The Hox Zodiac allows the human-audience to experience the shared history and potential of genetic diversity among animals. Here, the idea of the Hox gene as a binding element is introduced and the Chinese animal zodiac and dinner table as the structure / space for discussion is employed, allowing the format to build based on the audience interaction. In neuroscience this is the emergent property of network connections, where a simple array of neurons can give rise to complex behaviors through interactions and adaptations.
The Hox Zodiac Dinner is a performative culinary event. There will be 12 small courses served to the participants. The event draws parallels to universally shared genetics and the Chines Zodiac symbols. It is quiet and meditative. There will be participants in the performance, and the event is open to all viewers to share the experience.
This is the final event of the ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE: Technologies for Change exhibition.
Victoria Vesna’s work has long focused on immersing her audiences in installation spaces that are meant to slow down time and take us into other dimensions. This led her to work in close collaborations with musicians, sound artists, nanoscientists, biologists, neuro-scientists and buddhist monks among others. Some examples of work in the past two decades are the NanoMandala, Water Bowls, Blue Morph, Octopus Brain Storming, Bird Song Diamond and most recently the Noise Aquarium. In this new work, together with her collaborators from the UCLA Art Sci collective and Harvestworks, she takes us on a meditative journey to outer space.
Premiering with the support of Harvestworks, this work is meant to be experienced as a guided meditation bringing to life the sensations of meteorites and micro-meteorites falling on all continents and mixing with the anthropogenic dust falling on our planet from many dimensions. Layers of sounds from inner and outer space with animations of dust and data driven by corona deaths are presented with the intent of honoring those who left their bodies without preparation and all who are suffering.
This online version was created as a meditation that is guided by the artist following the extra-terrestrial, terrestrial, and human-made dusts traveling far and wide and creating complexity that is part of an invisible reality. Most go about their daily life without being aware of ever thinking about the extraterrestrial dusts that could be on their kitchen floor, right here on earth. The alien signal is lost in the human noise and the group meditation reclaims our vision of planetary citizenship.
We are created from stardust by nuclear fusion, like our myriad siblings – animals, plants, insects, plankton, bacteria, and viruses, and we all function together in vibratory fields – bottom up just as nature and nanotechnology works. [Alien] Star Dust rains on us every day and this piece brings these particles to our attention and reminds us of our interconnected heritage in the larger cosmos. Dust knows no borders.
Friday, 7 September 2018 - 5:00pm to Monday, 10 September 2018 - 6:00pm
Exhibitors / Artists:
Organizers: Dawn Faelnar + Ben Olsen
Art|Sci alumni and current grad student at Interface Cultures, Dawn Faelnar is one of the organizers of Leonardo SLAM, Sept. 7th, 9th and 10th, Ars Electronica Festival 2018, OK center Ursulinensaal, 5-6pm More info >>
The Leonardo Slam is an event for cross contamination of ideas, a short open public gathering based on the format of poetry slam, but more free-form: an individual or group may present work, words, stories, video, sound, ideas about work, work about ideas, work about work, ideas about ideas, work about nothing, ideas about music, music about performances, apples about oranges, oranges about history, history about histories, dance about architecture, et cetera.
Present or demonstrate an artwork, give a serious presentation, give a parody presentation, read a manifesto, tell an anecdote, involve the audience, improvise a song. There is no limit on the form of the presentation other than having a non negative duration and not being too long.
SYN CITY is a one night only exploration of merged perception. A pop-up event immersed within the installation Synaesthesia: what is the taste of the color blue? at Building Bridges Art Exchange, SYN CITY melds creative expression with scientific inquiry, inviting the audience to experience cross-modal perception through sculpture, performance, interactive installation, photography, and visual art. Produced by the UCLA Art | Sci Center in collaboration with Building Bridges Art Exchange and the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists, SYN CITY is a benefit / fundraising celebration focused toward the publication of a catalogue documenting this inaugural large-scale synaesthesia exhibition, symposium and accompanying performances and author readings -- the first of its kind in the United States.
Victoria Vesna, Artist and director of UCLA Art | Sci Center will present on this occasion Octopus Brainstorming: Synesthesia – a performative installation created in collaboration with neuroscientist Mark Cohen. This work utilizes real-time EEG brain waves, video, color, and sound in an illustration of brain-to-brain communication. Performers featured at Building Bridges Art Exchange gallery are Appelusa and Marcos Lutyens, synaesthete artists who currently have their works installed at Building Bridges Art Exchange.
