For Berta (They Fear Us Because We Are Fearless) Materials: [detail] Shell casings, shale, smalti, stained glass Size: 16″h x 16″w Year: 2019 [Artist: Julie Sperling]
At first glance I thought those were coins—they’re bullet casings. Science policy isn’t always a boring meeting or report.
Here’s a little more about the artist Julie Sperling, from the About page on her website,
I am a Canadian mosaic artist based in Kitchener, Ontario. My studio practice finds me camped out at the intersection of art, environment, science, and policy. I firmly believe in the important role that artists play as advocates, activists, and change-makers.
When I’m not wearing my work overalls I am a policy analyst with Environment and Climate Change Canada. [emphasis mine] But really, I’m happiest when I have a rock in one hand and my hammer in the other.
Getting back to ‘Berta‘, which is part of a series “By Our Own Hands.” Spence tells the story of how the mosaic was inspired (Note: Links have been removed),
Every week, about 4 people are killed for standing up to those (predominantly industry of various stripes) who are encroaching on their traditional lands and resources, threatening the environment and their very survival. That adds up to hundreds of lives each year. More often than not, their killers go unpunished as land grabs and environmental exploitation advance, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
…
I’ve been waiting three years to make this mosaic. The issue planted itself firmly in my brain in 2016 with the assassination of Berta Cáceres, one of Honduras’ most prominent environmental activists and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Cáceres co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and before her murder had been working with the Lenca people to stop the Agua Zarca dam, which would have affected the Gualcarque River, a sacred river for the Lenca people. The dam would have diverted 3 kilometres of river, displacing communities and jeopardizing their water resources and livelihoods. COPINH employed many tactics to stop the construction of the dam, most notably a blockade that lasted over a year. In the end, Cáceres, who had been receiving death threats for years, was shot and killed in her home. In November 2018, seven men were convicted of her murder. Among those convicted were two employees of the construction company, DESA (one of whom was, ironically enough, the company’s “community and environmental affairs manager”), a retired military officer turned DESA employee, and an active military officer. DESA’s then-CEO is being tried separately this year [2019].
…
Science policy and real life consequences.
Because it’s Friday (September 24, 2021) I wanted to end on a more hopeful note,
Bioswale (Slow It Down, Soak It Up) [detail] Materials: Asphalt, limestone, sandstone, marble, litovi, smalti Size: 18″h x 20″w (approximately) Year: 2017 [Artist: Julie Sperling]
This mosaic is all about using nature (specifically, rain gardens) to slow down and soak up the rain as extreme precipitation increases with climate change. …
Toronto’s (Canada) Art/Sci Salon (also known as, Art Science Salon) sent me an August 26, 2021 announcement (received via email) of an online show with a limited viewing period (BTW, nice play on words with the title echoing the name of the institution mentioned in the first sentence),
PROXIMAL FIELDS
The Fields Institute was closed to the public for a long time. Yet, it has not been empty. Peculiar sounds and intriguing silences, the flows of the few individuals and the janitors occasional visiting the building made it surprisingly alive. Microorganisms, dust specs and other invisible guests populated undisturbed the space while the humans were away. The building is alive. We created site specific installations reflecting this condition: Elaine Whittaker and her poet collaborators take us to a journey of the microbes living in our proximal spaces. Joel Ong and his collaborators have recorded space data in the building: the result is an emergent digital organism. Roberta Buiani and Kavi interpret the venue as an organism which can be taken outside on a mobile gallery.
PROXIMAL FIELDS will be visible September 8-12 2021 at
With: Elaine Whittaker, Joel Ong, Nina Czegledy, Roberta Buiani, Sachin Karghie, Ryan Martin, Racelar Ho, Kavi. Poetry: Maureen Hynes, Sheila Stewart
Video: Natalie Plociennik
This event is one of many such events being held for Ars Electronica 2021 festival.
For anyone who remembers back to my May 3, 2021 posting (scroll down to the relevant subhead; a number of events were mentioned), I featured a show from the ArtSci Salon community called ‘Proximal Spaces’, a combined poetry reading and bioart experience.
Many of the same artists and poets seem to have continued working together to develop more work based on the ‘proximal’ for a larger international audience.
International and local scene details (e.g., same show? what is Ars Electronica? etc.)
As you may have noticed from the announcement, there are a lot of different institutions involved.
Local: Fields Institute and ArtSci Salon
The Fields Institute is properly known as The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences and is located at the University of Toronto. Here’s more from their About Us webpage,
…
Founded in 1992, the Fields Institute was initially located at the University of Waterloo. Since 1995, it has occupied a purpose-built building on the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto.
The Institute is internationally renowned for strengthening collaboration, innovation, and learning in mathematics and across a broad range of disciplines. …
…
The Fields Institute is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863-1932). Fields was a pioneer and visionary who recognized the scientific, educational, and economic value of research in the mathematical sciences. Fields spent many of his early years in Berlin and, to a lesser extent, in Paris and Göttingen, the principal mathematical centres of Europe of that time. These experiences led him, after his return to Canada, to work for the public support of university research, which he did very successfully. He also organized and presided over the 1924 meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto. This quadrennial meeting was, and still is, the major meeting of the mathematics world.
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and Fields felt strongly that there should be a comparable award to recognize the most outstanding current research in mathematics. With this in mind, he established the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, which, contrary to his personal directive, is now known as the Fields Medal. Information on Fields Medal winners can be found through the International Mathematical Union, which chooses the quadrennial recipients of the prize.
Fields’ name was given to the Institute in recognition of his seminal contributions to world mathematics and his work on behalf of high level mathematical scholarship in Canada. The Institute aims to carry on the work of Fields and to promote the wider use and understanding of mathematics in Canada.
The relationship between the Fields Institute and the ArtSci Salon is unclear to me. This can be found under Programs and Activities on the Fields Institute website,
2020-2021 ArtSci Salon
Description
ArtSci Salon consists of a series of semi-informal gatherings facilitating discussion and cross-pollination between science, technology, and the arts. ArtSci Salon started in 2010 as a spin-off of Subtle Technologies Festival to satisfy increasing demands by the audience attending the Festival to have a more frequent (monthly or bi-monthly) outlet for debate and information sharing across disciplines. In addition, it responds to the recent expansion in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] area of a community of scientists and artists increasingly seeking collaborations across disciplines to successfully accomplish their research projects and questions.
We are pleased to announce our upcoming March 2021 events (more details are in the schedule below):
…
Ars Electronica
It started life as a Festival for Art, Technology and Society in 1979 in Linz, Austria. Here’s a little more from their About webpage,
…
… Since September 18, 1979, our world has changed radically, and digitization has covered almost all areas of our lives. Ars Electronica’s philosophy has remained the same over the years. Our activities are always guided by the question of what new technologies mean for our lives. Together with artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists, we shed light on current developments in our digital society and speculate about their manifestations in the future. We never ask what technology can or will be able to do, but always what it should do for us. And we don’t try to adapt to technology, but we want the development of technology to be oriented towards us. Therefore, our artistic research always focuses on ourselves, our needs, our desires, our feelings.
