 conversation tonight. It's 6 p.m. in LA, but we have guests in this conversation from all over the place, so we're really excited to host this conversation as part of, as part of ReFest, CULTUREHUB's annual festival bringing together artists, technologists, and activists. So we will start by kind of introducing the two organizations that came together to host this conversation. So CULTUREHUB is a global art and technology community with locations in Los Angeles, New York, Korea, Indonesia, and Italy. We're founded by La Mama and Soul Arts, and we provide connected environments for artists to examine evolving relationships to technology, intersections of art and technology, and all of beyond. So like I mentioned, this conversation is being hosted as part of ReFest. This year, ReFest LA is taking place entirely online with virtual experiences, remote workshops, online performances, and conversations like this surrounding the theme regeneration. So check out the full lineup of ReFest at CULTUREHUB.org, and I hope you'll join us for some of the programming that we have for the rest of June. So Rachelle, would you like to introduce Super Collider? Sure thing. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us tonight. I'm gonna just hop in and share my screen to show you a little bit about Super Collider. So Super Collider was founded in 2018, and it is comprised of two parts. We have a mothership headquarters, which is a science art gallery space here in Los Angeles. And then we also expand to do satellite exhibitions and programs, whether that's an international gallery exchange, curations and museum spaces and art fairs. Our mission is really to expand science, art, and technology based projects into new spaces. And we also have an emphasis on space as a platform to explore and expand our creations. So just kind of a glimpse at the mothership space. If ever you're in Los Angeles, definitely reach out to us. We have a range of artists represented in this panel that have participated in our exhibitions and are highly involved in our programming as SyArt ambassadors. And they've also contributed to guest talks and things. So we show anything from VR to large scale interlaced interactive installations, video and performance. So this is a glimpse at the mothership space that also sometimes expands into this other area. We also have a lot of living matter, so also working in the realm of bioart. And then kind of a glimpse at some of our satellites. We recently had a space art show in Japan. We were doing an art installation at the Torrance Art Museum here in California, prepping a show at the San Luis Obispo Museum, and then also recently had an exhibit at the Spring Break Art Show here in LA, in which a lot of the artists in this group also participated in. So you can follow us at supercolliderart and supercolliderart.com. All right. Thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you so much, Rochelle. So we had originally curated this event as a participatory conversation between artists and audiences at ReFest. So we encourage you to chat in wherever you may be watching from, whether it's Facebook or you're watching from HellRound or the Culture of Watch page. And anytime during the virtual event, please chat in any questions, thoughts, input, and we'll try to weave your questions and thoughts in throughout the conversation. So yeah, without further ado, I would love to transition into meeting the incredible group of artists and interdisciplinary practitioners we have on call with us. So we have some representatives from the supercollider community, as Rochelle mentioned, and we also have representatives from the culture of community, whether it's our past resident artists, associated artists that we've been developing projects with or and members of our global community. So yeah, why don't we start with the supercollider community? Rochelle, would you like to test the torch? Designate? Sure thing. All right. Well, Dana Abner, do you want to kick us off just introducing yourself a little bit about your work? And you were definitely part of the development of supercollider? Yeah, sure. So I'm a painter and I also have a background as a researcher and a writer. And I've done a bit of curation. And I think supercollider was so important, I think, psychologically for us at a time when, at least personally, I was looking for more to get more out of the art pedagogy that I got from undergrad, my undergrad education. And I felt like I needed an interdisciplinary approach to my practice where the art that I curate or the art that I work with, does more to speak to people on almost a material level, like food, water and shelter, right? Like that's what people are thinking about now and even more now, because of you know, what's happening today. So that was really the launching point for my thought process behind it. And Rochelle brought, you know, her, you know, a mass of research and perspective and, and energy and enthusiasm and creative know how to it that really, really brought it together in a beautiful way. So that was sort of, you know, the founding years. And yeah, as we can, you continue to curate, you know, we're definitely the programming is expanding and it's getting, it's getting virtual maybe right now on but it's going to go back to IRL soon. And yeah, there's just a lot more exciting things to come there. Yeah, and I think from that point of view, I could talk more about, you know, what I find is cool about the relationship between art and science, if we have time for that, or we can, I'm just checking on the on what is the time the time limit? Yeah, so we had a we have a limited amount of time today, but you know, we'll we'll get through it. And I'm yeah, I'm just excited to get to the conversation part where we get to more fluidly. Okay, yeah, let's do that maybe like one one at a time going back and forth between Culture Hub and Super Cliters. So maybe I'll ask you, Andrea, joining us from Seoul, or Korea, somewhere in Korea, to introduce yourself and tell us about your practice a little bit. Hello, everybody is really wonderful to be part of this conversation. So I thank you for planning and organizing it. I'm in Korea, I'm in Ansan, where the Seoul Institute of the Arts is located. And I am a professor here at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. And my role is in the performing art department. And I'm also part of the Culture Hub team, taking charge of the European side. So I try to help organize collaborations and exchanges with Europe, mainly. And here, I teach theater production to young students. And at the same time, through Culture Hub, I conduct more research type of projects connected to the use of technology and mainly remote performing and the internet technologies in performance. So that's my main focus. And during these latest last years, I've also had the opportunity to teach art research for design students through a collaboration with University of Amsterdam. Thank you, Andrea. That sounds great. And I really love your background. That looks incredible. Is that one of your pieces? Actually, I've stolen this from the wide web is just a photo I thought was cool. Oh, yes. It's very nice. I love it. The World Wide Web, the impotent abyss. Yes. Well, fabulous. All right, well, let's kick it off to another super collider artist, Ellie Jotoba. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your work in about a minute, two minutes? Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Ellie Jotiba, or Jotoba in the Bulgarian way. I'm Bulgarian, but I'm based in LA. And I also help run and carry shows for super collider at Norma, Shenandoah for a long time. And I guess my creative interest lie in kind of finding alternative ways of seeing, particularly like in collaboration with other than human systems of sentience. My background is in photography and new media. But my practice is now largely driven by technology and data. And I think I started working with scientists during grad school, where I was part of the UCLA Arts Science Center. And I also worked really closely with my Neuro physics lab, where they study the effects of VR on memory formation. I kind of did a lot of performances out of that research. And I guess my current research is more invested in finding parallels between digital and material spaces and linking things like planetary scale surveillance databases with biofeedback data, or memory systems of plant intelligence with machine learning algorithms. So in a lot of ways, I think in my practice, I use the data of scientific research in tandem with computer simulations to kind of render new ways of seeing and to construct more femoral artifacts that maybe bring us more of fleeting embodied experience of being alive in these bodies. Thank you. Can't wait to learn more. Great. Why don't we go to Eli Smith? Eli is one of our resident artists for CultureUp LA this year. And she is working on a piece called Elevator Music, which is a participatory exploration where you can find out about more on our website. So here's to you. Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Scarlett. I'm going to try and share my screen now. So hopefully that will be successful. Everybody can see the content I'm assuming. I am a multi disciplinary artist and activist. I'm originally from New York, and I actually have my bachelor's degree in physics. But I got my MFAs in art and technology and scenic design. So a little bit of a mix there. And as Scarlett mentioned, I'm a current resident at Culture Hub LA right now. But my practice in art is not so different from my practice in science. I take an investigative research based approach to every project that I undertake. And I'd say I'm deeply interested in the process of memory formation and how that process informs cognition. And thereby influences our individual perceptions of our experiences and also informs the decisions that we make, whether they be political or personal. So I guess you could say that my projects in art are also a series of experiments. And that I'm interested in collisions. When I worked as a physicist, I did diagnostics for tertiary neutron measurement of that is a product of inertial confinement fusion. And I think that my work in art is very similar to that actually. I'm looking at collisions between people collisions in memory. And I work a lot with affect and allegory. And I'd say I'm more interested in the stories that people write about the experience of my work more so than I am in the container or the form of the work. So as such, I consider the viewer to be sort of my primary collaborator at all times. And yeah, thank you for having me. All right. I'm a big fan of collisions. So with super collider, that's like really the synopsis of what we're about. Creating those creative moments of combining those different categories. So that's that's great. All right, then we have Isabel Beavers, who's really the bridge between Culture Hub and Super Collider as a current resident. Take it away. Cool. Hi, everyone. My name is Isabel Beavers. And I am a resident artist with Culture Hub LA this year, as well as a sire ambassador with Super Collider, which has been really fun. I am going to actually not share my screen because to be to be brief, my background is actually natural resource management. So I did my undergraduate degree in natural resources and my time working in ecological field sciences really fuels my spirit of experimentation and inquiry and exploration that I feel like has fueled my work over the last few years. And I've slowly moved from kind of existing as a painter to really having a technologically informed practice. And I'm also really interested in questions around the ethics of technology and as as the ethics of technology intersect with our climate features. So the current project that I've been working on as a resident artist with Culture Hub LA is looking at the California Megafires as a case study for thinking about responses and cultural responses to climate change disaster and how media and imagery are sort of implicated in these responses. So I'm I utilize multimedia installation and am interested in creating embodied experiences for the viewer to kind of become their own explorer or their own adventure and a space. And through that experience come away with their own critique or even a deeper understanding of a specific issue and the kind of multiplicity of considerations that are are at stake when thinking about ecological issues and especially climate crisis, which has been really interesting lately and sort of shifting as we are in a global crisis right now, thinking about how some of these questions and modalities of working cross disciplinary, which I know we'll talk a little bit more about later, feed into the artistic practice and really allows to solve problems when we come together in multi disciplinary groups. So I'm also super excited to be here and Culture Hub LA and super clutter to my like favorite initiatives or kind of communities that I'm part of right now. So I'm super excited about this conversation and thanks for having me. Yay. Isabelle is also hosting a mini hackathon this weekend as part of ReFest and it's Climate Chamber, a mini virtual hackathon. You can still join and be a part of a community of artists and technologists and activists working together to address climate change through the intersection of our technology. So I'm really excited about the hackathon and hope that some of the some of those of who you are watching today will join us. So great. Maybe we can next go to I.O. who is a resident artist at Culture Hub New York. So we've never actually met in real life, but I've been stalking your work online. So good. Hey, I'm I.O. Damolo Cassande. I don't think I'm going to share my slides just just for time, but there are some good images there. Yes, I'm an artist. I'm a technologist and I'm a professor of design and technology. I have I got an undergrad in painting and philosophy, which obviously, you know, it's a hard life doing that. So I was like, OK, let me get a master's in design and technology. And so I teach now at Over Parsons. I teach design and technology. And I'm in one more semester left to get an anthropology master's. So I've been wrapping a lot of my work into anthropology with the hopes of pushing that into a PhD. My work is a lot of my work is collaborative, is participatory. It's about Afrofuturism, which I don't call Afrofuturism, I call reclamation because after we can talk about that later. And yeah, my work is about sort of creating spaces for for people of color to be represented in the future or represented in the past, sort of breaking down time, space barriers, creating alternate realities, using speculative design and speculative design and technology to create a sort of magic that sort of fractures space time. I do a lot of work with techno shamanism, work with micro-organisms and food and slime and cancer cells, et cetera. And I think that's it, yeah. All right, man, techno shamanism, that is definitely something I'm going to have to take a closer look at. That sounds really interesting. And congrats on powering through all those degrees. You've been definitely multi-tasking. I know what that's like. All right, let's bring it over to Brittany Ransom, who is also in the realm of teaching and then also bringing science art to the forefront. Take it away, Britt. Cool, thanks. Thanks, Rochelle. I'll share my screen really briefly, that I'll just land on kind of one page and talk. So give me just a second. OK, so I am an associate professor and the associate director for the School of Art at Cal State University Long Beach, just outside of LA, an ambassador with Super Collider. And I met Rochelle through SciArt, which is another New York org that's interested in science and art collaborations. My work, I primarily work in digital fabrication space, so 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC, but specifically have been working with scientists and engineers studying primarily insect-based systems that parallel human ones. So in this particular slide that I'm showing you right now, it's a series that I just finished called Parallel Paths that explores the bark beetles, which are a common pest across the United States, but specifically aiding in wildfire spreading here in Southern California. And so a lot of my work draws on thinking about pest-based systems that we think of as things that are kind of undesirable and thinking about humans as a pest-based system as well. I teach a lot of these types of things in my class and focus on 3D printing technologies as ways to think through how we might solve some of these crises while also addressing kind of material issues all at the same time. So I will keep my brief, but just kind of give some visuals. And yeah, I've been working in the art and science field for quite a while. I went to Ohio State and got a degree in art and technology and then UIC, where I studied electronic visualization and also work in kinetics and electronics. So yeah, it's great to be here among like minds. Thank you so much. Let's go to Ashley. Ashley did a workshop with Caltrop on slime molds, which is my new obsession. So very excited. Take it away. Yeah, it's a fun thing to kind of fall down the rabbit hole for. I and I did that workshop together. So that was really an exciting moment to get to know culture, have a little more. I'm an interactive artist and a bio artist. I also have a diploma in food science and have been spending a lot of time in the past and especially thinking about the link between fermented spaces and biology that exists that can be observed and gleaned for its wisdom to apply to the way that we conduct ourselves societally. A lot of my work envisions empowered futures for marginalized groups, usually through the lens of cultural futurism or Afrofuturism and explores that through machine learning, network devices, slime mold and also things like data weaving and trying to really spend a lot of time connecting the importance of folk art to technology driven systems to try and bridge that connection and show people how in tandem those two experiences are in terms of expressing data and expressing technological creations. That sounds really interesting. And I think I saw you worked with Genspace too. Yeah, yeah. I don't know where you were growing to me with slime mold. Amazing. Yeah, Genspace is another great bio laboratory in New York, also close by to Biobat Art Space, which is another science art gallery out there. So I love that these communities are linking. Yeah, I had a great opportunity to work with them as a science communicator and it was just very revealing how much the work of science communication is linked to artistic storytelling. Those two worlds are basically a mirror to me. So they're just a lovely community. So it was great to work with them. Awesome. Oh, we'll dive deeper into that. Okay, so now let's pass it over to Emma, who is exploring the deep seas. Indeed. