Presented at Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery and curated by Ellen K. Levy, a multimedia artist, scholar, and past president of the College Art Association, “From Forces to Forms” explores the nature of form by engaging with the potent forces and processes of nature. By investigating how physical laws shape living and nonliving forms alike — ideas first proposed by D’ Arcy Thompson in his classic tome “On Growth and Form” (1917) — the exhibition explores universal principles of organismic development while delving into the flux and perturbations that characterize life today.
Reflecting Pratt Institute’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, “From Forces to Forms” features works by 19 artists and designers whose practices draw from both art and science and articulate a shared commitment to creating a more sustainable world. These works consider the implications of form generation through a variety of media (from analog to digital), at different scales (from subatomic to macroscopic), and in varied contexts (from prebiotic to ecosystems).
First Episode "Laws of Nature" will feature:
Tauba Auerbach
Adam Brown and Robert Root-Bernsteir
Todd Siler
Paul Thomas
Meredith Tromble
The first section of the exhibition is composed of works by artists who explore basic forces of nature and the behavior of entities that are often placed, unattended, in the background. The artists emphasize the activation of life, often constructing their own methods. Like Thompson, they look at the intersection of physics and chemistry. probing the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, and they consider the available sources of energy to initiate the transition. The late chemist Robert Shapiro, who embarked on a lifelong search for life's origins, pointed to the necessary conditions: "You need a compartment, you need a source of energy, you need to couple the energy to the chemistry involved, and you need a sufficiently rich chemistry to allow for this network of pathways to establish itself. Having been given this, you can then start to get evolution.'
This major exhibition of art, science, design, music and philosophy invites you to experience different global perspectives on our shared planet, and consider Earth as a community we all belong to. Interactive experiences, immersive installations and digital works come together to take you on a journey of self-reflection, discovering how technology can connect us to the natural world and leaving you feeling empowered to make positive change.
Artists, activists, researchers, writers, designers, scientists and more highlight the need to work across borders and disciplines to urgently tackle climate change together. By reigniting respect for our beautiful and complex planet Our Time on Earth will challenge your existing opinions on the most important issue of our lifetime.
[ALIEN] STAR DUST: Signal to Noise has evolved from a site-specific installation into a global, collaborative and participatory virtual guided meditation bringing participants into a space of healing and transcendence through visuals and vibrations. Due to times of crisis and quarantine it became evident that the connection is more vital than ever and stardust became the medium and the metaphor for contemplation and connectivity.
This meditation is created by the artist specifically for CYFEST-13 and will focus on the Chelyabinsk meteor that fell in 2013. Audiences are guided to follow the breakup of the meteor and stay centered as all falls apart, and the star dust is mixed up with various anthropogenic dust. Before the meditation, there will be a talk about the project followed by Q&A after the collective gathering of minds.
This collective/distributed meditation is an online version of Noise Aquarium, which evolved during the pandemic and was first presented by the Laznia gallery in Gdansk, Poland. We are all interconnected and we all need air to breathe – no matter what our philosophical/ political stance. The invisible virus has turned our world upside down, and we turn our attention to the micro-creatures that give us life. The Noise Aquarium installation is all about achieving inner balance in order to commune with plankton. Now that we cannot be there in person, we try to do the same by connecting online.
Victoria Vesna (New York) and Siddharth Ramakrishnan (Seattle) are joined by Anna Nacher (Slovakia), Rhiannon Catalyst (New York), John Brumley (Birmingham, UK), and Ivana Dama and Clinton van Arman (Los Angeles) who will create a live binaural sonic layering on the animations of plankton by Martina Fröschl.
We invite participation from all across the world to breathe together in rhythm, as we listen and dive into the interconnected ecology of the collective mind and share frequencies of healing amidst all the noise.
Victoria and Siddharth would like to draw your mind to the suffering in South Asia, caused by the lack of medical facilities, primarily the shortage of medical oxygen, in the fight against COVID-19. They have provided a list of organizations you could support to help in the effort to provide oxygen and other life-saving interventions.
Disasters Emergency Committee Coronavirus Appeal
UNICEF India COVID-19 Appeal
Raw Science Film Festival live events are postponed until later in 2020. The festival team considers it a challenge to bring science-based technical solutions and communication strategies to ensure a safe event where filmmakers can be honored, live.
