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Find out what films, events and series are currently on the slate at the Michigan Theater. Also check out our other series and programs:
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 "Thinking in Pictures"
Temple Grandin is a Doctor of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University, bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry in animal behavior. Facilities she has designed are located in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. Curved chute and race systems she has designed for cattle are used worldwide and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people to reduce stress on their animals during handling.
As a person with high-functioning autism, Grandin is also widely noted for her work in autism advocacy and is the inventor of the hug machine designed to calm hypersensitive persons.
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 "What the Bible Teaches us About Robotics"
Mihalyi Csikszentmihályi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, is noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. He is the author of many books and over 120 articles or book chapters. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, described Csikszentmihalyi as the world's leading researcher on positive psychology.
Christopher Csikszentmihályi directs the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities.
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 "Conflict Theory"
Noted for their fusion of High and Low Art, Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio have built a career creating interactive, collaborative community portraits ranging from comic books that tell the stories of social groups to a candy bar designed with the Chicago Confectioner's Union. They are currently collaborating on artworks for media internationally, including such diverse venues as WIRED magazine, London's Channel Four and DC Comics, as well as for such museums as the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, New York's Public Art Fund, the BALTIC Centre in Gateshead, England, and London's Institute of Contemporary Art.
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 "Taboos"
Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese poet, translator and journalist. In addition to being the founder and editor-in-chief of JASAD magazine, Joumana Haddad is head of the Cultural page in prestigious "An Nahar" newspaper, as well as the Administrator of the IPAF literary prize (the "Arab Booker"). She has published several poetry collections, widely acclaimed by critics. Her books have been translated to many languages and published abroad.
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 "My Designs Inside Your Body"
Designers who work with the subject of food are often called 'food designers'. According to Marije Vogelzang, food is already perfectly designed by nature. Instead, her designs focus around the verb 'to eat'. Vogelzang is inspired by the origin of food and the preparation, etiquette, history and culture around it. For this reason, she doesn't consider herself a 'food designer', but as the first 'eating designer' in The Netherlands.
Studio Marije Vogelzang has a wide-ranging practice, working on restaurant concepts, medical and educational projects as well as designing art installations and creating new food rituals.
Vogelzang gives inspirational, critically acclaimed lectures around the world about her work and vision. She tries to show the exploration and potential of a new approach on the act of eating.
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 "Chance and Skill"
Matthew Ritchie was born in London, England in 1964, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from Camberwell School of Art, London, and attended Boston University. His artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is catalogued in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judaeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles. Ritchie’s paintings, installations, and narrative threads delineate the universe’s formation as well as the attempts and limits of human consciousness to comprehend its vastness. Ritchie’s work deals explicitly with the idea of information being ‘on the surface’, and information is also the subject of his work. Although often described as a painter, Ritchie creates works on paper, prints, light-box drawings, floor-to-wall installations, freestanding sculpture, web sites, and short stories which tie his sprawling works together into a narrative structure. Drawing is central to his work. He scans his drawings into the computer so that images can be blown up, taken apart, made smaller or three-dimensional, re-shaped, transformed into digital games, or given to someone else to execute. One ongoing work that Ritchie calls an endless drawing contains everything he has drawn before. Ritchie’s work has been shown in one-person exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; MASS MoCA; SFMoMA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others. His work was also exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (1997), Sydney Biennale (2002), and São Paulo Bienale (2004).
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 "The Campaign for Kandahar"
From 1996, Sarah Chayes was Paris reporter for National Public Radio. She was dispatched to a number of conflict and post-conflict zones. Her work during the Kosovo crisis of 1999 earned her the Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards, along with her NPR colleagues.
Sarah left reporting in 2002 to remain in the field in Afghanistan. With President Hamid Karzai's older brother Qayum, she established Afghans for Civil Society in Kandahar. Among other projects, ACS rebuilt a village, and launched a radio station and a successful women's income generation project. In 2004, she left ACS to focus on economic development, and since May 2005 has been running Arghand, a privately funded venture that buys products from local farmers and turns them into seven varieties of soaps.
