Events

Lupin-Jimenez, L. (AM) - Data-Driven Deep Learning for Turbulent Phenomena: Regional Ocean Prediction and Assimilation, Spectral Bias in Diffusion Models, and Equation Discovery
2026-08-18 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Deep learning models trained on simulation and reanalysis data can now emulate turbulent geophysical flows at a small fraction of the computational cost of numerical solvers.
Their scientific utility depends on physical consistency, which for the systems studied here
rests in large part on spectral fidelity, the accurate reconstruction of variance across spatial
scales. This document presents two published studies and two studies in progress that develop, analyze, and apply data-driven methods for turbulent phenomena along that thread.
The first study develops FCDS, a framework that autoregressively emulates surface ocean
dynamics over the Gulf of Mexico at 8 km resolution and simultaneously downscales and
bias-corrects the emulated fields to 4 km, with a spectral loss that keeps decadal integrations stable and statistically consistent with a high-resolution reanalysis. The second study
develops a neural-operator-conditioned denoising diffusion model that reconstructs regional
surface ocean states from Lagrangian-like observations at 99% and 99.9% sparsity without a
background dynamical model, and shows that the recovered small-scale dynamics are visible
in spectral diagnostics but not in pointwise metrics. The third study derives a signal-tonoise theory of spectral bias in diffusion models for 2D turbulence, organized around the
crossover wavenumber kc(τ) at which signal and noise contribute equal power, and validates
its predictions on a sweep of 28 models spanning seven forcing wavenumbers and four noise
schedulers. The fourth study develops a window-pair spectral method for discovering governing equations from single-point sensor measurements of soliton dynamics in a superfluid
wave flume, replacing noise-amplifying instantaneous derivatives with finite-time spectral
shifts and verifying the discovered equations against a measured-scalar null model. A concluding chapter summarizes the results and outlines future work on novel architectures and
methods for data-driven emulation of physical simulations.
Event Host: Leonard Lupin-Jimenez, Ph.D. Student, Applied Mathematics
Advisor: Ashesh Chattopadhyay
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97866640488?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Note Taking and Reading Strategies
2026-08-18 14:00 - 14:45 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/7372922776?pwd=[REDACTED]
In this workshop, you will: Learn reading and note-taking methods and why they work to help you learn.
The Successful Slug Workshop series, hosted by Learning Support Services Peer Coaches, are open to all UCSC undergraduate students and focus on academic skills and tools to support your success as a student. At each workshop, you will be introduced to a topic, engage in active learning, be given resources to begin implementing the same day, and have an opportunity to learn more if you are interested.
You Belong Here: The programs and services described here are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities.
To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

HireUC Alumni Career Summit - Irvine
2026-08-18 10:00 - 14:00 | UCI Student Center, Pacifica Ballroom, 311 W. Peltason Drive, Irvine, 92697, United States
Ready to explore new career opportunities? Join fellow UC alumni from across all 10 UC campuses at the HireUC Alumni Career Summit – Irvine, where you’ll have the opportunity to connect directly with 75+ employers actively recruiting UC talent.
This complimentary, expo-style event brings together accomplished job seekers and employers representing a wide range of industries and career fields. Meet face-to-face with hiring representatives, learn about current opportunities, expand your professional network, and discover what’s next in your career journey.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
UCI Student Center
Whether you’re actively searching for your next role or exploring future possibilities, we invite you to join us for a day of meaningful connections and career discovery.
Complimentary for alumni attendees. Advance registration is required.
LEARN MORE & REGISTER

Gutie, J. (SciCAM) - SORh: Hyperbolic Relaxation Methods For Elliptic Problems In Computational Fluid Dynamics
2026-08-18 10:00 - 11:00
This thesis explores iterative methods for solving elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), which are used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model a wide range of physical phenomena. The primary application of interest here is self-gravity, modeled by Poisson’s equation. Although many numerical approaches exist, including direct matrix inversion, FFT-based methods, and classical iterative methods such as Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel, these approaches involve tradeoffs in computational cost, scalability, implementation complexity, and adaptability to changing boundary conditions and problem configurations.
Therefore, we introduce SORh, a simple and efficient relaxation method derived from a hyperbolic reformulation of Poisson’s equation. SORh generalizes classical successive over-relaxation (SOR) by providing independent control of residual relaxation and the directional propagation of Gauss–Seidel corrections. We present formulations of SORh in one and two spatial dimensions and investigate its stability, accuracy, and computational performance through analytical derivations and numerical comparisons with established relaxation methods. The results identify favorable SORh formulations, clarify their relationships to classical relaxation methods, and demonstrate improved convergence on selected test problems. Finally, we demonstrate applications of SORh to astrophysical self-gravity simulations in the FLASH code and to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) divergence cleaning.
Event Host: Jonathan Guite, M.S. Candidate, Scientific Computing & Applied Mathematics
Advisor: Dongwook Lee
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92153750104?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

