Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology
2014 Biennial, Cornell University.
Curated by Stephanie Owens for Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA)
- First nano polymer tests
- Professor Ulrich Wiesner discussing possible strategies for a unique light capturing polymer
- polymer vials
- Casting the synthesized polymer
- first large scale polymer tests
- Stephanie Owens (ART) and Ulrich Wiesner (MSE) aid in the development of an adhesive polymer for plexiglass to be used in construction of a sculpture.
- pulling first films coated with the polymer
- Artist Kimsooja, Curator Stephanie Owens and Professor Ulrich Wiesner looking over sculptural plan
- Architect Jaeho Chong, putting final touches on the sculpture
- detail of polymer on surface
- A Needle Woman: Galaxy Was a Memory; Earth is a Souvenir by Kimsooja installed
- Symposium
- A Needle Woman sculpture at night
- Nano etching art on silica wafer for physics student Robert Hovden’s work.
- PaperThin installation by Joe Kennedy, Sonny Xu and Caio Barboza
- Nano poem by Particle Group with Ricardo Dominguez
- Nanogarage by Particle Group
- ColorFolds eSkin by Jenny Sabin
- Detail of diachroic film
- Nanoessence installation by Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Kimsooja, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Paul Thomas/Kevin Raxworthy, Particle Group, Jenny Sabin, Juan Hinestroza/So-Yeon Yoon, Joseph Kennedy/Sonny Xu/Caio Barboza
SUMMARY
“Intimate Cosmologies” explored the cultural and human consequences of seeing the world at the micro and macro levels, through nanoscience and networked communications.
From Sept. 15 to Dec. 22, the 2014 Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” featured several events and principal projects by faculty and student investigators and guest artist-in-residence Kimsooja working in collaboration with Cornell scientists and researchers. Others artists examining the material and culture of nano science included in the exhibition are Paul Thomas and *particle group* collective with Ricardo Dominguez, Diane Ludin, Amy Sara Carroll (Cornell MFA ’95) and Nina Walsman.
The inaugural biennial theme was chosen to frame dynamic changes in 21st-century culture and art practice, and in nanoscale technology. The multidisciplinary initiative intends to engage students, faculty and the community in demonstrations of how radical shifts in scale have become commonplace, and how artists address realms of human experience lying beyond immediate sensory perception.
The Biennial focus brings together artists and scientists who share a common curiosity regarding the position of the individual within the larger world, CCA Director Stephanie Owens said.
“Scientists are suddenly designers creating new forms,” she said. “And artists are increasingly interested in how things are structured, down to the biological level. Both are designing and discovering new ways of synthesizing natural properties of the material world with the fabricated experiences that extend and express the impact of these properties on our lives…Today, art practice is a convergence of many disciplines – which, rather than dilute the experience of art, multiplies and opens up the ways in which artists engage the world around them. This often leads to surprising overlaps in human intention across all disciplines.”
Abject/Object Empathies
Empathy in cultural production as method, remedy, structure and screen.
2016 Biennial, Cornell University.
Curated by Stephanie Owens for Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA)
- Urchin: An Impossible Circus, Caroline O’Donnell, 2016
- Urchin: An Impossible Circus, Caroline O’Donnell, 2016
- Crossing The Line, Alexsandr Mergold, 2016
- Crossing The Line, Alexsandr Mergold, 2016
- Queer Rocker, Caroline Woolard & FLOSSA Collaborators, 2016
- Queer Rocker, Caroline Woolard & FLOSSA Collaborators, 2016
- Caroline Woolard Workshop, 2016
- BFA,MFA,PhD Workshop, with Caroline Woolard, 2016
- Jacob, (video projection) Pepon Osorio, 2016
- Traveling Tool Library, Building Community Collective, 2016
- Revolution, Teresa Diehl, 2016
- Susan Lanzoni, Independent Scholar, Keynote Presentation with Stephanie Owens, with CCA Director
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Pepón Osorio, Caroline Woolard, BFA,MFA,PhD (Emilio Popp, Susan Lahoda, Caroline Woolard), FLOSSA Collaborators, Alexandr Mergold, Caroline O’Donnell, Tersa Diehl, Building Community, Corinna Loeckenhoff/Anthony Burrow /Francois Guimbretiere
SUMMARY
Ideas of interdependent form in art have been addressed recently in theories of relational and participatory practices, but theories of art’s generation out of an intentional acknowledgement of the other—whether viewer, audience, citizenry, crowd, or globe—is often understood as rhetorical anticipation rather than actual co-authorship. It is the structure of inter-subjective experience that we hope to understand through a variety of ways of thinking about form as the political, aesthetic, and societal distinctions between “me” and “we.”
Whether by framing a connection that already exists or by providing the condition for new connections, what we create can either merely extend our own personal desires, goals, and directives, or can alternatively function as a bridge between who I am and who you are so that aesthetic experiences are interdependent, collaboratively generated and inherently reciprocal
“Abject/Object Empathies” began as a question: what are the ways in which art and design mediate and shape the emotional exchanges between people in tangible form? This second CCA biennial was a series of art projects, performances, events and designs focused on the cultural production of empathy and explored how the objects, buildings, clothing, machines, languages, and images we construct are shaped by our intentional or implicit emotional, interdependent relationship to others
Looked at from a wide perspective, ideas and experiences of empathy are expressed in many disciplines and forms, including many that would not immediately or characteristically be understood as empathetic: affordances in architecture and design, artificial intelligence in computation, mirror neurons in developmental psychology, network applications in information studies, responsive environments in media, synthetic biology in science, are but the few that come to mind.
SELF[n]: The Networked Self
Hartell Gallery, Cornell University (2011)
Organized and curated by Stephanie Owens
- Gallery event with Delhi-based artists
- Partnership with Khoj International
- PlexUs Installation by Amitesh Grover
- Detail of video event
- Detail of live video event
- SELF projects
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Roy Ascott, Zoe Romano/Serpica Nero, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Amitesh Grover, Khoj International, Antonio Prieto, Lane Relyea, Stephanie Owens
SUMMARY
SELFn (the networked SELF) is a 2-week public project series that addresses the complexity of representations and awareness of the self in the age of distributed information, the social web, and globalized media.
Numerous current online practices use network communication and the web to generate an atomized meta-subject, where one’s individual contribution is not valued as in singular form but only in the plurality of other individuals who together produce a kind of emergent intelligence or expression. Practices such as “crowd sourcing”, –where anonymous online users are asked to contribute to a large creative or industrial tasks, or “human computation”, where online users make context-based matches which computers have failed to identify– require a new understanding of the self as a portion of a greater geographic, cultural, numeric whole. As a result, we see ourselves less as perpetual beings than as contingent propositions with respect to our identity, making for art practices that eschew content for context, and form for point of view.
Technologies of Place
Medianoche Gallery, New York, NY (2008)
Curated by Stephanie Owens
(images coming soon)
Recent Comments