Featured works also include Pathless Woods by artist Anne Patterson, a touchable, walk-through sculpture, and Tim Thompson's The Space Palette, an instrument that combines sound with color, pattern, and light, providing visitors to SYN CITY with the chance to experience colored music of their own creation.
Building Bridges Art Exchange
2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit F2
Santa Monica, CA 90404
6pm
Image Credit: Appelusa Photography: www.appelusaphotography.com
Syn City: a multi-sensory imaginarium of scientific delight + artistic inquiry + synaesthetic confession is co-curated by Building Bridges Art Exchange founder Marisa Caichiolo and Victoria Vesna, Director of the UCLA Art | Sci Center.
Produced by IASAS, CC Hart, Sean Day
Produced by BBAX, Marisa Caichiolo
Produced by UCLA Art | Sci Center, Victoria Vesna
Creative content contributors: Michael Becker, Andrew Ortiz, Portrait XO, Appelusa
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS + SCIENTISTS
Jon Adams works in a variety of mediums, is a trained geologist and considers himself to to be an 'Outsider Artist'. Adams has synaesthesia and Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. The artist's work explores sense and sensitivity through the 'hidden' and plays with perceptions of normal and the inaccessible.
Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris individually and collaboratively engage both simple elements with engineering to create experiential art. Their work is intertwined with science, utilizing a fusion of commonplace and made objects fused with high level electronics which Brian invents and develops for camera and robotics along with Raewyn's olfactory scientific research and art practice. In Turner and Harris's collaborative work they create multisensory experiences and manifestations of unsensed data and invite the audience to sample, taste, smell and participate.
Anne Patterson has chromesthesia; when she hears sound, she sees color. Trained as an architect and theater production designer, this unique combination of senses combines to create an artistic practice, hovering somewhere between the theatrical and the experiential. She continues to explore creating synesthetic environments with site- responsive installation, Pathless Woods, an investigation that began with her acclaimed 2013 installation Graced with Light, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
James Wannerton is an Englishman with an incredibly rare ability to taste sound. Even as a young boy, James always experienced an involuntary taste on his tongue every time he heard a sound. Hearing the name Anne Boleyn in history class, for example, gave him a strong flavor of pear drops. He associated most of the British monarchs with a specific taste, making it easy for him to remember facts and events.
Appelusa is a world champion artistic roller skater, and also an accomplished actor, writer, voice-over artist, photographer, mixed media, and performance artist. As a visual artist, she strives to depict how synaesthesia affects her perception of daily life by combining technology, roller dance, photography, and music. She is a founding member of the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists (IASAS), and serves as the organization's Dance Curator.
M.J. Cordoba, Doctor of Fine Arts (1994), has been researching on the synaesthesia field since the 80's. In addition, she also researches in other topics such as engraving on new materials and illustration systems on synthetic polymers (piece of work published by the Institute of Science and Polymer Technology, CSIC, in the year 2005). Forerunner of the study and promotion of synaesthesia in Spain, she has managed to organize four International Congresses on Synaesthesia, Science and Arts, which are unique in Europe due to their multidisciplinary character, These congresses bring together the highest level of researchers among universities from 40 different countries.
Marjan Vayghan informs her life experiences through multiple forms of synaesthesia, Marjan Vayghan's creative practice is shaped by her flexibility and relationship with colors, sounds and cross-pollination of senses and the multiple realities these sensations engender.
Tim Thompson is a software engineer, musician, and installation artist. His wide-ranging artistic work includes a programming language for MIDI, interactive installations at Burning Man and other festivals, musical performances with Playstation dance pads and QWERTY keyboards, and realtime video looping and processing with a handheld security camera. The Space Palette is a collaboration with Paul Sable, who created the woodwork.
Christine Söffing, born in Dortmund, Germany, studied the history of art, German language and literature, computer science, psychology and art in Münster, Germany. She has committed herself to working as an artist, while also giving workshops for drawing, painting, sculpture and video for children, young people and adults. Since 2010, Christine Söffing has served as head of the EMU-Ensemble, which offers experimental music and art through the Musisches Zentrum Ulm University concerts and sound-installations uniting art and science.
Marcos Lutyens's practice has centered on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor's embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. His investigations have included research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds.