ReView
2026-08-18 01:00 - 2026-09-25 00:59, 2026-08-17 01:00 - 2026-09-24 00:59, 2026-08-16 01:00 - 2026-09-23 00:59, 2026-08-15 01:00 - 2026-09-22 00:59, 2026-08-14 01:00 - 2026-09-21 00:59, 2026-08-13 01:00 - 2026-09-20 00:59 | Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
August 13-September 19, 2026
Opening celebration and Artist Talk
Saturday, August 15, 2-4:30 p.m
Light refreshments will be served.
Summer Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday, 1-5pm
ReView: UC Santa Cruz Arts Alumni Exhibition features Arts Division alumni from the Monterey and San Francisco Bay Areas. Curated by Valéria Miranda, the Sesnon’s Director, ReView includes a wide variety of media and techniques highlighting the diversity of contemporary practice of alumni who graduated from 1972 to 2025. The exhibition title alludes to the portfolio critique process and suggests ideas of reflection and reevaluation—whether revisiting past work, rethinking materials, or tracing how a practice evolves over time.
This exhibition celebrates the creative path of artists who began their journeys at UC Santa Cruz. United by shared roots yet defined by distinct paths, the participating alumni reflect the lasting influence of the Arts Division programs. Their works speak to the spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and perseverance that has long shaped the university’s artistic community.
ReView presents an opportunity for the campus and larger community to see the professional practice of these artists who continue to build on the creative foundation that they received at UCSC and to inspire our current students, offering visualization of their own future artistic journeys after graduation.
ReView offers a unique opportunity for returning alumni to celebrate their creative expressions while reconnecting with classmates and the university community.
Admission is free and open to the public.
More Information

Nina Simon - My Sister Is Going To Kill Me
2026-08-17 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz
What’s a family vacation without a little murder?

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes New York Times bestselling author Nina Simon (Mother-Daughter Murder Night) back to the store for a reading and signing of My Sister Is Going to Kill Me, another fun, family-centered whodunnit about two sisters who work together to find a killer as they raft down the rapids of the Grand Canyon.

Nina Simon writes crime fiction about strong women. She is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Mother-Daughter Murder Night, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick, a Golden Poppy Award winner, and a “best of 2023” selection for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, CrimeReads, and Library Journal. Before turning to fiction, Nina wore many hats: NASA engineer, slam poet, game designer, museum director, and nonprofit CEO. Her work on community participation in museums, libraries, parks, and theaters has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NPR, and the TEDx stage. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nina now lives off-the-grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains with her family. More information can be found on her website, ninaksimon.com.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Nina Simon

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Build better chips
2026-08-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Join us for an interactive discussion on current industry trends, emerging skills, and career opportunities, and learn how our Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering courses are designed to help professionals build expertise, stay competitive, and achieve their educational and career goals.
Whether you’re looking to advance in your current role, transition into a new field, or expand your knowledge, this session is a great place to start.
Your speaker
Arvind Vidyarthi – M.S.E.E. is vice president of Silicon Design Engineering at Altera, where he leads SoC and IP physical design implementation, methodology, and automation. Arvind has served since 2022 as chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering program, where he also sits on the VLSI engineering advisory group and mentors the next generation of design engineers.
Keep learning
The Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering program presents this information session. Visit our program page for complete program details and a closer look at all upcoming courses.
Claim your seat today.

