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visitors to explore what climate change looks and feels like from a point of empathy and compassion, calling them to action.” Several political statements of note pinpointed the experimental animation entry Cankus, by Türkiye-born Melisa Saydi, a series of Orwellian shorts mostly set in and around an Istanbul urban dystopian landscape where the authoritarian leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan glared ever-present from screens and billboards as the bulbous-headed protagonist trudged about as if sleepwalking in a “psycho-political space.” Through generative visuals, Saydi explained how she became fascinated with “this interplay between the real and the digital. I was interested in creating a strong feeling of alienation or disconnectedness.” Meredith Drum’s Revolving Red Monuments involved an interactive AR sculpture garden featuring Soviet monuments in Eastern Europe—combining 3-D virtual sculpture with poems about war. Working out of Blacksburg, Virginia, Drum collaborated with a host of Bulgarian visual artists and employed poems by Paul Celan, Ilya Kaminsky, Denise Levertov, Du Fu, and many others. With this ever-changing, provocative work, Drum, who has worked with Civil War monuments in the US, hoped she “can contribute to a larger re-imagining of liberation.” In the Going Back to School department, the most original entry was certainly the hour-long performative lecture by astrobiology PhD student at the University of Washington, Seattle, Ranger Liu, as he applied the principle of quantization—fundamental to quantum physics—to the behaviors of love and desire in people. He called the lecture “Quantum Romantics,” wherein he compared the same key processes from physics (motion and force in particles) to romantics (love and desire in persons), using models to predict behaviors. While studying quantum mechanics as an undergrad astrophysics major,