…
They have a number of initiatives in addition to the festival. The next festival, A New Digital Deal, runs from September 8 – 12, 2021 (Ars Electronica 2021). Here’s a little more from the festival webpage,
Ars Electronica 2021, the festival for art, technology and society, will take place from September 8 to 12. For the second time since 1979, it will be a hybrid event that includes exhibitions, concerts, talks, conferences, workshops and guided tours in Linz, Austria, and more than 80 other locations around the globe.
…
Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology
Ars Electronica and Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) cooperate on projects but they are two different entities. Here’s more from the About LEONARDO webpage,
Fearlessly pioneering since 1968, Leonardo serves as THE community forging a transdisciplinary network to convene, research, collaborate, and disseminate best practices at the nexus of arts, science and technology worldwide. Leonardo’ serves a network of transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers, who experiment with cutting-edge, new approaches, practices, systems and solutions to tackle the most complex challenges facing humanity today.
As a not-for-profit 501(c)3 enterprising think tank, Leonardo offers a global platform for creative exploration and collaboration reaching tens of thousands of people across 135 countries. Our flagship publication, Leonardo, the world’s leading scholarly journal on transdisciplinary art, anchors a robust publishing partnership with MIT Press; our partnership with ASU [Arizona State University] infuses educational innovation with digital art and media for lifelong learning; our creative programs span thought-provoking events, exhibits, residencies and fellowships, scholarship and social enterprise ventures.
…
I have a description of Leonardo’s LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), from my March 22, 2021 posting (the Garden comes up next),
“… a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of LASER is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building.”
To be specific it’s Ars Electronica Garden LEONARDO LASER and this is one of the series being held as part of the festival (A Digital New Deal). Here’s more from the [Anti]disciplinary Topographies ‘garden’ webpage,
Culturing transnational dialogue for creative hybridity
Leonardo LASER Garden gathers our global network of artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together in a series of hybrid formats addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Animated by the theme of a “new digital deal” and grounded in the UN Sustainability Goals, Leonardo LASER Garden cultivates our values of equity and inclusion by elevating underrepresented voices in a wide-ranging exploration of global challenges, digital communities and placemaking, space, networks and systems, the digital divide – and the impact of interdisciplinary art, science and technology discourse and collaboration.
Dovetailing with the launch of LASER Linz, this asynchronous multi-platform garden will highlight the best of the Leonardo Network (spanning 47 cities worldwide) and our transdisciplinary community. In “Extraordinary Times Call for Extraordinary Vision: Humanizing Digital Culture with the New Creativity Agenda & the UNSDGs [United Nations Sustainable Development Goals],” Leonardo/ISAST CEO Diana Ayton-Shenker presents our vision for shaping our global future. This will be followed by a Leonardo Community Lounge open to the general public, with the goal of encouraging contributions to the cultural environments of different regions through transnational exchange and community building.
Getting back to the beginning you can view Proximal Fields from September 8 – 12, 2021 as part of the Ars Electonica 2021 festival, specifically, the ‘garden’ series.
This guy (Angus Fletcher) is a little too much the evangelist for my taste but the ideas supporting the book he has authored and is promoting in this video are in line with a lot of thinking about vision and memory both of which can be described acts of creativity. In this case, Fletcher is applying these ideas to literature, which he describes as an act of co-creation,
If you really want to understand literature, don’t start with the words on a page—start with how it affects your brain.
That’s the message from Angus Fletcher, an English professor with degrees in both literature and neuroscience, who outlines in a new book a different way to read and think about stories, from classic literature to pulp fiction to movies and TV shows.
Literature wasn’t invented just as entertainment or a way to deliver messages to readers, said Fletcher, who is a professor at The Ohio State University.
“Stories are actually a form of technology. [emphasis mine] They are tools that were designed by our ancestors to alleviate depression, reduce anxiety, kindle creativity, spark courage and meet a variety of other psychological challenges of being human,” Fletcher said.
“And even though we aren’t taught this in literature classes today, we can still find and use these emotional tools in the stories we read today.”
Fletcher explains these concepts in his book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.
For example, in a chapter about fighting loneliness, he discusses how reading The Godfather by Mario Puzo may help. A chapter on feeding creativity talks about the virtues of Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. Looking for the best way to make your dreams come true? For that, Fletcher proposes the TV show 30 Rock.
Wonderworks doesn’t ignore the classics: The book discusses how reading Shakespeare can help us heal from grief, Virginia Woolf can assist readers in finding peace of mind, and Homer can support those needing courage.
Fletcher said his neuroscience background very much influences the approach to literature he takes in Wonderworks.
“When you read a favorite poem or story, you may feel joy, you feel a sense of empathy or connection. One of the things I do in the book is provide the scientific validation for the things we’ve long felt when we’ve read favorite books or watched movies or TV shows that we loved,” he said.
“From my neuroscience background and studies that I’ve done, I can see how literature’s inventions plug into different regions of our brain, to make us less lonely or help us build up our courage or do a variety of other things to help us. Every story is different and is, in effect, a different tool.”
Fletcher said to truly understand the power of literature requires a different way of approaching stories from what is offered by most traditional literature courses.
The usual method of teaching literature focuses on the words, asking students to look for themes, to consider what the author intended to say and mean.
But that’s not the focus at Project Narrative, an Ohio State program of which Fletcher is a member.
“At Project Narrative, we reverse the process. Instead of looking at the words first, we look first at what is going on in your mind. How does this story make you feel? We look at how people are responding to the characters, the plot, the world that the author created,” Fletcher said.
After examining how the story makes you feel, the second part of the process is to trace that feeling back to some invention of the story, whether it is the plot, a character, the narrator, or the world of the story.
The themes of the story, or what the author means to say, are less important in this approach to literature.
That means when you are looking for a book to stimulate your courage, you don’t have to look for a book that has “courage” in the title or even as one of its themes according to traditional literature analysis, Fletcher said.
“Courage comes from reading a work of literature that makes us feel like we’re participating in something bigger than ourselves. It doesn’t have to mention courage or have courage be one of its themes,” he said. “That’s not relevant.”
For example, you wouldn’t think of reading The Godfather to ward off loneliness. But Fletcher said it can have this effect, partly through its use of a specific operatic technique. In Wonderworks, Fletcher explains how some operas feature a period of dissonant and turbulent music that is eventually resolved by a sweet harmony.
“The clashing and discordant music is upsetting, but then the sweet relief of harmony comes and releases dopamine in our brain, bonding us to the music,” he said.
“Puzo does the same thing in The Godfather, by creating chaos and tension in a chapter and then just partly resolving it at the end, giving us this partial dopamine rush that bonds us to the characters and to the story and makes us feel like they are friends.”