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen quickly. I'm a mixed media installation artist. I got my bachelor's in arts from California State University, Channel Islands. And when I was there, I spent a lot of time on these islands outside of Southern California, the Channel Islands, and there is where I started collaborating with scientists and using their research waste to create installations. So let me share the screen really quickly. I think there leaves a lot to think about when I say just I work with waste. So I work primarily with fishing nets that a researcher, Makayla Miller, has been collecting as a four-year research study on marine debris that washes up on the islands. And also in conjunction with her research, I've been using some of the data that Kushner and other scientists are collecting about the kelp forests around the Channel Islands and that overall that entire ecosystem and all of its creatures. And I've been weaving that in the patterns of my large-scale installations that are very much inspired by the culture and history of the islands. So here's some photos briefly. I've also recently become really fascinated in tar as a substance and medium and oil as well. Here's seaweed. So that's the kelp forest I've been making and I'm also a upcoming grad student at UCLA in the design and media arts department. And yeah, okay, I'm gonna stop the screen now. Thank you so much. I had a chance to see the exhibition at Spring Break Art Show and it's so great to see some of the artists who presented work there here and it was a really phenomenal experience. Let's go to Thomas who we met recently at a conference at Cal State Northridge. Hi everybody, I'm Thomas Chan. I'm a assistant professor of psychology at Cal State Northridge. It's known for the earthquake, right? But it's technically LA County and Northwest. I'm actually, I'm a scientist by training. A lot of my work focuses on promoting mental and cognitive health and aging adults. And using the latest technologies to promote that. And I develop augmented reality solutions because it's just not augmented reality solutions, but lately I've been developing augmented reality solutions because it just gets them interacted with the holograms but then also they get to, it's still real life. So that's kind of, I could share my screen just to show, Scarlett tried this as well. But I have a couple of, do you guys see my screen? Yep, circle. And then this is, I guess this is one of the holograms. It's just like a flashing of somebody's life. So you're just able to interact with all this, those holograms of somebody's life because so much of older adults identity gets wiped away through, they start to identify themselves as their disability. They forget the just rich life they live. So one of this intervention that we have going promotes this cohesion of somebody's life. That's just one of the projects we have going but in terms of like art, I think people don't do things if they're not pretty, if they don't are engaging. So we have other things, other projects like promoting walking to augmented reality. So just it's mostly health-based coming out of from that type of question. And then I try to get grants to get that funded and get the ball rolling. So I have my PhD in positive developmental psychology, which is a strengths-based type of psychology. So that's the, I guess that's the framework I am working on, like how do we get people build upon their strengths and what they do naturally to move, to do these health behaviors. Thank you so much, Thomas. Yeah, I had the pleasure of exploring the flash of life. And it was a very unique extended reality piece. Yeah, we were very excited when we met Thomas because this year's theme for ReFest is regeneration and looking at that from really all angles, artistic, historic, biological and all of these different interdisciplinary perspectives. So Thomas working directly with intergenerational collaboration we felt was a really interesting perspective to bring into ReFest. So, yeah, I believe we have our last participant. Our last two, so let me pass this off. First off, I wanna say, Thomas, I like your Yuri's Night shirt. We, at Super Collider, we were working a little bit with Loretta who founded Yuri's Night as well as Space for Humanity. So they're doing some really great things. And speaking of space, Anastasia, she's been really leading the charge in space architecture and thinking about life on Mars. Thank you so much, Rachel. It's really a pleasure to be here. So my name is Anastasia Brossina. I am an artist, architect and practitioner in space architecture. The Netsun field of helping people thrive in small spaces in outer space. As well as I'm also a founder and CEO of Slattermentes, a company with the mission of designing space habitats with lightweight, deployable and human-centered solutions to support well-being in space. I'd just like to share my screen. So here we go. So as I said, I founded a company last December with the mission of picking human-centered design solutions for the next generation of living space habitats. And we provide a bunch of services. We provide consulting and design services for space companies. We collaborate with filmmakers and do outreach activities to promote the Netsun field of space architecture. And so just talking about my background, I graduated with a Bachelor in Urban Design. As well as I'm from early age, I was still an artist, so I've been drawing my whole life. Plus I have master's degree in space architecture, which is our space degree. So I kind of combine these different perspectives from science and art, and I appreciate both of them and their marriage. And that's why it's really exciting to talk to you today. And also, so we do Art of Future. Art of Future is the imagining how you're going to live in space, not only outer space, but also other planets and trying to show how it's going to be different and what kind of things could be invented. And then also we pay attention on the public engagement and workshop to show how you're going to live in space. So this is a few projects we worked on. This is really different projects. We worked with institutions, as well as aerospace companies, as I said. And basically this is the Art of Future. This is my art, and this is one example. So I'm, you know, during this lockdown, I became really productive in art. And as a, like, Rachel, she is painting and drawing her own reflections on the current situation. And I think that's really important. So I also try to think of ways how this current situation could be translated into different realms of living. So also, I host Space Architecture Talks. You can find videos of past talks. We have a variety of speakers talking about, you know, the psychology of living in space and what kind of things we're going to give up living Earth, and then what kind of new things will be discovered once we are there. What kind of societies. So this is kind of these aspects we discuss. So next panel is going to be really soon in like 10 days. So please stay tuned. You can find it on YouTube. So yeah, please feel free to talk, like, to reach out and if you have any questions or suggestions or if you want to collaborate with us. Thank you so much. Looks great. And I will say I did tune into her last talk and it was really interesting with Frank White who coined the Overview Effect and Ariel who founded the Space Exploration Program at MIT. So she really brings together an amazing community of people. Thank you. Yeah, have we gone through everyone? There's so many amazing voices that it's like looking at the gallery view as a kind of overview effect. Yeah, well, great. Thank you so