 So, I'm also feeling a little bit nostalgic about Prague because we were there. I was there with my partner, nanoscientist James Jimjewski in 2008, I think, or nine, for the conference on biotech and art and it was a very beginning of this whole area moving biology and technology together. It was a very moving, disturbing moment because we were showing the Blue Morph project, which was dealing with sounds of metamorphosis from a chrysalis to a butterfly and it was an installation we put together and there was going to be a talk and there was also the Kristallnacht day and there was this absolutely horrendous meeting of Nazis and counter Nazis and just this kind of explosion of these polarities that was going on and of course this was also when the economy was crashing around 2008 if everybody remembers the financial markets crashed. So, it was also a beginning of thinking about collective metamorphosis and how destructive they can be and they are and we're in the midst of one right now and these kind of patterns happen that they're mostly unconscious for us that you can see as you get older how there's these returns and how it's in your personal life but also in the collective life and I feel we're in the same place so it's actually not by accident. I don't even believe in accidents anymore that speaking I'm somehow connected to proud even though it seems unlikely and it would have been absolutely impossible as we mentioned earlier for me to travel right now regardless pandemic or not just just the effort and amount of CO2 and funding and all that so I'm very happy to be here I feel it's a very important moment and I'm extremely feeling responsible to work with students right now because I feel that for young people in particular this is a very tough time to to function to think about arts and science and expression and survival and all these things so to expand viewpoints and also figure out ways where we move forward is really important so I take a very serious responsibility as a mentor and I'm amazed to work with Sasha because she's really cool and that I'll start my talk so let's share the screen and excuse me actually just kind of going along as if I was in my own class so for everybody else please be patient okay so we're going to view this full screen so what I'll be talking about is the project that I'm actually this project premiered March 10th in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna March 11th the whole city closed and as you know it was like this ripple effect on all of Europe and then the states that was the last plane going to the states was just really chaotic so all this energy that went into putting together this installation and being in residence and etc just came to a standstill and I'll talk to you a little bit about where it's going and and what I'm doing with it now so this is the opening and it was a big deal and then nothing and here's a quote that became kind of an important moment historically where Johnny Mitchell's song about stardust that we are stardust and to remember that we're a billion-year-old carbon we're golden cotton devil's guard bargain and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden now 1969 was really a momentous year because this is the first time that we saw ourselves as a planet from a distance it was the first time the internet or the arpanet at that point was connected and one connection was actually a UCLA so the beginning of this process of transformation of humanity is 1969 it was the year of love and you can just find so much that happened that year or a little before a little after the back ends of it so we're making this kind of full circle to something and we're also now this year with the pandemic and with all of us locked down we're also seeing incredible things going on with space with solar systems with explorations so this for instance is just recent from SpaceX then we have just recently Field Museum scientists discover seven billion-year-old stardust on earth on a meteorite this was just recently so maybe a few days ago then there's in October also just a couple of months ago NASA discovers a weird molecule in Titan's atmosphere so the idea that this molecule actually we never even knew of and chemists don't even know how to pronounce it so that was also something that is on Titan right one of the largest of the Saturn's moon and then we hear about water on Mars but here with where also what is connected to this project and I keep listening and hearing about events in space is that heat and dust actually are what generates and is how water can be found in space so they were all surprised that there actually was water also in on Venus too and so here's an illustration about the global dust storms on Mars and they're finding more and more the very beginning of the year when in Wuhan the beginning of the pandemic happened with the coronavirus and animals China had just landed on the other side of the moon so what we're saying is not the dark side of the moon the other side of the moon this is not talked about so much in the west but actually it's a phenomenal accomplishment and to see these juxtapositions of you know Wuhan market and what was going on there next door the biotech lab but at the same time going out into space it's just it's a bit mind-blowing for us I think and then we have again this is the SpaceX just recently sending people into space again two days ago Japan's Hayabusa capsule lands with carbon rich asteroid samples so I just want you to imagine for a moment what it would take to capture this rabbit from an asteroid in space and so this just landed on the Australian desert and then this is a picture of the Chang probe of the journey of the moon so there's this kind of a space station with everybody working on this and finally there's two bits of news that are related to what I'm going to talk about in this work this is like news from space so this is the oldest material on earth seven billion years old and this this has actually just discovered and again in Australia which I think is interesting I'm not sure why things are landing there but it seems like our viewpoint is pointing in that direction and a little bit of a laughter here this was from today you can see it's today so this retired space pioneer Hayim Ashed actually claims that aliens visited the earth they made deals with people and Trump even knows about it and this made news everywhere and I just thought that we really live in amazing times okay so let's talk about some artwork now so when I was invited to do an installation at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna I was a little bit confused because I never was so much into meteorites but I loved the Museum of Natural History I loved going