Colliding Worlds
Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art
June 18th 6:00pm, refreshments at 5:30pm Science Center, Room 4102 The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, NY
Margarita Cimadevila
“I am a painter (science painter) and a teacher (science teacher),” Margarita Cimadevila told me. Her first love was art but the university in Santiago de Compostola, Spain, did not offer a degree in it, so she opted for her second love, chemistry. Not surprisingly, what immediately struck her were the symmetries in chemical processes … Read more
Wolfgang Trettnak
I met Wolfgang Trettnak at Margarita Cimadevila’s Summer School. Born in Graz, Austria, he received a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Graz, worked in applied scientific research on sensors and biosensors for many years and published a number of scientific articles. In 2002 he decided to give it all up and become an … Read more
Chapter 9. The Art of Visualizing Data
For three months between October and December 2010, Erik Guzman’s Weather Beacon lit up the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center in New York City (p. 277 and Insert).
Guzman refers to Weather Beacon as an “oracle for the digital age.” This complex work of kinetic art merges wireless connectivity, industrial engineering, movement and light. Installing it was a work of work unto itself.
Chapter 4. Computer Art Morphs into Media Art
In the late 1960s Peter Weibel was at the center of the Viennese Activists, a wildly Bohemian group of artists who practiced what they called the politics of transgression (pp. 108-9). In the course of their “actions” they often used their body as canvases as in this video where Weibel has blood extracted from him to make an artwork while he holds forth on the end of time as well as the history and future of art and of humankind. Next to him a clearly bourgeois group lounging around on couches largely ignores him, except for the occasional snicker. […]
Chapter 7. Imagining and Designing Life
This dramatic line of research explores the body and how it will undergo radical changes in the future – in other words, what it means to be a body. Stelarc’s works are astounding examples (pp. 199-201). Many border on science fiction. […]
Colliding Worlds FAQs
Here are some questions that I am frequently asked
What do you mean when you say art, aesthetics, science and technology are being redefined?
Since my contention is that in the 21st century art, science and technology will merge, the common ground is what interests me. What went before will be relegated to history. Let me review what is usually understood as the difference between beauty in art and beauty in science. …