much. Even just hearing a little bit about everyone's practices is so exciting as I'm sure everyone has noticed there's such interesting resonances between all the practices already and resonances between approaches to interdisciplinary thinking. It's very, very slime moldy, very rhizomatic. So why don't we transition into the next part of the talk. We have about an hour left. And really we're going to dive right into conversations, conversation and hearing more about everyone's experiences working in an art side collaboration. So a question that Rochelle and I were kind of rattling around in our brains is share an experience. We'd love to hear about an experience where you worked with a scientist or a research institute and how was that experience specifically? And for those of you who are coming from a science background, what led you to art? So yeah, anyone can jump in and we can be organic. OK, I can start. So as you mentioned before, I combine different perspectives. So I have a scientific background as well as artistic. So on the projects, I was very fortunate to work on a self-assuming space with art at MIT Media Lab, Space Aperture Initiative. And Rochelle, she actually mentioned Ariel Eglo. She was one of our participants in the panel, Space Ecotecture Talks. So I was there as a space architect combining my background from art school, bachelor in urban planning and master's in space architecture, which is a space degree. And the goal was to complement this space that is lightweight, deployable, human centered interior elements, which actually requires technical knowledge, understanding how things work in space. And then you should have a system engineering and research, you should have research-oriented mind and artistic points. And this combined plays a crucial role in this capabilities of designing as efficient as well as in a beautiful space habitat. So yeah, this was a great experience. So it's one of the, one of the experiences. I would say that engineering architecture combines two perspectives. Architects there are people that combine the art vision and science building things. Yeah. Thank you so much. And also feel free to, anyone can please feel free to ask questions, kind of respond to what other folks are saying. Just to recap the question, yeah, we would love to hear about one experience where you worked with the scientists or research institute and how that experience was, or if you're coming from a science background, what led you to art? I did a project with NYU Langone Orthopedic Center. And it was really amazing. It was basically about thinking about victims of stroke and how could they recover better, right? So we created this jacket that allowed the victims to sort of move their arms in a particular location. The jacket will record that position, send it over to their doctor. And one of the greatest challenges with recovery from stroke is that most stroke victims have to go into the hospital to actually try to get the, try to get training to recover. But with the jacket, they're able to do that online. And on top of that, the project was gamified in the sense that there is a screen where you're being asked to, let's say row a boat. And by rowing that boat, you are actually making some therapeutic motions. And then on top of that, it gives you feedback as well. So this was a project that we started, we did several prototypes. And it was really interesting to see not only the, the development, but also to see how aesthetics plays into development of medical technology, to see how testing plays into that. The devices that they are, that they had were basically these clunky devices that were metal and plastic. So how do you create a project? How do you create a suit that's not metal? That's not plastic. That has latitude and still functions well. So it was, it was really amazing. One of the, one of my favorite projects. That sounds really fascinating. And one thing I think you bring up that's come up a few times is. Well, one, one. Where art falls in terms of like science communication, right? But then also a question that I come back to a lot, which is what, what can artists and what can art bring to the sciences? I think so often a sire is thought about as science communication when really there's this huge feedback of what artistic thinking and artistic practice and what artists work end up bringing to a process, a scientific process. Excuse me. Which I also experienced recently in a project I've worked on at California University at Bakersfield. Excuse me. I'm just going to take this up. With two botanists there who have a high resolution commuted tomography machine that other folks might be familiar with what this is, but it was new to me. And it's essentially like an MRI machine or 3d x-ray. And we were able to scan. Seeds and stems and other reproductive organs of chaparral species, which are native species to California and are really critical as part of the ecosystem here and also highly threatened by an increased frequency of fire. And this is great for me because I was able to sort of create some imagery I was really interested in working with, but also for them on an opportunity to sort of play with their own materials and with the, with the, this equipment that they often they were making a joke usually are just sort of yelling at grad students, how to not mess the equipment up. And so we're really happy to just get the opportunity to sort of come in, use the equipment and study something without a specific goal in sight and really to be exploratory. So I think that's a question that I always come back to is that the feedback between like an artistic practitioner and a scientist and what can that look like and how can we reimagine that and that's really exciting for me. And I hear that resonating through a lot of what everyone has shared, which I really appreciate is thinking about these relationships in new and exciting ways. So on that note, because I recently I've been working a lot these past three years with a botanist to the Channel Islands. And the really cool thing about islands is that because they're outlying land masses, they have these biological anomalies that are intense. And you get desert plants that have evolved over millions of years and you get plants that I realized carry this huge history, this human history in them, and you can trace a plant and you can see how humans live alongside the history of a plant, which is really fascinating to me. And then second to that, what you were saying, Isabel, which really fascinates me and what I've been thinking about a lot right now is where is the divide between art and science and why is there a divide and how can we bring those two interdisciplinary studies together to create something substantial to create solutions. And yeah, I think that's really what a lot of us at the heart of it is, is how can we bring those two mediums together. And it's interesting too, because I have a friend who just completed his doctorates in soundscape ecology, and he became inspired to listen to sounds when he was in Costa Rica, and he was out in the wild, and he was a musician too. So he took his fascination and art and music, and then all of a sudden turned it into a science. So for him, it was never separate his music and his science. They were both one in the same. And so I guess one of the inquiries I have is how our fields evolving and changing to adapt art and science as one singular medium as its own species instead of being separate. Yeah, that's I mean, it's funny because I have had such similar experiences personally. For me that my practice is never really, I wouldn't say that it differed or that I was led into art. I think I've just had sort of a different focus at different points in my life. But I don't know sometimes I think, and I think Scarlett and I might have had a conversation about this when I first became a resident, but sometimes I think scientists are sort of the real artists in a way. Because I think that both people who identify as artists and as scientists are really driven by a need to understand the world, to understand themselves to take these observations and then describe them in a language that makes sense. And I think that really it's about that language and who has access to that language and you know when and where that language can live. And for me, I think it just I got to a point in my life where I felt that the language of math wasn't really the place where I could be most effective. But I'm really curious to hear what other people think of like a continuation of that question that you're asking Emma, which is now in a digital age when I don't know if everybody feels this way as well, but I question what what does it mean to even have a discipline when people are kind of much more autodidact than they are maybe today than they ever have been. And you know what tools do people have to set through