there and I kept going to see and think about it and looking at these rocks I kind of I had to use a lot of my imagination to think about how they're falling and from space and what it means and then one thing led to another and I discovered stardust actually micro meteorites and this became kind of the most important thing for me to think about because in general if you know my work I'm interested in showing the invisible and the inaudible I'm really interested in expanding how we're experiencing our reality beyond our very very narrow scope of vision and hearing so this dust 70 to 100 tons of it falls on earth every day and that to me was like what I just I have this is amazing in fact if you look on your keyboard if you look in your kitchen if you're collecting dust one of them could be from another solar system and this is not just me inventing things it's actually true so to to clean your kitchen or look at your dust you just go wow and there's once I started learning about this I actually discovered a whole world of micro meteorite hunters so I became one of these nerds I got myself a really strong magnet a little bag it's very DIY I started doing with the students and we would actually with high school students with my students with students and interface cultures we were just going around collecting dust once you collect the dust you're kind of looking for the magnetic ones because and then a lot of them you can't even identify what they are so there's a whole thing I could spend hours on this I won't I promise but I will say and talk a little bit about art-based research because this is really important for students but for others too to really respect the kind of research we do that it's not just a matter of oh you work with the scientists and they do the research and you do the art no we do research series always whether you're a painter or working in high tech so when I got invited to do a residency at the Ecole Polytechnique I actually asked to work with their atmospheric sciences and I had I got three students to work with Ryan Cook and Vera and Gu and this is actually the SIRTA Center where we spent a week or so working with the scientists and understanding how they research dust and at that point because we were in Paris and the Notre Dame had burned a lot of it was looking at the dust from the from the fire so we came up with some project and we looked into microscopes and looked at the different dusts had a lot of fun thinking about one of these little particles actually comes from other space so but what we also found is that when you're looking for these micrometeorides and people are specifically looking for them the direction you're getting is that oh most of it will be junk or pollution which really reminded me of DNA when they say oh that's just junk DNA and this is the important ones I was I started getting interested in the pollution in fact and here I am with Daniella who helped me put the installation up and we were doing some dust hunting on the roof of the museum this is Ludovic Ferrer who was a scientist helping me out and here's the dust that we collected very quickly and then we went downstairs to their actually it was upstairs to their lab and we started looking at what we found very quickly so it didn't take much time we're just kind of you know to see we didn't find any stardust and but we did find some interesting things so this is a piece of hair some plastic a lot of lichen this is Saharan dust so there we are in Vienna but we're finding dust from Sahara and that is the whole point then this whole idea that the virus somehow we can lock out lock ourselves down and put the borders it doesn't work like that the dust carries bacteria it carries viruses so this can just keep circulating and we just have to eventually figure that out then we found this little picture and I was what is that red little thing there ah it's a micro plastic so there we are like in in three slides we found biological dust we found lichen we found micro plastics carb all kinds of dust materials and I kept looking at these different dust particles sometimes maybe this is from other space now you have to realize what what size we're talking about it has to be much much smaller than the grain of sand so most of it is invisible or if it's visible it just all looks the same so one of the reasons that I found this fascinating is because I've been allergic to dust for a long time and when the doctor tells you you're allergic to dust now I realize they don't know what they're talking about because what does that mean like which dust am I allergic to there's five million that are out there both human and natural it could be pollen it could be other things so to continue so here's the approach I asked the director of the museum Christian Cobra who is a geologist and was absolutely passionate about the meteorite gallery to pick out with Ludovic seven meteorites each one from a different continent so what we have here this one fell from Africa from Morocco and on the side what you see is the crossover how it looks inside so that became interesting to me too because when you see the meteorites they're interesting but they're kind of bunch of rocks but what's interesting is the composition and when when you slice them what you're showing so that's Africa Morocco and we know that that one's from Mars some of them we can't identify this one is from cellar bins from Russia that was a pretty phenomenal crash if you go on YouTube you can actually find some amazing images of it crash it was like a nuclear bomb exploded like really wild and actually documented because it was recent so this one is from China from Foucault and it's a palisade beautiful inside and then here we have Australia this is this fell in Henry and it's an iron look at this structure so this to me is so beautiful and this one is in Canon Diablo and again a completely different structure and then in South America this was in Campo de Cielo and they just know that it's iron so those little pieces I actually got to keep and the they told me oh you know this is I'm not sure that I checked out the book can you hear the sound okay oh no there's no sound here so here's uh here's the seven meteorites that now are animated and breaking apart so this was a test and I'm actually showing everybody process a little bit I worked with Ellie Jotava who is a next student of mine that's amazing work with animation and Deborah Isaac who also is a next student of mine from years ago who is teaching Houdini animation now so those are the initial tests and here so you see now the meteorites now these are the micro meteorites so what you're saying here is different micro meteorites that were found on earth and identified as alien alien