Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor. She has developed a visual language that brings the realities of time and space to a human scale and is acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent art works executed in the landscape and public sites.
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.
A native Minnesotan, Jamie fell in love with nonprofits at a young age through volunteer work. She continued to cultivate this passion in her role as Director of Service Learning Camps for Augustana, partnering with over ten nonprofits in the Twin Cities. In 2010 Jamie moved to Santa Barbara and worked in programs and development for the Turner Foundation. In her spare time, she volunteers at the Village after school program, the Fund for Santa Barbara's Youth Making Change Program, and Partners in Education. Jamie received her BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus and is currently pursuing her MBA at Antioch University while working at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. Jamie is also an active artist in Santa Barbara and enjoys working with mixed media and printmaking. She is excited to combine her passion for the arts and give back to the community through her board membership at The Arts Fund.
COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION is an online series featuring media artists and scholars in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts. Each featured presenter will discuss selected artworks in history and context and in relation to their own work and connections. This series is produced in collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation.
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.
Ellen K. Levy is a multimedia artist and writer known for exploring art, science and technology interrelationships since the mid-1980s. Levy highlights them through exhibitions, educational and curatorial programs, and publications. Her graduate studies were at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston following a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Zoology. She was President of the College Art Association (2004-2006) before earning her doctorate (2012) from the University of Plymouth (UK) on the art and neuroscience of attention. She then was Special Advisor on the Arts and Sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (2012-2017). She was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College (1999), a position supported by the Luce Foundation, and has taught many transdisciplinary classes and workshops (e.g., at The New School, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, Banff). She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Levy’s solo exhibitions include the New York and National Academy of Sciences, and she was represented by Associated American Artists and Michael Steinberg Fine Arts (NYC) until they closed in 2009. Her work has been in landmark group exhibitions overseen by Lucy Lippard and Martin Kemp and in more recent exhibitions at Cyfest held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, at Ars Electronica and ISEA. She was guest editor of Art Journal’s special issue, “Contemporary Art and the Genetic Code” (1996), the first in-depth academic publication about genomics and art and has since pursued these topics in depth. She was twice an invited participant at Robert Wilson’s Art and Consciousness Workshop (Watermill, NY). Since 2009, she and Patricia Olynyk have co-directed the NY LASER, a forum in support of Leonardo/ISAST. With Charissa Terranova, she is co-editor of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design: From Forces to Forms (2021, Bloomsbury Press). Following the publication, attuned with pop artist Richard Hamilton who curated an exhibition devoted to Thompson’s insights in 1951 at the London ICA called "Growth and Form," she curated a related exhibition of contemporary art at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (NYC). Levy and Barbara Larson co-edit the “Science and the Arts Since 1750” book series of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Press.
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.
Ann McCoy has studied alchemy for fifty years. This talk will focus on the relationship of alchemy to the dream world, and how alchemy is a symbolic language which describes processes occurring below the threshold of consciousness. In a time when we are seeing a war on psyche, especially in the approaches advocated by many MFA programs and the art world in general, this lecture will be on the importance of the realm of the unconscious. For McCoy connecting art to the inner life is of supreme importance. Current mechanical, material, and positivist models feel lacking, and critical theory will hopefully give way to more expansive ways of viewing art making that have greater dimensionality. This lecture will be on McCoy’s own work and the relationship of her work to alchemy and dreams.
About Ann McCoy
Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019. She taught art history, the in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.
Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D..
Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library.
About Gerald De Jong:
Gerald De Jong has a background in computer science and combinatorics from University of Waterloo, and has been a freelance software builder for decades in the Netherlands. He encountered the works of Fuller and Snelson early on, and over the years has developed several generations of an open source software model called Elastic Interval Geometry to enable playing with spatial geometry in general and tensegrity in particular. The latest manifestation of EIG is available on the web and in the last two years Gerald has evolved the code into a tool to guide the actual building of physical tensegrity objects. These new tensegrity structures exhibit a level of intricacy and complexity that was unaccessible to the previous generations who could not use computational design. He has built a number of tensegrity pieces based on his technique of prefabricated slack tension networks combined with compression bars that extend to tighten the structure.
Kristin Jones maintains both studio and public practices, working collaboratively across disciplines to create site-specific, time-based projects that frame natural phenomena against the built environment. With a deep commitment to public projects and the belief that art is a powerful vehicle for urban renewal and environmental awareness, Jones has spent her career creating large-scale collaborative works for the public domain. Jones was a member of the ‘Dream Team’ for the master plan for Hudson River Park. She has devoted more than 16 years to the founding of the Rome-based non-profit TEVERETERNO. By partnering with a treasury of artists, colleagues and the City of Rome to raise awareness of the Tiber River, Jones directed and facilitated programs for its protection and revitalization. Her installations, works on and paper and time-lapse photography have been exhibited internationally. Jones holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is the winner of three Fulbright Fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She is currently based in New York City.
**IMAGE CREDIT- OCULUS: Collaborative work for the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, 2000 - present - Proposed installation by Kristin Jones with nighttime projection composed by Michael Benson from digital images collected with the CFHT telescope.
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.
