Research + Development
XR Discovery, Social Entrepreneurship
Kathleen partners and consults with companies and organizations across several verticals, including neurodivergent, indigenous and social impact communities – and how these particular communities will add tremendous value to virtual worlds and digital assets in our future.
World Building and Visionary Technology
John Anderson is a world-builder and design scientist who directly empowers students to explore the boundaries of science and fiction. Students explore research that visualizes complex systems to reveal new knowledge and “make the invisible, visible.” His research promotes the development of novel decision support technologies that use virtual environments to reveal the scientific processes that govern social ecological systems. His research has provided scientists with alternate decision support technology and enables communities to communicate their concerns. This body of research advances scientific discovery and has enabled new insights into how changes in climate may be altering the Anthropocene.
Indigenous People’s and Neurodivergent XR Storytelling at Surel’s Place
Kathleen Cohen discusses the process for a November art installation piece along with her collaborators John Anderson, Jim Bradbury, and Chuck Westerberg. Together, they will work to stitch a through line of indigenous peoples alongside neurodiverse XR communities – juxtaposing the northern and southern Idaho perspectives.
Surel’s Place – Extended Reality
Joining us from California, Kathleen Cohen is our very first artist-in-residence representing immersive art (which we are jointly defining during the course of her residency.) Her residency focuses on tech humanism, asking specific questions inside virtual worlds, “What makes up you?” and “What is real?”. She and her collaborators are specifically focused on exploring this in Boise and Moscow with two communities that struggle to communicate the answers to these questions to our larger community: indigenous peoples in Northern Idaho and neurodivergent individuals in Boise. Can creating identity in a virtual space preserve and better clarify identity in that space and/or for us as a physical community?
