Since 2015, Joel Ong has been collecting sonic memories through interviews and casual conversations. As part of his Residency with UCLA this summer, Ong turned his attention to sonic memories in the environment, and is collecting these in order to draw attention to fluctuations in the climate observed and remembered through the inter-subjectivities of a diverse group of interviewees. The archive of memories is then audiated/imagined as a musical composition through binaural recordings and electroacoustic processing of field sounds. Where appropriate, each interviewee also provides an image of his/her ears that are then sculpted as closely as possible in clay and included in a binaural recording system. Through this, his project asks – how do we hear through someone else’s ears the same way we may imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Might we develop a deeper responsibility to the environment through the conservation of sounds that may be lost, or never again heard because of noisy anthropogenic changes to our soundscapes? How might we attend to the affect within each instance of listening, and create transformative politics of listening?
Sept. 9th - 9:00am PST / 18:00 CET
That Unseen Vibrance
Yolande Harris
Can our conscious listening effect the world around us? That unseen vibrance. These are dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums. They work through us. They present as oceanic. I have a sense of being inside the sound, submerged in another medium, molten, or perhaps growing wings. Of enormous pressure depth yet vibrance shimmer. To dive into the oceanic with our own airborne sounds, feet on the ground, ears underwater. What animal could hear like this?
Imagine an entwined sonic future of humans and ocean creatures. The pandemic-induced ‘anthropause’ in human activity, when oceans and land became suddenly and significantly quieter, offered both a window into possible sonic futures, and importantly, an opportunity to reflect back and hear ourselves more clearly. Yolande Harris’ audio visual worlds setup hope that an expanded sonic imagination can contribute to re-balancing human relationships to our environments. Sound is the harbinger of such a renewed relatedness.
Yolande will lead remote underwater sound walks along the Pacific coast as part of ‘Melt Me Into The Ocean’ (2018) and present work with collaborating scientist Ari Feidlaender using video and sounds from tagged whales in ‘From a Whale’s Back’ (2020). Her most recent highly resonant sound work presents the oceanic with dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums, sounds that work through us, in ‘That Unseen Vibrance’ (2021)
Walking and breathing meditation led by Anna Nacher and members of the Art Sci collective. Audiences are required to RSVP and encouraged to record and add 30 seconds of their breath to the growing Breath Library. The way we, as humans, participate in the vibrational fields and flows of energy of the Planet Earth is embodied practice, even if the process often remains somewhat mysterious, unnoticed or unacknowledged. This workshop will explore how a human vocalization, which is nothing else than amplified and conscious breathing, can become a practice of inquiry into the planetary water cycle. The human body is a fluid phenomenon, not only because the average amount of water in human organism ranges between 45-75%, depending on the particular organ or tissue (majority of which constitutes intracellular fluid), but also because it is incorporated into the planetary cycle, in which water constantly changes from liquid to vapor to ice, circulating around, through, and above the Earth. Through a simple act of breathing we may participate in the whole range of scales and time flows: for the terrestrial atmosphere, a given water molecule, the one we breathe in and breathe out as oxygen, might spend in the atmosphere 15-23 days on the average. What if the way we breathe and vocalize impacts the water cycles? Can we turn our bodies into water cycles measuring units and the instruments of cooperation with weather patterns? What if even the tiniest movement of the oxygen in our nostrils and lungs and even the slightest resonation of the vocal cords, chest, and abdomen can affect a rainstorm? Meditating on such questions may provide an interesting departure point for both scientific inquiry and embodied practice of breathing and vocalizing.
The David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion was established in 1986 with the mission to encourage and advocate experimental visual art which draws its form, content and working materials from late twentieth-century technology. The working materials include physical sources of energy, light, and sound. The resulting artworks question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts. To learn more about The David Bermant Foundation and its collection, visit the foundation website DavidBermantFoundation.org.
[ALIEN] STAR DUST – SIGNAL TO NOISE
Online Meditation: Molecular Light for South America
Hosted by artist Clarissa Ribeiro from Fortaleza, Brazil
Victoria Vesna and Art Sci collective members
Wednesday, August 25th | Meditation, 9 AM - 10 AM PST
CHRISTIAN KOEBERL
ALIEN STAR DUST SOUTH AMERICA: CAMPO DEL CIELO METEORITE
On the occasion of a collective online meditation to benefit those impacted by COVID 19 in South America, Dr. Christian Koeberl introduced the background of a meteorite that crashed in Argentina -- Campo del Cielo. The craters' age is estimated as four to five thousand years. Containing iron masses, they were reported in 1576, but were already well known to local indigenous communities. Dr. Köberl is a Professor of impact research and planetary geology at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is best known for his research on meteorite impact craters. From June 2010 to May 2020 he was director general of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. He commissioned Victoria Vesna to develop a piece for the meteorite gallery at NHM in Vienna and the premiere of Alien Star Dust was on March 11, the day before the entire Europe locked down due to the pandemic. The installation was not seen by many and this piece migrated to the web as a meditation on dust caused by pollution mixed in with star dust that falls on earth every day.