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 "John Cage's Indeterminacy"
The John Cage Trust was established in 1993 as a not-for-profit institution whose mission is to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of the late American composer, John Cage. Its founding trustees were Merce Cunningham, Artistic Director of the Cunningham Dance Company, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum, and David Vaughan, Archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, all long-time Cage friends and associates.
The John Cage Trust functions as both a business concern and an archive and repository for Cage’s work. In the latter capacity, it maintains sizeable collections of music, text, and visual art manuscripts. It also houses extensive audio, video, and print libraries, which are continually expanding, as well as a substantial permanent collection of visual art works by John Cage, which are made available for exhibitions worldwide. The John Cage Trust also works closely with others in the promotion and placement of Cage’s work, including archival restoration, remastering, and working on new projects that contribute to the continuing relevance of Cage’s work.
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 "Gravity"
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle investigates diverse subjects such as technology, climate, immigration and the global impact of social, political, environmental, and scientific systems. Often working in partnership or employing technical experts across multiple disciplines including engineering, architecture, genomics, and climatology, Manglano-Ovalle produces objects that are often technically complex, formally captivating, and conceptually engaging. His early work focused on collaborative explorations with young people in his hometown of Chicago, which led to the founding of Street-Level Youth Media, a community arts organization for youth in 1993. Across multiple independent projects executed during the same period, Manglano-Ovalle explored a multi-faceted and socially-focused approach to art making, blending layered concepts with a variety of materials both typical and unorthodox. Incorporating objects such as identification cards in Assigned Identities (1991) or automobile tires in Flotilla (1991), Manglano-Ovalle made reference to the difficulties surrounding illegal immigration into the United States. In the sculptural works Bloom (1995–96) and Subwoofer (1995), Manglano-Ovalle utilized ballistic gelatin, firearms and car sound systems to explore notions of violence and division. His noted film trilogy Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000), and In Ordinary Time (2001) focused on the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and the implications of Modernism. More recently, he has employed genomic and meteorological methodologies to explore issues of race, identity, and the promise and threat of technology in works such as Cloud Prototype No. 1 (2003) and Portrait of a Young Reader (2006)
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 "My Dirty Little Heaven"
Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist based in New York, makes luscious yet unsettling pictures of female figures. Her painted and collaged works on Mylar function as potent social critique while simultaneously exploring more poetic strains of mythology and allegory as well as the sensuousness of form, color, and pattern. Particularly interested in myths about gender and ethnicity that have long circulated in Africa and the West, Mutu has adopted the medium of collage — which by its nature evokes rupture and collision — to depict the monstrous, the exotic, and the feminine.
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 "Influencing Train Design"
Luis Chomiak is an International Transportation Design Consultant and Industrial Design Engineer with experience in all types of product design, rail vehicles and other forms of public and personal transportation. As a consultant he has worked with major design houses in transportation and product design where his work has won several awards. Recent projects include the innovative China Zefiro VHS (Very High Speed) Train and Metro Singapore.
Chomiak will present an overview of how many factors - including service requirements, operational scenarios, environmental conditions, infrastructures, safety, manufacturing technology and cost - influence the design of modern rail vehicles.
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 "Up Wake"
Playwright and performer Natasha Tsakos works in a brave new form of theater, where sound, computer-generated images and the performer move in sync to create a dreamlike yet sharply real stage environment. Within this space of total possibility, Tsakos muses on the deepest questions of the human soul.
A Swiss-born artist living in Miami, Tsakos has been a performer with Circ X and the Big Apple Circus, and writes, teaches and performs her own work in Miami and worldwide. She's the author of several plays and one-acts, a few collections of poetry and the cartoon “The Eskimans,” about a penguin and an Eskimo.
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