Condon, C. (BMEB) - Genomic conflict across scales
2026-08-17 13:00 - 15:00 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
Genomes are often viewed as cooperative systems in which genes work together to support organismal function. Yet genetic elements can also act in ways that favor their own transmission or persistence, creating conflict within the genome. In this talk, I examine the evolutionary and functional consequences of such genomic conflict across three systems. First, I investigate segregation distortion in Arabidopsis hybrids and its potential role in the early evolution of reproductive isolation. Second, I characterize the population dynamics and functional effects of introners, mobile elements that generate new introns in the green alga Micromonas pusilla. Finally, I explore widespread splicing dysfunction in algal mating-type chromosomes and its consequences for transcript diversity. Together, these studies highlight how departures from genome cooperation can shape inheritance, genome evolution, and gene regulation.
Event Host: Chris Condon, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Russell Corbett-Detig

Nikolakakis, M. (ECE) - Learned Gridless Representations of Cone Beam Computed Tomography Scans
2026-08-17 10:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Medical image representation has long been dominated by voxel-grid matrices. While
their inherent structure and order work efficiently for various linear transformations and
provide a seamless visualization method on monitors, they fail to preserve the topology
of the scan and to encode sparse information in a memory-efficient way. The recent emergence of machine learning-based continuous coordinate-based
scene representations such as neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting has provided alternative representation techniques. These approaches overfit the weights of
a model by iterative differentiable rendering and have been shown to be more compact than grid representations. They are then able to perform novel view
synthesis from any given camera pose.
Off-grid representations translate directly to Cone Beam Computed Tomography
sparse-view acquisitions, where streaking and quantum noise artifacts are dominant.
Using differentiable rendering, a continuous representation is achieved, with interpolation providing a path to recover some of the lost signal.
In this dissertation, we apply a variety of methodologies, including Gaussian splatting, implicit occupancy fields, and Neural Attenuation Fields regularized with an
anatomic prior, to Cone Beam Computed Tomography reconstruction, and evaluate
their performance across a range of anatomic datasets. Our models show that learned
gridless representations achieve substantial memory reduction, recover signal under
extreme view sparsity, and preserve scene topology.
Event Host: Manolis Nikolakakis, Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Razvan Marinescu
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5964517596?pwd=[REDACTED]

Graduate Preparation Program
2026-08-17 01:00 - 2026-09-11 00:59 | CA
The Graduate Preparation Program (GPP) is a four-week intensive non-credit course offered in person on the main campus prior to the fall quarter, which is open to all current and newly admitted international graduate students. It focuses on English for Academic Purposes (EAP), academic skills, and cultural orientation. The program also provides a foundation for transitioning into the Teaching Assistant role.
The course offers guided support with:

Seminar-style classroom discussion
Presentation and oral communication skills
Information on U.S. classroom culture; roles and responsibilities of faculty, Teaching Assistants, and students
Critical thinking: using evidence to support ideas
Research writing, citation, and avoiding plagiarism
Collaborative and project-based learning

A collaboration between the Graduate Division and Global Engagement, the Graduate Preparation Program provides a strong foundation for the U.S. classroom environment and university system, in addition to the opportunity to practice and master the language and academic skills needed for success.
For more information and to register, please visit our webpage.

Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access
2026-08-16 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-15 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-13 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
On view in the IAS Screening Room is a selection of short films curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Fellow Dr. Pooja Rangan.
Prisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information, to intimacy, to community, to meaningful work, to nourishment of all kinds, and perhaps most cruelly, to care. This program assembles a series of films, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital, the university), turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.”
Thanh Tran
Dying in Prison, 2022
HD Video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Carolyn Lazard
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound), 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3
Anthony Alejandrez
Another Rainy Day, 2023
Phone video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Jordan Lord
After…After… (Access), 2018
HD Video (color, sound), 16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
Friendly Signs, 2023
Video (color, sound) 21 minutes
Courtesy of Tommy Wickerd, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media

Spring Exhibitions at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences
2026-08-16 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-15 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-14 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-13 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Visit the IAS, UCSC’s premier art galleries, for our spring exhibitions. On view April 10–August 16, 2026 are three diverse and interdisciplinary shows: Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right, the first US solo exhibition by the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor; Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj, a site-specific and immersive exploration of the Haitian kreyol conception of rasanblaj; and Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies, a mixed-media exhibition emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art.
The IAS Galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 12 pm – 5 pm. Admission is free to the public.
Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right
Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States features installations, sculptures, and drawings meticulously constructed from surgical instruments, gauze bandages, crutches, used books, and domestic picture frames. The new and existing works in the exhibition powerfully stitch together the personal, social, and political disorders and afflictions that currently trouble the world, from the wars that resonate across the globe to the violences of aging in US prisons.
Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements
The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view as a premier Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas.
Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies
Collage is both a material practice and a structural interrogation in the Faculty Spotlight Exhibition artworks by literature professor Ronaldo V. Wilson. In video, painting, and installation, layers and folds conceal and reveal, delving into the experience, both bodily and emotive, of living in times of violence.

