Artists are well-placed to ask critical questions that are aware of but not constrained by the nature of AI, grappling with questions of access, agency, and equity in relation to AI and its impact on the art ecosystem, including the encoding of bias and the (digital) marginalization of various social groups, including but not limited to people of color, immigrants, and women. Such critique of AI allows for the emergence of those bodies (of knowledge) that stem from, or live through, the types of cosmologies that have been marginalized or erased through colonization but can be recentered through processes of decolonization, i.e. through a questioning of the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic and social worlds.
In 2019, Amir Baradaran was at the forefront of the AnotherAI.art: Decolonizing Art Ecosystem Summit, which united over 80 distinguished thinkers and professionals to delve into the intersections of critical discourse, art creation, and artificial intelligence. This initiative, endorsed by the New Museum, the Knight Foundation, and Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, sparked the concept of a unique issue recommended by Victoria Vesna, North American editor of AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication. The groundwork established during the summit has grown in importance given the advent of Chat GPT, presenting substantial and pressing questions that our society faces today.
Satinder Gill, the managing editor of AI & Society and Victoria Vesna are delighted to extend an invitation to Amir and contributors to the special issue for a series of intriguing dialogues.
Join us for a conversation between physicists Franz J. Gießibl, Physics dept., University of Regensburg, James Gimzewski, FRS, Distinguished Professor, CNSI, UCLA Art Science center scientific director.
In their conversation, Franz J. Gießibl and James Gimzewski will share their profound insights into the intricate world of atoms and their potential to reshape our understanding of the universe. They will focus on the fusion of art and science as well as the profound connections between the tangible and the intangible, and challenge the boundaries of human perception. "Thinking Atoms" promises to be a thought-provoking and enlightening encounter, where the microscopic mysteries of existence are brought to life through the minds of these distinguished physicists.
Wednesday, 24 May 2023 - 5:00pm to Wednesday, 31 May 2023 - 6:00pm
Exhibitors / Artists:
Professor: Victoria Vesna | Exhibitors: Joy Yang + James Barty
'Listening to Machines' by Joy Yang and James Barty
This art installation creates sounds from the electrical signals produced by laboratory devices. You can interact with the devices to change the sounds and their visualizations in the gallery!
OPENING
ArtSci Gallery at CNSI
Wednesday, May 24th, 2023, from 5 -7pm
EXHIBITION #3 will be on display until
May 31st by appointment only
email: artscicenter@gmail.com
ArtSci Gallery, 5th floor
570 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, California 90095
Thursday, 18 May 2023 - 5:00pm to Thursday, 1 June 2023 - 5:00pm
Exhibitors / Artists:
Hyun Cho, Eunice Choi, Michael Luo, Maya Man, Krista Ramirez-Villatoro, Bobby Joe Smith III, Henrik Soederstroem, Ariel Uzal, Wiley Wiggins, Camille Wong, Bomi Yook, Tengchao Zhou
To host a TOWN HALL is to initiate a public gathering. A gathering of thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties that each of us holds dear behind our screen presence. A space for remembrance and healing while we work through conflicting ideas, moving towards some kind of future. The 2023 UCLA DMA MFA cohort invites you to this town hall, where we could exchange our divergent voices about our collective personal struggles.
To begin this TOWN HALL, our cohort presents 12 media artworks built with material forms and immaterial pixels. These works extend our invitation to contemplate on digital selves and the lethargy they carry; to explore reality/unreality where places, spaces, and histories converge; to memorialize once colonized landscapes and minds; to cherish and archive corroding memories and entangled rituals; to communicate within and without extended realities; to hold reflections in a space, cry and feel lost; and to resist our perpetual instability amidst designed precarity.
TOWN HALL opens at 5 pm on Thursday, May 18th, 2023, lasting until June 1st.
Participating Artists:
Hyun Cho, Eunice Choi, Michael Luo, Maya Man, Krista Ramirez-Villatoro, Bobby Joe Smith III, Henrik Soederstroem, Ariel Uzal, Wiley Wiggins, Camille Wong, Bomi Yook, Tengchao Zhou
New Wight Gallery
Broad Art Center, Suite 1100,
Los Angeles, CA 90095.
Public parking is available in UCLA Parking Structure 3.
