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.
This question is at the core of human robot interaction, an inherently interdisciplinary research aspiration. Human robot interaction research brings together engineering and social science, cognitive science, neuroscience, ethics and arts. Humans have a strange response to things that are lifelike, but not alive. Robotics is as much a study of people as it is about robots; it requires us to reach insight into a new and dynamically changing relationship between human and intelligent machines. By creating robots, we can reflect humanity and subsequently we can understand humans better. Learning from human behavior is critical for developing robots for the real world.
In the lecture we will also discuss about Android Science. The development of robots that closely resemble human beings can contribute to cognitive research. The approach of cognitive science uses the android robot for verifying hypothesis for understanding humans. We call this cross interdisciplinary framework Android Science.
Maša Jazbec is an artist, curator and researcher. She holds a Ph.D. in human informatics, attained at the Univ. of Tsukuba (Virtual Reality Lab) in Japan and MA in interactive art, achieved at Interface Culture at the Univ. of Arts and Design Linz. She was a visiting researcher at Ishiguro Laboratory at ATR where has deepened her research in human-like robotics and android science also in practice. She is engaged to the vision and execution of the Trbovlje New Media Setting project in Slovenia, and was curating events integrating science, art and technology at the new media culture festival Speculum Artium. Her projects, exhibited as artworks, have always shown her understanding of new media as a research artistic practice, stemming from artistic and scientific thought, linked to the current situation in the contemporary society. Her latest research interests are mostly focused in social robotics and android science. She presented her research at conferences such as Computer Human Interaction, Human Robot Interaction, ISEA and System Man and Cybernetics IEEE. Currently she is leading DDTLab in Trbovlje, Slovenia. DDTLab is a research lab operating in the fields of cybernetics, virtualization, BCI systems, and robotics.
The Quantum Drawing workshop designed by Honorary Professor Paul Thomas would benefit scientists, physicists, artists and designers. The participants will explore via drawing concepts of John Bell’s 1964 provocation, to try and capture reality in the act of happening. Bell’s theorem was designed to prove or disprove the fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics. The Quantum Drawing workshop draws an analogous relationship with probability and uncertainty prevalent in science where the observer affects what is observed. The workshop questions the role of the observer influencing what is seen and experienced whilst measuring the world through drawn marks. By the act of drawing, the participants will question their roles in observing and measuring the world. Complex subjects such as delayed choice quantum erasure, probability, indeterminacy, entanglement, superposition and the classical-quantum divide will be explored through the traditional act of mark-making. When an artist makes a mark on a piece of paper through a process of summing all the probabilities of what they experience then the mark collapses the world down to a single state. Intentional repositioning and reshaping of science practices through art can promote exploration of different ways of visualising, perceiving, understanding, communicating and acting in the material world. In so doing this workshop becomes a model for facilitating transdisciplinary development of alternative domains and discourses that garner insights gained from perception, seeing with understanding.
The most exciting aspects of our work on the beadwork team have been finding unexpected overlaps between the forms and shapes that leap from our hands to processes and structures from the natural world. Our methods of deconstructing our beadwork resemble the way the enzyme helicase unzips DNA, and our morphing surfaces take origami ideas to the study of metamaterials and analog computation. That we are studying these ideas in beads may sound odd, but not only does this study reflect the deep connection that human beings have with beads and beadwork, but beads (being individual units) fit perfectly with studies of the natural world as they easily stand in for numbers, pixels, atoms, or any smallest discrete unit of structure or calculation.
In this talk, I will show how we can physically build energy into beadwork, how repeating patterns or counts can combine into fantastically complex machines and objects of beauty, and how we have been able to enjoy living in a world based in creating art while still being able to contribute materially to scientific and mathematical exploration and discovery.
Kate McKinnon (she/they) is a researcher and co-founder of the UnLAB, a non-profit team currently based in Savannah, Georgia. The UnLAB is a multi-disciplinary group that seeks to develop and further ideas simply for the sake of learning. Current projects include advanced propulsion, the study of momentum and energy, aware architecture, human consciousness and QI (Questioning Intelligence, as opposed to AI, which stands for Artificial Intelligence). In addition to participating on the science teams, Kate leads the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork project, a ten year long open-source exploration of sewn beadwork that includes hundreds of thousands of beaders from diverse fields and hailing from over 30 countries. The team has published two books on the techniques they've developed to create geometric architecture and energetic forms, and they have a series of new books coming out soon showing a range of cycling linkages, morphing surfaces, and detailing their study of energetic lines, planes and forms.
UNDERSTANDING VIBRATIONS: FROM NANOTECHNOLOGY TO EASTERN PHILOSOPHY A TALK WITH VICTORIA VESNA, PHD
In this talk, Dr. Victoria Vesna discusses vibrations from the point of view of visual and sound artists considering the scientific research into matter, brain waves, human and animal voice, environmental noise and outer space.
Quantum mechanics is based on music theory and nanotechnology is showing us the waves that underlie all matter which many Eastern philosophies have known for centuries. We need to learn to listen to the inaudible.
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?
The way we, as humans, participate in the vibrational fields and flows of energy of the Planet Earth is embodied practice, even if the process often remains somewhat mysterious, unnoticed or unacknowledged. This workshop will explore how a human vocalization, which is nothing else than amplified and conscious breathing, can become a practice of inquiry into the planetary water cycle.
The human body is a fluid phenomenon, not only because the average amount of water in human organism ranges between 45-75%, depending on the particular organ or tissue (majority of which constitutes intracellular fluid), but also because it is incorporated into the planetary cycle, in which water constantly changes from liquid to vapor to ice, circulating around, through, and above the Earth. Through a simple act of breathing we may participate in the whole range of scales and time flows: for the terrestrial atmosphere, a given water molecule, the one we breathe in and breathe out as oxygen, might spend in the atmosphere 15,23 days on the average. What if the way we breathe and vocalize impacts the water cycles? Can we turn our bodies into water cycles measuring units and the instruments of cooperation with weather patterns? What if even the tiniest movement of the oxygen in our nostrils and lungs and even the slightest resonation of the vocal cords, chest, and abdomen can affect a rainstorm?
Meditating on such questions may provide an interesting departure point for both scientific inquiry and embodied practice of breathing and vocalizing.