And even though it may not be good to be friends with gangsters in real life, the dopamine rush that we get from befriending the Corleone family can help ward off loneliness, he said.
If you’re reading stories like The Godfather while isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic, it may even help ease the transition back to normal life when the world opens back up.
Neuroscientists have discovered that a part of the brain, called the dorsal raphe nucleus, helps us make friends, Fletcher said. It contains a cluster of dopamine neurons that are primed for short periods of loneliness and stand ready to encourage us to be sociable when we again meet people.
But if our isolation lasts weeks or months, like during the pandemic, that priming fades and our brain hunkers down in isolation – making it harder to re-connect with people.
“So what The Godfather and other stories can do is wake up the dorsal raphe nucleus and make it easier to rejoin society when the pandemic is over,” he explained.
Fletcher said the use of operatic techniques in The Godfather is just one example of how literature can be a form of technology.
And he hopes more people will want to figure out how these technological tools in literature really work in our brains.
“The idea behind the book is to give you a different way of reading, one that unlocks the extraordinary power of literature to heal your brain, give you more joy, more courage, whatever you need in your life.”
A brilliant examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, that shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling any scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.
Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.
Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most powerful developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui—all while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found all throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.
An easy-to-understand exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class. Based on author Angus Fletcher’s own research, it is an eye-opening and thought-provoking work that offers us a new understanding of the power of literature.
Should you be interested in Project Narrative, it can be found here.
A May 17, 2021 posting on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio Ideas programme blog describes and hosts embedded videos and audio clips of space data sonfications and visualizations,
After years of attempts and failures to get a microphone to Mars, NASA’s [US National Aeronautics and Space Administration] latest rover, Perseverance, succeeded. It landed in February carrying two microphones.
For Jason Achilles Mezilis, a musician and record producer who has also worked for NASA, listening to the haunting Martian wind was an emotional experience.
“I’m in this bar half drunk, and I go over to the corner and I listen to it on my cellphone and … I broke down.”
The atmosphere of Mars is a little thinner than Earth’s, but it still has enough air to transmit sound.
Ben Burtt, an Oscar-winning sound designer, editor and director, made the sounds of cinematic space fantasy — from Star Wars to WALL-E to Star Trek. But he’s also deeply interested in the sound of actual space reality.
“All sound is a form of wind, really. It’s a puff of air molecules moving. And when I heard the sound, I thought: ‘Well, you know, I’ve heard this many times in my headphones on recording trips,'” Burtt said
…
SYSTEM Sounds, founded by University of Toronto astrophysicist and musician Matt Russo, translates data from space into music.
Planets or moons sometimes fall into what’s called “orbital resonance,” where two or more bodies pull each other into a regular rhythm. One example is the three inner moons of Jupiter: Ganymede, Europa, and Io.
“The rhythm is very similar to what a drummer might play. There’s a very simple regularity,” Russo said.
“And there’s something about our ears and our auditory system that finds that pleasing, finds repeating rhythms with simple ratios between them pleasing or natural sounding. It’s predictable. So it gives you something to kind of latch on to emotionally.”
Russo created this tool to illustrate the musical rhythm of the Galilean moons.
…
During the pandemic, scientists at NASA, with the help of SYSTEM Sounds, tried to find new ways of connecting people with the beauty of space. The result was “sonic visualizations,” translating data captured by telescopes into sound instead of pictures.
Most images of space come from data translated into colours, such as Cassiopeia A, the remains of an exploded star.
A given colour is usually assigned to the electromagnetic signature of each chemical in the dust cloud. But instead of assigning a colour, a musical note can be assigned, allowing us to hear Cassiopeia A instead of just seeing it.
…
There are several embedded videos and the Ideas radio interview embedded in the May 17, 2021 posting. Should you be interested, you can find System Sounds here.
You will find a number of previous postings (use the search term ‘data sonification’); the earliest concerning ‘space music’ is from February 7, 2014. You’ll also find Matt Russo, the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, and music in a May 11, 2017 posting.
An image can capture a moment, communicate a message, and evoke emotion. From selfies and sketches to micrographs and modelling outputs, the Visualizing SCIENCE contest celebrates all images that visualize all facets of scientific research.
Whether you’re at the lab, in the field, or online at home, it’s time to start creating images for your chance to win cash prizes.
….
Grand Prize of $400 CAD People’s Choice prize of $250 CAD From the Lab category prize of $200 CAD From the Machine category prize of $200 CAD From the Field category prize of $200 CAD
In 2016, Canadian Science Publishing organized the Visualizing SCIENCE image contest. The contest seeks images that visualize scientific research. The contest is open to all members of the international research community.
Contest Participants can submit a maximum of five (5) images to each of the three (3) categories.
FROM THE LAB
This category includes all images taken within the lab including micrographs and photographs.
FROM THE MACHINE
This category includes all images created in silico (i.e., by computer) including data visualization, modelling, digital art, and infographic representations.
FROM THE FIELD
This category includes all images taken of and during field work including field sketches and photographs.
…
Please check out the Contest Rules (PDF) for more details such as Image requirements and Submission requirements.
According to a July 5, 2021 news article by Maya Margit in the Jerusalem Post (originally published by The Media Line) The Fetter Museum of Nanoscience & Art will be opening at Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA)* this Thursday, July 8, 2021 (Note: Links have been removed),
A new museum set to open in Israel this week combines the cutting-edge field of nanotechnology with the world of contemporary art to create a uniquely mind-bending experience.
The Fetter Nanoscience and Art Museum located at Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA), pushes the limits of creative expression with a series of artworks that are exhibited throughout the institute’s seven floors.
…
This museum seems to be conceptual as it is ‘found’ in spaces within BINA rather than having its own designated space within BINA or its own ‘brick and mortar’ structure.
Slated to open to the public on Thursday [July 8, 2021], the museum is the brainchild of acclaimed physics professor Yuval Garini, former director of BINA.
As he was wandering down the spacious halls of the institute one day, Garini realized that much could be done to make better use of the expansive central rooms and meeting areas at BINA.
“Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary field so you really have to have the scientists from different disciplines working together to get something really novel,” Garini told The Media Line, adding that one of the primary purposes of the museum is to attract youngsters to join the burgeoning field of nanotechnology.
The Nano-Art Museum will showcase breakthrough research conducted at the Institute, fusing art and science to create an interactive thought-provoking experience.
Art that speaks science
“It started several years ago as a dream to establish a nanotechnology museum through a collaborative process of scientists and artists,” said Prof. Yuval Garini, the visionary and driving force behind the project. “We wanted to dazzle visitors with magnificent experiences, exposing them to scientific principles and to the vast research possibilities in the natural sciences. I am deeply grateful to the Fetter family, whom, without their gracious help our vision would not have been realized”, he said.
