Professors Iris Meier and Amy Youngs will co-teach an interdisciplinary Art and Science course in Autumn 2021. We will do science experiments and art projects which culminate in a collaboratively designed and built art installation. Example artwork from past classes: Unbecoming Carbon: traveling in intercellular space and Where Rocks are Fed to Trees.
We welcome interested graduate students and advanced undergraduate students from any discipline. Contact youngs.6@osu.edu or meier.56@osu.edu
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces her work investigates the power dynamics of techno utopias, global economics and outsourced labor. She has exhibited throughout the US and internationally in venues including Eyebeam (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art / MASS MoCA (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She is a recipient of numerous awards, most recently from the Harpo Foundation and Creative Capital.
Artist Website: http://stephanierothenberg.com/
When: Monday, March 8, 12pm EST.
Contact Amy Youngs youngs.6@osu.edu for zoom link.
With thanks to the Department of Art Fund to support visiting artist presentations.
The contemporary moment is one of unprecedented transfiguration. A constant tug of war where institutions, communities, interests, and most importantly, individuals coincide in an undulating state of deformation and alteration. Those boundaries that defined our movements and occupations have blurred to the point of non-existence, facilitating an amorphous space for constant activity. Shopping for winter clothes while attending a lecture, replying to business emails at the dinner table, or participating in job training while taking the subway, the established limits of social and personal spaces are expunged, and with that, so are the boundaries of the individual. And while this shapeless chimeric reality in its unparalleled distraction and discontinuity demands the individual’s utmost awareness and participation, it continues to expand its disciplinary practices to every crevice of daily life. The punch clock is now next to the bed; better wake up, sunshine!
Nothing is ever finished anymore, and no one is ever done with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the factory, and the household subsist in a simultaneous state of coexistence. And it is at the dawn of this new day of bewildering complexity and anomalous virtual convergence that I ask from you, from you the eternal surveilling gaze, from you my mentor, my peer, my adversary, and my friend: the audio seems to be working, but can you see my screen?
We welcome this dynamic duo into the Art & Technology area in the Department of Art this year. As a team, they will fill the position as Visiting Assistant Professor, teaching courses, working on their research and participating our creative community.
Both earned their MFAs from the Media Arts program at the University of California Los Angeles in 2020. Their creative practices span widely across the field of new media art – from interactive web comics to algorithmically-generated 3D animations, to music videos. They occasionally create artwork together and their live, audiovisual performances have been exhibited at MoMA PS1 and ICA London.
Dalena Tran hails from Salt Lake City, Utah, where she received her BA in Film & Media Arts with Honors from the University of Utah. She creates stories and situations that entangle subjectivity and temporality in response to notions of voyeurism, hegemony, memory, and the phenomenon of media. Her work has been featured in O FLUXO, Assembly Point, Flat Journal, Adult Swim, and Nowness.
Hirad Sab is from Tehran, Iran. He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Utah. In conversation with emerging technologies, his work reflects on current political, social, and cultural realities intertwined with a critique of technoculturalism and technopositivism. He has exhibited at The Wrong Biennale, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, CHAO Art Center, and The LOW Museum of Contemporary Culture; and it has been featured in Der Spiegel, W Magazine, NPR, Vice, Dazed, and The Guardian.
Un-becoming Carbon: Traveling in Intercellular Space focuses on the importance of carbon sequestration by plants. The viewers enter the plants’ intercellular space, beginning their journey as a molecule of carbon dioxide, donating their carbon to the plant’s body, and emerging as life-giving oxygen. The interactive installation explores this process through physical, audio and virtual experiences. Entering a giant leaf through a stomatal opening, the viewers are surrounded by sculptural plant cells. Palisade Parenchyma droop from above while below Spongy Parenchyma and Stomata line the floor. Soft structures invite viewers to rest and continue their experience by entering virtual reality. An exploration between the macroverse and the microverse begins in a forest where the viewers take on the role of a carbon particle being absorbed into a leaf; first traveling through intercellular space, then moving into a cell to become part of its substance.
