Emergent Form in Art and Science

April 10 - 14, 2018, The Fields Institute

Description

For more information, please visit the Event Website.

A project by ArtSci Salon,

With the support of the Fields Institute, Ottawa Scienza (Italian Embassy) and the Centre for Drama (U of T). Apr. 12 reception kindly provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. Community Partners: BYOR Toronto

What is Emergent Form?

Form does not always follow function. Nature teems with self-organized forms that seem to spring spontaneously from the smooth background of things, by mechanisms that are not always apparent. Think of rippled sand on a beach or regular stripes in the clouds. Plants, insects and animals exhibit spirals and spots and stripes in an exuberant riot of colours. Fluid flows in amazingly regular swirls and eddies. Morphogenesis is not only a biological phenomenon, but is also physical, geological, astronomical and even sociological.

The emergence of form is ubiquitous, and presents a challenge and an inspiration to both artists and scientists. In mathematics, patterns appear as solutions of the nonlinear partial differential equations in the continuum limit of classical physics, chemistry and biology. In the arts and humanities, “emergent form” addresses the entangled ways in which humans, plants animals, microorganisms inevitably co-exist in the universe; the way that human intervention and natural transformation can generate new landscapes and new forms of life.

Emergent Form questions the notion of a fixed world.

With this event, we wish to explore Emergent Form not only as a series of natural and human phenomena that often seem too complicated to understand, measure or predict, but also as a concept that helps us identify ways in which we can come to term with, and embrace their complexity as a source of inspiration.

Bios

Antje Budde

Prof. Antje Budde M.A., PhD (Humboldt-University Berlin) taught previously at Humboldt-University in Berlin and the Academy for Film and Television “Konrad Wolf” (HFF) in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. In 1990-1991 and 1994-1995 she conducted research and artistic projects in Beijing, China (Central Academy of Drama and National Experimental Theatre Company) followed by several short study trips to P.R. China. Prof. Budde works both in the academic and the artistic field of performance studies. Since 2005 she is cross-appointed at the University College Drama Program and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Roberta Buiani

Roberta Buiani is an interdisciplinary artist, media scholar and curator based in Toronto. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and a co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her work investigates how scientific and technological mechanisms translate, encode and transform the natural and human world, and how these processes may be re-purposed by relocating them into different venues. Her work is mobile, itinerant and collaborative. She brought it to art festivals (Transmediale 2011, Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Brazil 2013), community centers (the Free Gallery Toronto, Immigrant Movement International, Queens), science institutions (RPI) and the streets of Toronto. With The Cabinet Project she proposed a new "squatting academia” curatorial model, consisting in appropriating and re-populating abandoned spaces within the university with SciArt installations. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University (CAN). http://atomarborea.net

Pier Luigi Capucci

Pier Luigi Capucci (https://capucci.org) is a scholar, an educator and a cultural manager in the media studies, the arts, and the relations among sciences, technologies and culture. He has been a teacher in the universities of Rome “La Sapienza”, Bologna, Florence, Urbino, Lugano, and at the fine arts academies of Carrara and NABA-Milan. Since 2008 he has been a Supervisor at the T-Node Ph.D. Research Program of the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, of which since 2013 he is the Director of Studies. Currently he is a teacher at the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino and at the University of Udine (Dept. of Mathematics, Computer, Multimedia and Physics Sciences). He extensively and internationally published texts, essays and papers in books, magazines and proceedings, organized exhibitions and symposia, managed projects and participated to conferences worldwide. In 1994 he founded and directed the first Italian online journal, NetMagazine/MagNet, on the relations between arts and technologies. In 2000 he started Noema, a series of projects and an online magazine about culture-sciences-technologies interrelations and influences.

Marco Donnarumma

Since the early 2000s, Marco Donnarumma has developed a deeply transdisciplinary expertise, drawing equally from live art, music, biological science, computation and cultural studies. He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Lab Berlin. His practice uses emerging technology to deliver artworks that are at once intimate and powerful, oniric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renowned for his focus on sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment. http://marcodonnarumma.com/

Stephen Morris

Stephen Morris is the J. Tuzo Wilson professor of Geophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. His experimental research projects have included icicle morphology, the cracking of mud and rock, and the washboarding of gravel roads. Recently, he has assembled the largest collection if icicle images ever made. He is an award winning university teacher and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He sometimes presents his scientific photographs as art. He is the Scientific Director of the ArtSci Salon.