…
The Nano-Art museum is scheduled to open in the summer of 2019, offering visitors a wondrous celebration of the senses. …
Bravo to professor Garini and the others whose continued determination has resulted in the museum.
The launch show, Titled “New Languages,” features collaborations between artists and scientists from a wide variety of nanotechnology-related disciplines, including biology, computer science, engineering and chemistry.
…
New works will be added as time goes by and as these dialogues continue, she said. Unlike traditional white cube museums, the art at the Fetter Museum is exhibited in the institute’s main halls and in between its research labs, making for a one-of-a-kind museum experience in Israel.
Artist Vardi Bobrow, for instance, created an imposing large-scale sculptural installation called “Stretching the Limits” in BINA’s main hall that consists of a staggering 15,000 rubber bands. The rubber bands are intended to illustrate how damaged neurons recover by stretching and growing, an area of research that was explored by Prof. Orit Shefi.
…
It’s not clear if they will be hosting an event of some kind; I was not able to find any press releases.
*ETA July 6.21 0840 PDT: Bar-Ilan University is in the city of Ramat Gan in the Tel Aviv District.
I stumbled across this event on my Twitter feed (h/t @katepullinger; Note: Kate Pullinger is a novelist and Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries [CCCI] at Bath Spa University in the UK).
Anyone who visits here with any frequency will have noticed I have a number of articles on technology and the body (you can find them in the ‘human enhancement’ category and/or search fro the machine/flesh tag). Boddington’s view is more expansive than the one I’ve taken and I welcome it. First, here’s the event information and, then, a link to her open access paper from February 2021.
This year’s CCCI Public Lecture will be given by Ghislaine Boddington. Ghislaine is Creative Director of body>data>space and Reader in Digital Immersion at University of Greenwich. Ghislaine has worked at the intersection of the body, the digital, and spatial research for many years. This will be her first in-person appearance since the start of the pandemic, and she will share with us the many insights she has gathered during this extraordinary pivot to online interfaces much of the world has been forced to undertake.
With a background in performing arts and body technologies, Ghislaine is recognised as a pioneer in the exploration of digital intimacy, telepresence and virtual physical blending since the early 90s. As a curator, keynote speaker and radio presenter she has shared her outlook on the future human into the cultural, academic, creative industries and corporate sectors worldwide, examining topical issues with regards to personal data usage, connected bodies and collective embodiment. Her research led practice, examining the evolution of the body as the interface, is presented under the heading ‘The Internet of Bodies’. Recent direction and curation outputs include “me and my shadow” (Royal National Theatre 2012), FutureFest 2015-18 and Collective Reality (Nesta’s FutureFest / SAT Montreal 2016/17). In 2017 Ghislaine was awarded the international IX Immersion Experience Visionary Pioneer Award. She recently co-founded University of Greenwich Strategic Research Group ‘CLEI – Co-creating Liveness in Embodied Immersion’ and is an Associate Editor for AI & Society (Springer). Ghislaine is a long term advocate for diversity and inclusion, working as a Trustee for Stemette Futures and Spokesperson for Deutsche Bank ‘We in Social Tech’ initiative. She is a team member and presenter with BBC World Service flagship radio show/podcast Digital Planet.
Date and time
Thu, 24 June 2021 08:00 – 09:00 [am] PDT
…
@GBoddington
@bodydataspace
@ConnectedBodies
Boddington’s paper is what ignited my interest; here’s a link to and a citation for it,
The Weave—virtual physical presence design—blending processes for the future
Coming from a performing arts background, dance led, in 1989, I became obsessed with the idea that there must be a way for us to be able to create and collaborate in our groups, across time and space, whenever we were not able to be together physically. The focus of my work, as a director, curator and presenter across the last 30 years, has been on our physical bodies and our data selves and how they have, through the extended use of our bodies into digitally created environments, started to merge and converge, shifting our relationship and understanding of our identity and our selfhood.
…
One of the key methodologies that I have been using since the mid-1990s is inter-authored group creation, a process we called The Weave (Boddington 2013a, b). It uses the simple and universal metaphor of braiding, plaiting or weaving three strands of action and intent, these three strands being:
1. The live body—whether that of the performer, the participant, or the public;
2. The technologies of today—our tools of virtually physical reflection;
3. The content—the theme in exploration.
As with a braid or a plait, the three strands must be weaved simultaneously. What is key to this weave is that in any co-creation between the body and technology, the technology cannot work without the body; hence, there will always be virtual/physical blending. [emphasis mine]
…
Cyborgs
Cyborg culture is also moving forward at a pace with most countries having four or five cyborgs who have reached out into media status. Manel Munoz is the weather man as such, fascinated and affected by cyclones and anticyclones, his back of the head implant sent vibrations to different sides of his head linked to weather changes around him.
Neil Harbisson from Northern Ireland calls himself a trans-species rather than a cyborg, because his implant is permanently fused into the crown of his head. He is the first trans-species/cyborg to have his passport photo accepted as he exists with his fixed antenna. Neil has, from birth, an eye condition called greyscale, which means he only sees the world in grey and white. He uses his antennae camera to detect colour, and it sends a vibration with a different frequency for each colour viewed. He is learning what colours are within his viewpoint at any given time through the vibrations in his head, a synaesthetic method of transference of one sense for another. Moon Ribas, a Spanish choreographer and a dancer, had two implants placed into the top of her feet, set to sense seismic activity as it occurs worldwide. When a small earthquake occurs somewhere, she received small vibrations; a bigger eruption gives her body a more intense vibration. She dances as she receives and reacts to these transferred data. She feels a need to be closer to our earth, a part of nature (Harbisson et al. 2018).
…
Medical, non medical and sub-dermal implants
Medical implants, embedded into the body or subdermally (nearer the surface), have rapidly advanced in the last 30 years with extensive use of cardiac pacemakers, hip implants, implantable drug pumps and cochlear implants helping partial deaf people to hear.
Deep body and subdermal implants can be personalised to your own needs. They can be set to transmit chosen aspects of your body data outwards, but they also can receive and control data in return. There are about 200 medical implants in use today. Some are complex, like deep brain stimulation for motor neurone disease, and others we are more familiar with, for example, pacemakers. Most medical implants are not digitally linked to the outside world at present, but this is in rapid evolution.
Kevin Warwick, a pioneer in this area, has interconnected himself and his partner with implants for joint use of their personal and home computer systems through their BrainGate (Warwick 2008) implant, an interface between the nervous system and the technology. They are connected bodies. He works onwards with his experiments to feel the shape of distant objects and heat through fingertip implants.
‘Smart’ implants into the brain for deep brain stimulation are in use and in rapid advancement. The ethics of these developments is under constant debate in 2020 and will be onwards, as is proved by the mass coverage of the Neuralink, Elon Musk’s innovation which connects to the brain via wires, with the initial aim to cure human diseases such as dementia, depression and insomnia and onwards plans for potential treatment of paraplegia (Musk 2016).
