[-empyre-] Introducing Machine Dreams Contributors: Ana Monroe and Jenny Rhee!

[Margaret J Rhee]

Hi All,

These conversation has been so generative, thanks everyone! Buoyed by 
all the very exciting work, and appreciate Keith and Sun Yung's 
insights, and joining the dialogue! To add to Keith and Sun Yung's 
wonderful contributions, I'm pleased to introduce two more participants 
from the Zine, Ana Monroe and Jenny Rhee!

Ana Monroe is a designer and writer, and her inventive short fictional 
piece, Les Futures Flanuers, drawn from her MFA thesis at Art Center 
College of Design is on page 36.

As a scholar, Jenny Rhee's moving piece, "Petit Mal, Proprioceptive 
Precocity, and Robotic Futures," on Big Dog, and other robotic art is 
excerpted from her forthcoming monograph, and included in the Machine 
Dreams Zine, page 45.

Check out their respective work here: 
https://issuu.com/repcollective/docs/machine_dreams_issuu

Their bios are below.

To begin, like Sun Yung and Keith's exciting work on cyborg poetics and 
worlds, could you both speak on the inspirations behind your research on 
robots, and fiction writing? More specifically, I understand that both 
of your excerpts drew from a dissertation and a thesis, and I wondered 
if you could reflect on the process of revising into another form that 
was published in the Zine, and in your larger body of work?

------

Jenny Rhee

Jennifer Rhee is an assistant professor of English at Virginia 
Commonwealth University. Her book, All Too Human: Labor and 
Dehumanization in the Robotic Imaginary (forthcoming, University of 
Minnesota Press, 2018), examines cultural forms and technologies to 
highlight the robot's entanglement with dehumanization and devalued 
labor. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including 
Camera Obscura, Configurations, Postmodern Culture, Mosaic: A Journal 
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, and Thresholds. She is 
working on a new book  on counting technologies and practices, from the 
emergence of statistics to contemporary digital surveillance. Bringing 
science and technology into conversation with artistic and literary 
works, this book examines who determines what counts, who constitutes 
the uncounted or the uncountable, and who is all too readily counted.

Ana Monroe

One year after earning her Modern History A.B. from Columbia University 
in 2004 and following a quick stint as a translator at the first Apple 
Store in the world (Soho, New York), Ana began her design training by 
jumping into the creative role of Prop Stylist for Still Photography 
projects. In this position, Ana was responsible for the physical 
elements of the shoot: the props, the sets, the fabricated, and the 
found.Moving quickly into Production Design for both larger scale Stills 
projects as well as Motion Picture, Ana led the Art Department section 
of movie making.

As a Production Designer, Ana worked closely with the Director and 
Director of Photography to bring a script off the page. Research into 
the visual languages of diverse groups and historical periods, 
ethnographic inquiries, and sheer imagination all combine to form 
identity of a production. The practical side of both Styling and 
Designing required the development project management skills. She 
created and managed budgets, schedules, and personnel. The scope of this 
role honed not only the ability to conceptualize and produce myriad 
design styles, but also that of visualizing and evaluating options, 
managing teams, and growing client relationships.

She applied and was accepted with an Honors scholarship to the award 
winning Media Design Practices Department at Art Center College of 
Design in 2014. Working in the field with UNICEF as part of her 
2014-2015 year, Ana quickly gained praise for her self directed 
technology projects with Luzira Primary School as well as her 
evaluations of UNICEF’s MobiStation and ICT projects.

During her 2015-2016 thesis year, she received both Honors and Thesis 
Awards and worked with advisors such as BMW DesignWorks lead Mike Milley 
and Art Center College of Design's DesignMatters Chair Mariana Amatullo. 
She is now a Service Designer leading multiple projects from The 
Innovation Lab at OPM, detailed to the Office of Veterans Experience at 
the Department of Veterans Affairs.

-- 
Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor
Women's and Gender Studies
University of Oregon