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)

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)

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

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)