In a newly published study, Morteza Gharib, Professor of Aeronautics at Caltech, and two of his colleagues argue that Leonardo accurately estimated the gravitational constant two centuries before Newton without the aid of advanced mathematics (Leonardo 56/1, 2023, 21-27). Two specialists on Leonardo's writings discuss how Leonardo developed his ideas using a very different conceptual apparatus through a combination of words and images. Their conversation focuses on small-scale models and a variety of graphic techniques that are relevant to contemporary challenges ranging from fluid dynamics to determining the composition of the earth's core.
About the Speakers:
Matthew Landrus
Dr. Matthew Landrus is Supernumerary Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where he teaches early modern history. He is also a Senior Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Most of his publications address the work of Leonardo da Vinci, particularly with regard to engagements between early modern visual culture, natural philosophy, engineering and technology. His books include The Treasures of Leonardo (2006), Leonardo da Vinci’s Giant Crossbow (2010), Le Armi e le Macchine da Guerra: il de re Militari di Leonardo (2010), and Instruments and Mechanisms: Leonardo and the Art of Engineering (2013).
Claire Farago
Claire Farago is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she taught Renaissance art, theory, and criticism for thirty years. She has held visiting professorships at UCLA, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Melbourne, Australia, the University of York-U.K, the University of Zürich, and Smith College.
Often working collaboratively, she has published widely on topics ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s writings to contemporary critical theory. Her book publications include Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation (1992); the edited volume, Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style (2008); the edited volume, Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe 1550-1900 (2009); and The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura, with a scholarly edition of the editio princeps (1651) and an annotated English translation (2018), a collaboration with an international group of Leonardo scholars including Matthew Landrus. She currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is affiliated with UCLA.
Marisa Caichiolo is an artist and curator who studied art history and curatorial studies, she holds a PhD in art history and psychology.
Special Guests joining this session:
Shana Nys Dambrot / Art Critic
Doug Kacena / Director KContemporary Denver
Lidia Rubinstein / Art Collector Los Angeles
Ana María Mattei / Art Collector and Director AAL Magazine Chile
Her research focuses primarily on the impact on social and political changes in society. She focuses on cultural exchanges researching cultural production fluctuating between theory and practice.
Her curatorial projects have been shown internationally, including MUSA Museum of Arts of the University of Guadalajara(Mexico); Kirchner Cultural Center, Buenos Aires, (Argentina); DOX Center for ContemporaryArts, Prague (Czech Republic); Frost Science Museum, Miami (USA); PVAC PalosVerdes Art Center, Palos Verdes (California); Building Bridges Art Foundation,Los Angeles (California); KATARA Cultural Center, Doha (Qatar); Sharjah Museum of Contemporary Art, Dubai (United Arab Emirates); Anaheim Muzeo Museum andCultural Center, Anaheim (California); Telefónica Art Foundation, Santiago(Chile); among others.
She is the founder of Building Bridges International Art Foundation an international non-profit organization based in SantaMonica, Los Angeles County. The foundation is conceived to be a platform for critical thinking, and researching; local and international programs in LosAngeles; art residencies; and education programs among others.
She was part of the curatorial team for several international biennials, such as the Casablanca Biennale, Morocco;Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Biennial of the Americas,Denver, Colorado; among others. She is also an active board member for Bugatti Foundation, Italy; Now Art LA, Los Angeles; and the Advisory Board of the DAP Program at The Broad, Los Angeles, also one of the jurors for Art of Recovery Program with the City of Santa Monica.
Starting with the late 1960s, artists have experimented with neurofeedback techniques to unveil that we can model our brainwave oscillations in relation to sounds and images that signal our transition into meditative states. Cultivating enchantment with the agency we can develop over unconscious processes and the non-verbal connections we mentally establish with others, they have invited us to reflect on the intrinsic alterity of our inner and outer worlds.
In this talk, I map out a genealogy of artworks informed by the aesthetics of neural networks and their dynamic behavior. I argue that the diversity of these practices results not only from the artists' original coupling of multiple media of expression but also from their imaginative blending of ideas derived from phenomenology, biofeedback experimentation, cybernetic theories, and Southeast Asian philosophies. I delineate a taxonomy of artworks encompassing neural data and I discuss how they catalyze speculative thinking about biological, cultural, and social entanglements.
