CURRENT:LA / VICTORIA VESNA / CHARLES TAYLOR / DAWN FAELNAR / MICK LORUSSO / CLAUDIA JACQUES / ART|SCI COLLECTIVE
In collaboration with UCLA evolutionary biologists and nanotechnology experts, the Art|Sci Collective will introduce the wetlands’ diverse resident bird species and life in the water at Del Rey Lagoon, as part of the CURRENT LA Public Art Biennial. Experience bird song in its purest form—unsullied by the noise of daily activities—with our bird mimicking contraption and an introduction to the wetlands' diverse resident birds!
BIRD SONG DIAMOND WETLANDS Tuesday, July 19 and Saturday, July 30
4:00–7:00PM at Del Rey Lagoon
6840 Esplanade Street, Los Angeles CA 90293
About CURRENT LA:
Every two years, the CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial will focus on an issue affecting Los Angeles and other global cities to inspire civic discourse and use contemporary art to deepen connections between people. Putting a new spin on the international biennial, CURRENT:LA democratizes the way people access art by featuring temporary art projects and public programs at outdoor locations, taking art out of the museum environment and into LA's diverse neighborhoods. This citywide cultural event is presented by Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The first presentation of the CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial in 2016 is funded by DCA and Bloomberg Philanthropies through its Public Art Challenge initiative.
"Philosophy+Art+Science: Building the platform for interdisciplinary projects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico"
Lecture
May 26, 2016
6:00pm
Presentation Space
CNSI 5th floor
María Antonia González Valerio, PhD, will speak of her work as the director of the interdisciplinary collective Arte + Ciencia (Art + Science) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), aimed at producing art and knowledge in the intercrossing of humanities, arts and sciences.
The group Arte + Ciencia was constituted in 2011 under the direction of Prof. Dr. María Antonia González Valerio and it is based at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since the beginning its main objective has been to produce art and knowledge in the intercrossing of humanities, arts and sciences. It has reunited artists, scholars, scientists and students to creatively collaborate in several projects. It has been pioneer in Mexico in the production of interdisciplinary works.
Arte+Ciencia has organized and produced the exhibitions: “Sin origen/Sin Semilla (first transgenic and biotechnological exhibition in Mexico)”, MUCA Roma-MUAC, UNAM, México, 2012-2013. “Bioartefactos: Desgranar lentamente un maíz” MACO, Oaxaca, México, 2014. “Bestiario del día final”, Quinto Piso, México, 2015.
It has also organized some workshops about art and science: “Artistic investigations into Robots and Plants” (2015), “Antropología del cerdo” (2015), “Vida maquinaria: Limitaciones y transgresiones en la relación arte-vida-sociedad” (2014), “From Bioethics to Bioart: The Question about the Limits” (2014).
It has edited two books about humanities, art and science, Sin origen/Sin semilla (México: UNAM/Bonilla editores, 2016) and Pròs Bíon: Reflexiones naturales sobre arte, ciencia y filosofía (México, UNAM, 2015).
It has hosted lectures from well known artists, curators and academics such as Jens Hauser (DE), Marta de Menezes (PT), Ingeborg Reichle (DE), Nicole Karafyllis (DE), Suzanne Anker (US), Brandon Ballengée (US), Laura Beloff (FI), Melentie Pandilovski (MK), Manuela de Barros (FR), Mónica Bello (SP), etc.
The group has been linked and sponsored by two research project financed by the UNAM and whose leader has been González Valerio. Therefore, the group has a strong attachment to the university and works mainly from there, being the education of undergraduate and graduate students in arts, sciences and humanities a principal aim.
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)
Following the reception is UCLA Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous, FOURTH STATE OF MATTER
featuring talks by UCLA plasma physicist, Walter Gekelman, the Art|Sci Collective,
physicist & IPAM research fellow Ana Jofre, and visual artist Megan Lindeman.
