Third Annual Unite to Light Weekend Gala & Art Exhibit

The 3^rd Annual Unite to Light Fundraiser Gala is October 18 – 19, at the Community Arts Workshop on Garden Street. There are two Galas, an art x science x tech exhibit by 45 artists, performances by the State Street Ballet and the Selan Dance Collective, light painting, craft cocktails, DJs, and an after-hours party at STUDIO Bar & Soundroom. 

For the kids, there will be a free event with activities by Explore Ecology, the Children’s Creative Youth Projects, and the MOXI museum team. 

I met with five of the UCSB Media Arts and Tech (MAT) Grad Students at SBCAST exhibiting at Unite to Light, and who just returned from the largest international tech expo – ARS Electronica 2024, held in Linz, Austria, where they exhibited their work. They are the project teams of Sabina Hyoju Ahn,PhD,and Ryan Millett,PhD,who are doing analog bio-synthesizer music plugged into an AI computer generative sound design program that will create a feedback interface with the real-time AI generated and projected visuals from the team of Nefeli Manoudaki,PhD,and Iason Paterakis,PhD. Paterakis and Manoudaki are winners of the Mellichamp Mind and Machine Intelligence’s 2024 AI/Human Visual Art Creativity Contest with their project, “Osmosis”_ XR urban fluctuations using Generative AI. Their colleague, Weihao Qiu, PhD, will be doing AI generated projections. Acknowledgements went to Millett and Ahn.

The MAT Chair Marcos Novak and scientist Alan Macy are presenting updates of the organoids project I covered in the June graduations in the MJ; and also exhibiting are MAT’s Diarmid Flatley, PhD; Stejara Iulia Dinulescu, PhD; Jazer Giles, PhD; and UCSB Graduate Student Researcher Tim Wood.

My interview with President & CEO of Unite to Light, Megan Birney Rudert, yielded her share on the event: 

“This is a celebration of light. We wanted to create an event that would challenge people to see light, and our connection to light and power, in new ways. A dear friend, Kate Kubiak, came up with the idea of a multi-day, light-based interactive art festival with great music. The goals of the event are threefold: to use art to help us understand the importance of light as a basic necessity and a creative medium, to raise awareness about the almost billion people still living without electricity, and to raise funds to provide solar light and power to people living without electricity. For the artists exhibiting, Unite to Light solicited sponsorships for Art Grants from local donors to help support them. Our Event Committee selected 15 artists to receive over $11,000 in Art Grants this year. The artists retain 70% of all proceeds from sales. Unite to Light picks one local and one international project to support with event proceeds. This year, we are partnering with Santa Barbara Street Medicine/Doctors without Walls to provide their team with our solar Chandler Chargers so that they have power for their phones and light at night as they are assisting our neighbors without housing. Some of these solar phone chargers may also go to their clients seeking medical care who need follow-up appointments (so that the team is able to reach them by phone and locate them). And funds will also go to create light libraries in Zambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. This project is in collaboration with schools supported by ChildFund and Books for Africa. Students in these schools will be able to check out one of our solar Luke Lights in addition to the books provided by Books for Africa.”

The Event Committee is Armando Ramos, Katya Armistead, Marco Pinter, Diane C. Mackenzie, Laura Ragan, Dawn Mitcham, Rachel Johnson, Jessica Willbanks, Ashely Jacobs, Michelle Weinman, Wendy Barels, Nathan Huff, Elizabeth Wagner, Scott Vincent, Ashley Woods Hollister, Julie Schneiderman, Tracy York, Megan Birney Rudert, Kate Kubiak, and Sarah Dildine.  

411: www.unitetolight.org/lightthenight.html#/