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
Christiane Paul, Alex May, Tamiko Thiel and Anuradha Vikram
NFTs (Non-Fungible-Tokens) have consumed conversations since early February and have left many with contradictory feelings of excitement, confusion and, in some cases, outrage at this rapidly growing art market. NFTs at the same time have disrupted traditions in the artworld and offered potential for democratization of the art market, provided a resource for artists to show and sell work, provided a lens for carbon traceability of transactions resulting in discussions about the carbon footprint of NFTs and raised questions about archiving digital art.
In order to gain an understanding about what's going on, we are sitting down with some experts to open up a dialogue for critical conversation surrounding these contentious possibilities. Christiane Paul (Parsons School of Design/The New School) and Alex May (contemporary British media artist/University of Hertfordshire) will will provide us with history and context of NFTs and their relationship to art, discuss the challenges of digital preservation for NFTs and artists' response to the environmental impacts and how this growing market might forever change the way we look at art. After their presentations, Tamiko Thiel (Virtual and Augmented Reality media artist) and Anuradha Vikram (Writer, curator and educator) will respond to the topics up and begin the discussion.
Anna Dumitriu will discuss her collaborative projects "Fermenting Futures" and "Biotechnology from the Blue Flower", which focus on the potential of synthetic biology to offer solutions for existential issues such as climate change and food security. She will discuss the methodologies of yeast and plant biotechnology, and explore what influences how we define unnatural or natural. Finally, she will reflect on 'Murphy's 10th Law' which is "Every solution breeds new problems" in the context of arguments against scientific progress.
Anna Dumitriu is an award winning internationally renowned British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics. Past exhibitions include ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, HeK Basel, Science Gallery Detroit, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and Eden Project. She holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, and with the National Collection of Type Cultures at Public Health England. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts Section of the British Science Association. Her work has featured in many significant publications including Frieze, Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Nature and The Lancet. Current collaborations include the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology at BOKU – Universität für Bodenkultur in Vienna, the EU H2020 CHIC Consortium, the University of Leeds and the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells at HelmholtzZentrum in München.
This talk will explore the multiple possibilities of artistic approaches that can be developed in relation to Art and Biology in contemporary art practice and research. A special emphasis will be placed on the work developed by me throughout my career in the development of collaborative art and biology projects where the artist has to learn some biological research skills in order to create artwork and where the new knowledge brought to the field of art research derives directly from the practice of art. The conversation will serve to also discuss methodologies and the generation of meaning, critical making through critical thinking. To situate the inquiry, I will draw upon my work, using examples like “Nature?”, “Immortality for Two'' and "Anti-Marta". The underlying intention of my work is to question our biological commonalities and challenge our conception of identity individually, as a species, and as organisms while asking how the artistic manipulation of life shifts our sense of identity to give rise to new forms of (un)indentities.
Marta de Menezes (born 1975) is a Portuguese artist, with a Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Lisbon and a MSt from the University of Oxford. De Menezes is director of Cultivamos Cultura, the leading institution devoted to experimental art in Portugal and Ectopia, dedicated to facilitating the collaborative work between artists and scientists. Marta de Menezes has worked in the intersection of art and biology since the late 90s, in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and Portugal, exploring the conceptual and aesthetic opportunities offered by biological sciences for visual representation in the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited in major venues in all continents, presented in most anthologies devoted to bioart, discussed in doctoral dissertations, and considered an example of research in the visual arts. Among the most recent international exhibitions, de Menezes was invited for the 2019 Ars Electronica Festival: Out of the Box, and organized two 2020 Ars Electronica Gardens (Lisbon and São Luis). She was invited to be the official representation of Portugal at the London Design Biennale 2016 and exhibited at the Beijing Biennale of New Media Art 2016. De Menezes was nominated in 2015 by Time and Fortune magazines for the Art and Technology Awards 2015. Besides her work as an artist, de Menezes curated major international exhibitions including for European Capital of Culture (Portugal), Kontejner Festival (Zagreb), Verbeke Foundation (Belgium), and this last three years the editions of FACTT – Transnational and Transdisciplinary Festival of Art and Science that took place in Lisbon, New York, Mexico City, Berlin, and Toronto.
The conversation between art and science has been a robust one since the mid-twentieth century, generating innovative art works that have mined complex information systems, cybernetics, the phenomenology of perception, and more recently new advances in biotechnology, climate change, and neuroscience. Fantastic Voyage will provide a brief introduction to the art, science, technology nexus over the past 70 years, with an emphasis on more current works, many of which are driven by pressing technological, environmental, and socio-political issues. This lecture will also introduce the Art I Sci Center's new Medicine + Media Arts Fellowship and Initiative, which seeks to bridge the fields of medicine and media art and serve as a hub for the artistic exploration of contemporary medical science and biotechnology.
Patricia Olynyk’s practice investigates the ways in which social systems, institutional structures, and our senses shape an understanding of our place in the world. Known for collaborating across disciplines on projects that explore the mind-brain relationship, theories related to the umwelt, and the phenomenology of perception, her work often interprets scientific objects and archives in various contexts or calls on viewers to expand their awareness of the environments they inhabit. In 2007, Olynyk was appointed inaugural director of the Graduate School of Art and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Washington University, in St. Louis, where she holds courtesy appointments in Medical Humanities and the School of Medicine’s Center for Humanism and Ethics in Surgical Specialties. In 2020, she was named inaugural Medicine + Media Arts Fellow at UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. She also co-directs the Leonardo/ISAST NY LASER program, which promotes cross-disciplinary exchange between artists, scientists, and humanists. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally at Venice Design 2018, Palazzo Michel in Venice, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, Galeria Grafica, Tokyo, and the LA International Biennial. Her writing has been featured in publications that include The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Leonardo Journal, PUBLIC Journal, and the Angewandte Book Series.