19 May 2016 | 6:00PM–8:00PM
Presentation Space | 5th Floor CNSI
Human destiny is to evolve and expand, and that of course include technology development. We are questioning our human biology and challenging what it means to be human. Robots both fascinate us and make us feel uneasy. The idea of creating a humanoid machine or device has existed man’s imagination ever since Antiquity. For time immemorial, man has fantasized about how to create a spark of being in an artificial body. The manner in which such phantasms were manifested depended on the technological endowment of the period in which he lived. Nowadays, robots represent one of the most complex technical achievements of the humankind. It is the paradigm of how to adjust the world to our own measures, found already established throughout the entire history of art and science, which is swiftly taking over the space of the natural by the development of new technologies. The historical transformation of the body is reaching new peaks in connection with the artificial technological structure. There is a time frame being established, based on the recognition that nothing is ever going to be the same as before, when exactly the robots, as well as artificial bio-organisms are going to be the ones who will reason for us what the essence of life is, or what it means to be human. Robots are interesting from the point of humanist philosophy, as they arise the questions concerning the difference between the living - non-living – created - born. When we are in the interaction with robots, we cannot see their inner mechanisms, so at the first sight we simply believe that they are human. The mimesis of a robot, a device with a series of sensors, controls, and pneumatic drives is becoming a simulacrum of the presence of human emotions.
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Maša Jazbec (Slovenia), after having finished the study of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Education Maribor (Slovenia) continues her study at the post-graduate department of Interface Culture, at the University of Arts and Design Linz (Austria). During her study she completes a residence at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences IAMAS (Japan). Her projects, exhibited as artworks, have always shown her understanding of new media as a research artistic practice, stemming from the tradition of the video and the new artistic thought, linked to the current situation in the contemporary society. She is also active as a curator of artistic-scientific events within the frame of the new media culture festival Speculum Artium in Trbovlje (Slovenia). She is currently a Ph.D candidate at Empowerment Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Japan and a visiting researcher at ATR (Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories).
For more than two decades, media artist and designer Anne Niemetz has been working in the areas of audio-visual design, interactive installation and wearable technology. Her newest work, Drone Sweet Drone, an installation of an embroidered drone swarm using Arduino technology, is a combination of these interests. By fusing the traditional with the technologically advanced, Drone Sweet Drone, asks us to consider the ordinary and extraordinary ways that drones affect our everyday lives.
Anne Niemetz holds a Media Arts degree from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), Germany, with a focus in digital media and interactive sound installation. She continued her studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received an MFA in Design and Media Arts in 2004. In 2007 she moved to New Zealand, where she holds the position of Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the Media Design programme at Victoria University of Wellington.
Anne is a media artist and designer working in the fields of wearable technology, interactive installation and audio-visual design in general. She is particularly fascinated by the convergence of art, science, design and technology, and she pursues collaborative and cross-disciplinary projects.
Her work has been exhibited in the World of Wearable Art show Wellington (2013), BODY festival Christchurch (2010), Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong (2008), The ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2006, 2000, 1999), Happy New Ears festival, Kortrijk, Belgium (2006), LACMA - Los Angeles Country Museum of Arts, USA (2004), MAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Santiago de Chile (2003), SIGGRAPH Cyberfashion Show in San Diego, USA (2003), Montevideo Institute, Amsterdam, Holland (2000), and at various other international festivals and screenings.
The Art|Sci team had the pleasure of attending the talk of architect and Art|Sci collaborator Philip Beesley last Friday (April 15th) as part of IPAM's Culture Analytics and User Experience Design workshop!
We had a chance to catch up with Philip after his presentation—Living Architecture Systems —and he was more than happy to think back on and discuss his Art|Sci installation of years past: Endothelium, a project which Philip prescribes as formative to his practice.
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.
TONI DOVE / TAYLOR AUBRY / CLARISSE BARDIOT / LAURA CECHANOWICZ / ERKKI HUHTAMO / MARCO PINTER / SHANNON WILLIS
LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous)
following an interactive demo by Toni Dove
Thursday Apr 21st 2016
7-9pm
Presentation Room,
5th floor CNSI
Video recording:
Featuring:
TONI DOVE - Featured Art|Sci Artist - Considered one of the pioneers of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates unique hybrids of film, installation, experimental theater and gaming. Participants interact with video, using motion sensing and other embodied interface strategies to “perform” on-screen avatars. Major projects include: Artificial Changelings, an interactive cinema installation in which viewers navigate between two centuries, debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 1998, Spectropia, a feature length live-mix movie performance for two players debuted 2008 Wexner Center, Lucid Possession, a live mix video performance with multiple robotic screens and musical performers, premiered Roulette, NYC, 2013. The Dress That Eats Souls, a robotic cinema installation is currently in development and will premiere at a retrospective of Dove’s interactive work at the Ringling Museum in Fla., 2018 2000/2003 – Dove served on a Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, USA. Grants and awards: Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, MediaThe Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. http://www.tonidove.com/
TAYLOR AUBRY received her Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After that, she moved to sunny Los Angeles, California to research new solar cell technologies. She is currently a second year PhD student in Ben Schwartz’s lab at UCLA in the materials division. Her work focuses on improving the performance of polymer solar cells by seeking to understand the fundamental physics and property-structure relationships within these devices.
