AUTONOMOUS Perspectives: A Forum on Art, Engineering and Critical Theory

This forum on art, engineering and critical theory features talks and new perspectives from Peter Ballantine, Ryan Bishop, Benjamin Bratton and Robert Skelton in connection with the gallery@calit2 AUTONOMOUS exhibition. The talks will follow an introduction by UC San Diego Visual Arts Professor and Chair Jordan Crandall, who also directs the gallery@calit2 Committee. In addition to the introduction by Crandall, the 20-minute talks will explore themes connected to the AUTONOMOUS exhibition. The topics will cover:

- Ryan Bishop: Farther Afield: The Cultural Politics of Remote Sensing in the Long Cold War;

- Benjamin Bratton: Autonomy as Abstraction: Notes on Robotics and Material Composition;

- Peter Ballantine: Transferences Between the Process of Fabrication and the Specificity of Material Form; and

- Robert Skelton: Deployable Tensegrity Structures.

Bishop and Bratton are speaking about general themes related to the exhibition topic, while Ballantine and Skelton will refer to their works in the exhibition (and in the case of Ballantine, the work he fabricated for sculptor Donald Judd). All speakers will expand on other issues raised by works on display in the AUTONOMOUS exhibition which runs through January 30, 2014 (with a two-week break for the holiday starting Dec. 21 and reopening January 6).