BREAKOUT SESSION LEADERS

Saturday morning, December 7,  9:45 - 10:45 am
7 concurrent sessions

 

  • Gregorio Rivera, Ph.D. Prof.Digital Communications, Col. Tecnologico, Monterrey, Mexico

    Cynthia Cox, video installation artist, Brooklyn, NY

QUESTION: How can you as ArtScience collaborators play significant roles in sustainable development, research and projects to meet the challenges to humanity?

Art, as a societal visionary tool, is now bonding with:

1.  scientific methods and technology,
2.  global development applications,
3.  ethical and spiritual re-evaluation,
4.  local communities' self-organizing potential,
5.  critical views of development.

Several trends lead the transcultural evolution of ArtScience practice: new media and its ability to visualize complexity, a system's approach to address humanity's challenges, personal and societal transformation, networking potential of collaborative learning communities, sustainable development, respect for localized and indigenous knowledge, and evolutionary consciousness.

The ArtScience Online Lab Network's mission is to create the conditions for key players worldwide to work online as ArtScience research teams to provide creative and imaginative sustainable development. We can make the ArtScience Online Lab Network have exemplary value by developing tools and best practices through a diverse worldwide learning community.

BRIEF BIO: Gregorio Rivera

Gregorio Rivera has been a participant of the virtual environments industry since 1983 with pioneering projects at NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Langley Research Center, DEC, and LEEP Systems. Involved with early development of new media as a member of the Visible Language Workshop/MIT Media Lab. Presented Virtual Heart Project to the U.S. Congress Virtual Reality Committee, 1994. Commissioned for InfoArchitectura by the Ministry of Development, Spain, 1997. Presented SIGGRAPH '81, '93, '94.

Presently Coordinator of the Advanced Lab for Learning hosted by the Center for Knowledge Systems at Monterrey TEC in Monterrey, Mexico. The Advanced Lab for Learning focuses on R&D of global collaborative virtual lab environments. Board Member of ASCI. Also International Performance Area Director for the Club of Budapests Planetary Consciousness Network in 17 countries. With these areas Riveras doctorate dissertation is focused on collaborative virtual lab environments networked to explore ArtScience knowledge for sustainable development in human systems and environmental concerns.

e-mail address gregoriorivera@alum.mit.edu

Mailing Address
ITESM/DECIC/CSC
Campus Monterrey
Col. Tecnologico
E. Garza Sada 2501 Sur
Monterrey, N.L. 64849
MEXICO

Telephone number
52(81) 83-28-4049 Direct
+52(81) 83-58-2000 x5205

Fax number
+52(81) 83-59-1538

BRIEF BIO: Cynthia Cox

Cynthia Cox has been making sculpture installations for over 15 years that now incorporate video in a highly theatrical manner, with original scores which can be performed live. Her philosophical concerns are phenomenological in base, her scientific, ecological.

She has of late, been utilizing ancient mythology, with a contemporary spin. Recent works were, Ge Speaks; An Oracle for the 21st Century, in which the goddess tells us how we are fairing at this point in time; A Collective Cleansing, a environmental spin on the Aeschylus tragedy, The Suppliant Maidens; and Oasis, an Israeli exhibition whose material was drawn from working with the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and the Environment.

She is currently in Mexico, producing a collaborative video with local artists in San Miguel de Allende dealing with water.

e-mail address coxstudio@yahoo.com

Mailing Address
819 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, NY

 

  • Karl Grimes, artist and lecturer 

         QUESTION: How can ASCI best represent its artists and scientists and communicate the diverse range of collaborative projects undertaken by its members internationally? Are we too diverse? Is it time to develop satellite groups based on research interest and specialism?

         BRIEF BIO:
    Karl Grimes is an artist and lecturer on new media and imaging at Dublin City University. His work is exhibited and published in Europe and United States and is represented in numerous public and private collections. His lens based projects and art/science collaborations focus on issues of identification and classification in science and medicine, specifically in developmental biology, pathology, forensics and natural history display. He is currently completing, Future Nature, a collaboration with the Hubrecht Laboratory, Netherlands, on animal embryological and foetal collections. He is Chair of the M.Sc in Multimedia programs at Dublin City University, Ireland.
    www.karlgrimes.net
    info@karlgrimes.net 
    Karl.Grimes@dcu.ie

 

 

QUESTION: How can technology be used to be inclusive, lift the spirit, empower bodies that may not move as we want them to, and/or to provide valuable skills and new perspectives for those often excluded from the 'knowledge economy?

