Profiling the poor

The Tech/Law Colloquium Series presents “Automating Inequality” author Virginia Eubanks, Oct. 26, 3:30-5 p.m. in G01 Gates Hall.

Her talk, “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor,” is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Inequality.

Today, automated systems control which neighborhoods are policed, which families obtain needed resources and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data analytics, Eubanks says, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In her book, Eubanks investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms and predictive-risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are cut off as she lay dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

Eubanks is an associate professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany, a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a New America fellow.

MFA reading series

New graduate student writers at Cornell are presenting their poetry and fiction in a series of free readings this fall at Buffalo Street Books in downtown Ithaca, presented by the Department of English Creative Writing Program.

The first installment in the First Year MFA Reading Series is Oct. 26 at 6 p.m. and features fiction writer Kathryn Diaz and poet Jasmine Reid.

Upcoming readings, all at 6 p.m., are Thursday, Nov. 1, with fiction by Carlos Rafael Gomez and poetry by Anastasia McCray; Friday, Nov. 9, with poetry by Chi Le and fiction by Sophia Veltfort; and Friday, Nov. 16, with poetry by Yessica Martinez and fiction by Ashley Hand and Anum Asi.

Halloween Eve rock opera

Cornell Cinema presents “House of Usher,” a multimedia rock ’n’ roll opera, Oct. 30 at 7:15 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Tickets are $12 general, $8 for students, available at CornellCinemaTickets.com.

The production is a re-telling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” combining film, music and theater. Anna Coogan and Tzar will perform a live improvised score to the 1928 silent film by Jean Epstein.

The score was originally created for the 2015 Ithaca Fantastik Film Festival, and restaged in March 2018 and directed by Samuel Buggeln at The Cherry Artspace in Ithaca. Buggeln directs the Halloween Eve program with theatrical lighting, Foley sound effects and an atmospheric set.

Credit: Provided

Also showing at Cornell Cinema: “Dogs of Democracy,” Thursday, Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. with filmmaker Mary Zournazi. The screening is cosponsored with the Cornell Institute for European Studies.

In the film, Zournazi depicts the stray dogs of Athens, Greece, the birthplace of democracy. The dogs become a symbol of hope for the people who take care of them and for the anti-austerity movement in Greece, which Zournazi says has become the “stray dog of Europe.”

Biennial performance

Associate Professor of English Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and artist Emilie Stark-Menneg ’07 will present “Measured/The Clover Project,” a collaborative multimedia performance of poetry, video and music, Nov. 1 at 5:15 p.m. at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

The performance project “springs from tensions of an urgent present moment marked by breakdowns and failures in communication between women,” Stark-Menneg says. “The piece examines how a modern-day interracial friendship plays out within the context of the Victorian era.”

The performance is free and open to the public and is part of the Cornell Council for the Arts’ 2018 Biennial, “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival.”

First impressions multiply

Infinite possible futures and simultaneous parallel existences make for endless chances to make a first impression for protagonists Roland and Marianne in playwright Nick Payne’s “Constellations,” coming to the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts Nov. 1-3.

Payne proposes that life exists in a multiverse in his play, which combines science, technology and storytelling to engage audiences emotionally and intellectually in Marianne and Roland’s romance, across multiple possible scenarios. Do they hit it off right away or part, never to meet again? Does he break her heart? Does she break his?

The Department of Performing and Media Arts production is directed by Julia Dunetz ’19. Showtimes are Nov. 1 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 2 at 5 p.m., and Nov. 3 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center’s Black Box Theatre.

The play is “a marvelously technical production,” sound designer Franklin Wang ’20 says. “It’s a rare chance to see something so transformative in the Black Box. The story is unique and the whole show is such an experience.”

Tickets are $5, available at schwartztickets.com or at the Schwartz Center box office, 430 College Ave., open Monday-Saturday, 1-8 p.m.