Dr. Richard E. Cytowic, MD, MFA, currently Professor of Neurology at George Washington University, is a pioneer in synaesthesia research and, as an author, his books are considered the foundation for much of what we now understand about inherited synaesthesia. Dr. Cytowic and artist Marcos Lutyens often collaborate to create an ongoing dialogue between science and art.
ART+BRAIN: A CATALOGUE OF STORIES AND STRUCTURES
From the metaphorical potency of anatomical art and stories that probe decision circuits and mirror neurons in monkeys, to revolutionary biological visualizations of the dynamics of cellular and sub-cellular structures, ART + BRAIN: Stories and Structures explores the complex histories, practices, and interconnections between art, architecture, medicine and neuroscience, with the human brain as the central focus.
// Co-organized by Patricia Olynyk (Washington University in St. Louis) and Victoria Vesna (UCLA Art|Sci Center + Lab)
MORPHO NANO
A retrospective exhibition of a decade of artworks created by media artist Victoria Vesna and nanoscientist James Gimzewski. Their collaborative works create an intersection of space, time and embodiment by employing a very subtle and responsive energetic exchange. By reversing the scale of nanotechnology to the realm of human experience, the artist and scientist create a sublime reversal of space-time. Morpho Nano featured the premiere of a new collaboration between Mark Cohen and Victoria Vesna—BRAIN STORMING.
// Organized by David Familian (Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine)
16 MARCH 2016
The Art|Sci Collective celebrates the recent birthday of creative director Dawn Faelnar!
We're also sending off our Soft/Hardware Programmer John Brumley, who is off to Japan to start his Ph.D. in the University of Tsukuba.
12-2pm Luncheon, Presentation Space, California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI)
4-6 pm Fowler Museum at UCLA. Book Release featuring Art|Sci Collaborators
The Art|Sci Center celebrates a decade of intersections between art and science with the release of a book cataloging 200+ collaborative and interdisciplinary exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and curricula.
We begin with a Luncheon at CNSI honoring staff that have contributed so much dedication to the Art|Sci Center.
Then join us for an evening book signing and reception at the Fowler Museum featuring artists and scientists who have contributed to building the Third culture on the UCLA campus and beyond.
This event marks the beginning of a collaborative initiative with the Fowler Museum.
Bio-Artist KATHY HIGH will give a public presentation on her creative work in the emerging field of biological art, a field referred to as "bioart". She will introduce her influences and her interests and amazement with bio-art history.
Kathy High is an internationally recognized, award winning interdisciplinary artist from New York currently working with living systems, animals, and biology and art. She produces videos, sculptures and installations around issues of gender and technology, pursues queer and feminist inquiries into areas of bio-science, science fiction, and animal studies.
Her works have been shown in festivals, galleries and museums nationally and abroad, including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), the Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Videotage Art Space and Para-Site Gallery (Hong Kong), Festival Transitio_MX (Mexico), among others. She has received awards for her works including grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010), the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts.
She has had artist residencies with SymbioticA, art and science residency at the University of Western Australia (2009-20), the Bioart Society of Finland, Helsinki and Kilpisjarvi, Finland (2013) and in Hong Kong with the Asian Arts Council (2005).
Her UCLA exhibition opening April 16 is Waste Matters: You Are My Future and explores immune systems as autopoiesis, capable of maintaining themselves, looking at research in fecal microbial transplants and gut biomes to better understand the important function of bacteria in our bodies. This project looks at the metaphor of interspecies love, immunology and bacteria as players.
January 2015 marks the anniversary of the Art|Sci Center’s founding 10 years ago, and the launch of our year-long celebration. Join the Art|Sci Collective in looking back through the prolific decade and looking forward to the next. Sketches for future projects intermingle with presentations from memorable Art|Sci exhibitors, constructing a dynamic picture of the center’s continuing quest to promote “the third culture” between art and science.
In celebration of the Art|Sci Center's 10 years of promoting collaborative, interdisciplinary exhibitions, lectures, installations, and curricula, this LASER will feature presentations from Art|Sci affiliates of years past and years future. Presenters include sound artist Maciej Ozog, Professor of Biological Chemistry Dr. Lenny Rome (UCLA), Executive Director of the UCLA Confucius Institute Susan Jane, Professor of Arts Activisim Dr.David Gere (UCLA), Curator and Co-founder of Mindshare LA Dougie Campbell, and artist and lecturer Jim Barry (CalTech).