About Cristina Albu:
Cristina Albu is an art historian, educator, and writer focusing on crossovers between contemporary art, cognitive sciences, and technology. She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Albu is the author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2016) and the co-editor (with Dawna Schuld) of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Her writings have appeared in scholarly anthologies (e.g. Nervous Systems, Hybrid Practices, Framings, The Permanence of the Transient, Crossing Cultures) and journals (e.g. Afterimage, Artnodes, Camera Obscura, and the Comparative Media Arts Journal). At UMKC, Albu teaches courses on global contemporary art, participatory and site-specific tendencies, museum studies, and the role of emotion in art reception. She is currently working on a book which charts how artists have paired neurofeedback technology with sounds and video images to cultivate an embodied understanding of our entanglement in more or less visible systems.
Image description: Nina Sobell, EEG: Video Telemetry Environment (also known as Brainwave Drawings, 1975), installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
Eli Joteva, Bulgarian media artist and graduate of UCLA's Design Media Arts MFA program, exhibits IntraBeing, an artistic exploration of the limits of perception and resolution in medical images. The immersive Installation with AR extension is the outcome of her »STEAM Imaging III« residency at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Germany.
What lies within the bounds of being? IntraBeing explores the boundaries of imaging the human body to imagine a limitless and intra-active sense of being. Eli Joteva worked remotely with researchers at Fraunhofer MEVIS to develop the work, exploring the capacities of medical imaging and simulation techniques to locate the enigmatic spaces that emerge at the limits of resolution and computation.
Artist in residence Eli Joteva performed a series of full-body MRI scans and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans, which are usually only used to visualize connectivity in the brain, to instead reveal nerve fibers in the chest, pelvic region, and the feet of her own body. She was inspired by the fact that hydrogen atoms, on which MRI processing relies, are also in constant nanosecond flux and thus elude precise measurement. These components are key elements of the three-screen installation, complete with AR extension, which shows an oscillating internal landscape of hydrogen atoms, the nerves they flow along, and the magnetic potentials generated between them.
The starting point of the »STEAM Imaging III« residency was to bring artists together with scientists and school students to create broad access to a self-motivated exploration of topics in digital medicine through 10 STEAM evenings. The course was jointly created by artist Eli Joteva and scientists at Fraunhofer MEVIS. Boundaries of individual disciplines are crossed, flexible forms of learning and collaboration are developed, and skills are taught to deal effectively and critically with new technologies in digital medicine. The residency allows artists to exchange intensively with MEVIS experts and link their work with the latest scientific methods and approaches in digital medicine.
»STEAM Imaging III« was hosted by Fraunhofer MEVIS and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, in collaboration with the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen, the Schulzentrum Walle, Bremen, and the UCLA Art|Sci Center in Los Angeles, USA.
This exhibition will be on display for a week BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Email: artscicenter@gmail.com
In Marta de Menezes' public talk, attendees can expect to learn about the intersection of art and biology, and how these two fields can collaborate to create art based research work. De Menezes, who has worked in this field for over two decades, will share her insights on the opportunities and challenges of this interdisciplinary practice, as well as her experience in leading experimental art institutions in Portugal.
Marta Menezes is a renowned Portuguese artist with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Lisbon and a Master's degree from the University of Oxford. She is also the director of Cultivamos Cultura, the leading experimental art institution in Portugal, and Ectopia, an organization dedicated to facilitating collaboration between artists and scientists.
Website link: https://martademenezes.com
The theme for Re–Fest 2023 is Re-New, which critically examines our culture’s obsession with newness. How can we prioritize ancestral knowledge, healing practices, and forgotten technologies in order to renew our relationship with creation and progress?
Festival sites in NYC and LA will feature exhibitions, performances, and conversations that will stream into our virtual venue, converging disparate disciplines, perspectives, and approaches in an effort to spark renewal.
Exhibition Artists:
Blair Simmons, Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete
Bobby Joe Smith III, Wókiksuye
Caco Peguero, FUTURING : Portable Park
Folly Feast Lab (Viviane El Kmati & Yara Feghali), Be.Longing XR
Iman Person
Jamison Edgar & Huntrezz Janos, White Man's Foot :))))))
Kate Parsons, Bloom AR
Kira Xonorika, Coral Reef, I am Presence
Laure Michelon, Machinic Reflection
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario & Paul Donald, Macho Stereo
Nicole Yi Messier & Victoria Manganiello (Craftwork Collective), Ancient Futures
Sarah Sweeney, A Conversation with My Deepfake Dad