…
Given how many times I’ve featured art/sci (also know as, art/science and/or sciart) and cyborgs and medical implants here, my excitement was a given.
For anyone who wants to pursue Boddington’s work further, her eponymous website is here, the body>data>space is here, and her University of Greenwich profile page is here.
For anyone interested in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Industries (CCCI), their site is here.
In this unique colour-focused artist talk, Sova will explore her Covid19 Collage Project created in direct response to the pandemic. She will take the audience through an analysis of how she utilizes the precise symbolic and aesthetic qualities of colour-choice to reflect her psychological response to our current times and amplify the intent in her artist statement: ‘Former eyes have been replaced, and the curtain pulled back on the inequities that we didn’t fully see before. Newsfeeds are full of surreal deaths and devastating condolences. Different eyes; metallic and shiny. Eyes that no longer know how to ‘look to our future” for hope and possibilities. Our Instagram lives and our vitriolic materialism now laid bare. We are left to self-reflect, face ourselves, slow down, and toss and turn at night with vivid crackling dreams alive with messages screaming from our subconscious. We thought we were separate from nature, but now we know we are one. Sequestered in our homes, our minds begin to change, fracture with confusion. We float in a sea of unknowns, covering our faces with psychological and real masks. In a sparkly shiny isolated dreamy space; how will we prophesize our new future and manifest in a new uncertain one?
Bio: Ilene Sova holds the position of Ada Slaight Chair of Contemporary Drawing and Painting in the Faculty of Art at Ontario College of Art and Design University [OCAD University]. She identifies as Mixed Race, with a white settler, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Seminole ancestry. She is also an artist who lives with the disability of Epilepsy. As such, she passionately identifies with the tenets of intersectional feminism and has dedicated her creative career to art and activism. Ilene Sova is also the founder of the Feminist Art Collective and Blank Canvases, an in-school creative arts programme for elementary school students. She holds an Honours BFA from the University of Ottawa in Painting and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Windsor. With extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, Sova’s work has most notably been shown at Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Mutuo Centro de Arte in Barcelona. Sova’s artwork has been featured internationally in the Journal of Psychology and Counselling, the Nigerian Arts Journal, Tabula and the Italian feminist journal, Woman’O’Clock. In her academic career, Sova has been invited to speak on diversity and equity in arts curriculum at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Pratt University and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design conference in Los Angeles. A passionate public speaker, Sova was chosen to speak at the first TEDx Women event in Toronto, and Southern University New York where she gave an all University Lecture on Art and Social Change. Additionally, Sova was invited to deliver the Arthur C. Danto Memorial Keynote Lecture at the 76th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA). Sova’s exhibitions and advocacy in education have been featured on Global Television, CBC Radio, the Toronto Star, Canada AM, The Metro, National Post, Canadian Art, and MSN News.
Presentation #1: Cosmovision of the Polynesia and Rapanui.
Featured Speaker: Edmundo Edwards Eastman. Archeoastronomy. President Fundación Planetario Rapanui
Abstract: Some 3,500 years ago, the ancestors of the Polynesians led the speediest human expansion of the pre-historic world, guided by nothing more than their complex astronomical observations and an understanding of natural signs. This knowledge, coupled with tremendous navigational skills and human ingenuity, allowed the Polynesians to explore the vast Pacific Ocean and develop highly sophisticated cultures on thousands of different islands.
Bio: Edmundo’s passion for archaeology started when he was 12 years old and discovered a pre-Incan site in northern Chile, yet it was after visiting Rapa Nui in 1957, that he became enthralled by Rapanui culture and returned to the island in 1960 with archaeologist William Mulloy. Edmundo has lived and worked in Polynesia ever since. In 1977 he co-founded the Centro de Estudios de Isla de Pascua where he carried out archaeological and ethnographic studies for the University of Chile until 1985. He then left for Tahiti, conducting archaeological surveys and leading restoration work in the Society, Marquesas, and Austral Islands until he returned to Rapa Nui in 1994. Edmundo has since then devoted himself to the scientific study and preservation of the archaeology and culture of the Pacific islands. He is the co-founder of the Pacific Islands Research Institute (PIRI) and co-owner of Archaeological Travel Service (ATS). Edmundo is an active member of the Explorers Club and in 2011 he was honored with the Lowell Thomas Award for his exceptional contribution to human knowledge through his valuable research and discoveries in Polynesia, and in 2016 he received the Citation of Merit.
Presentation #2: Celestial Africa
Featured Speaker: Jarita Holbrook
Abstract: The continent of Africa is large and has thousands of ethnic groups living in over 50 countries. Though home to some of the biggest astronomical telescopes in the world, there remains the perception that Africans have little awareness of the celestial realm. In reality, African indigenous astronomy is rich with many cultural connections to the sky as well as many practical uses of the sky. Holbrook will share some of the African legacy of rich skylore, artistic works, and practices connected to the sky.
Bio: Jarita Holbrook is a Marie Skłowdowska Curie Fellow in Science, Technology & Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Holbrook has successfully navigated the physical science and the social sciences. Upon moving to South Africa in 2013 to the Physics department at the University of the Western Cape, Holbrook was engaged in indigenous astronomy, studying the sociocultural aspects of astrophysics education in South Africa, and making a film about the social issues connected to building the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope. Using interview based inquiry, Holbrook researches the practices of inclusion and exclusion through analyzing socioeconomic class, gender, and ethnicity among database-driven astrophysics collaborations. Holbrook’s current project, ASTROMOVES, explores these in the context of career decision making among astrophysicists.
Panellists:
Anita Tenasco is an Anishinabeg from Kitigan Zibi. She has a Bachelor’s degree in history and teaching from the University of Ottawa, as well as a First Nations leadership certificate from Saint Paul’s University, in Ottawa. She has also taken courses in public administration at ENAP (The University of Public Administration). In Kitigan Zibi, she has held various positions in the field of education and, since 2005, is director of education in her community.
Anita was an active participant in the Honouring Our Ancestors project, in which the Anishinabeg Nation of Kitigan Zibi, under Gilbert Whiteduck’s direction, was successful in the restitution of the remains of ancestors conserved at the Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau. Anita also participated in the organizing of a conference on repatriation, in Kitigan Zibi, in 2005. She plays an important role in this research project.
Wilfred Buck is a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. He obtained his B.Ed. & Post Bacc. from the University of Manitoba.
As an educator Wilfred has had the opportunity and good fortune to travel to South and Central America as well as Europe and met, shared and listened to Indigenous people from all over the world.
He is a husband, father of four, son, uncle, brother, nephew, story-teller, mad scientist, teacher, singer, pipe-carrier, sweat lodge keeper, old person and sun dance leader. Researching Ininew star stories Wilfred found a host of information which had to be interpreted and analyzed to identify if the stories were referring to the stars. The journey began… The easiest way to go about doing this, he was told, was to look up.