Margherita Pevere

With a visceral fascination for organic processes, Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher investigating leakyness and transformation of biological and technological matter. Her practice employs a unique constellation of installations, performances, visual and video works, collections of plant and animal relics, workshops, and collaborations with bacterial cultures.

Based between Berlin and Helsinki, Pevere is PhD candidate (Artistic Research) at Aalto University, Helsinki, where she collaborates with the transdisciplinary platform CHEMARTS. She is founder member of the Berlin advocacy group AG21c and member of the Finnish Bioart Society. Most recent exhibitions include the Article Biennial – i/o lab, Stavanger (NO); State Festival for open science and society, Berlin, curated by Daniela Silvestrin; Non-human agents, Art Laboratory Berlin, curated by Christian de Lutz and Regine Rapp.

www.margheritapevere.com

Angela Shoellig

Angela Schoellig is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where she heads the Dynamic Systems Lab. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Aerial Robotics Research and Education (CARRE) at the University of Toronto. With her team, she conducts research at the interface of robotics, controls and machine learning. Her goal is to enhance the performance, safety and autonomy of robots by enabling them to learn from past experiments and from each other. Angela has been working with aerial vehicles for the past nine years and, more recently, has applied her motion planning, control and learning algorithms to self-driving vehicles. You can watch her robots perform slalom races and flight dances at www.youtube.com/user/angelaschoe.

Charles Sowers

Charles Sowers is an artist and exhibition designer based in San Francisco. He was exhibition director at the Willamette Science and Technology Center (WISTEC), Eugene, OR, and has been working as exhibition developer at the Exploratorium since 1998. The creator of numerous public arts commissions, Sowers’ work presents actual physical phenomena - often of striking visual beauty – that draw people into a careful noticing and interaction. His installations seek to provoke a sense of delight and wonder and reward extended observation. Sometimes this involves developing an apparatus to recreate and highlight some natural phenomenon observed in the world – the swirl of fog blowing over a hill, the formation of ice on a puddle, or flow of water and foam on the beach as a wave drains away. These things can fascinate yet often go un-noticed until pointed out.

Jane Tingley

Jane Tingley is an artist and a curator. She received her MFA at Concordia University in 2006, and is interested in how interactivity combined with art objects and installation can be used to explore contemporary experience. She is one of the founding members of the Modern Nomads and has participated in exhibitions and festivals in the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe – including translife – International Triennial of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, the Canadian Embassy and Gallerie Le Deco in Tokyo (JP), Festival Break 2.3 in Ljubljana (SL), Elektra Festival in Montréal(CA) and the Künstlerhause in Vienna (AT). She received the Kenneth Finkelstein Prize in Sculpture in Manitoba, the first prize in the iNTERFACES – Interactive Art Competition in Porto, Portugal, and has received support from a number of funding agencies, including the Manitoba and Ontario Arts Councils, le Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Doug Van Nort

Doug Van Nort is an artist, researcher, composer and performer. His work is concerned with issues of performance and sensorial immersion in technologically-mediated environments. His creative/research work has been supported and recognized by disparate sources including the NY Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the NY State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). At York University he has founded the DisPerSion (DIStributed PERformance and Sensorial immerSION) Lab, dedicated to explorations in distributed agency, improvisation and technologically-mediated performance. He also works as an Assistant Editor for the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press).

Ron Wild

Ron Wild is a western-Canadian Digital Artist currently working in downtown Toronto. Wild is known for his extreme mapping montage technique, which he uses to explore the divide between art and science and the interdisciplinary nature of human and natural phenomena. He is an emerging explorer at the art and science frontier, who bridges the divide between the two. His Maps has been exhibited in Toronto and New York City.

Recently, Wild has developed an interest in geometry and is currently studying Buckminster Fuller’s architecture and Leonardo Da Vinci’s modular bridges that could quickly and easily be assembled or disassembled, creating sculptures with fascinating mathematical structures. His recent exhibition, smARTcities is on display until July 6 at the Atrium Gallery in the Vaughan City Hall. Portfolio: http://bit.ly/GgBLW

The Fields Institute for
Research in Mathematical Sciences