information and what utility does the discipline have now as maybe it did compared to 50 years ago. I can I can touch on that like like a little bit. I was doing some research on artificial intelligence and I was writing an article on a social critique of human robotics. And I felt that I really did need to talk to experts about that. I did need their opinion on it so I worked with you know AI scientists and researchers and the reason I needed their help you know their help was because there's so many myths out there of you know AI taking over right and so I think that what the scientists can help us do is debunk those myths that you know people commonly have at least they're not going to take over anytime soon I mean the research I was working with was like yeah they have the intelligence of like three year olds which is really impressive from a scientific perspective but from a commercial perspective it ain't much. So I think you know it's piggybacking on what the science is I think arts can find a way to communicate you know these sort of more complex perhaps science-laden jargon and translate it in a more tangible way I think for you know everybody else. On that note I do have like sort of some paintings I guess I can I can screen share real quick but I'm trying to focus on that in my painting practice right now I'm trying to communicate you know climate change but in a way that's perhaps a little bit in my mind easers it to digest. So I think I'm well I might not be able to share it from my computer I think I have a systems preference issue but I can just show you an image through the screen if that's okay yeah okay so I have a couple works that are actually landscape paintings and I'm a lot of my work right now is going towards a figurative approach to it because I'm interested in taking these references to past art historical paintings and landscape paintings and sort of the romanticism of nature paintings from you know the early 1900s Sydney Lawrence is a big influence and applying some sort of perspective to it that will show you know an extinction symbol or something like that that can take it and add a little bit more of a perspective on what I'm working with I wish I can show you guys better images of it but but yeah maybe I'll try and tinker around a little bit so I have a couple works and that was just like one example I guess I should say from a scientist sorry just saying from like a scientist perspective most scientists are just lame honestly they're just so like they're just so narrow focused and well I'm a scientist right and just talking to a lot of them and most of them are old guards right if you think about this how higher education is set up it's like these people who have been doing 20 years of work on something very specific it's hard to get out of that you know they're experts in something very niche you know that like two people three people maybe read their papers you know so I think and I think that's the that's what I've encountered a lot you know in terms of but I think how to merge the field or how to see the utility in both I think it has to do with money and projects and really it's just like the practical thing you know using leveraging art you know to make people move like you were saying with the stroke thing I did something similar at Hopkins when we were promoting neuro-classicity right you were saying like during the early parts of a stroke right those are the most critical gets mighty to move and I help do the UX and so I think that's like that's like the key you know it's there's there's creativity in science but it's like if you're studying for something very niche it's very difficult unless it's like public health you know promoting public health so I guess I apologize for scientists but then I guess there's a new wave of coming coming I guess I think I think in that same vein I think about the facility I know you're talking about funding as well but I was really pleasantly surprised and really like fell in love with the community at Gen Space that was comprised largely like I think in advertisement as scientists but I but when I started I was very convinced that most of these people were also artists there are like two or three operating as bio artists outwardly but there was just a little bit of a gap between between like the kind of practice that I had and some of the other artists and the scientists largely centered around questions I feel like both those demographics are just really asking a lot of questions and I think that what's really exciting about the ability to work with scientists or to like adorn a scientist a scientific practice is that all of the things that I do usually guide my artistic practice could also be paired with an experiment that could perhaps execute a prototype of what that what if would look like and so I think that that is like you know if the if the facility wasn't there then maybe those kind of relationships wouldn't have generated but I do think that there's just like so many ideas behind both fields that maybe it's just a matter of like bringing those two kinds of philosophies together and and answering some big what ifs maybe I can go ahead a little bit of a different perspective in terms of the fact that I was a bit surprised when Scarlett invited me to this conversation because I don't have a background in science and so I had an interest in science I mean I did in Italy there are different high schools and that's where I grew up and I was in a science high school but my studies and my work started in the experimental theater right so but the word experiment often among artists that are also narrow minded it just it refers to just weird things right whatever is weird is experimental so and and then there was this other keyword which is innovation and so how do you innovate in the arts and and that was the drive starting in Lama Theater that I was pushed towards and then later on in the moment I got closer and closer to technology and how that could relate to the performing art and researched on that and experimented in a real sense and research and experimented in a real sense and once this process was finished the cycle returned to my high school where my former professor of science invited me to lead courses within the center museum that he was running with the teachers in high schools and local schools on how to use media and theater and methodologies for education of science so that was an interesting first experience in that sense and then later on as I had my company for a few years in Italy I was asked to work on projects in which the performing arts helped as a vehicle in for example in psychology there was a special project that was organized by the electric company national electric company in which they were promoting safety in the workplace with the workers so we developed a series of workshops in which through the theater we conducted these workers, electricians and people that climb ladders and attach cables on how empathically not just with their mind and following rules but how empathically start to feel and connect to the need of safety so that was an experience in a way where art and psychology converge and we know of psychodrama and that was another really meaningful experience where I collaborated on a special psychodrama event with families from both sides of Israel and Palestine that had victims of conflict in their families and this moment of using the theater practice was a revelation and was extremely cathartic and healing for these families in which the art serves as a vehicle as a tool that serves promotion and diffusion of scientific needs but also there is the other reverse side and you all practice that where the science can help the art practice and I'm not very much connected to art science but more to qualitative research and anthropology and how that helps collect data that can be used for developing narratives Could I just jump in because I think what you said is pointing directly to a point that I want to make and I would be remiss not to mention this like when one talks about collecting data when one talks about anthropology when one talks about science let's not forget that science and the scientific process is entwined with imperialism it's entwined with a lot of issues so for me I see the combination of art and science as a way to hold science accountable as a way to question those epistemologies that science keeps pushing forward as truth science is not the arbiter of truth it's not the arbiter of reality and I think especially in this day and age when we see science pushes this universality of this is what design is or when science pushes the idea of this is reality and particularly important when we look at technologies and when we look at AI or when we look at medical practices I think of course I love science I think it's great the beauty of the combination of art and science especially