BROOKLYN COLLEGE–On Friday, April 25, a cluster of Brooklyn College students and professors gathered in the bare, white-walled art gallery in the basement of Boylan Hall for the PIMA Symposium of 2025.
PIMA, Performance & Interactive Media Art, is a Master of Fine Arts program at BC that aims to “provide students with training, theoretical and technical knowledge, and practical experience,” according to the Brooklyn College website.
The PIMA graduate students typically display their work off-campus, but since the opening of the art gallery at BC, the director of the PIMA program, Jennifer McCoy, decided to use this symposium to bring more attention to this graduate program and their art to other students of Brooklyn College.
“We do a lot of our performances…off campus, and because this new gallery opened, I thought, ‘Well, we should do something on campus just to raise visibility because […] a lot of people don’t know what this is…so it’s great to bring everybody together,” McCoy told the Vanguard.
In this symposium, there were three guest speakers for the event, two of whom were alumni from the PIMA program. Andre Zachary, an NYU assistant professor and founder of the Renegade Performance Group, discussed his way of approaching AI by showing a videotaped conversation he had with ChatGPT, wondering how an artist can use it reliably without getting misinformation, and holding it accountable when it does.