Learn how a performance artist/scholar has embraced technology and new media to work with grassroots communities in various parts of the world, with examples from the Moroccan Cybercafe Project, the SMARTshell, and the Flutterfugue dance with live movers with and without wheelchairs. This session will demonstrate and discuss the challenges as well as the personal rewards of art-sci collaborative work that seeks to touch people and connect communities 'through the screen', reaching towards a new vision for the future. Share your art-sci humanitarian projects for feedback.

BRIEF BIO:

Lizbeth Goodman is the Director of the SMARTlab Centre for Site Specific Media, Performing and Digital Arts at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, the London Institute. She also directs the Practice-based Ph.D. programme for CSM through which she integrates her own performance practice into a programme that aims to create a new model of artistic and academic theory based in and informing fields of performance, visual and media arts.

Dr Goodman is the Principal Investigator of: the SMARTshell Project; the Virtual Interactive Puppetry; the British Council's Cultural and Media Studies development programmes in North Africa; and the European Commission's RADICAL project; and the UK Executive Producer of the Code Zebra Project.

Dr. Goodman has written and edited some 12 books including a range of titles on women and theatre, the arts, representation and creativity. Her books have been translated into several languages and are set on courses internationally.


 e-mail address lizbeth@smartlabcentre.com

Address
The SMARTlab Centre
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
the London Institute
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4AP

Phone
44 207 514 8378

website addresses:
http://www.smartlabcentre.com and http://www.get-radical.net

  • Grace Weir, artist

    QUESTION:     An artist, a scientist, some pencils and paper... can an artist and scientist collaborate on 'gedanken (thought) experiments' to illuminate art and science?

    Over the course of this past year, artist Grace Weir and astrophysicist Ian Elliott, have explored ideas regarding issues pertaining to time and space and their effect in the conceptual interplay between art, philosophy and science. They explored Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity with the aid of various 'gedanken' (thought) experiments, possible in principle but usually impracticable. A 'gedanken experiment' performed in the mind can test a hypothesis and lead to a clarification of ideas. Learn how Weir and Elliott used active documentation methods such as filming and drawing torecord their discussion and explore these concepts with the minimum of equipment.

    BRIEF BIO:

    • Artist, Grace Wier, is a Dublin based artist. She received her M.Sc. in Multimedia, Trinity College Dublin in 1997 and graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1984. In 2001 Wier represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 49th International Art Exhibition. She has shown extensively in Ireland and Europe and in the US including, PS 1 Museum, the ICA, Florida, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and InsideArt Gallery, Chicago. Weir's work in video and installation stems from physics and ideas concerning relativity, time and space.

    Grace Weir
    21/22 Temple Lane South
    Dublin 2
    Phone: +353.1.6719272
    email: gweir@eircom.net

  • Donna Light-Donovan, biology research teacher, Croton-On-Harmon High School, NY


QUESTION: "How can interdisciplinary art and science concepts be integrated into the traditional explanations found in high school biology?"

An innovative teacher shares how her classroom explores the questions: What principles underlie patterns in the natural world? How do the parts of the cell, the basic unit of all living things, interact with one another? Where do new species come from and why? Original games and activities will be presented with the help of Breakout participants. Opportunities to brainstorm new ideas in art-science curriculum will also be included in the session, including how students can examine core samples from their area [the Hudson River in this case] by using the environmental scanning electron microscope at the University of Ilinois via the Internet. The sheer beauty of diatoms as well as their structural and functional makeup create a natural bridge to learning.

BRIEF BIO:

Since 1995, Donna Light-Donovan been involved with the Rockefeller University Science Outreach Program as a participating teacher working in the laboratory/field station of neurogenesis researcher Fernando Nottebohm, and as a Steering Committee member. She has received funding to adapt research concepts into lesson plans from: the National Institutes of Health, the American Society of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, American Association of University Women (Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship,1996), the Howard Hughes Institute, and the Croton-Harmon Education Foundation (2001). In turn, she has shared this work in presentations at: the American Museum of Natural History (New York, 1995), American Association of University Women conference (Philadelphia, 1997) and the Coalition of Essential School Fall Forum (San Francisco, 1997). She also received arts related grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Dance Video award, producer/ editor, 1989), and the Metropolitan Transit Authority Creative Stations (coordinator/artist, "Loizaida," an interactive mural celebrating the various cultures of the Lower East Side,1988).

email: dld@highlands.com

Mailing Address
41 Chapman Road, Garrison, New York 10524

Phone: 845-424-4919