The ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) conference will be held this year in Chicago from 12-15 June. And at 7pm on Tues 13 June there will be a staged reading of Recursion, a play that Jessica and I wrote.
Recursion is an entertaining and thought-provoking (we hope) play with computer science themes that connect to many of the topics that bring people to FAccT. The play will be directed and acted by a troupe of students from the Northwestern University theater program. We even have some funding thanks to Northwestern’s Engineering school.
If you’ll be coming to FAccT, we hope you can boot it to the performance! And if you’re not coming, well, maybe you should reconsider.
P.S. Recursion comes with a rad soundtrack, featuring early 80s gems from ESG, New Order, Fat Boys, OMD, R.E.M. and of course that balloon song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY
I confess to being the one who added dad-rock REM to the soundtrack. Jessica picked all the cool tracks. In fairness to me, though, the REM song (Perfect Circle) does fit the theme of the play.
I added a Crosby, Stills and Nash song on it. Pretty sure that out-dads your REM.
What? CSN but no cuddly Grandpa Niel? The Father of 1990s Grunge and the last social justice warrior from the sixties to retain any street cred? At a conference on “fairness”? A multi-generation party foul!
Chipmunk:
The play has no direct connection to the FAccT conference. We wrote the play, and then awhile later we had the opportunity to present it at the conference. So you can blame the musical choices on Jessica and me, not on FAccT.
In the undergrad statistical mechanics class I’m teaching this term, I’ve been playing before the start of each class a song that might have some (perhaps tenuous) connection to thermodynamics / statistical mechanics / probability, and there’s a “music quiz” in which people have to name the band/song. Last class, “Viet Nam” by the Minutemen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHq454x-xoQ). One student noted that it’s on one of her dad’s playlists. Neither she nor anyone else in the class named the band, though. I didn’t point out that her dad and I are cooler than her classmates.
(I was 8 when the song came out, and was at least 30 when I first heard it.)