chemistry and then then we have animations of different particles so this one is a sand particle this one is a micro meteorite that is unidentified and then we have another one here this would be a piece of pollen actually and then this is a fossilized pollen that that was found in Antarctica and here we have a piece of coal that so we we kind of re-animated them so and this will all make sense to you at some point so then you can actually see how we animated this here's another micro meteorite based on actual ones so here's then the the way I sketched out what happens so if you go to Africa you have these meteorites micro meteorites in dust and here we are falling onto tiscent in Morocco and you actually find out about the meteorite but in this case and this is I wanted to show this because it gives you a better example you can see how the Saharan dust travels across the planet and actually it fertilizes the amazon and different parts of the earth these are some of the images from Saharan dust going to amazon and it's what we found on the roof of the museum in actual history and it keeps going like that for each continent so I won't do that but just to give you an idea and then what I did in the space is I put four pedestals which I found in their basement so I wanted to actually mimic the the setup of the museum and the installation and when you walk in you're not jarred into oh this is something else you're walking through the collection and then you walk into another space that looks like the collection but it's a little different there's something odd about it so it was really fun to go to the basement and drag out all the different pedestals and microscopes and everything else and the idea was to have the fourth part of the earth and then you have these micrometeorites with 3d printed what I showed you as an animation and that was also interesting because I was supposed to work with Angevan to students there but it happened to be the holidays so I ended up working with students in New York a student Alex who was working in a lab with Ian Kerr's lab doing 3d printing and then shipping it to me so we're already kind of anticipating how we're working in these days without knowing it um anyway so there's the micrometeorites and here's the setup um and then I should just mention this was actually the earth the oops sorry this was the globe that was part of a kind of an educational installation before I did this and I reused that so I repurposed a lot that was there basically and let me talk to you now that I discussed the visuals let me talk to you about sound so on top of the roof what's happening here is the Vienna the museum natural history and this is a meteorite and here is a transmitter and and a station in France that's actually searching for meteorites so as I was going to go to um polytechnique to do some research I thought oh I could go to check that out uh and they were like no no no no that's actually a military facility I thought oh really uh I guess you're searching for other things than meteorites too so it's this kind of layering of of uh technology and science I find really fascinating and interesting and this is again on the roof I spend a lot of time there uh here's the antenna and now I'll talk about how it was developed uh after I came back I really felt I was still in that space of expression of dust and stardust and pollution and it became even more relevant to me with the virus because it's 140 nanometers and it actually potentially travels through dust as bacteria do um so I really wanted to keep working on this and that's what I'm gonna explain to you now what we did so sound in my work is critical in fact I imagine image and all that I do with image to be in service of sound and not the other way around and what we created and um I've talked about it in a little detail is layers of sound that become uh audio audio visual meditation online meditation with binaural sound so we had COVID-19 data that was taken from John Hopkins University still is live translated into sound frequency a drone sound seven of them sounds from space and then human voice that leads you so what you have here is um sound that we were grabbing from the Natural History Museum that I just mentioned to you um that was one of the sound files we were dealing with and then here oh that's good do you hear did I you hear okay good um so I'll just show you a little bit and then we'll go into the so this was how the sound was in the installation and it was meant to develop your end installations we had sounds coming from different areas and then you had different um media rights from each from each planet explode so you have each one but because this was in the in the museum and suddenly we were out of the museum um just to backtrack a little bit here's the day after the opening just to give you a sense of the space so you get the idea of how empty this was and it stayed empty like that and to think about dust became really important and I'll show you now the how the meditation came through so this is the covid data that um we created software that converts these daily data that gets worse and worse so it's noisier and noisier it seems like um and we process it at intervals so you can actually receive it and you go through the media and create the data so this was a moment in time of uh covid data so you saw each continent was covered and um just to say one thing about this uh this is life it's constant and it's really meant as a constant anxiety that we collectively feel so it's um a live frequency of this data going through cycling through different continents and then what we have is the drone sound which is composed by Paul Juluso and he created seven of these healing sounds based on sulfagio that are is constant too so the instruction for the online meditation is to actually tap into that sound while you're dealing with all the anxiety so here's the drone sound that's constant and it's meant to really just go into your kind of relaxed mode um and then we have um the sound of human voice here it's Rihanna here we have space sounds and these sounds are from different uh sources actually NASA is uh the museum uh it all became this kind of layer of uh space sounds so you can hear the initial ones that were in the museum that uh actually two of my students Clinton and Ivana Clinton spend a lot of time pulling sounds from different sources and we work together to create this composition and then the whole thing to me is about how you create an experience in these situations to be more holistic more um like give you a reason to actually get off zoom and do this right so we're also exploring um doing uh AR and you would actually have um a meteorite you will have a meteorite that's on