Raw Science Film Festival (RSFF) is an annual event that takes place in Los Angeles, California and brings together people across science, technology, entertainment and media to showcase best in class film from around the world. The event was initially made possible through the support of the National Academy of Sciences and The Science and Entertainment Exchange.
The festival was created by Raw Science Inc. founder Keri Kukral thanks to the inspiration of producer Mitchell Block. The mission of RSFF is to humanize science and bring fact-based experts to the forefront of popular culture by celebrating the best science storytelling in the world. The goal is to create a world class film festival for science media on par with Cannes or Sundance Film Festival, and to extend it globally.
RSFF2020 is the 6th annual event and RSFF is collaborating with Gensler and Art|Sci Center and Natural History Museum Vienna are redesign the red carpet, defining a newly accessible and focused Hollywood experience. [Alien] StarDust is the featured, interactive red-carpet exhibit and based on extraterrestrial and anthropogenic dust which falls across the Earth with no boundaries. The art exhibit was developed at the invitation of Dr. Christian Koeberl, geologist and director of Natural History Museum Vienna, home of the one of the largest meteorite collections in the world.
About Loss Less:
In 2008 Kamran Sadeghi was selected resident artist at Satsop. Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s “I am Sitting In A Room” (1970)—Sadeghi amplified an original electronic music passage with a length of 2 minutes into the open aired structure and recorded the outcome of the tower’s acoustic response. This recording was then re-amplified back into the structure and re-recorded. The process was repeated ten times, and with each cycle the natural acoustics of the tower began to reshape the original passage until it disappeared entirely. This approach captured the architectural integrity and holistic immediacy of the nuclear cooling tower while symbolically removing it’s entire existence.
The result is a unique 25 minute sonic experience full of audible artifacts that document space, time and our environment. The composition was created on location and in real-time, allowing all natural elements such as wind, rain, wildlife, resonance and feedback-distortion to be a part in the process and therefore the end result. No post production effects were used.
The ‘Rework’ version is a studio interpretation recorded live using samples of the original composition, processed through effects and used as a guide for added atmospheric electronic tones as counterpoint. The large throbbing bass drum pattern emphasizes the weight and physicality of the cooling tower, while recalling a sacred ceremonial chants or drums used to converse with or drive away destructive spirits.
The title ‘Loss Less’ is a play on the term lossless compression—a type of process that allows for the preservation and and perfect reconstruction of data (audio). In this case the audio was not preserved, but intentionally degraded. The title also taps into the reality of catastrophic loss and destruction caused by nuclear energy, and the call for less.
NanoMandala, by Victoria Vesna in collaboration with nanoscientist James Gimzewski and Tibetan monks from the Ghaden Lhopa Khangsten Monastery - The nano mandala installation incorporates a sand mandala a cosmic diagram and ritualistic symbol of the universe. Visitors watch as images of a grain of sand are projected in evolving scale from the molecular structure of a single grain to the recognizable. Beginning at 5:30pm, Gimzewski will be there in person to introduce this unique collaboration.
UCLA California NanoSystems Institute
(CNSI), 5th floor
JENNIFER MOON explores the possibilities of virtual world-building for ameliorating psychic pain and social anxiety in her 2018 body of work, “Familial Technologies.”
This exhibition is curated from a larger body of work first exhibited at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and includes virtual living spaces and personal avatars developed for use in Avakin Life, a virtual world game that Moon and her parents and brother used to experience family therapy sessions under self-determined circumstances in conjunction with visits to a therapist “IRL”. Moon’s family members are represented here by “player cards” that profile their avatars, screen shots of their individual dwellings in Avakin Life, and screen recordings of their ongoing weekly Avakin Life family relationship sessions.
Through the idealized, mediated virtual platform, the Moon family is able to access aspects of their emotional psyches free of the barriers that physical embodiment presents.
Stealth Drones is comprised of seven embroidery hoops hung in formation. Each hoop contains fractal patterns and ornamentation embroidered in white thread. The hoops are presented on a black velvet backdrop. At regular intervals UV lights are activated in the exhibition space. The embroideries react to the UV light and reveal a new type of information. Once the regular room lights are turned back on, this information disappears.
Please join us for our monthly LASER talk following the opening reception for Stealth Drone by Anne_Niemetz.
