BREAKOUT QUESTIONS & LEADER BIOS
for PANEL #4



QUESTION #1
If the environmental condition is a mirror of society's values, how does your work impact your vision of our common future?

WENDY E. BRAWER - is an ecological designer with an artist's background. Since 1990, her New York-based company, Modern World Design, has created services and products that promote ecological stewardship, including the Green Apple Map of NYC's environmentally significant places. Under Wendy's direction, this has grown into the Green Map System, an award-winning local-global collaboration active in more than 30 countries (website: www.greenmap.org). Wendy was the 1997 Designer in Residence at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and winner of 1998's ECO Kudos Award for Connections for utilizing the info-web in celebration of the web-of-life. Inspired by renewables, she is the co-winner of ASCI's 1999 SolarScape competition.Wendy has written about, spoken on and taught eco-design extensively. She is an active member of the O2 Global Network (US Liasion) and ADPSR (NY Board) and chaired the Industrial Designers Society of America's Environmental Committee in 1993-95.
EMAIL: web@greenmap.org
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QUESTION #2:
More and more artists are morally driven by pressing scientific issues and recent research which directly inspire the form and content of their artistic expression. How does the artist, without science credentials, prove their sincerity and win the respect of the research scientist so that collaboration may happen?

BRANDON BALLENGEE - attended The Maryland Institute College of Art, The Art Academy of Cincinnati, and The New York Studio Program. He currently lives and works in New York City. Over the last four years, he has corresponded with and received research materials from scientist around the world. Over the past year Ballengee has had the opportunity to document the laboratory of Dr. Stanley Sessions of the Center for Deformed Amphibians. He has also worked with field biologists doing amphibian observations in New York State and Tennessee. Ballengee has exhibited his work at Exit Art, NYC; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY; The Holland Tunnel Art Project, Brooklyn NY; The Islap Art Museum, Oakdale NY; and internationally. Currently, selected works from 'The Malformed Amphibian Project'are on view at the Cornell Medical Center, 12 West 72nd Street in Manhattan through Dec. 15,1999.
EMAIL: obsoletestudios@hotmail.com
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QUESTION #3:
In both form and content artists question themselves and society. If artists had a collaborative and integral role to play in the field of Bioethics, would the questions be different and better than those being posed by scientists?

RUTH BEN-TOVIM - is the Artistic Director of Louder Than Words Productions, a company based in London which produces performance, laboratory and installation work. For the last 6 years our work has been inspired by the possibilities of science art collaboration and we have produced several performance projects working closely with scientists from a variety of disciplines. Our current major project, Secret Worlds is a 2 year interdisciplinary arts project involving collaboration between scientists, artists and community groups with a focus on issues of genetic engineering, artificial Intelligence and key related issues. Secret Worlds builds from small scale community projects to a large scale interactive performance installation. At every stage methodologies for collaboration between scientist, artists and members of community groups have been conceived.
EMAIL: ben-tovim.yeger@virgin.net
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QUESTION #4:
Will science open the door to the possibility that technologically and scientifically trained artists can advance science itself through new visualization tools and the knowledge they reveal? Can these same artists' tools provoke critical questions and be more than just illustrations?

ROB FISHER - is a Senior Research Artist in the School of Art and Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as Artistic Director and Co-producer for "Journey Into the Living Cell", an innovative multi-media program about cell biology presented at science centers nationwide. He is Director of a new NSF funded interactive planetarium show on the Brain that will premiere in January 2000 entitled "Grey Matters: The Brain Movie". He received a B.Sc. degree in Humanities, Visual Design and Engineering from MIT in 1961 and a M.Sc. degree in Industrial Design from Syracuse University in1965. Mr. Fisher serves on the Executive Board of Directors of the International Sculpture Center. Fisher is an internationally recognized artist who has received numerous commissions for monumental sculptures in Japan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
EMAIL: rnf1@andrew.cmu.edu
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QUESTION #5:
How can we use original scientific imagery so that it informs and excites today's public?

DEE BREGER - is Manager, Scanning Electron Microscope Facility, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY. Dee started as a scientific illustrator at Columbia University's Earth Science Research Institute, where she soon discovered the compelling potential of electron microscopes. Specializing in scanning electron microscopy since its inception, her micrographic art has been featured in numerous public venues as well as in her books "Journeys in Microspace" and "Through the Electronic Looking Glass".
EMAIL: micro@ldeo.columbia.edu
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QUESITON #6:
In the context of collaborations, what do the scientists expect of the artists?

PHILIP RILEY - is the son of a doctor (medicine) and a religion teacher. This has led to a profound dichotomy that he has spent much his life and art trying to reconcile. He studied Fine Art Painting at the Central School of Art in London. Since then he has worked organizing and installing shows at the Lisson Gallery London, the Whitechapel art Gallery where he also ran a screening program of films by and about artists, and finally as the curator of the Center 181 Gallery in London until moving to the USA in 1994. In his own workÑÑwhich he pursued concurrently with his gallery workÑÑhe has exhibited internationally in notable survey shows of young English artists such as the Lisson Gallery's Wonderful Life, the ICA's Institute of Cultural Anxiety and in Instructions curated by Liam Gillick at Gio Marconi in Milan. His one person shows have included The Death of the Author an installation and collaboration with the cellist and composer Audrey Riley, Family Tree at the Adam Gallery London and the forthcoming It's All About Eve at The London School of Economics and Political Science that opens in October '99. He Lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
EMAIL: me@philipriley.com