your screen or you print and then when you point to it you're seeing this dust and meteorite anywhere in your room so you're actually hearing and searing the sounds while you're uh having your headphones on and also working with this surround by neural sound and you have the visuals it's allowing you also to step up it's allowing you to experience in your space differently um and this we're just about doing a proof of concept so we're actually using snapchat to do it because it's uh off the shelf and we can and we're getting used to working like this so the people I just mentioned actually were in different locations this I was in LA uh John and San Francisco uh Paul and Rihanna both in New York and even I'm Clinton in LA as well and we figured out ways where we could share sound uh and really pull it together as a composition so we're getting support from harvest works and NEA and different um institutions who are interested to see can we do this and we are actually but we're also interested in taking it further to engage the audience so the audience is not just sitting there and I will just end now with one short statement that's no borders so let's now talk thank you thank you very much I don't believe everyone has seen the the notes because some people came a little bit later but if you have questions for Victoria you can either type them if that's easier but of course now we would prefer if you can just show yourselves and ask her directly uh that would be of course uh much much better and uh while everybody's thinking I just maybe want to start with this kind of uh I guess from the point of view of the art student this uh most immediate question is the complexity of these collaborations feels almost overwhelming for uh someone starting out as as our students do would you address this in some way personally so the I was in a classic art school actually doing my MFA in belgrade at the academy of fine arts and um it was excruciating for me working alone and I actually liked the music and concerts and bands much better anyway so I would go to do my academy and then just hang out and go to clubs and eventually I just left and went to New York and formed the band and this band went on for about four or five years where I was experimenting with sound with visuals cable tv came on and working with the band and the audience was collaboration I was really learning how to work in groups so yeah it was like I had my ideas my lyrics whatever but you know working with the group without the group it wouldn't work and so to me uh what I'm doing now with with the group it's I feel like it's a band you know and when I add scientists to it and other people it's just fantastic you know it's it's so much easier you know so it seems like it's more complicated no it's easier it's much harder to be in your own head and and be self-conscious of what others think and is this the right way is this the wrong way you can keep bouncing off ideas and take turns in who's leading so there's times when another person in our collective is taking the lead and then we support that and let the person lead that and it's kind of a relief too that you don't have to lead all the time but there's times when you can just support someone and let them do their thing so I would and you know the problem with academia is that everything is still set on the individual the problem with the world actually I should say is that it's it's very much based on individual and uh that's okay if you're uh aware of the collective and if you're aware you know you can work as an individual and still feel like you're collaborating I explain to people that even when you're a painter you're collaborating it's just that you don't understand or or appreciate the fact that somebody had to make that canvas somebody was doing the pigments somebody's helping you in the gallery there's people who are interested in your work who talk to you who give you ideas or who shift the way you're thinking so it's really about the mind frame to have and you know schools don't help very much because they even an art department um in media arts department UCLA your MFA is a solo MFA and if somebody does something that's like two three people it becomes a problem like well how who did what and and and it's a very tough one because I feel like no that that's how it should be because if you do everything by yourself and then go out in the world it's a problem you don't know how to work with people you don't know how to deal with different egos with different problems with you know funding whatever so I I think it gets more complex as time goes and as you establish yourself of course and there's a responsibility gets bigger there's times when projects seem like you know I feel like um that you know conducting an orchestra right so it becomes really intense um but it's it's um a better thing to work with others yeah wonderful for sure and in this way in which you speak of your work is kind of expanding the dimensions in which we are able to think it also places the artist as a very sensitive node in this very complex network that's that's actually not just about the collaborators but it's also about the materials you bring into into your work yeah so I would like us to be less shy and start asking questions here so would I invite people if you are asking a question just unmute yourself and switch the camera on so you would be with us for that moment so I'm gonna ask Sasha to start off I thought nobody was raising their hands sorry okay Alexander go for it hi thank you for the lecture I was waiting on facebook for it to start but it never started maybe this is an absolute disaster which we will maybe leave in the recording as an apology uh that from Prague College this is not somehow being managed on at least they say something is a problem on facebook so what will happen at least there will be a message there and the link to uh I hope to zoom so yeah this I really shouldn't waste our time on that but it's it's there were 90 people working for us oh no we have to do a repeat performance I'm glad you're recording it and and the recording will be put on facebook but it won't be live for those 90 years so Alexandra please okay I would like to thank you for the lecture and I would I'm wondering if you have encountered some resistance or suspicion from some security organizations or something similar when you are collecting dust or this data from different countries or is it the opposite that it's met with support it's actually neither you know what's shocking to me I was actually afraid that you know people would wonder what am I doing because I'm just kind of collecting and I was really surprised at every single place including places where you would think it