ATC@UCB:
Mind Shifting and Future Bodies: From Networks to Nanosystems
Victoria Vesna, UCLA
The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 21 Oct, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.
Since the 1920s, when ecologists began studying food chains,
understanding networks has been of interest to scholars in many areas.
More recently, neural networks have been proposed as models for the
enormously complex structure of the human brain, containing 10 billion
neurons linked by a trillion synapses. Comparisons of the human brain
to our global interconnected communications networks abound.
Looking at patterns and geometric forms that appear repeatedly in
nature can provide insight into art projects that actively involve
audiences in social environments. For example, hexagons appear in
beehives, are used in the technological infrastructure of cellular
phone systems, and are the primary structure of buckyballs, the
molecule that has helped launch nano-science. This new science pushes
the limits of our rational minds - working at the level of atoms and
molecules, using the measure of a nanometer, about 1/80,000 of the
diameter of a human hair. This talk will look at work that addresses
these ideas and to our current collaborative project:
'zero@wavefunction: nano dreams and nightmares'.
…………..
Victoria Vesna is an artist, professor and chair of the department of
Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She defines
her work as experimental research that resides in between disciplines
and technologies. She explores how communication technologies effect
collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation
to scientific innovation. She is co-director with Katherine Hayles and
Jim Gimzewski of SINAPSE, a center that promotes transdisciplinary
dialogue and collaboration.
Victoria has exhibited her work in 16 solo exhibitions, over 70 group
shows, published 20 papers and gave over 100 invited talks in the last
ten years. She is recipient of many grants, commissions and awards,
including the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and
the Cine Golden Eagle for best scientific documentary in 1986. Vesna's
work has received notice in publications such as Art in America, the
Los Angeles Times, as well as Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times
(Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil).
These and other projects are linked from:
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/ and http://notime.arts.ucla.edu
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Victoria Vesna will be introduced by
Greg Neimeyer, Asst. Prof. of Art Practice, UC Berkeley
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The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum and the Walker Art Center to present online video of ATC talks,
available both in QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and
the full 2002-2003 series schedule, please see:
www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
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ATC @ UCB: Victoria Vesna Oct 21
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Type: discussion