Ellen K. Levy is a NY-based artist and writer. She was Past President of the College Art Association before earning her doctorate in 2012 from the University of Plymouth (UK) on art and neuroscience. She then served as Special Advisor on the Arts and Sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston followed a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Zoology. Levy’s solo exhibitions include the New York and the National Academy of Sciences, and she was represented by Associated American Artists and Michael Steinberg Fine Arts (NYC). Her honors include an arts commission from NASA, an AICA award, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Skidmore College. She has lectured, taught, and published widely, locally and internationally, on art and complex systems. With Patricia Olynyk she co-directs the NY LASER.
Robin Gose has been a STEM educator for more than 20 years, in both classroom and museum settings. She joined the MOXI team in November 2017 during its inaugural year as Santa Barbara’s newest hands-on science museum and destination for families. In this role, she oversees the museum’s operations, finances, fundraising, outreach, and programming to ensure alignment with the organization’s mission, “to ignite learning through interactive experiences in science and creativity.” She also cultivates relationships with supporters, business and civic leaders, schools, community partners, media, and more to further promote MOXI as a world-class institution for informal science learning.
Robin came to MOXI after three years as director of education at Thinkery in Austin, Texas where she cultivated the pedagogical vision of the institution and oversaw all programming, exhibits and facilities at the latest iteration of what was once the Austin Children’s Museum. Robin’s passion is to make science fun for young learners to promote their social, cognitive, and emotional development. She values providing authentic learning experiences for children to explore the world around them, with an emphasis on making science accessible to children from diverse backgrounds.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in geography and environmental resource management from the University of Texas, Austin. Robin began her career managing summer camps at the Austin Nature and Science Center before moving to Los Angeles to oversee programs at the California Science Center. She then transitioned to teaching K-5 science at an independent school in Los Angeles. During this time, she earned a doctorate degree in educational leadership from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her academic research focused on English language learners’ experiences in science classrooms.
Robin is an active volunteer in the Santa Barbara community, serving on the boards of Visit Santa Barbara and Downtown Santa Barbara as well as the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden’s Education Committee. She also serves on subcommittees for the Association of Children's Museums, the Association of Science and Technology Centers, and has been a grant proposal reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library services for almost a decade.
Presented at Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery and curated by Ellen K. Levy, a multimedia artist, scholar, and past president of the College Art Association, “From Forces to Forms” explores the nature of form by engaging with the potent forces and processes of nature. By investigating how physical laws shape living and nonliving forms alike — ideas first proposed by D’ Arcy Thompson in his classic tome “On Growth and Form” (1917) — the exhibition explores universal principles of organismic development while delving into the flux and perturbations that characterize life today.
Reflecting Pratt Institute’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, “From Forces to Forms” features works by 19 artists and designers whose practices draw from both art and science and articulate a shared commitment to creating a more sustainable world. These works consider the implications of form generation through a variety of media (from analog to digital), at different scales (from subatomic to macroscopic), and in varied contexts (from prebiotic to ecosystems).
First Episode "Laws of Nature" will feature:
Tauba Auerbach
Adam Brown and Robert Root-Bernsteir
Todd Siler
Paul Thomas
Meredith Tromble
The first section of the exhibition is composed of works by artists who explore basic forces of nature and the behavior of entities that are often placed, unattended, in the background. The artists emphasize the activation of life, often constructing their own methods. Like Thompson, they look at the intersection of physics and chemistry. probing the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, and they consider the available sources of energy to initiate the transition. The late chemist Robert Shapiro, who embarked on a lifelong search for life's origins, pointed to the necessary conditions: "You need a compartment, you need a source of energy, you need to couple the energy to the chemistry involved, and you need a sufficiently rich chemistry to allow for this network of pathways to establish itself. Having been given this, you can then start to get evolution.'
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).
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.
Jen Arch, Erkki Huhtamo, Christine Johnson, Christina Ramos
A collaboration between UCLA's Art|Sci Center and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Medical Humanities program, Screening Contagion invites you to a series of panel discussions on four films, with faculty drawn from a variety of disciplines. This week's panel will explore a classic of world cinema: Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (1957). How does our own pandemic moment inform how we view these films?
Patricia Olynyk; Dr. Chris Zahner, MD; Asien Caro Chacin, PhD.; Carlo Ventura; Monica C. LoCascio, MA; Bianka Hofmann
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.
Stealth Drones is comprised of seven embroidery hoops hung in formation. Each hoop contains fractal patterns and ornamentation embroidered in white thread. The hoops are presented on a black velvet backdrop. At regular intervals UV lights are activated in the exhibition space. The embroideries react to the UV light and reveal a new type of information. Once the regular room lights are turned back on, this information disappears.
Please join us for our monthly LASER talk following the opening reception for Stealth Drone by Anne_Niemetz.