“The greatest teaching that was ever given to me, other than my wife and children, is the ability to see the humor in the world”…Wilfred Buck
Yasmin Catricheo is the STEM Education Scholar at AUI’s Office of Education and Public Engagement. She is a physics educator from Chile, and of Mapuche origin. Yasmin is passionate about the teaching of science and more recently has focused in the area of astronomy and STEM. In her professional training she has taken a range of courses in science and science education, and researched the benefits of scientific argumentation in the physics classroom, earning a master’s degree in education from the University of Bío-Bío. Yasmín is also a member of the indigenous group “Mapu Trafun”, and she works closely with the Mapuche community to recover the culture and communicate the message of the Mapuche Worldview. In 2018 Yasmín was selected as the Chilean representative for Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassador Program (ACEAP) founded by NSF.
*Ingenium is the name for Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, which acts as an umbrella organization for the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Science and Technology Museum.
Tools for Catching Clouds at Venice’s Biennale Architettura 2021
This information comes from a June 8, 2021 email received from the artist himself, Lanfranco Aceti,
Tools for Catching Clouds is a new series of works of art by Lanfranco Aceti. They are a segment of Preferring Sinking to Surrender — the artist’s installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. The installation is comprised of drawings, sculptures, paintings, videos, performances, and a vegetable garden.
Curated by Alessandro Melis for the Italian Pavilion, Preferring Sinking to Surrender is a progression and accumulation of works of art that will be developed throughout the duration of the Venice Architecture Biennale, from May 21, 2021, to November 21, 2021.
The artist reimagines the future in matriarchal terms and bypasses social upheavals and legacies of environmental disasters through a series of aesthetic approaches that navigate melancholia, anger, and hope. The works of art retrace the legacies of the past — back to the Italic tribes that populated the Apennines before the founding of Rome and the arrival of Greeks in southern Italy.
The worship of the Magna Mater — or the Great Black Mediterranean Mother — by the Italic tribes is a necessary rediscovery to understand the resilience of matriarchy and its values of acceptance and inclusion within societies that have become patriarchal in nature and, de facto, hierarchical and exclusionary. Nevertheless, these values resist and persist, and have empowered entire generations who were considered ‘outsiders’ and who have found, in the embrace of the ‘Mamma Schiavona’ (another name for the Magna Mater), their strength, networks of solidarity, and empowerment.
Aceti’s research in gender issues and alternative structures to patriarchy, developed during a one year affiliation at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) @ MIT, inspired a continued analysis of pre-Roman matriarchal societies. This led to the conception of Preferring Sinking to Surrender as an alternative space and narrative to current capitalistic cultural frameworks.
“I have to say that it is a pleasure working with Alessandro Melis,” said Aceti. “Not every curator is fond of process based art. For me it is particularly rewarding to have found a curator that is both empowering and supportive.”
For more information and images of Tools for Catching Clouds, click here.
About the Artist
Lanfranco Aceti is known for his extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On); Shimmer, a series of sculptural, photographic, and painting works curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra; a large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki. Currently, he is developing a large international project, Preferring Sinking to Surrender for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, which includes performances in major cities around the world.
About The Studium
The Studium is Lanfranco Aceti’s artistic studio. It has partnered with public and private organizations as well as with individuals to realize the artist’s works and to develop fora for the discussion of aesthetic approaches to public space, the role of contemporary art in the social political landscape, and themes of social and environmental justice.
For questions or information and materials, please contact The Studium’s Marketing Director, John Francescutti.
I’m a little late to the congrès (May 27 -29, 2021) but they’re still taking registrations. Of course, you will need some French language skills.
InterAction
It might be worth testing those French language skills, as the organizers (L’Association des communicateurs scientifiques du Québec [ACS]) have arranged a fairly lively programme (PDF),
JEUDI 27 MAI
13 h 00 à 13 h 30 – Kiosques
13 h 30 à 13 h 45 – Plénière Allocutions d’ouverture du congrès
13 h 45 à 14 h 30 – Plénière Discussion avec Nicolas Martin, animateur de La méthode scientifique à France Culture
14 h 30 à 14 h 45 – Pause
14 h 45 à 16 h 00 – Ateliers
(1) Laboratoire artistique (2) La polarisation dans les communicationssur les réseaux sociaux en lien avec la COVID: bilan et perspectives
16 h 00 à 16 h 15 – Pause
16 h 15 à 17 h 00 – Plénière Discussion avec Louis T, humoriste
VENDREDI 28 MAI
13 h 30 à 14 h 00 – Kiosques
14 h 00 à 15 h 00 – Plénière Comment communiquer la science en temps de pandémie ?
15 h 00 à 15 h 30 – Pause
15 h 30 à 16 h 45 – Ateliers
(1) Discours et pensée critique (2) Science et savoirs autochtones
Both organizations are covering many of the same topics but they’ve adopted different tones for approaching them as evidenced in the titles. While I’ve characterized the congrès programme as lively, I’d characterize this conference programme as earnest.
First off, there’s Canada’s annual Science Odyssey (see my April 26, 2021 posting for more about the government initiative or you can go directly to the Science Odyssey website for a listing of the events).
Since posting about Science Odyssey, I have received a number of emails announcing event and not all of them are part of the Odyssey experience.
From the looks of things, May 2021 is going to be a very busy month. Given how early it is in the month I expect to receive another batch of notices and most likely will post another May 2021 events roundup.
At this point, there’s a heavy emphasis on architecture (human and other) and design.
Proximal Spaces on May 3, 2021
This is one of those event within an event notices. There’s a festival: FACTT 20/21 – Improbable Times. Trans-disciplinary & Trans-national Festival of Art & Science in Portugal and within the festival there is Proximal Spaces in Toronto, Canada. Here’s more from the ArtScience Salon (ArtSci Salon) May 1, 2021 announcement (received via email),
Proximal Spaces
May 3, 2021 – 3.00 PM (EST) [12 pm PST]
Join us at this poetry reading by six Canadian artists responding to the work of eight bioartists. Event with be streamed on Facebook Live.
Please note that you don’t need to sign up in order to access the streaming as it is public.
Proximal Spaces’ is a multi-modal exhibition that explores the environment at multiple scales in concentric circles of proximity to the body. Inspired by Edward Hall’s [Edward Twitchell Hall or E. T. Hall] 1961 notation of intimate (1.5ft), personal (4ft), social (12ft) and public (25ft) spaces in his “Proxemics” diagrams, the installation portion presents similar diagrams of his concentric circles affixed to the wall of the gallery space, as well as developed in Augmented Reality around the venue. Each of these diagrams is a montage of microscopic and sub-microscopic images of the everyday environment as experienced by a collaborative team of international bioartists, and arrayed in a fractal form. In addition, an AR-enabled application explores the invisible environments of computer generated bioaerosols suspended in the air of virtual space.