speculative words is that questioning of epistemologies is that ability to break away from this progression and maybe find a different reality my hope is that that questioning falls back into science and allows science to rethink itself as well yeah I love that you bring that point up and talking about epistemology in general and I think that what art is incredible at is holding two things at once like both being able to be a proponent of something scientific and also critique that structure and so I think what's really exciting to me and is thinking about art being able to be critical of epistemology and bringing up new epistemologies and really rethinking how various knowledges can impact our concept of what is truth or what is real and that's something that I mean maybe someone will argue with me on this but that science can't always do on its own like if you're embedded within an empirical way of thinking about a subject you have to follow those rules and I think that's something that's really beautiful about the partnership of art and science is that ability to add that critique that I think can help bring more equity to some of those systems that have led to really incredible art and I think that's something that I think is really important to me and I think that has led to really incredible observations and discoveries but also oppression and other inequities Yeah I would just add that I think it might accelerate the opportunity for science to be able to look at things from a more diverse perspective so if science is very slowly taking its time to embed the ability for women and people of color to practice at a very limited rate as a majority identifying scientist then artists can act as an interjection point where there can be new modern perspectives in collaboration with identities that have held that space for a very long time allowing us to have some models and moments of diversity where perhaps that field would not have otherwise but I'll tag on to that not only diversity for humanity but also look at the world that we're living in now we need to reconfigure we conceptualize the notion of the human and that means to take into account all types of non-human entities I think also adding on all of your faces notes sorry Michelle in art and science because I feel like indigenous people have really been left out of the equation completely and I feel like their knowledge of the natural world in many ways are very very different and sometimes even surpass scientific knowledge and I think that artists are sensitive to that at times and they kind of act as a cultural mediator like listen like there's different ways of understanding the world it's not just this way or that way it's more holistic when you bring art and science together things become all of a sudden more holistic so I completely agree with everyone I was just going to chime in I think what really connects a lot of the artists in this room is that you're bringing that that bridge between the arts and sciences through this like system of embodiment like many of you are letting people experience firsthand for themselves so they can decide what stance they take towards a scientific idea if it's the factual side, if it's the emotional side the political side, and that embodiment I think is a really important thing that is also left out of the ways that we experience science firsthand and another component too that seems to be linking a lot of artists in this room is also this process of like scanning rendering digitizing the world around you to also create these like artifacts that replicate the natural world so that people can also interact with their surroundings in another way so I just wanted to point out that I'm seeing these kind of connections happening between between the artists in this room and I think that's a really important capability of science art to provide this new way of interacting with the world Yeah, thank you Rochelle for sharing that because yeah, something that came up in our conversations between Rochelle and myself over and over again is what can sci art, art side do for social change and you know, ReFest again our tagline is festival bringing together artists, technologists and activists so we always kind of see that triad or trifecta as a very powerful kind of interdisciplinary framework that is mutually enriching mutually empowering perspective and this year especially we're looking at participatory strategies and intergenerational collaboration as some kind of pathways towards that kind of collaboration but yeah I'm really curious about this question that's already been addressed all of the questions have already been addressed so I think we can say the conversation can continue organically unfolding sci art do for social change has been on our minds big questions One of my favorite questions I mean for me I think a lot of it the way that I kind of approach that question has to do with this idea of the ethics of objectivity which I think like a lot of you guys were touching on before we brought up this new question but you know if somebody is the object or something is the object something is the subject and I think that this idea of trying to pursue knowledge and pursue some level of objectivity is both like really inspiring and can be inherently problematic so I think yeah like art art for me is so much a subjective language I think and a lot of it is like sort of founded on trying to find commonality through association but also trying to challenge association that may not be shared through you know from individual to individual and so I think to answer that question with a question but I guess I'm wondering what everybody else kind of thinks about that and whether or not like art can kind of bring a more ethical kind of component to the conversation not even just through subject but also through language itself yeah sorry I'm getting a little emotional doing this whole COVID situation just all the deaths all the stuff that's happening there are words that can't be spoken like quite literally cannot have the words the language to sort of speak about this but there's data about that right there's data didactically sort of presenting that data it doesn't do anything right there is this affective aspect of the human human experience to be able to feel and I think that you know for social justice for for things that don't have words universally human that the ability to sort of create that space of magic you know and have that be supported by data by by science right but to be able to shoot that into someone and they feel it I think that's the main thing I believe that science and science can combine can do for social causes I cannot agree more with what you're saying in the sense that inevitably we know that there is a fuzzy area where science certainties and and there is a mystery and that's maybe that fuzzy area is where these two disciplines can come together because and also I think Emma was mentioning about traditional knowledge and an art connects deeply to that traditional knowledge where the art can help find understanding through experience and through empathy through the arts we can find we can have experience of something that science cannot explain and I have this reference of a little book collection of short stories by an artist I mean a live writer Italo Calvino and maybe you are familiar with it. Some several years ago he wrote this series of stories called Cosmic Comics and it tells each story based on a scientific theory and through these very humorous stories the person can understand how the big bang happened or what does it mean to be a molecule spinning around in the cosmic dust or how life moved from the waters into the earth and somehow these stories and some of these things that are facts and theories that have been proved through the art become possible to experience it. I was just going to add that I totally agree with what you are saying and I think that it reminds me of some of the philosophies that are being discussed in the future architects in New York. They are a cultural futurist group and at the moment they are taking the age of AI to both mean the age of artificial intelligence but also the age of ancestral intelligence and I have been able to watch them explore this with a deep understanding that if we are going to move forward in a technologically advanced way it has to be done in tandem with storytelling, cultural relationships that allow us to learn from the past and learn from what has already taken place in order to construct a more meaningful and meaningful art. The measures of storytelling, oral histories, the measures of depicted histories, traditions and cultural ritual and so I completely agree with you that in this joint world of creating a better future through art and science maybe it does lie in a more meaningful or emotive way than science can do. Definitely adding to what