CLARISSE BARDIOT is a speaker, consultant, art director or editor in various institutions and cultural events. A PhD on Virtual Theatres , she is an associate researcher at CNRS and professor at the University of Valenciennes (laboratory Devisu). She obtained in 2005 the stock market researcher resident of the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal for research on 9 Evenings, Theatre & Engineering . It contributes to international project DOCAM (Daniel Langlois Foundation - Montreal) on documentation and archiving works of art with a technological component. From 2009 to 2010, as Deputy Director of manège.mons / CCDS (Belgium), coordinates two European projects (CECN2 and Transdigital), led many projects of training and artist residencies around the arts and technologies and is the editor of the journal Patch , which creates the editorial. In 2010 she founded with Annick Bureaud Cyril Thomas and Jean-Luc Soret platform Nunc . In 2011, she created Substrate , a publishing house dedicated to contemporary creation in the form of printed and electronic publications, and in 2013 opened a gallery in Brussels. Her publications include arts and digital technologies: digital performance , Collection Basic, Leonardo / Olats June 2013; 9 Evenings, Theatre & Engineering , website of the Daniel Langlois Foundation, May 2006. It is currently developing Rekall , an open-source environment to document, analyze the creative process and simplify the recovery works.Curator, Editor, University of Valenciennes (FR). http://www.clarissebardiot.info/
LAURA CHECHANOWICZ is a PhD student in Media Arts and practice at USC. She is a mixed media artist dedicated to sound and production design, among other interests. Her training includes experience in the Los Angeles film industry and higher level education. She received her BA with honors from the University of Michigan with majors in Film & Video, Psychology and German; her MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa; her MFA in Animation from the University of Southern California; and she began her PhD in Media Arts and Practice at USC this fall, where she worked as the Sound Lead for the Advanced Game Project Miralab this past year. As a sound designer, Laura is committed to crafting rich environments and creating emotional experiences through experimental and musical sound design. She is highly influenced not only by media and history, but also by neuroscience and psychology. http://worldbuilding.usc.edu/people/bio/laura-cechanowicz/
ERKKI HUHTAMO is a UCLA professor between the Departments of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media. He holds a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland. He is a media archaeologist, author, and exhibition curator. At DMA his areas are the history and theory of media culture and media arts. He is internationally known as a pioneer of an emerging approach to media studies called media archaeology. It excavates forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to penetrate beyond canonized "grand narratives" of media culture. http://www.erkkihuhtamo.com/
MARCO PINTER creates artwork and performances which fuse physical kinetic form with live visualizations. He has a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. His work integrating graphics with robotic sculpture is supported by grants from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. He has exhibited artwork and performances at cities around the world, including Dubai, New York, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, Anaheim, San Diego and Santa Barbara. Wired magazine’s online UK site published a feature on Pinter’s work that explores perception through kinetic sculpture and graphics. Pinter is a contributing author to The McGraw Hill Multimedia Handbook and The Ultimate Multimedia Handbook. He is an inventor on over 70 patents, issued and pending, in the areas of live video technology, robotics, interactivity and telepresence. http://www.marcopinter.com/
SHANNON WILLIS is a multi-disciplinary artist residing in Santa Barbara California. From very early on, her artistic family fostered her visual imagination by immersing her in a creative environment. Her work continues to evolve and push boundaries. Currently she is finishing her Masters of Fine Art at University of California Santa Barbara. She shows her expansive multi-media installations and artwork internationally, recently exhibiting a video installation during International Digital Arts Week in Paris France. Shannon's work explores the exchange between philosophy, quantum physics, spirituality, and emotions. Working with video, tactile sculptural objects, projection, and viewer interaction, as the tangible results of those converging ideas. The art work becomes an event. She creates the objects and the script, providing spaces for the viewers to become engaged, entertained, and entangled in the phenomena of being alive. http://www.artbyshannonwillis.com