This work visualizes the variegated response of the biological environment to unprecedented levels of physical distancing and self-isolation and recent developments in vaccine design that impact our understanding of interpersonal and interspecies ‘messaging’. What continues to thrive in the 6ft ‘dead spaces’ between us? What invisible particles linger on and create a biological archive through our movements through space? The artwork presents an interesting mode of interspecies engagement through hybrid virtual and physical interaction.
In the spring of 2021, six Canadian poets – Kelley Aitken, nancy viva davis halifax, Maureen Hynes, Anita Lahey, Dilys Leman, & Sheila Stewart – came together to pursue a lyric response to Proximal Spaces. They were challenged and inspired by the virtual exhibition with its combination of art, science, and proxemics. The focus of the artworks – what inhabits and thrives in the spaces and environments where we live, work, and breathe—generated six distinctive poems.
Poets: Kelley Aitken, nancy viva davis halifax, Maureen Hynes, Anita Lahey, Dilys Leman, & Sheila Stewart
Bioartists: Roberta Buiani, Nathalie Dubois Calero, Sarah Choukah, Nicole Clouston, Jess Holtz, Mick Lorusso, Maro Pebo, Felipe Shibuya
This project is part of FACTT-Improbable Times (http://factt.arteinstitute.org/), a project spearheaded and promoted by the Arte Institute we are in or production and conception partners with Cultivamos Cultura and Ectopia (Portugal), InArts Lab@Ionian University (Greece), ArtSci Salon@The Fields Institute and Sensorium@York University (Canada), School of Visual Arts (USA), UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], Arte+Ciência and Bioscénica (Mexico), and Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Together we will work and bring into being our ideas and actions for this during the year of 2021!
Morphogenesis: Geometry, Physics, and Biology on May 5, 2021
i love this image, he seems so delighted to show off the bug (?),
Harvard professor L. Mahadevan
Here’s more from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) April 30, 2021 announcement (received via email),
Earth is home to millions of different species – from simple plants and unicellular organisms to trees and whales and humans. The incredible diversity of life on Earth led Charles Darwin to lament that it is “enough to drive the sanest man mad.”
How can we make sense of this diversity of form, which arises from the process of morphogenesis that links molecular- and cellular-level processes to conspire and lead to the emergence of “endless forms most beautiful,” as Darwin said?
In his May 5 [2021] lecture webcast, Harvard professor L. Mahadevan [Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan] will take viewers on a journey into the mathematical, physical, and biological workings of morphogenesis to demonstrate how scientists are beginning to unlock many of the secrets that have vexed scientists since Darwin.
Possible Worlds: “How Will We Live Together?” on May 6, 2021
For those who are interested in human architecture, there’s this from a May 3, 3021 Berggruen institute announcement (received via email) about a talk by Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Prize winner, Alejandro Gastón Aravena Mori (Alejandro Aravena),
Possible Worlds: How Will We Live Together
May 6, 2021
11am — Virtual
Possible Worlds: The UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] – Berggruen Institute Speaker Series is a new partnership between the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Berggruen Institute.
Please click here to submit a question to Alejandro Aravena
About Alejandro Aravena Alejandro Aravena is an architect, founder and executive director of the firm Elemental. His works include the “Siamese Towers” at the Catholic University of Chile and the Novartis office campus in Shanghai. In 2016, the New York Times named Aravena one of the world’s “creative geniuses” who had helped define culture. He and Elemental have received numerous honors, including the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2015 London Design Museum’s Design of the Year award and the 2011 Index Award. Aravena currently serves as the president of the Pritzker Prize jury. Aravena’s lecture title, “How Will We Live Together?” echoes the theme of the upcoming international architecture exhibition, Biennale Architettura, in which Elemental will be participating.
Featuring a discussion with moderator Dana Cuff
Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she is also Director of cityLAB, an award-winning think tank that advances goals of spatial justice through experimental urbanism and architecture (www.cityLAB.aud.ucla.edu). Since receiving her Ph.D. in Architecture from Berkeley, Cuff has published and lectured widely about affordable housing, the architectural profession, and Los Angeles’ urban history. She is author of several books, including The Provisional City about postwar housing in L.A., and a co-authored book called Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, documenting her collaborative, crossdisciplinary research and teaching at UCLA funded by the Mellon Foundation. Based on cityLAB’s design research, Cuff co-authored landmark legislation that permits “backyard homes” on some 8.1 million single-family properties, doubling the density of suburbs across California (AB 2299, Bloom-2016). In 2019, cityLAB opened a satellite center in the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood where a deep, multi-year exchange with community organizations is already demonstrating ways that humanistic design of the public realm can create more compassionate cities. Cuff recently received three awards that describe her career: Women in Architecture Activist of the Year (2019, Architectural Record); Distinguished Leadership in Architectural Research (2020, ARCC); and Educator of the Year (2021, American Institute of Architects Los Angeles).
About the Series Possible Worlds: The UCLA – Berggruen Institute Speaker Series is a new partnership between the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Berggruen Institute. This semiannual series will bring some of today’s most imaginative intellectual leaders and creators to deliver public talks on the future of humanity. Through the lens of their singular achievements and experiences, these trailblazers in creativity, innovation, philosophy and politics will lecture on provocative topics that explore current challenges and transformations in human progress.
UCLA faculty and students have long been at the forefront of interpreting the world’s legacy of language, literature, art and science. UCLA Humanities serves a vital role in readying future leaders to articulate their thoughts with clarity and imagination, to interpret the world of ideas, and to live as informed citizens in an increasingly complex world. We are proud to be partnering in this lecture series with the Berggruen Institute, whose work addresses the “Great Transformations” taking place in technology and culture, politics and economics, global power arrangements, and even how we perceive ourselves as humans. The Institute seeks to connect deep thought in the human sciences — philosophy and culture — to the pursuit of practical improvements in governance.
A selection committee comprising representatives of UCLA and the Berggruen Institute has been formed to make recommendations for lecturers. The committee includes:
• Ursula Heise, Professor and Chair, Department of English; Professor, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies • Pamela Hieronymi, Professor of Philosophy • Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor of Urban Planning; Associate Provost for Academic Planning • Todd Presner, Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives; Chair of the Digital Humanities Program; Michael and Irene Ross Endowed Chair of Yiddish Studies; Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature • Lynn Vavreck, Professor, Department of Political Science; Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy • David Schaberg, Senior Dean of the UCLA College; Dean of Humanities; Professor, Asian Languages & Cultures • Nils Gilman, Vice President of Programs, the Berggruen Institute
Generative Art and Computational Creativity starts May 7, 2021
A Spring 2021 MetaCreation Lab (Simon Fraser University; SFU) newsletter (received via email on April 23, 2021) highlights a number of festival submissions and papers along with some news about a free introductory course. First, the video introduction to the course,
This first course in the two-part program, Generative Art and Computational Creativity [there’s a fee for part two], proposes an introduction and overview of the history and practice of generative arts and computational creativity with an emphasis on the formal paradigms and algorithms used for generation. The full program will be taught by Associate Professor from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and multi-disciplinary researcher, Philippe Pasquier.
