This pop-up studio visit, hosted by Victoria Vesna, will follow Neidich through his studio, video performances, neon sculptures and most recent paintings. Neidich will guide us through an entangled journey while he and Vesna discuss the history, context and processes involved.
ABOUT WARREN NEIDICH- Having studied photography, neuroscience, medicine and architecture, Warren Neidich brings to any discussion platform a unique interdisciplinary position that he calls “trans-thinking.” He currently uses writing, theory, and multimedia text-based neon sculptures to create cross- pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zone of art, science, politics and social justice. His performative and sculptural work the “Pizzagate Neon” (2018), a large hanging neon light sculpture, recently on display at the 2019 Venice Biennial, analyzed the relations of Fake News, the networked attention economy, accelerating technology, and their possible combined effect upon the architecture of the brain. His recent conceptual project Drive-By-Art (Public Sculpture in This Moment of Social Distancing) just opened on the South Fork of Long Island and Los Angeles to acclaim including reviews in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Time Out and Los Angeles Magazine. He is a former tutor at Goldsmiths College, 2004-2008 and professor of Art at Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, 206-2018. He has lectured at such institutions as Brown University, Harvard, GSD, School of the Chicago Art Institute, Columbia University, La Sorbonne, Paris viii, University of Oxford and Cambridge just to name a few. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015-), a theory intensive postgraduate course that attracts students worldwide operating in Los Angeles, New York City and Berlin. This year it addressed the topic of Activist Neuroaesthetics a term he invented to express the power of art alter the socio-political cultural milieu and thereby mutate the conditions of the neural plastic brain with which it is entangled. His latest book The Glossary of Cognitive Activism was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“We’re all part of this swirl of change [..], and it’s very human.” Join us this week for a discussion with Monica C. LoCascio in her new studio space, surrounding her MA thesis - OUR BODY IS OUR ANCHOR TO THE PRESENT, an exploration of the epigenetics of trauma through sensation and the materiality of embroidery and biomaterials. Vesna and LoCascio discuss the impetus of the work and LoCascio expresses how she found rest, reflection, and meditation in this work during the events of the past year. This important work reflects the changing tides of our world over the past year, bringing together trauma and healing, body and spirit, rest and reflection.
Monica C. LoCascio is a mixed-media artist exploring the inherent powers of the body, energetic phenomena, and non-human biomaterials in their capacity to challenge established knowledge hierarchies. Informed by her own occult ritual practice and inspired by theoretical quantum physics, somatic trauma studies and therapies, and inclusive philosophy, her work arrives as artifacts of her material and theoretical research.
LoCascio’s work has been shown at the Museum of Natural History of Vienna, The Academy of Fine Arts Krakow, CERN, the Angewandte Innovation Lab and the Biennale Sessions at the Venice Biennale 2019. She recently completed her MA in Art & Science with distinction at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Austria.
Under the Hood is a video series presented by the UCLA ArtSci Center that pops open the “hood” to reveal the mechanics and mechanisms of ArtSci projects. In these short interviews, you are invited to take a deep dive into the process of how these complex artworks are created. Through a practical break-down of the technology, software, and science behind these art-science features, you will gain understanding of how art-based research is practiced and applied. Under the Hood is a series that serves as a source of inspiration and information for anyone interested in understanding the inner-workings of the multidisciplinary projects at the ArtSci Center.
He discusses one of his interests in going beyond human perception in both spatial and temporal scales, and how it is applicable to the pandemic. Two pressing issues we face today, climate change and the virus, are both beyond our temporal perception, as climate change is on a scale of thousands of years, and in comparison, the virus is a few nanometers in length. Takashi also contemplates how we can bridge the large gap between the digital and real worlds, something increasingly prevalent in the time of the pandemic as we work from home, thinking about how Coronavirus is a good opportunity to update the way we understand things. He asks how we can understand the world without storytelling and discusses how AI has the ability to help us go beyond storytelling. This engaging conversation about the role of the intersection between art and science in current events is not to be missed.
