InterPlay Salon with Austin Anderson, Jussi Ängeslevä, and Patrick R. Crowley | Stanford Affiliates Only

InterPlay (Interdisciplinary Playground) is a quarterly salon series co-organized by VPA Interdisciplinary Arts Programs and the Cantor Arts Center. Designed for faculty, graduate students, and campus collaborators, the series creates a lively space to share work, spark ideas, and build community across disciplines. Each salon features fast-paced presentations alongside playful, interactive experiences that encourage creativity and connection. With time for mingling, networking, and dialogue over light refreshments, InterPlay is a gathering place to discover the diverse and innovative projects happening across campus—and a forum to imagine new ones together.

This salon will feature Austin Anderson, Ph.D, Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab; Professor Jussi Ängeslevä, 2026 Artist in Residence at the Stanford Robotics Center; and, Patrick R. Crowley, Associate Curator of European Art, Cantor Arts Center.

Bios:

Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. His first book project, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, charts of history of racial aesthetics in videogames by exploring the recursive formal structures within games and race. His work has appeared in a variety of venues, including the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Transformative Works and Culture, Electronic Book Review, KULA, The Comparatist, Popular Culture Review, and other outlets.

Professor Jussi Ängeslevä is a designer, an artist and an educator. Having taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and Royal College of Arts in London, he is working with digital materiality and interaction design. His work as Creative Director at ART+COM Studios commands global recognition in media arts and exhibition design. His focus is in between fields: combining understanding of visual, physical and interaction design with algorithmic, electronic and mechatronic knowledge to create innovative and elegant experiences, where the meaning is inseparable from the medium communicating it. He now lives and works in Palo Alto, California, United States. This year, he will serve as the Artist in Residence at the Stanford Robotics Center.

Patrick R. Crowley joined the Cantor Arts Center in 2020 and oversees the department of European art from antiquity through 1900. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. Patrick is a historian of Roman art and visual culture and its afterlives in European classicisms, specializing in Roman portraiture, funerary art, and decorative arts, especially in precious stone. His research spans a broad range of questions about media, materiality, and the historical silences that imperceptibly, yet powerfully frame the ways in which we access the ancient past through its visual, material, and discursive residue. Patrick’s first book, The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2019), explores how the figure of the ghost makes visible ancient concepts of representation, conditions of visibility, and modes of embodiment. His second book project, Roman Portraiture: A Media Archaeology, grows out of his interests in the technical procedures of molding and casting, as well as the historical intersections between documentary photography and the production of knowledge in classical archaeology. His research has been generously supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He holds a PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University.

​All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for admission, but walk-ins are very welcome if space allows! RSVP here.

Accessibility Information or Requests

Cantor Arts Center and the VPA Interdisciplinary Arts Programs at Stanford University are committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access. For questions, please contact [email protected] Christina Linden, [email protected], 650-497-0340.

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