FEATURED ART-SCIENTIST: Siddharth Ramakrishnan

ART-SCIENTIST FEATURE

We continue our 10 year anniversary feature this week with Neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Read what he has to say about his experience at the center below!

Since 2008, when I started collaborating with Dr. Vesna and the UCLA Art Sci Center, I have been pulled into the world of artists and scientists. I had the opportunity to teach with Dr. Vesna on Art, Science and Technology at the New School of Design in New York from 2009 to 2012. Since 2012, I have been at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA as the Jennie M Caruthers Chair in Neuroscience. As a liberal arts college, they value my cross-disciplinary work and support me in the endeavors.

In February 2013, we launched the Art+Science Salons here at the University of Puget Sound. We have since hosted many artists, scientists and interdisciplinary thinkers over the last 2 years. Events are held at the Tacoma Art Museum and the Kittredge Gallery at the University of Puget Sound and attract crowds from the university faculty and students, and the community at large. Recently we also were absorbed under the LASER umbrella.

I have also continued my collaborative art-science projects over the last few years. With Dr. Vesna, I have been working on the Hox Zodiac, an interactive audience driven exhibit on the genes that underlie body patterning and the conversations on mutagenesis & metamorphoses. This project has been exhibited at the Microwave New Media Festival (2011), the Posthumanist Desire Exhibit: MOCA Taipei (2013) and other international venues. We have also explored the world of dog olfaction via the Sniffing Booth projects. Our works have been published in Technoetic Arts, AI & Society and recently as a book chapter in the Handbook of Digital Games.

My continued interests in Art and Science has led me to secure funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation to help spread awareness of topics in neuroscience via art.

We plan to host Neuro+Art workshops to bring in a larger, diverse audience into the world of sciences. As a part of the Cotard Syndicate (Stefani Bardin- New School of Design and Dr.Toby Heys, Manchester Metropolitan University), I have worked on phantom sensory perception (shown at the Sheila Johnson Center at the New School of Design) and recently to create agar wearables to make the invisible microenvironments around us visible again (Workshop at Eyebeam, New York) . Our work on Earworms was displayed at the Asia Triennial in Manchester last Summer.