Explore a hands-on, experimental approach to typography with Tomáš Hlava, CCAM Graphic Designer and MFA candidate in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art!

Note: For participants who would like to do the exercise in full, please have experience with Adobe Illustrator or Glyphs and bring your own computer.

This workshop will begin with a short talk by Tomáš, who will share his interest in typography and specific context—when a type or a letter, often not even designed by a type designer, derives from specific situation or physical circumstances.

Following the talk, you’ll have the opportunity to work with physical materials, such as clay, to explore and determine shapes from which you can design a few letters or even a complete set. The goal is not necessarily to leave the workshop with a complete alphabet, but rather with an idea or interest that can be expanded later.

Designed and taught by Tomáš Hlava (Yale School of Art, Graphic Design, 2025)

Create, discover, and explore—and be part of the CCAM community! Our Wednesday Wisdom workshops explore dynamic intersections of the arts and technology, and are designed and taught by our team, along with collaborators from both on and off campus. Come to CCAM on select Wednesday evenings between September and May for creativity, conversation, and a pizza dinner.

Join us for a “Meet the Showrunner” event with Dr. Neal Baer, Yale professor, showrunner of “Law & Order: SVU,” and longtime writer and producer of “ER.” This event is a part of the CCAM Film Advisor Office Hours. Join us for these discussions with Susan Youssef and fellow leaders from the world of film!

Dr. Baer recently served as Executive Producer and Showrunner of the third season of “Designated Survivor,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, which premiered globally on Netflix in the summer of 2019. Prior to “Designated Survivor,” he was Executive Producer and Showrunner for the hit CBS series “Under the Dome” and Executive Producer and Showrunner of the CBS medical drama “A Gifted Man.”

From 2000 to 2011, Dr. Baer was Executive Producer and Showrunner of “Law & Order: SVU,” where he oversaw all aspects of producing and writing the show. During his tenure, the series won numerous awards, including the Shine Award, People’s Choice Award, Prism Award, Edgar Award, Sentinel for Health Award, and Media Access Award. Actors on the show won six Emmys and a Golden Globe, and the series consistently ranked among the top ten television dramas in national ratings.

Before his work on SVU, Dr. Baer was Executive Producer of the Peabody and Emmy Award-winning NBC series “ER.” A member of the original staff, he wrote and produced for the series over seven seasons and received five Emmy nominations as a producer.

Join us for the CCAM Symposium: “Illuminations” on February 19, 20, and 21!

From 5pm to 9pm each day, we’re bringing together artists, scientists, technologists, and more from CCAM, Yale, New York, and the world to explore the “bringing of light.”

The word “illumination” carries diverse meanings across time, space, and cultures. It evokes images of adorned medieval manuscripts, as well as Walter Benjamin’s critical essays. As an artistic medium and movement, light has shaped the development of many technologies—from fire and lightbulbs to glowing screens. Festivals around the world celebrate divine inspiration, and the concept of intellectual enlightenment has marked historical progress. To illuminate can mean to reveal the unknown—and also inspire us to envision the yet unimagined.

The CCAM Symposium: “Illuminations” will delve into these and other themes, gathering a community around it. In this, we also draw inspiration from Pulsa, a collaborative group of artists who gathered at Yale in the 1960s to explore light, sound, and emerging technologies.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19

5pm–5:15pm:
Symposium Opening with the CCAM Team

5:15pm–6:45pm:
“ReVerb Room” with Sarah Oppenheimer, Vic Brooks, and Pam Jordan

7pm–7:15pm:
Byte (short, featured project presentation) by Chaitanya Harshita Nedunuri Kahn

5pm–8pm:
Demo & Discussion of a documentary virtual recreation using Simulcam and stylization with Setareh Samandari and Habib Zargarpour

8pm:
Reception with Queen of Tarts Catering

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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20

5pm–5:15pm:
Submersible Experience with Alison Sweeney

5:45pm–7pm:
Panel: “Illumination, Darkness, and Non-Human Organisms”
* With: Matthew Suttor (moderator); Theodore Kim, Priya Natarajan, Richard Prum, Alison Sweeney