Seymour Center's Art in the Aquarium
2026-08-15 10:30 - 11:30 | Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Dive into your creative side and make a splash with us! 🎨🌊
Bring the whole family and unleash your inner artist while surrounded by fascinating ocean life. Whether you’re a budding painter or just looking for a fun weekend activity, you’ll leave with your very own sea-inspired masterpiece to take home! 🐠✨
Join us on the third Saturday of every month for a fun art project with a talented Seymour volunteer!

UCSC Farm U-Pick
2026-08-15 09:00 - 12:00 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Come enjoy picking your own organic strawberries and/or flowers at the campus farm!
When: U-picks will take place on Saturdays from 9am to 12pm, July 11–August 22, or while supplies last. PLEASE NOTE that u-pick will not occur on Saturday, August 29.
Where: Free parking will be available in the Hay Barn lot or lot 115/116 during u-pick hours. Please do not park in the dirt lot at the farm’s back gate. Please walk to the check-in table near the strawberries/flowers at the farm to pre-pay and collect your u-pick container(s). We will have directional signage displayed. There is one ADA parking spot on the farm. The UCSC Farm has uneven, hilly terrain. If you require accommodations to fully participate, please email agroecology@ucsc.edu.
Cost: UCSC students with valid ID get 25% off produce.

Strawberry pints – $4 each
Strawberry flats (12 pints) – $44
Flowers, small bouquet – $5
Flowers, large bouquet – $15
Flower, bulk buckets – $65

Payment: Credit card payments only (you will need a smartphone to scan a QR code and enter your card info manually).
Dogs are not allowed on the UC Santa Cruz campus (service animals are OK).

Aliamooei Lakeh, S. (ECE) - Optimization and Decision-Support Frameworks for Resilient Power Systems Under Large-Scale Electrification
2026-08-14 14:15 - 16:15
The rapid electrification of transportation is creating new interdependencies between power and transportation systems, particularly during extreme events and disasters. As electric vehicle (EV) adoption increases, evacuation-related charging demand, infrastructure disruptions, and limited access to energy resources introduce challenges that conventional power system planning and operation frameworks were not designed to address. Wildfires provide a critical example: transmission outages and public safety power shutoffs can reduce network capacity while evacuation simultaneously concentrates charging demand along affected transportation corridors. Improving resilience therefore requires coordinated decision-making across the full disaster lifecycle, from infrastructure preparedness to emergency operation and post-disaster recovery.
This research develops optimization and decision-support methods for resilient power systems under large-scale transportation electrification, addressing three complementary stages of resilience. First, the research will extend existing infrastructure planning models through a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming framework for the strategic siting and sizing of distributed generation, energy storage systems, and EV charging infrastructure under disaster uncertainty. Second, building on a developed single-period nonlinear AC optimal power flow formulation, the research will extend the framework to multi-period operation to coordinate priority-based EV evacuation charging with mobile EV charger dispatch during grid contingencies while explicitly representing voltage and thermal operating constraints. Third, a mixed-integer routing and scheduling framework is proposed for the deployment of mobile energy resources, including energy tankers and vehicle-to-everything (V2X)-capable fleets, to support electric transportation and critical loads when conventional infrastructure is disrupted.
Together, these components connect long-term infrastructure planning, emergency grid operation, and post-disaster energy recovery within an integrated optimization and decision-support framework. The research will build on preliminary results obtained using IEEE benchmark systems and will incorporate California case studies representing wildfire and flooding scenarios. Resilience will be evaluated using technical and operational metrics such as load not served, priority-weighted EV energy served, and recovery time. The overall goal is to provide decision-support tools for utilities, transportation agencies, and emergency planners to support resilient planning, operation, and recovery in increasingly electrified energy and transportation systems.
Event Host: Saeed Aliamooei Lakeh, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisors: Keith Corzine and Leila Parsa
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95295718011?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Krishnaswamy, L. (CSE) - Network Load Balancing for Geographically Distributed Datacenters
2026-08-14 08:30 - 10:30 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
As datacenters scale up and become more geographically distributed, wide-area network inter-datacenter traffic, which typically consists of data-heavy tasks, has become increasingly prevalent. Some of the noteworthy challenges raised by the coexistence and interaction between inter- and intra-datacenter traffic are the differences in their QoS requirements, link utilization, and round-trip times. To the best of our knowledge, these challenges have not yet been addressed by current datacenter load balancers. To highlight this gap, we conducted a comparative performance study of state-of-the-art datacenter load balancers. Through extensive simulations, we study how they perform under different network topologies and workloads, including intra-datacenter, inter-datacenter, and mixed intra- and inter-datacenter workloads that reflect how datacenters have evolved to keep up with their continuously changing driving application landscape. Our study shows that current load balancers are not able to adequately distribute load under inter-DC workloads as well as mixed intra- and inter-datacenter traffic coexistence.
Motivated by our observations, we introduce Balancia, a transport agnostic, lightweight network load balancer that dynamically switches between per-flow and per-packet control in order to provide adequate performance for both intra- and inter-DC traffic given their different characteristics and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. We show that, when compared against state-of-the-art load balancers, Balancia achieves close to 80% reduction in the 99% tail flow completion times for inter-datacenter traffic in the presence of intra- and inter-datacenter workload coexistence. Further in this work, we explore proactively monitoring for congestion with the help of phantom queues and rerouting flows in a timely manner. Through Balancia2.0 we decouple congestion control and load balancing signaling, and examine its effects on DC and WAN traffic.
Event Host: Lakshmi Krishnaswamy, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Katia Obraczka
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94414934371?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Return to the Redwoods 2026
2026-08-14 00:00 - 2026-08-16 23:59 | John R. Lewis College, College Ten Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Get ready to Return to the Redwoods! Reconnect with friends, family, and fellow alumni as you explore the beauty of UC Santa Cruz. From the kick-off party and Stars & S’mores to hikes, workshops, and family-friendly fun, this weekend offers something for everyone.
Ticket, housing, and registration details will be shared in early 2026—stay tuned!
You won’t want to miss it.