would be worse um nothing people just just kind of looked at me or didn't so I found that really odd because I was getting ready for that and I actually remember bringing a bunch of different dusts to the museum for them to look under the microscope and the guy said to me you know I don't know that it's okay that you were traveling around with all this dust and I said well dust travels anyway what does it matter whether I take it in my suitcase or it's in the air so it's a it's a really funny thing but I did another project recently that was posting signs I'll share it in a second I posted signs where I calculated how many miles it related to the COVID deaths and like I went to a traffic company and I put traffic signs that I was so worried that the police would stop me or something nobody it was really weird like I'm walking on the street with this traffic sign by myself putting it up and nothing like so I'm not sure people even paying attention to the signs like it's just crazy I think there's just too much information or something thank you so much can I go now yes thank you for this presentation I really enjoyed it I was also lucky enough to once experience it when you had the performance online and this was really nice experience meditation and I was wondering what about the dust what kind of analysis of the dust was done because I know that in in the air there's also like tons and tons of fungal sports and I was wondering if it may be like found any or yes yes many and you know the the roof that I showed is Leichen Leichen is everywhere I don't know how you say it in in Serbian or Slovenian but you do know what I'm talking about the leichen it's everywhere I mean now that we're all baking bread right I mean you can just create yeast overnight it's because it's everywhere so that was the most easy thing to find and lots and lots of dust that's hair actually it really surprised me and then I found out something that's kind of shocking that most of the dust in our homes is our skin like most I just I find that so disturbing in a way it's like what so yeah thank you so I would like to just share a couple of things more really briefly so I'm kind of glad that it's just the students actually so everybody else can check it out later do you see the integrity on screen that I picked the right one okay so this is the event that now is I'm preparing for the 21st of December which is the summer solstice and it's going to be at the integratron which sorry I said summer it's winter solstice I was just being corrected so if you go to the integratron itself you can do this on your own too you'll find that this is in the Mojave Desert and here in California and it was built in the 50s by a kind of a mad scientist that got his information from the UFOs and it is an incredible acoustic structure so the idea was to create this dome that was surrounded by a Tesla coil and the Tesla coil would be activated and the people who go inside would be healed by the frequencies created by the Tesla coil and this actually became a space where the biggest UFO meetings happened and you can go through all the history and etc so and there's some videos also about the integratron which I won't go into but this is the structure where we're doing this and then Victoria if you before you get into the project itself again we are having the question about this UFO point that is coming through and the student is asking what is have you had any personal experience meeting hearing seeing aliens with a smile and what's your own generally about the ufo existence so I think this deserves an answer please yeah no actually I think the my personal experience with UFO is an octopus I think the octopus is the alien in our midst and I'm still totally fascinated by the octopus but it's a project that I did that basically involved two people sitting across each other let's see if I have a better image here oh that's not working sorry um anyway the point is I think that the UFOs is this one the octopus um sometimes I feel like an alien I have not had experiences with meeting aliens but I did meet people who have and uh and and swear by it um so I think for sure there's a much more life uh just like we're so egocentric about being in charge of this planet and not being conscious or aware of consciousness of other creatures on this planet um and and the idea that everything is consciousness around us equally it's pretty egocentric to think that there's nothing else no other consciousness in the entire system I mean it's ridiculous so of course there's different life forms and different consciousness and potentially much much much higher than ours exactly thank you sorry for the interruption so uh I guess would you like to go back to just the the project that's going to happen now sure so I um I put two links here one is for the the project side itself and the other one is for the integral um but you know the the this winter solstice is actually really an important one there's going to be a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn that's not going to happen again for another 600 years and the planets are I mean astrologically it's important and astronomically it's important so I'm really feeling that the looking into space and thinking of ourselves as planetary citizens is really the most important thing we can do so this is a meditation that will be collected and the way we're imagining it you can take a look actually on the side too so what we're what we're planning is you get a AR of a meteorite uh we have sounds that are baneural and you go from one planet to the next um I mean one continent to the next so we're going from each meteorite that I showed you earlier now animated we follow with our minds how it crashes and then explodes into dust and the dust is actually a mixture of the pollution dust and the space dust and the meditation is how to stay centered when everything's falling apart so in a way it's a training we're also so at the integratron what they do is these sound bowls sound baths I should say so they have 13 crystal bowls that people lay down in this incredible acoustic space and the frequencies are meant to get you into other space obviously we took samples from each of the sound bowls and so when you register and you log in you get a sample of one of the seven sounds of the sound bowl and that becomes a collective sound wave so it's actually we're feeding in the sound of everybody's choice and then feeding it back so there's this kind of a loop of sound and image and then you have of course the layering of the anxiety and the drone and the space sounds and the visuals so it's a immersive experience without you having to go anywhere or move anywhere is this something we can sorry sorry sorry I