everyone is saying because I am really intrigued with what everyone is saying right now and I would love to add that I think it is really interesting to think about how change happens and when you start to change yourself because of a direct effect and I think right now is really like the example right now we are living in it. Some people their life is going to change more than others and that is just how it is because some people are so incredibly affected and then some people feel the indirect effect. They see the numbers and the data and they are desensitized because of this overload of knowledge but then they might encounter an art piece and revisit that feeling and all of a sudden I think it is important to understand the world and perhaps I really agree with what everyone was saying especially on reexamining histories in our past and also looking at the histories of other kinds too of other species and maybe reconsidering our history looking at the history of other beings not just ourselves and not just egocentricly. It is interesting because I have always found that for many people cognition is held within the embrace of belief and that it is very hard to move forward with cognitive concepts if there is an inherent conflict in that person's belief system and I do think that our discipline of art is very important to us and I think it is important to think that our discipline of art really has the potential through a lot of these mechanisms that you all are describing of empathy and experience to really fundamentally converse with the belief part of what is inside a person in order to enable access to the cognitive part but I also wanted to bring up something that I think is I do think I'm really interested in what people think that we can learn from science outside of the material itself. I mean I think that it's so obvious that we can learn literal science but I found a lot of inspiration in my practice from the scientific practice and sometimes I find it a little bit of a relief to step into a world where my identity can feel more of a bomb in dealing with a language that is so universal and so erasing of subjectivity that it allows me to feel a little bit less in the spotlight perhaps and I'm wondering if anybody else felt the same way or if they felt the opposite way or if they feel both ways like I do but I thought it was an interesting thing to bring up when we're really talking about two practices in two different communities and I think that's one of the reasons that we're so much more instigating truth and committed to observing the world around them. Just to add to that amazing question you know one of the questions that we were discussing before today was how have you discovered have you discovered that your role or practice shifted or evolved through interdisciplinary collaboration and have you arrived at or contributed to scientific discoveries perhaps through an artistic practice or an audience through chat and I'll read it out loud many of us as artists are talking about art and science collaborations but do we know if scientists are looking at artists as communication partners so these are just some additional colors to add to what Eli posed. Yeah I'd love to comment on that I mean I know that there's like an enormous amount of science that lives in the metaphor especially when you're talking about communication but I found it to be a huge relief in some ways to be in an ecosystem that was like okay so if we do this experiment this is the outcome and that means this and if you do that experiment and this is the outcome this is what it means and it felt kind of like to like learn through some I guess when you're working with like bacteria and in my head I'm thinking of like an E. coli specific experiment that had like absolute outcomes before we could ask the experimental questions it was kind of like I don't know like playing with paint for the first time where you're like oh if I mix these two primary colors together this is the color that I get and it's kind of like fun to build that foundation and recognize that some things are true and then once you understand what's true you can kind of begin to like let your mind wander but it's really fun to discover those truths it's like being in kindergarten for the first time and everyone's mixing the same two colors together in secondary color like I don't know it was really it was really novel in that way for me I can address the question in the chat I'm actually married to a material scientist my brother is a solid state physicist and I still have ties to the community but what I think a lot of people don't know is that there are grants in almost every major university that can be given as teaching grants to both PhD students and faculty members or specific departments if they welcome and community members and allow them to intern this can be high school students it can be you know an undergrad in another department a community college member and it can be an artist so if you do have an interest in working with a scientist yes there are a lot of grants that do motivate them to welcome you in as a respectful partner a good place to start is actually to look at universities in the areas that you are interested in check out the departments and just email the department heads but particularly the PhD students and the research students are very happy most of the time to talk about their work with someone so yeah I would say go for it those opportunities are there you just have to do a little bit of taking I'll jump in and sort of answer that question and the more in a different way I think that there is scientists that know the value of diversity diversity of thought etc etc welcome and should welcome artists and the ones that do you know and collaborate with artists I think it serves both the artists and the scientists well it's hard to collaborate I do a lot of all my work is basically collaborative and sometimes you know you just want to rip your hair out because you're speaking one language they're speaking another language and you just cannot get to the to the center of it and I think that for me what I've learned with working with scientists or working as a collaborator is that it's worth it to make that effort it's worth it to go through that because it's so much better when it's collaboration when it's participatory I always talk about the idea that when I first started working I would think of an idea and I'll sort of make it myself and now what I do is I'm like okay I've had enough of manifesting my own ideas let me work with others and then collectively we'll come up with something and then and it gives a it gives voice to it gives a true voice that if it's just my own sort of machinations yeah I totally agree with you I think that the the most successful efficient companies and entities that have been created it's a multi-disciplinary entities so we have different perspectives designers programmers for example scientists different backgrounds so and then together we can come up with amazing achievements like for example at NASA there you know tremendously diversity of backgrounds and even in our space companies even there even though it sounds really technical they acknowledge that they also need designers and artists to come up with new ideas and kind of you know look from the kind of overview perspective and see how things are working and how you know I just can bring a different perspective so I I more than agree with you yeah I want to share an experience about that I last year got to take part in the stroke of the new normal program which is less of a residency but more like a post grad speculative think tank situation in Russia and it's kind of funny it's called the new normal and now it's like everywhere right because we are in the new normal but there's it was really interesting to have to like collaborate and think through ideas with people from different backgrounds like there was 30 or so researchers not just from different yeah I heard of the new normal I'm actually from Russia so I pretty much so it's I guess it's the Strelka yeah this is you know many schools they really also acknowledge that you need to have a multidisciplinary team of designers, architects and scientists as well as if you think about Sayyar there's a LA based school there's one of the examples they have extremely different backgrounds and mostly they consider architecture more like a knight rather than engineering so you you basically learning how to work with composition instead of trying to think of engineering like how to build this building because they also understand that you as a established architect you will work with engineers and you don't need to you know kind of work out on that so yeah yeah I mean it can be a very frustrating process but it's also so fruitful it can generate a lot of ideas when you have multiple minds putting their like