Presentations From Fluidity Forum 2025
The sessions and exhibits listed on this page are subject to potential change if necessary. Some cancellations will inevitably occur. We will assign rooms and time slots soon.
You may also see our 2023 session list, and our 2024 session list. You can see some videos of past sessions on this playlist on our YouTube channel.
Please email us at our contact@ email address, or through our Contact Page, if you catch anything that seems mistaken or unlikely!
Intro to Fluidity Forum, Matt Arnold
coffee ritual, Matt Arnold
karaoke, Breanna Bartholomew
Turing and Tabletops, Joshua Brulé
session about ecosystems broadly construed, Joe Cecil
Manifesto for a New Culture, Patrick Day
Creating Resilience and Connection in the Age of Overwhelm, Patrick Day
The Yin and Yang of Partner Dance, Harry Gao
discussion group on that which is Alive in the Moment, Ann Gemlich
interactive workshop on the ethnographic style of interviewing, Chelsea Jones
how Team Woo and Team Materialist can have better conversations, Eileen Martz
FIRST Robotics, Peter Mueller
workshop on meditation, Srikar Pamidimukkala
how dissociative identity disorder teaches us about the/our self, Laura Pearl
observations of psychomagical practices and events, Claire Peters
presentation on music festivals, Marko Schmid
unannounced workshops and talks, Allen Tipper
Perspectives and Purposes, Brandon Watson
General Semantics, Bruce Webber
Arm Yourself 101, Alexis Wu
Competitive-rules Five in a Row Is Pretty Hardcore, Alexis Wu
coffee ritual
by Matt Arnold
A Monty Python-esque high church parody ritual. The Pope of Coffee shall blesspresso the Holy of Holies: the most theatrical brewing method ever devised. The acolytes will serve the Holy Liquid unto the congregation, who shall raise the sacrament to the east, and in unison, recite the litany “God, I needed that!” A blend of caféths such as Press-byterian, Buzzentine, Sipiscopal, the Latte-day Saints, and even Atheismericano.
Turing and Tabletops
by Joshua Brulé
“Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”
Yes—we’ve all seen ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
But can AI be a satisfactory roleplaying partner? Can we tell the difference between roleplaying with a fellow human versus an LLM?
Instead of the classic Turing Test where we ask a series of questions, we’ll prompt an LLM to interactively roleplay a fictional character in some scenario, e.g. a tsundere elf princess, avoiding the enemy army with the help of the mercenary she just hired. Please feel free to bring your own prompts. Dramatic readings are encouraged.
Perspectives and Purposes
by Brandon Watson
In this talk, we’ll be murdering a sacred cow of modern thought: a “View from Nowhere” which promises an escape from our messy, partial perspectives. What happens when we stop trying to escape these lived perspectives, and instead embrace them as a starting point for inquiry? What we find is that mind and world aren’t separate—they’re entangled!
Precisely because we don’t leave our viewpoints behind as we examine their construction, this leaves us with a question: how do we unpack a circularity that we ourselves are a part of? The answer lies not in escaping this circle, but in learning how to navigate it skillfully.
Arm Yourself 101
by Alexis Wu
An introduction to designing and assuming your personal heraldic coat of arms. In his 1901 essay “A Defence of Heraldry”, G. K. Chesterton argued that democracy made the appalling mistake of not saying, as it should have, to the common citizen, “You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk”, but instead used a meaner formula, “The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are”. How, then, do we translate that adoration of symbolic colors and shapes, that celebration of beauty, pageantry, and self-expression from the old days, into our age of (nominally democracy, but in actuality) homogenization and enshittification? How might the principles and best practices of heraldry help you navigate a sea of uninspired Twitter/Substack icons and profile pictures? Why is the seemingly impenetrable technolect that is heraldic blazons nevertheless useful? And is the Rule of Tincture a hard and fast rule or just a respectful suggestion?
Competitive-rules Five in a Row Is Pretty Hardcore
by Alexis Wu
Go players may think of gomoku as not much besides a simple and shallow kids’ game that happens to be played with Go equipment, and this reputation is not exactly undeserved. After all, vanilla-rules gomoku, just like Connect Four, is a solved PSPACE-complete m,n,k-game in which, provided optimal play from both players, the first player always wins. But did you know that a society of enthusiasts in Japan have been patching the rules of gomoku since 1892, introducing handicaps for the first player and devising opening constraints that balance the game to the point that contemporary AI can’t solve it? Did you know that the resulting professional, competitive-rules variant of this silly little game, which can be played with paper and pencil if you wanted to, is as strategically complex and dynamic as chess? Let’s play some renju. After all, it’s still nowhere near as daunting as Go.