didn't want to interrupt is this Victoria is this something which we could experience altogether via via zoom or the internet yes yes so if you go into the site I'll do I'll show you so you basically you register and it's going to be the integratron is treating it like a concert really so you book a ticket you go in you get your pass and then the meditation starts the thing about we're also planning to so there's only three of us who will be on site and the rest is all virtual and we would want as many people as possible obviously because the whole thing about winter solstice is that the lights coming back and and it's something that people have been having rituals about since the beginning of time really so we're and then it's such a important moment if you think about what's going on I'll pull it up so you have I'll just read it out because it's easy I'll just read it out so on this day it's the first conjunction since the year 2000 and it's the closest conjunction since 1623 so it's really just amazing and the Jupiter Saturn on this day will be only 0.1 degrees apart which is really really close right and it's not going to happen again until 2080 so it's it's just like such a magnificent event one of the things that we're trying to work out and maybe I can get some feedback here we set the the whole event to be at sundown in california which would be around 4 30 p.m. and then at last for about half an hour before that we have a sequence of different events going on so there's some talks some meditation some playful things but I've been realizing a number of people from europe who are writing me and saying wait that's like two in the morning for me so we're thinking maybe to do it twice to actually do one earlier at noon and then have like a time where we do a talk and other things and then do it again um what do you think good idea yes yeah it's just too much in the middle of the night so we're actually you know we yesterday we were discussing it almost artists would say you should just do it 24 hours so we have people actually that was initially the first idea and we were planning to have something live the entire time so yeah no that's not it's not off the table it's just that the to actually put all of us together and make it work in a focused way should be points in time you know so so it's um there will be the drone and the kovit will keep going so yes so what we're going to say is a live image from the integretron with the projection mapping of the meteorites on the on the integretron and you'll hear these two sounds they'll just keep going so even with of course sleeping it's just gonna keep going and then like next meditation will be at right and we'll just do it and we will have some oh i should mention this is really important so Anna Nahir who's from Poland slash Slovakia i've been working with online and she does amazing work with her voice polyponic kind of work um she'll join so actually this is how the whole conversation started first people were saying wait it's the middle of night and then second was Anna was like oh it's 2 30 in the morning let's and then she said i'll do it anyway and i thought no you were gonna be so tired um so okay it's decided we'll do one um it's 1 p.m so that would be 10 p.m is that too late or no we're fine 10 p.m 10 p.m sounds good and then you go to sleep and have crazy dreams all right thank you for letting me um in the talk to you about this i could work it out i will have to change it uh you totally want headphones because paul uh actually paul gelus is an expert on surround sound he teaches that at NYU and we've been working for years together and now he's obsessed as i am with really taking the binaural sound to another level so you know for sure i have headphones for the experience uh maybe i just want to ask on this point of experience how the online the museum the gallery your phone everyday situations how do you see these different kind of ways of entering your work or how do they is there a preference is there a way that you are working just now where these things can actually easily somehow spread like dust into the other kinds of ways of presenting it and actually kind of getting in touch with the work you know that there's good and bad to everything right i mean of course we want to be together we're such group animals and we want to be in space and of course um but on the other hand this couldn't have happened there's events that literally people from different parts of the world come together that normally wouldn't certainly opens up to parts of the world that have been ignored because it's been so western centric so to be in in Prague or Belgrade or places like that actually really means a lot to me i feel like it's always an effort to do that um i've always worked online it's just been well kind of a parallel thing for me i had projects you know doing vrml in the you know 90s so to me it's not a foreign land i i'm not like having to adjust it's more like oh this is great i can actually expand on this so i don't it doesn't bother me uh it's it's a little bit tough with teaching because um for instance my graduate seminar meets at five p.m which means that by the time they get to my class they're so zoomed out including me i mean we're just sitting on zoom zoom zoom so trying to figure out both in my work and in teaching how to get people off the zoom and back and go back and forth in interesting ways i've devised these exercises that require pencil and paper only and i we have a class that's two hours i give them an hour to with an assignment to do some map drawing whatever it ends up being part of the discussion there has to be pencil and they have to share it after an hour so i know that they're not going off and just hanging up and and it's been really wonderful to have those extremes in the sense that you completely have to unplug you have to completely unplug and then completely plug in right so these kind of extremes is what we're trying to balance and it seems to be the general challenge collectively also we have these extremes constantly and how do you balance it how do you create how do you exist in the middle so you're constantly doing that and just exploring where it's going to take us we're all changing and everything will be different when we come back from this pandemic and we don't know exactly how so that uncertainty can be unnerving but i think it's also important not to stand still it's important to figure out which way we're moving and and keep going because we could be left behind or things can really fall apart um so i don't i don't mind it honestly um but i also feel that it's not a time to to stand still we have to connect and work on shifting our collective vibration and there is another