INTERNATIONAL COMPLAINTS DOSSIER
OF BRAZIL’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
We present this International Complaints Dossier to the world, as it registers severe violations and threats hovering over the lives, bodies and territories of indigenous peoples in Brazil. We do help spreading the message of the dossier expecting this call to be heard worldwide, inviting for an online meditation to remember that this juncture needs to be fought not only by the indigenous communities, but by all those who defend human, animals, and plants rights, impacting the future of all life on Planet Earth.
Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity
LASER talk as a part of the Medicine + Media Arts series
Integrating Science and Art to look Beyond the Limits of our Perception
Featuring Medicine + Media Arts Board Members: Bianka Hofmann, with special guests Barney Steel from Marshmallow Laser Feast and Elí Joteva.
The Medicine + Media Art Initiative is a multi-layered artistic and scholarly endeavor that serves as a national and international hub for the artistic exploration of contemporary medical science and biotechnology. The fellowship will act as a conduit for advancing new projects and artistic research that reimagine the medicalized body, corporality, notions of embodiment, posthumanism, and the effects of our environment on our sense of bodily presence and well-being in the world.
New advances in medicine, transgenics, and biomechtronics have generated genetically-modified “superhumans,” cyborg fantasies, and new evolutionary futures in the fields of art and medicine and also the cultural imaginary. Whether participating in bio-elective surgeries, performative dissections, or experimenting with invasive genetic editing, manipulations of the human form summon Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale, which serves as a metaphor for our darkest fears involving human evolution and knowledge. This event will feature four subject experts on the spectacular body in art and medicine. Transhumanist artist, Stelarc, who has used himself as an experimental canvas for exploring alternate anatomies, will discuss the obsolete body and its potential for technological alteration. Scholar, author, and medical historian, Rebecca Messbarger will respond to these notions, and also discuss increasing scientific analysis of criminal and saintly bodies via dissection in the Early Modern period. MD, surgeon, and medical ethics specialist, Piroska Kopar will also respond to the ethics of bio-elective surgeries in contrast to the delivery of acute care surgery. Siddharth Ramakrishnan will respond from the perspective of neuroscience....
The Art|Sci Center is excited to announce the launch of a new initiative that bridges the fields of medicine and media art. The Medicine + Media Art Initiative is a multi-layered artistic and scholarly endeavor that serves as a national and international hub for the artistic exploration of contemporary medical science and biotechnology. The fellowship will act as a conduit for advancing new projects and artistic research that reimagine the medicalized body, corporality, notions of embodiment, posthumanism, and the effects of our environment on our sense of bodily presence and well-being in the world.
In a time of pandemic conditions, the exchange between media art, medicine and the medical humanities in particular foregrounds the critical role of art practice in negotiating the human experience. And while medical science has evolved over time in culturally specific ways that are not value-neutral, media art and its related discourse have advanced the social, ethical, and humanistic investigation of medicine. Embedded in this network lies the interconnected categorizations of gender, race and class—intersectionality—as media art and medicine explore the corpus and its hidden landscape under the skin.
Through lectures, exhibitions, symposia, and the production of original creative work, The Medicine + Media Art Fellowship will bring together various collaborative partners that include: UCLA’s Art|Sci Center, the California NanoSystems Institute, and School of Medicine; the Sam Fox School of Visual Art, the School of Medicine, the Institute for Public Health, and Medical Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis; Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Stuttgart; Angewandte University of the Arts, Vienna; Ars Electronica; Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology (ISAST); Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA); and Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA).
Joel Ong will be discussing his latest work including the performance series void * ambience : Latency, which responds to the idea of the digital wilderness –the overabundance of online streams that we must filter and comprehend, and explore a common issues in everyday communication today – latency – as a compositional parameter.
He will also be discussing upcoming workshops with the ArtSci Center and UCLA Sci|Art Lab + Studio Summer Institute. This talk is not to be missed!
Joel Ong (PhD, MSc.Bioart) is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment. His recent works explore the visibility and audibility of ambient phenomena with a particular focus on the wind and the atmospheric microbiome. His individual and collaborative works have been shown at festivals and galleries internationally such as the Currents New Media Festival, Nuit Blanche Toronto, ISEA, the Seattle Art Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, the Penny Stamps Gallery and the Ontario Science Centre. Joel is an alumni of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts in Perth, Western Australia, and holds a PhD from DXARTS at the University of Washington. He was a recipient of the Petro-Canada Young Innovators Award in 2020 and is currently an artist with the Biofrictions Creative Europe transdisciplinary research project. He is Assistant Professor in Computational Arts and Director of Sensorium:The Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University.
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