7:15–7:30pm:
Byte by Joseph Zinter

7:30–8:30pm:
Performances (Film, Video, Projection, Spatial Audio, Music):
* Scattered Light by Joshua Mastel and Nico Cadena
* Solo voice by AZ
* A performance by Konrad Kaczmarek
* A new audiovisual performance by Ross Wightman and Matt Wellins
* Violin solo composed by Matthew Suttor, performed by Keeley Brooks

8:30pm:
Reception with Queen of Tarts Catering

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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21

5pm–5:15pm:
Byte by Ravi Kumar

5:15pm–7pm:
Panel: “Illuminating the Mysterious and Unexplainable”
* With: Elise Morrison (moderator); Francesco Casetti, Ravi Kumar, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Al Powers

7pm–7:30pm:
Performance Demo & Discussion with choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance performers Maki Kitahara and Andrea Trager

7:30pm–7:45pm:
Byte by Balarama Heller

7:45pm–8pm:
Symposium Closing with the CCAM Team & Opening of the Illuminations exhibition at the CCAM ISOVIST Gallery
* Works by: Bohan Chen and Deming Haines, Lauren Dubowski, Dana Karwas, Balarama Heller, Gabriel Winer, Alfred Wong, and more

8pm:
Reception with Queen of Tarts Catering

Join us for a transposition of Sarah Oppenheimer’s “N-04008,” created at Atelier Calder in Saché, France in 2024. Participants in this interactive workshop will explore the reverberations of the artwork in a new space and time. A reconstructed sonic network will simultaneously perform as documentation of the work at Atelier Calder and an exploration into new possibilities for documentation. Following this experiment, Oppenheimer will be joined in conversation by Vic Brooks and Pamela Jordan.

“ReVerb Room” and the transposition of Sarah Oppenheimer’s “N-04008” are supported by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), with collaboration on technical production by Simon Jeger, Ross Wightman, Konrad Kaczmarek, Maggie Schnyer, and the Yale Center for Engineering and Innovation Design (CEID). With special thanks to Atelier Calder and EFPL-CDH Enter the Hyper-Scientific for their invaluable contributions to this project.

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From Oppenheimer:

An artwork’s echo extends its physical footprint in space and time. Each re-telling is a process of translation and transposition. When an artwork is documented—through image, sound, language—its spatial and temporal limits expand to absorb contexts beyond its initial boundaries. The artwork changes form, and its contextual determinants shift in time and space.

ReVerb Room explores this complex teleportation. Using Sarah Oppenheimer’s N-04008 as a case study, the workshop will consider documentation as re-location.

Created at Atelier Calder in 2024, N-04008 embodied material potential in an energetic circuit. A network of instruments was activated by human touch. Visitors set in motion a chain reaction: by pulling a cable, air was routed through a pneumatic system, raising and lowering linked instruments in distant locations. The instruments communicated with one another, extending human connections through the building’s boundaries and across spatial gaps. Visual and sonic reverberations created questions of agency and causal attribution.

As a multisensorial network, the technical dimensions of N-04008 are profoundly social. Visitors become active participants in a choreography of spatial revelation, where the rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again.

How might this dynamic be documented?

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Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator whose work explores the emergent relations between human and non-human systems. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change. Oppenheimer lives and works in New York, USA and Rotterdam, NL, and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale School of Art. sarahoppenheimer.com

Vic Brooks is a curator and creative producer who develops films, exhibitions, performances, and programs. Her research centers on the production and presentation of time-based visual art, with particular focus on the technological infrastructures and architectural acoustics of the institutions that support them. She consults on new initiatives for the Calder Foundation, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, and is developing feature films with Aria Dean, Sierra Pettengill, and Martine Syms. Her co-edited book “Tuning Calder’s Clouds,” on the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna, is forthcoming with Athénée Press: Bogotá in 2025.

Pamela Jordan is a licensed architect (RA, LEED AP), heritage consultant, and writer who uses sound to disquiet our assumptions of built space and analyze and conserve historic built environments. She is the co-founder of the SHAARP network for interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners who incorporate the senses into their practices. Her work has featured in both academic publications and art institutions; she is also the co-editor of the forthcoming “New Sensory Approaches to the Past: Applied Methods in Sensory Heritage and Archaeology” (University of College London Press, 2025).