Octopus Mandala Glow (OMG) was a public artwork and performance premiered on September 28th 2014 at Santa Monica’s Glow Festival on the famous Pacific Wheel. OMG was created by Art|Sci Director Victoria Vesna, who was invited to be the keynote artist of the festival, together with the Art|Sci Collective Team: Ray Zimmerman / Dawn Faelnar /Mike Datz / Peter Rand / Steven Amrhein / Lindy Ransom.
The vision was to spread the project beyond the Pacific Wheel and on to other ferris wheels with the slogan “Occupy Your Wheel,” in order to create a global chorus and spread the joy.
Echo & Narcissus was an installation that explores this ancient myth as a metaphor for the interaction between two individuals who cannot communicate. An interactive visual projection on water and multi-channel soundtrack of Echo’s voice used counterpoint to produce a series of visual and sonic relationships.
As one looked into the water one would see an image of their own face gradually materializing, dematerializing, disappearing, then reappearing once again. Echo’s voice permeates the space, moving throughout the gallery creating a haunting affect.
Echo & Narcissus is directed and produced by artist/curator David Familian, who is artistic director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts in UC Irvine. His collaborating team included actor Marie Chambers (voice of Echo), media artist Eric Parren (programmer of the interactive elements) and author Terry Wolverton (writer of the Echo’s monologue).
Fallen Fruit presents a set of their Public Fruit Maps paired with their 2010 video, “The Loneliest Fruit in the World.” The maps are one of the collaboration’s signature projects: mapping all the fruit trees that grow in or over public space in neighborhoods around the world to which they are invited. The maps are hand-drawn and distributed free of copyright; they serve as guides for foraging but more importantly as visionary representations of what we hope to see: alternative urban spaces that engender new forms of sharing and thereby create new public experiences. “The Loneliest Fruit in the World” addresses a different kind of public fruit, berries that grow wild in the Arctic. The lingonberry, the salmonberry and the blueberry grow without any human involvement, and for a few short weeks become the site of intense activity as people flock to pick them on all public land. Shot in a residency in Tromsø, Norway, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the video follows a group of Norwegians through a beautiful, spare landscape; while picking, they negotiate the relation between solitude, gleaning and company.
ARTIST BIO: Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects, site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. From participatory performances such as Public Fruit Jams and Fruit Meditations, to ongoing indexical work such as Public Fruit Maps and curated exhibitions that reorganize the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing their collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject, the three artists of Fallen Fruit — David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — deploy fruit as a lens through which to see the world.
Duality is an Art|Sci manifestation of complexity emerging from a tiny network of billions of tiny self assembled, self-organized, non-linear connections that materialize in time and space through holistic processes and which are a kinesthetic visualization of wandering in and out of the fuzzy borders of chaos and order. We use a real network, where the creator has given permission to its expanding and collapsing spatio-temporal morphogenic and often catastrophic dynamics.
This project represents the transition in science and art from giving up on the clock to embrace a cloud in terms of Karl Popper’s important statement “we live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.” In the laboratory we build electro-ionic clouds. In the gallery we let them self create images songs and dance for this Art|Sci exhibition entitled Duality. It is the duality of the dark space between the known and unknown, determinism and surprise, mathematical form and fuzziness from which the atoms, electrons and ions speak to the visitors without censorship.
Microbes are often synonymous with rot, decay, infection, and disease. When microbes are made visible—or worse, smellable—it signals danger, a situation best avoided. But microbes are unavoidable, essential as part of the ecology of the healthy human body and the global dynamics of biogeochemical cycles. The growing realization of microbial usefulness and diversity is changing our relationship to microorganisms from one of fear, isolation, and sterilization, to a more ecological understanding of symbiotic exchange. Bacterial Encounters is an exploration of nature and culture from a microbiological perspective, capturing the microbial ecology and the living diversity thriving after the death of the Salton Sea. Through culturing such microbes, we make visible the ecologies that make up our world.
Sci|Eye Apparatus is an experimentation in images, sound, and space, as we shape them with our tools. The Apparatus takes us through different scales, states, and dimensions. The intention is to help us imagine the invisible with composed aural atmospheres.
Blanka Buic studied music and economics, takes pictures and shoots videos for a living, and started exploring scientifically-inspired perception when she joined the Art | Sci center in 2009.
Soundscapes were created by Günther Jones, inspired by both natural and man-made rhythmic sounds that have their own kind of music.
Art|Sci Gallery / CNSI 5419. Click here for a downloadable PDF map and here for an interactive campus map.
Project Eureka is a shapeshifting narrative that will unfold over the course of 2013. Through performance, installation, and video the project will follow the first and last designer baby, as she struggles to contribute to the future of humanity in a post-climate change world.
This iteration of Project Eureka will introduce two characters from Eureka's world.
Featuring interviews with Laurie Zoloth, PhD (Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics and Religion; Director of Center for Bioethics, Science and Society) and Gizmo Jon (of Slab City)
Between 7 & 8, the gallery will become a dance floor.
Thursday, April 25th, 2013
5-7pm
Art|Sci Gallery, CNSI 5419
Click here for a downloadable PDF map and here for an interactive campus map.
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her works include digital sculpture, installations and large-scale photography. Her project, Genetic Seed Bank, demonstrates the recuperative and adaptive power of nature and the potential for organic materials as a medium for artistic expression.
Link: Please note that these are two separate events.
Tuesday, Nov. 13 6 p.m. Design | Media Arts Lecture Suzanne Anker EDA (Room 1250), Broad Art Center Thursday, Nov. 15 5 p.m. Art | Sci Exhibition
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her works include digital sculpture, installations and large-scale photography.
EDA (Map)
Broad Art Center
240 Charles E. Young Drive, Room 1250
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Art|Sci Gallery / CNSI 5th floor Presentation Space. Click here for a downloadable PDF map and here for an interactive campus map.
Launch of card game conceptualized by Victoria Vesna and neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan, graphics / game design by Adeline Drucker (DMA Game Lab).
Reception and introduction to project: Friday, November 9th – 6-8pm Game testing workshop: Saturday, November 10th – 3-6pm
Harvestworks 596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