question from a student there is one actually above with nicola tesla first so i guess there are two questions connected so where's the nicola tesla one just above so oh yes i'm wondering are you researching about nicola teslas research if it's even available to get it or if it's in your interest if it's helpful for you because it's maybe considered as old knowledge by now or maybe not oh come on no i mean nicola tesla i wear a t-shirt of his every day i should have worn it today all right so let me tell you my life story so my father was a diplomat from ex-yugoslavia from titus yugoslavia and i grew up in indonesia and then we went to back to new york and that's where i went to high school and so when we were in new york this is 70s new york i was like 10 11 12 something like that enough to get damaged for life right because new york and 70s was very intense my parents were very dizzy so boom anyway my father was obsessed with helping to put a monument to nicola tesla on the Niagara falls because he was shocked that no americans knew who nicola tesla was and so it became this big research project and he was dragging me around so we went and met his cousins we went to the hotel in first avenue and first street where he passed away we met people scientists who were obsessed with him we went to Princeton to the university to some laboratories and nuclear physics and and all of this was just me being dragged around so it just went into my subconscious like it just kind of went like this but it keeps coming back into my life like there's nicola tesla just is part of my life in fact one of the places where i went to search for dust was the nicola tesla museum in belgrade i thought oh i wonder if some special dust fell here nobody asked me anything nobody nobody asked like excuse me there's no more things and i didn't find any stardust i'm sorry to say no i i actually i'm still very much amazed there's there's still so much to learn from him and he actually said he talked to the ufo's you know he there's an interview with him where he says he talked to aliens you know and people say oh he's mad but you know maybe i mean who knows maybe he did obviously he brought amazing knowledge to the world wireless this is tesla's work the wireless technology this totally directly so the answer long answer is yes and i'm wondering have you found some substance from so-called black holes or if it's ever done or if you think you have no i mean you give me too much credit um no i mean i have a student who's obsessed with black holes and so i actually find through him a lot of information okay i don't think about it he's like wow there's another thing about black hole um no but it's super interesting and and i think um you should look into it alexandra okay yeah you should check it out are you living in Prague or where are you yes in Prague but i'm wondering the reason and more about the research from nikola tesla uh how is it the confidential information or is it easily accessible it's not you know um you can find a lot a lot of it was as you know taken away so we don't really have access to it but you can find a lot even online you can find a lot of information and um there's groups that are focused on it um even if you go contact the tesla museum in belgrade that they can probably connect you or give you information and there's scientists who are researching this especially the research the later research where he was working with electromagnetic fields and borders and frequencies and i teach a class that's called vibration matters and it's all about frequencies and vibrations so we go into tesla's work for sure and also the sonic warfare that's going on um anna was telling me that there was so many demonstrations and war so as you know and she was saying that they were actually planning to utilize sonic warfare on their own citizens which is like mind blowing and then if you think of um the recent uh incidents in cuba where some of the diplomats had these horrible headaches and something was going on and it turns out that there was sonic um interference going on so everything is good and bad you know there's we don't have the light without the dark and that's where the black hole is actually interesting because it's the dark side that's behind the light thank you so much thank you for the questions and the interest i wish i could see the other people here oh this is the moment where it would be really nice to have people kind of present it's so good yay there's humans there's humans here so can you introduce yourself to me yeah better you start should i call you out i'll call you out irina hello all right you already know my name thank you so much for the lecture i'm a an amazing student on fine art and i have already graduated from future design all here in brak college and yeah i work mostly with things connected to nature and perform as well wonderful and kersti kersti hi hi um so do you hear the echo yeah you're coming from another space i'm a master student for the finite fine art departments work with sculptures uh for my masters i'm taking apart computers and putting them together together into different things i'm working with kind of computers and spirituality um computer screen wow that's so beautiful oh my goodness next wednesday people can come and see these sitar studios oh i'd love that i'd definitely come how beautiful and george has somebody there many me yes i've been attentively listening to the entire talk this evening oh no come on really a budding a budding artist scientist here absolutely hi hi so alexandra is it another me student here as well she already introduced herself jenia is a da student who is also from brak college hi hi hello and i'm afraid to ask me questions by the way as so emilia i'm actually glad that facebook cancels so we can just do this in a more intimate group so i mean there's no reason to be too self-conscious because we depending on what people prefer we can keep this off of the record to meet your friends marcus is here with us hi hi how you doing hi marcus i teach um graphic design and illustration over at t-side and we're affiliated with prab college so i was invited along to this so thanks for the talk that was really cool i do have a question um if you don't mind me asking no of course if space time travel was possible would you would you head into the future or would you head into the past i'm always sort of curious about whether people kind of go forward or kind of backwards um that that kind of question popped in my head following your your talk that's an interesting question actually and because i keep struggling to be in the present yeah okay so my my big struggle is to like be here and actually pay attention to in this case squares and