The Imagination Desk

In this episode of the Imagination Desk, we sat down with ASU futurist in residence Brian David Johnson. In this chat, we talk with Brian about his work on artificial intelligence and introduce his new podcast called Sci-Fi House Presents Imagining Intelligence which premieres next week.

Katie Bouman is an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering, and astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, California. In this episode, we talk about scientific collaboration, imagination, and Katie's work on the Event Horizon Telescope, which produced the first image of a black hole by combining insights and methods from signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and physics.  *** This work was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities grant AKA-265705-19

Regina Kanyu Wang is a science fiction writer, researcher, and critic from Shanghai. She is now based at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the CoFUTURES project. In this conversation, we talk about the Chinese science fiction scene, its fan culture, and gender politics in the genre, as well as insights on Regina's own recent writing—including how she builds nuance and complexity into her portrayals of AI and other technologies.   *** This work was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities grant AKA-265705-19  

Moya Bailey is a Black queer feminist scholar, writer, and activist. She is the co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice and has a new book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance, coming out May 2021. In this conversation, we talk about online communities of support and activism, racial inequalities in medicine, the healthcare system, artificial intelligence, and Moya's term misogynoir, which describes a specific form of discrimination experienced by Black women. *** This work was supported in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities grant AKA-265705-19.  

Troy L. Wiggins is a writer and editor with a focus on Black speculative fiction and social justice.  In this episode of The Imagination Desk, we chat with Troy about power of speculative art as a tool for Black people around the world to reckon with their realities, share their histories and imagine new worlds.

Ytasha Womack is an award-winning author, filmmaker, independent scholar, and dance therapist. She is a leading expert on Afrofuturism, and on the imagination and its applications. In this conversation, we discuss her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, her film A Love Letter To The Ancestors From Chicago, and much more.

This episode of The Imagination Desk features Jonathan Alexander. Jonathan is Professor of English and Informatics at The University of California, Irvine and author of books such as Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship (2016) and a critical memoir, Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (2017). We take a closer look at popular modern Science Fiction TV shows and their cultural and political uses, along with a look at writing stories in the digital age

This episode of The Imagination Desk features the band YACHT or Young Americans Challenging High Technology. We spoke with them about their new album Chain Tripping and it's use of machine learning.

This episode of The Imagination Desk features science fiction heavy-weight Paolo Bacigalupi, author of The Water Knife and Shipbreaker. We caught up with him in this bonus episode to discuss the changes in his writing process as well as his latest projects. 

This episode of The Imagination Desk features Maureen McHugh. Maureen is an author and narrative designer who has worked on some of the biggest transmedia stories and alternate reality games (ARGs) in the history of the medium including The Beast for Steven Spielberg's AI, I Love Bees for Microsoft's Halo franchise, Nine Inch Nails' Year One and Why So Serious? for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Her novels include China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis.

This episode of The Imagination Desk features Matt Derby. Matt is a writer and designer who works on innovative media projects where these two disciplines meet. Matt is a designer at the game studio Harmonix, the co-writer of the serialized fiction podcast, Sandra, for Gimlet and co-creator of The Silent History, the first interactive digital book for iOS devices. Matt's newest project is Phreaks, a fictionalized look at the real-life community of "phone phreakers."

Our first interview for The Imagination Desk features Anne Cofell Saunders. Anne is an award-winning TV writer and producer, who has worked on some of the most popular genre shows of the past decade including Battlestar Galactica, Chuck, Smallville, and 24. Her new show is The Boys, a gritty superhero dramedy based on the Garth Ennis comic book series of the same name. It premieres in Summer 2019 on Amazon.