Concluding the experience, visitors are invited to adopt and nurture a living plant propagule to continue its carbon-binding work in their own home. Plant awareness posters act as a souvenir from their intercellular space travel.
This multimedia art installation was collaboratively created by the students and professors of an Art & Science class (Art 5001) by Ellie Bartlett, Jacklyn Brickman, Ashley Browne, Amanda Buckeye, Diva Colter, Mona Gazala, Youji Han, Saba Hashemi Shahraki, Brice Jordan, Liam Manning, Iris Meier, Brooke Stanley, Lily Thompson, Zachary Upperman, Stephen White, Taylor Woodie, and Amy Youngs.
Presented as part of the Art & Technology exhibition, Non-Human Intelligence.
Come out and celebrate with us at the opening on December 4th, 5 – 7pm.
Hopkins Hall, the Ohio State University – campus map and transportation
Art & Technology exhibition
Non-Human Intelligence: In the realm of animal, insect, plant and computer systems, can humans co-create with “other”? Can we look beyond human-dominated ways of understanding?
Artists, technologists, and scientists are as likely to collaborate with bees, bacteria, spiders as with artificial intelligence in the creation of their work, provoking difficult questions regarding the nature of creativity and non-human others’ consciousness. When working with living systems, the biggest struggle is to keep the systems alive and this requires a sensitive humility and respect. Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” describes the back and forth nature of interacting with animals as we form a connection and broaden our notion of the nature of the intelligence of others. It entertains the idea of multispecies and transspecies interactions in the co-creative process. “Becoming-with” allows us to better acknowledge “others” right to exist, thrive, and express individual agencies.
Through an expanded understanding of the intelligent, intertwined, symbiotic nature of our living planet, might we become more human?
“Becoming-with” allows us to better acknowledge “others” right to exist, thrive and express individual agencies. Through accommodating non-human others, might we become more human in the process, by demonstrating an understanding of the deeply intertwined symbiotic nature of our living planet?
This semester, students in the Art & Technology courses – ranging from animation, art-science, 3D modeling, and internet art to robotics – have created individual and group artworks related to this theme and they will be presenting them in this juried exhibition. Make sure to visit the special installation in the Emerging Technology Studios on the 3rd floor of Hopkins Hall.
Jacklyn Brickman, MFA student in Art & Technology, was awarded a Tech Hub grant to produce an art installation that connects the human body to black walnut trees. She discusses her finished work Spellbreaker and her thoughts on the role that technology can play in helping us understand living systems.
Rose Stark, MFA student graduating Spring 2019 presents her installation work and describes how her experiences as an animator influenced the way she approached building these sculptures for her exhibition, Transluminal.
Professors Iris Meier and Amy Youngs will co-teach an Art Science course. Designed to be interdisciplinary between art and science, we welcome graduate students and advanced undergraduate students from the sciences and the arts. Contact youngs.6@osu.edu or meier.56@osu.edu
Overclocked computers have been configured to run at faster speeds than intended. Overclocking can lead to instability in the system and unpredictable behavior. Overclocking is an act of pushing computers for more speed, while it is also a metaphor for high tech low brow techniques of hacking to wrest control from computer engineers. Overclocking can reference the dream of a higher-performance computer as well as the nightmare of runaway technological growth at the expense of biological and ecological systems. Now fueled by new forms of artificial intelligences that allow machines to upgrade themselves, who might be holding the joystick?
This semester, students in the Art & Technology courses – ranging from animation, digital imaging, moving image art, and 3D modeling, to robotics – have created individual and group artworks related to this theme and they will be presenting them in this juried exhibition.
Opening: Monday April 23, 5:00pm – 8:00pm
Open hours: Tuesday 4/24 – Thursday 4/26, 11:00am – 5:00pm & Friday 4/27, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Where: Hopkins Hall Gallery, Lobby, Corridor, and Collaboratory – directions
Admission is free and open to the public