Participatory Action Research & Design
Curated by Jon McKenzie and StudioLab S26
MACRE, 415 N Tioga St, Ithaca, NY 14850
EXHIBITION Apr 10-17, 2026
OPENING Apr 10 5PM-8PM
Support provided by Mellon Rural Humanities/Society for the Humanities, Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, and Department of Literatures in English.
Comics, Posters, PAR&D features information comics and posters created by first-year students at Cornell University. Combining old school and new school, writers mix argument and story, idea and image using forms of transmedia knowledge and strategic storytelling to tackle issues ranging from AI and spiritual homecomings to fast fashion and math prizes.
Information comics situate knowledge in real or speculative scenarios, examine different perspectives, and seek transformation via sharing of worlds. Info comics combine everyday and expert discourse to explore and share contemporary ideas and issues with adults, high school students, and other experts. Their covers serve as posters.
After researching a topic of their choosing, students compose dialogues, storyboards, and hand-drawn, copy-and-paste, and/or AI-generated images. We learn about fair use, copyright, and “copy left” approaches and their vexed connections with neoclassical, Romantic, and avant-garde art and design traditions.
It all comes together using Comic Life software, saving to pdf format, and printing at Gnomon Copy here in Ithaca.
Ry Ferro,director of MACRE adjusts a video projector in preparation for the show, which also featured The Cruellest Month: Video and Artificial Intelligence Reports, a group exhibition by Yana Malka, Jon McKenzi, Ralo Mayer, and Jack Stenner.
MACRE member Norm peers in the door of the space at 415 Tioga Street, a long walk down the hill from Cornell and Ithaca College. Our collaboration focuses on the ways writing, media making, and networking can help restore and strengthen ties with communities and the larger world.
In the main room, Alejandra pitches a pop-up board game event that CeCe and friends take in. Each semester students share their research with local artists and community members.
Olesia, Jake, and Rebecca share their info comics and posters based on their research of different stakeholder from their own fields of interest. Students think through a variety of media genres and platforms: academic essays, abstracts, proposals, annotated bibliographies, info comics, posters, Pecha Kucha presentations, and exhibition.
Local MACRE artist Jennilie Brewster tells Jake about her spiral cosmogram of 31 life events, based on the structure of a novel important in her life. Jake’s research paper and info comic focus on the history and myth of intelligence.
Cassidy and a friend watch Yann Mal video that uses AI to simultaneously display T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, its translation into German, and back again into English. MACRE is a media arts collective and resource exchange in Ithaca. This semester our exhibit was part of three interrelated events in one place.
A poetry reading by playwright Saviana Stanescu featured experimental poems dating back to 2001, when she studied at NYU in StudioLab’s “9/11 class,” a defining moment in the development of performance design. She is pictured here with Ry, Jon, Cassidy, Grace, Hibba, Anar and friends after her reading.
Poetry reading by Saviana Stanescu
Installation of Video and Artificial Intelligence Reports