different expertise on the same answering the same question not even really solving the problem but more so like expanding a new imaginary I guess with from different perspectives I've also like taught a couple of summer sessions by summer institute where high school students take part in this sort of approach and we're prepping the new one right now and we're kind of trying to think through steam as a as as not the traditional way of thinking of steam but rather like science technology ecology art and mindfulness this idea of expanding beyond traditional boundaries is I think maybe the future of education as well. There's another question from chat. Are any of the panelists familiar with the gold matrix rich gold which proposes relationship between art science engineering and design doesn't resonate in this context cool so interesting thing I'm definitely going to be looking at the Wikipedia page for that the gold matrix tonight the gold matrix I don't know what this um yeah so we have a little less than 10 minutes left Richelle do you have any last questions that you wanted to throw into the mix so that everyone can oh my begonia is falling apart um so everyone can kind of respond to really quickly before we close out today absolutely I I suppose something that comes to mind in this conversation is also this idea of facility so yes it can be tricky to work with a science artist or a scientist as an artist and how do you start to build those relationships and I think there is this need as culture hub and super collider are finding where we have to create those collaborations and those collisions and house them somewhere and so what I'm really interested in learning from all of you is where have you found the facilities for this and maybe it's describing your experience at a residency or yeah or did you just go straight up to a scientist and say hey I want to work with you what what is that process like I can jump in and answer I'll start the answer on that one I've done a lot of different residencies and I'm sure a few of us like I know Rochelle and I recently have done the Arctic Circle residency but I think in answering to the question about working with scientists and where to kind of begin I think looking at municipal resources is a really good opportunity to in your own city so most recently I worked at Lacey which is stands for that Los Angeles clean tech incubator which is a municipally run space or it's funded by the LA Department of Water and Power but they have an advanced prototyping center where they're essentially engineers and startup companies working on clean tech initiatives for the city of Los Angeles and they invite three artists a year to work alongside those engineers and partners in that space to supplement their own practice in terms of access to tools but also work in collaboration with those engineers and scientists as well and so that for me was a really beneficial kind of mutual use of like being able to use these really advanced tools but also being able to access a community of people that are working towards a common goal of thinking about how we can improve our own city and I think that's happening in a lot of other cities but I think municipal resources is something that I'm finding to be a space that I've maybe accessed in the past but have started to become really interested in the future as things like libraries and other public spaces start investing in kind of maker artists engineering culture I'm just going to jump in my phone is ringing no sorry phone call I'm going to jump in and talk about about access and about in my field design technology there aren't that many people of color in that field I know also in the sciences there aren't you know relatively and part of that is sort of thinking about how do we create that access or what can we do to create that access and it's not only access in terms of working with scientists and institutions but it's also how do you create the access to the language to be able to write those forms apply for those residencies and things like that so for me I think it's I've been looking at sort of thinking about this idea of new territories sort of like old geographies of the of physical space and new territories of the virtual space and thinking maybe those are spaces that are not then have not been sort of colonized and perhaps using these virtual spaces can be a way to gain access could be a way to teach so that others may have access to those spaces in the physical territories yeah I think that's such an important thing to think about and consider especially as we're like sort of distant and socially isolated and where that'll be in the future but having these spaces that are accessible for anyone I don't know this is something I was thinking about sort of posing as a question maybe we can keep in touch and keep talking about it but yeah how do we navigate that in a digital world I know I've been part of like hackathons and there's sort of these grassroots like discord channels where people are connected with each other but what are some other ways that these bridges can happen without an institution and yeah grassroots we have oh go on I was just going to quickly say like in some ways I feel like it might even be easier maybe this is my optimism playing a part in this response but in some ways I feel like it might even be easier to create these connections when we are in isolation than when we are not in isolation only because in isolation we lose sense of like what the perhaps what the like prestige of a facility is or the prestige of an institution is because none of us can access these spaces anyways so like in a little bit in a small sense it kind of like flattens a hierarchy so like in a regular normal world if I'm an artist collaborating outside of an institution with other artists who are like you know not affiliated to big schools not affiliated to big funders you can often feel less important dwarfed by these places that have like you know funded residencies and like full sweet maker spaces but when we're all in isolation it kind of like flattens the whole thing right like nobody's in these like fancy spaces so it's like I don't know in some ways I'm seeing there's an opportunity to like create more to like decentralize the like institution and decentralize the like major funders in a way that allows us to feel like we're perhaps on like a flatter plane and that other artists irrelevant to their affiliations have like credible things to say and think and collaborate on and in such of that manner so I'm just like sort of seeing hints of that as we get deeper into the quarantine yeah we're almost at we're at time but yeah that's you know like Richelle said culture of and super collider examples of communities that really seek to foster access and also space where these interdisciplinary conversations can happen yeah we're very in but culture is very invested in partnerships that kind of create opportunities for new new forms new conversations increased that fuel artists mobility and access so yeah it's going to be an interesting continued exploration as we adapt to the pandemic and I hope that you all watching stay tuned about what our organizations are up to and also what the artists who have participated artists and scientists who have participated today are up to yeah there's a really incredible thought-provoking conversation and I wish we could just continue into the night over dinner and go into you know 2am but what is time now no one knows thank you so much everyone Richelle do you have anything else to add I guess just my my closing remark would be that so much of this conversation is about access and I really have discovered by by being an artist myself but then also with super collider is a lot of the power of these collaborations happen when you ask and so just for all of us to keep knocking on those doors and now if we're virtual have those phone calls and conversations with scientists engineers it's those conversations that let this happen and then I'm also reading Rachel Carson Silent Spring a classic ecological book but something that comes up is that the health of a garden or an ecosystem or coral reef really thrives because of its biodiversity and I think this is also true in our capabilities of tackling some of these environmental and social challenges is there's so much that requires the diversity of us all and so I just want to encourage all of us to keep working together and for everyone tuning in please to reach out to artists if you're scientists call us up and we're going to continue our efforts as culture hub and super collider to bring those collaborations together thank you so much thank you thank you to be continued to make a share Google doc so we could all have our contact info yeah for sure we'll set that up we'll do a series this will be a whole talk series for years to come bye thanks everyone good night