On the technical side, we will study core techniques from mathematics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life that are used by artists, designers and musicians across the creative industry. We will start with processes involving chance operations, chaos theory and fractals and move on to see how stochastic processes, and rule-based approaches can be used to explore creative spaces. We will study agents and multi-agent systems and delve into cellular automata, and virtual ecosystems to explore their potential to create novel and valuable artifacts and aesthetic experiences.
The presentation is illustrated by numerous examples from past and current productions across creative practices such as visual art, new media, music, poetry, literature, performing arts, design, architecture, games, robot-art, bio-art and net-art. Students get to practice these algorithms first hand and develop new generative pieces through assignments and projects in MAX. Finally, the course addresses relevant philosophical, and societal debates associated with the automation of creative tasks.
Music for this course was composed with the StyleMachineLite Max for Live engine of Metacreative Inc.
Artistic direction: Philippe Pasquier, Programmation: Arne Eigenfeldt, Sound Production: Philippe Bertrand
Schedule
This course is in adaptive mode and is open for enrollment. Learn more about adaptive courses here.
Session 1: Introduction and Typology of Generative Art (May 7, 2021) To start off this course, we define generative art and computational creativity and discuss how these relate through the study of prominent examples. We establish a typology of generative systems based on levels of autonomy and agency.
Session 2: History Of Generative Art, Chance Operations, and Chaos Theory (May 14, 2021) Generative art is nothing new, and this session goes through the history of the field from pre-history to the popularization of computers. We study chance, noise, fractals, chaos theory, and their applications in visual art and music.
Session 3: Rule-Based Systems, Grammars and Markov Chains (May 21, 2021) This session introduces and illustrate the generative potential of rule-based and expert systems. We study generative grammars through the Chomsky hierarchy, and introduce L-systems, shape grammars, and Markov chains. We discuss how these have been applied in visual art, music, design, architecture, and electronic literature.
Session 4: Cognitive Agents And Multiagent Systems (May 28, 2021) This session introduces the concepts underlying the notion of artificial agents. We study the belief, desire, and intention (BDI) cognitive architecture, and message based agent communication resting on the speech act theory. We discuss musical agents, conversational agents, chat bots and twitter bots and their artistic potential.
Session 5: Reactive Agents And Multiagent Systems (June 4, 2021) In this session, we introduce reactive agents and the subsumption architecture. We study boids, and detail how complex behaviors can emerge from a distributed population of simple artificial agents. We look at a myriad of applications from ant painting to swarm music and we discuss artistic approaches to virtual ecosystems.
Session 6: A-Life And Cellular Automaton (June 11, 2021) In this concluding session, we introduce artificial life (A-life). We study cellular automaton, multi-agent ecosystems for music, visual art, non-photorealistic rendering, and gaming. The session also concludes the class by reflecting on the state of the art in the field and its consequences on creative practices.
If you’re interested in the lab and its other projects, go to metacreationlab.net.
Architectural Portraits on May 13, 2021
From the May 2021 Dante Alighieri Society of British Columbia’s newsletter,
ARCHITECTURAL PORTRAITS: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY, DESIGN & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT A talk by architect & photographer Oliviero Godi (Politecnico di Milano)
Photo by Oliviero Godi – Frantoio Ipogeo nel Salento
THURSDAY, May 13, 2021 IN ENGLISH – ON ZOOM at 5:00 pm (PST)
Admission:
FREE for the Dante Society’s members
$5 MINIMUM DONATION for non-members
Become a member! Annual membership $30.00 – See membership benefits here
The human being – so fragile, so ethereal, speaking a sweet language. A piece of architecture – so physically imminent, so solid, speaking a language of hardness.
Photo by Oliviero Godi – Frantoio Ipogeo nel Salento
Join photographer & architect Oliviero Godi as he explores the relationship between the body & the material, the transient & the permanent, in search of the correct balance where neither element prevails.
To make your donation, please send an e-transfer to info@dantesocietybc.ca. Thank you!
Learn More [about this other upcoming Cultural Events]
Respiration and the Brain on May 25, 2021
Before getting to the April 29, 2021 BrainTalks announcement, here’s a little bit about BrainTalks from their webspace on the University of British Columbia (UBC) website,
BrainTalks is a series of talks inviting you to contemplate emerging research about the brain. Researchers studying the brain, from various disciplines including psychiatry, neuroscience, neuroimaging, and neurology, gather to discuss current leading edge topics on the mind.
As an audience member, you join the discussion at the end of the talk, both in the presence of the entire audience, and with an opportunity afterwards to talk with the speaker more informally in a catered networking session. The talks also serve as a connecting place for those interested in similar topics, potentially launching new endeavours or simply connecting people in discussions on how to approach their research, their knowledge, or their clinical practice.
For the general public, these talks serve as a channel where by knowledge usually sequestered in inaccessible journals or university classrooms, is now available, potentially allowing people to better understand their brains and minds, how they work, and how to optimize brain health.
[UBC School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry]
Onto the April 29, 2021 BrainTalks announcement (received via email),
BrainTalks: Respiration and the Brain
Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM [PT]
Join us for a series of online talks exploring questions of respiration and the brain. Emerging empirical research will be presented on ventilation-associated brain injury and breathing-based interventions for the treatment of stress and anxiety disorders. We presenters will include Dr. Thiago Bassi, Dr. Lloyd Lalande and Taylor Willi, MSc.
Dr. Thiago Bassi will address the biological connection between the brain and lungs, exploring the potential adverse effects of mechanical ventilation on the brain. Dr. Bassi is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, who worked clinically for more than ten years in Brazil. He joined the Lungpacer Medical team and C2B2 lab in 2017, and is currently completing his doctorate in Biomedicine Physiology at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Lloyd Lalande will describe Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT), as an emerging clinical breathwork intervention for its effectiveness in reducing depression, anxiety and stress, and in increasing mindfulness and sense of wellbeing. Dr. Lalonde is an Assistant Professor teaching psychology at the Buddhist TzuChi University of Science and Technology, and the developer of GRMT. His current research is based out of the TzuChi Buddhist General Hospital, investigating GRMT as an evidence-based treatment for a variety of outcomes.
Mr. Taylor Willi will present the findings of his dissertation research comparing the effect of performing daily brief relaxation techniques on measures of stress and anxiety. Mr. Willi completed a Masters Degree of Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and is currently completing his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Simon Fraser University.
Each of the speakers will present an overview of their research findings investigating respiration in three unique ways. Following their presentations, the speakers will be available for an audience-drive panel discussion.
They don’t mention COVID-19 but given that seriously ill patients with the disease are routinely placed on ventilators, it is almost certainly going to be mentioned in the presentations.