Rules Are Not Neutral: Play As Sense-Making, Acts Of Resistance, And Imagining Otherwise
2026-08-13 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives.
In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives.
All games embody values, whether intentional or not.
– Mary Flanagan, game designer and scholar
Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning.
Games are the art of agency.
– C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher
The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it celebrates creativity and difference, it also asks how these works engage critically with the structures that shape our lives.
Some works use rules to model systems, helping players understand how those systems operate. Others use play to rehearse action, asking players to practice navigating or challenging those systems. Still others turn toward speculation, inviting players to imagine alternative futures, worlds, and the systems that might shape them.
The imagination is an instrument of change.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, author
The focus on analog games reflects how they foreground materiality and shared physical presence. Played face-to-face, handled, read aloud, and experienced together, these works show how rules operate not in abstraction, but through lived, embodied experience.
Ultimately, the exhibition asks us to consider not only how games represent the world, but how they shape our engagement with it – and how through play, the social and political systems they model might be understood, challenged, and reimagined.
Games are not apolitical.
– Kishonna L. Gray, media scholar

Gallery Reception
May 15 from 1 to 4pm at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

Art Friday
Hands-on art activities drawing from the current exhibition.
ALL ARE WELCOME regardless of skill level. Art supplies and free snacks are provided!

Working Hard Isn’t Enough: The Unspoken Rules That Shape Your Career
2026-08-13 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
Working Hard Isn’t Enough: The Unspoken Rules That Shape Your Career With Ricky Koo
Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026 | Noon PT
Virtual via Zoom
Hosted by UCLA Alumni Association, open to all UC alumni
As a first-generation immigrant, career coach Ricky Koo was taught to work hard, stay humble, and let results speak. Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing: You can be great at your job and still be misunderstood, overlooked or underestimated.
In this webinar, Ricky Koo — a first-generation immigrant who rose through the ranks to become a corporate executive before building his own professional coaching business — breaks down what actually shapes how you’re perceived at work, and how to take control of your professional narrative without being fake, loud or political in ways that feel misaligned. This isn’t about self-promotion. It’s about self-definition.
Learn More & Register

Chat with the AI Chair
2026-08-12 18:00 - 18:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
AI is advancing faster than ever. Join Praveen Krishna, chair of the AI Program Advisory Board, for a discussion of the latest developments shaping the field, from Agentic AI and AI orchestration to enterprise deployment, emerging regulations, local AI models, and breakthrough innovations.
This is a monthly conversation series. Each session highlights timely trends and concludes with an interactive Q&A.
Claim your seat today.

Learn more about the courses and offerings available through our UCSC Silicon Valley Extension AI Application Development program.
