** The talks have now passed – online videos will be coming soon! **
Extraordinary talks from artists, scientists and engineers working in cross-disciplinary practices.
Art & Science Talk Series at Cranfield University
Free and open to all
6.15 – 7:45 pm Vincent Building (52a Health) – Ground Floor (direction and map)
You are welcome to join us for drinks after the talks.
- 1st October 2008 - Professor Paul Brown – artist
- 15th October 2008 – Francesca Galeazzi – artist & architectural engineer
- A recent expedition to the Arctic with Cape Farewell; preventing creativity freeze in the name of climate change awareness
- 29th October 2008 – Dr Emma Lawrence – experimental psychologist & Julie Freeman – artist
- Tricks of the Psych Trade: an art & psychology collaborative event unraveled. Find out how art helped communicate the science of empathy.
- 12 November 2008 – Anna Dumitriu – artist, founder of The Institute of Unnecessary Research
- Talking to bacteria – our relationship to the everyday microbial world in which we co-exist, plus the importance of Unnecessary Research
Wed 12th November 2008
Anna Dumitriu – Founder of The Institute of Unnecessary Research. Artist in Residence at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University.
In this talk Anna Dumitriu will explain her approach to transdisciplinary art practice, what working collaboratively means to her, why she ‘talks’ to bacteria and why unnecessary research is so important. As Einstein said “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Anna Dumitriu’s highly experimental work is involved with the nature of trans-disciplinary practice-based research. She has collaborated with scientists on at least 10 major projects over the past eleven years and often tends to go very deeply into her chosen area of research, taking on, or attempting to take on the role of scientist, in an almost performative sense, raising paradigmatic questions in her work. Her installations, interventions and performances use a range of digital, biological and traditional media including video projections, mobile phones and embroidery, working with diverse audiences often in non-traditional settings. Her key research interests are normal flora microbiology, artificial life (and its links to microbiology), philosophical notions of the sublime, medicine and healthcare.
Her work has been exhibited internationally including USA, Brazil, France, Russia and Lithuania and is held in international public collections including the Science Museum, London. She is currently Artist in Residence at The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University, participating in the prestigious e-MobiLArt project (European Mobile Lab for Interactive Artists), a visiting lecturer at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and researching her practice-based Fine Art PhD part-time at The University of Brighton.
Wed 1st October 2008
Paul Brown – Artist, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK. Chair of the Computer Arts Society (CAS).
Paul Brown is an artist who has closely collaborated throughout his career with scientists and engineers. He discovered computers at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition held at the ICA in London in 1968 and he is now recognised as one of the early pioneers of computational and generative art. At the Slade School of Art in the 1970’s he and his colleagues were lucky to have one of the first computers systems in an art school (a Data General Nova 2) and their work into cellular automata, deterministic non-linear systems and related phenomena is now being recognised as one root of the scientific discipline of artificial life. Brown will illustrate this history and discuss his own work including his latest project – the DrawBots – that is attempting to use evolutionary robotics to create drawing automata that have their own personal style. He will also describe his experience of working in close collaboration with scientists, the various kinds of relationship and will speculate on best practice.
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late-1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. His early work involved creating large scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups (Meredith Monk, Music Electronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc…) and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s. He has participated in shows at major venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain, the Substation in Singapore and the Venice Biennale. His work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA.
In 1984 he was the founding head of the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design and in 1994 he returned to Australia after a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University to head Griffith University’s Multimedia Unit. In 1996 he was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology.
From 1997-99 he was Chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology and he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards for LEA, the e-journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (MIT Press) and the journal Digital Creativity (Routledge). From 1992 to 1999 he edited fineArt forum, one of the Internet’s longest established art ‘zines and he is currently Chair of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and moderator of the DASH (Digital ArtS Histories) and CAS e-lists.
During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council and he spent 2000 as artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. From 2002-05 he was a visiting fellow in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked on the CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc…) project and he is currently (2005-08) visiting professor and artist-in-residence in the Dept. of Informatics at the University of Sussex where he is working on a project to evolve robots that can draw.
Wed 15th October 2008
Francesca Galeazzi – Artist, Architectural Engineer (Environmental Sustainability Specialist), Arup Associates, London. Cape Farewell arctic expedition member October 2008.
In this talk Francesca will talk about environmental sustainability – what we can do to help – plus her recent experiences, from both artist and engineer points of view, as part of a Cape Farewell expedition to the Arctic where she created two art works: a controversial performance about polluting; and a more poetic legacy work that can be followed online. http://www.capefarewell.com/diskobay/carbon-emissions/
Francesca Galeazzi is an architectural engineer working as environmental sustainability specialist. She has been working for Arup Associates since 1999. Francesca is also a practicing artist, working mainly with sculptural installations and site specific interventions. In 2007 she was awarded a Masters in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.
Cape Farewell aims to bring together the highest levels of the arts, science, communication and media to disseminate the urgency of the climate change challenge, through an annual 10-days expedition in the fragile and fast changing Arctic environment and through a series of events, world-travelling exhibitions, talks and films that will follow the expedition.
Wed 29th October 2008
Dr Emma Lawrence – Lecturer in Cognition and Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London.
Julie Freeman – Artist in Residence, Microsystems & Nanotechnology Centre, Cranfield University. NESTA Fellow.
In this talk experimental psychologist Emma Lawrence and Cranfield University artist-in-residence Julie Freeman will discuss Tricks of the Psych Trade – a science communication event held at various locations in the UK. How artists can complement scientific presentations, side stepping ethical issues, presenting abstracted ideas, raising questions without answers?
Emma Lawrence’s main research focus is emotion regulation in healthy controls and clinical groups where these processes have gone awry. She is also interested in the impact of these processes on empathy and emotion perception. Part of her research involves working with people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism whereby language ability and intelligence are intact. People with Asperger’s Syndrome find some aspects of social perception and empathy difficult. She also works with people who report a condition called Depersonalisation – sufferers of which often talk of feeling emotionally numb or detached from their body and/or mental processes.
Dr Lawrence works within the framework of Cognitive neuropsychiatry which views psychological and behavioural difficulties as occurring when the usual mental processes and their brain correlates become altered. This can be due to a multitude of factors such as psychological and/or environmental triggers, brain injury, and unusual brain development .
Julie Freeman’ work spans visual, audio and digital artforms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. For the past 12 years her work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ – whether it is through the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf; a pair of mobile concrete speakers who lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs’ ears. In 2005 she launched her pioneering digital artwork The Lake, which used advanced technology to track bioacoustically tagged fish and translate their movement into an audio-visual experience. The work was supported by Tingrith Coarse Fishery and a NESTA fellowship (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). Julie is a graduate of the MA in Digital Arts at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, London. She is currently artist-in-residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre at Cranfield University.
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