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.
In this engaging episode, Claire Farago speaks with urgency about the Climate Crisis advocating that we think of ourselves relationally, to the world and people around us, and not individually. She provokes, "how do we build support for planetary citizenship?" Nudging further that art and science collaborations are critical for building this future, Claire and Victoria take a deep look through art history, discussing works and examples of how throughout time collaborations and interdisciplinary thinking has produced novel and thoughtful advances. This is a wonderful conversation that is packed full with stories, information, and lessons. It is surely not to be missed!
In this episode we are joined by the ever-inspiring María Antonia González Valerio a philosopher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who invites us to really look at and consider how we are responding to the pandemic in our institutions, in our bodies, and in our communities. María Antonia is interested in our incapacity to stop, to slow down and questions why we as humans have responded to this unprecedented circumstance with the mentality that we must continue business-as-usual. She proclaims, "Let the extraordinary be extraordinary! Why are we so afraid to stop?"
María Antonia also strongly urges us to resist the normalization of online teaching and education. Within her experience, this platform greatly limits interactions and community-building which are the aspects of education that truly allow for learning to take place. When our eyes and sense of ourselves and one another are limited to a 2-dimensional screen, we lose our bodies, we lose our transmission of affect and connection. This conversation and ideas provoked by María Antonia and Victoria is a reticent call to action, reminding us to remember the phenomenology of our bodies, to step back into ourselves and to reconnect to the physical and each other.
"If you create chaos in the system, that opens for change, but who can take part in that change? What if the change is in the wrong hands?"
(Danielle Siembieda)
The second edition of Post-Pandemic Provocations, hosted conjointly by Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/(ISAST) and the ArtSci Center features the incredible Provocateur cast consisting of Roger Malina, Nina Czegledy, Joel Slayton, Victoria Vesna, Danielle Siembieda and features special guest María Antonia González Valerio.
This entangled and entirely provocative conversation disobeys conventional thinking urging listeners to think critically and deeply about the current situation we are facing internationally. Stemming from the pandemic, this conversation pays specific attention to local re-thinking as we negotiate the post-pandemic condition. The diverse group begins with critical theory about body politics and intentional disobedience then dendritically branches off into discussions of chaos and change, xenophobia in the human and the more-than-human worlds, empathy as a form of protest and informal economies and innovation. This conversation, and the multiplicities of opinions will take you on a wild (and necessary) ride into the complexities of our now.
What is the material interface of the pandemic? Sarah Brady addresses this question in her work and teaching practice at University of California, Santa Barbara and discusses her experiences and current thoughts with Victoria Vesna. Sarah is interested in face-to-face and tactile exchanges between humans, emphasizing this as an essential component of research and her art practice. In the face of the pandemic, however, Brady is having to figure out new modes of material interaction. Brady is prompting her students to think creatively about technology – beginning with the body – seeing how the body can be used as an override through the zoom platform.
As a multiracial First Nations and Xicanx artist, Sarah shares information about her home communities, who are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 due to a substantial lack of relief efforts and support. This conversation is vital and brings issues such as, who has access to materials, resources, and technology to the forefront. Sarah’s work, teaching and research lead us down a radical path that compassionately confronts these many issues.
Robertina joins us from Ljubljana, Slovenia and talks with Victoria about her shifting work and experiences brought on by the pandemic. Robertina is particularly interested in the how the environment is responding to the pandemic, noticing what species and sounds are returning to the river and how this changes the audible ecology. She has been creating a sound archive of these changes while considering what type of ecological data might come out of all of the slowing. This conversation also navigates a changing artworld as museums and galleries shut down globally and prompts artists to consider how to generate new and meaningful markets. Robertina is actively negotiating these changes by localizing her practice – focusing on her immediate community and environment to enact and empower positive change. Robertina reaffirms that art and science collaborations are even more essential during and after this pandemic and her current work, focused on the sound-scape of the Adriatic Sea, is a clear demonstration of this. This heartfelt and interesting conversation is not to be missed.