you know people in the squares um i think we're always in the past and the future but if i had a choice to travel i would probably go into the future yeah yeah sure if i if somebody says you got to go let's go to the future of course the future why do i want to go to the past yeah great but really i'm interested in in um being in the present and and then the future and the past is what informs you anyway yeah right yeah so great thank you thank you for that provoking question all right so kelly yes kelly is there as well yeah i'm here i've been uh off camera wrapping my christmas presents while i listen oh cool but wrapping with star um paper as you're talking about star dust and nice things for my family in new york while you're talking about you were living in new york so this is really nice two activities to join together thank you it's really interesting and i would love to join the meditation that's uh planned as well yeah so now we just shifted that my group's gonna go what we're doing another one like yeah there's a demand yeah i think this is an important time for that so it's really really is um critical time emilia hi i'm also connect some my project with this cosmic idea because it's so fascinating for me that's really cool so you have a question emilia um sorry i can't hear you do you have a question okay isabel i'd love to see you yay hi i think you're muted hi sorry good evening amazing lecture thank you very much um you're welcome it's it's one of those talks where i just don't have any question because the things that you gave us tonight just makes you think deeply you know so i've i've just been digesting this whole thing um but i especially love what you said about well by the way i'm a future design student um and i'm studying uh experience design right now in kind of a different way but what i love one thing that i love about your lecture um what you said previously was this thing about showing people things that we don't see on not just because they're so small but we don't think about these things you know and also hearing things that we don't really hear and because i've been reading a lot about our senses as perceptual systems because that's that's one element of experience design that i'm studying about and so yeah that's one thing i love and so after your lecture i just opened my my 3d software and just kind of messing with geometry just because of the things that you showed earlier i just want to simulate something like this so yeah i always have this fantasy that students from different classes come together and share things and i'm actually thinking you know that academia is falling apart as we know it which may be a good thing i think it may be a good thing and i'm trying to think how it would how it will reframe itself like how it'll become more hybrid where students can i mean the i'm imagining it more like we meet this way but then we meet in person and these intensive two week things and then go away and keep keep going this way something like that so like when you're talking isabel i'm thinking wow she should meet ellie and talk to her about you know houdini and 3d and ar and work i would love to i mean that's what i mean so how do we create these kind of educational spaces i guess marcus that's a question for you too you must be thinking of the same thing yeah i completely agree i've had some conversations around around that that we need more intensive weeks and spaces where students can create a more open question in work because i think you know you kind of worry and check in kind of every week with students been online and actually it's it's making us rethink how we should be working with students online so totally agree there needs to be much more kind of questioning and thoughts around around that yeah let's see how it's all gonna how the dust will vary from from itself so let's see did i hear from everybody so alexandra you have another question there's a lot of curiosity coming from her before that i want to meet jackie you got me now right my name is jackie tanikliffe i'm doing an ma at memer school in um the fine arts and design in twoside and um my project at this moment is uh where science meets art and um i'm looking at ai and i'm also looking at as one of a few other students have been talking about here about um taking computers apart making art from the the components and things like that and i'm also looking at um a study with covid too um about the care homes here in england and i'm looking at making some kind of um relationship with the binary system to the people that have passed away in our care homes so when you were talking about what you did about with all the cones and the miles and the covid situation i'm totally related to that because i'm trying to look at something similar interesting yeah i mean there's so much going on with ai and um i'd like to just turn your attention to a life i think uh it's being ignored but actually artificial life is the really interesting stuff that is being ignored because ai ai is so much easier to control and and to manipulate etc um but do take a look at a life a little bit i'm really a proponent of reviving that that kind of was big in the 90s and then because a life is is about complexity and it is about looking at how life works and how unpredictable it is you know the whole corporate industry just dropped it like let's just do this so take a look at a little life thank you very much sure and we forget anybody did we see everybody no no i think this is all of us because the arena and you spoke at the beginning so the two okay so now alexandra yeah i'm just wondering i don't know if the question is relevant or not but i'm i'm wondering if you ever have been compared to marina bramo which work the cleaner where the viewer is uh in a meditative exhibition no i mean her name comes up a lot and um maybe it's because of similar background and similar um interest in performative works um but not really i i think um the the thing about marina's work i find fascinating is that she can really capture people's imagination and tap into a lot of uh spiritual stuff without making it to like new agey and she keeps going i mean it's it's really inspiring you know to just see like in her 70s she's still making waves so um but i haven't no and and it's not necessarily my my go to for inspiration i i was more um inspired by rock bands punk rock um i'm just it's a no but and like those kind of performers where it's like audience and like they jump into the audience i love that um i also like making myself invisible so that um when the performative stuff happens people don't even know who created it so it's like they're they're the center of it but you know like it's their thing that kind of do that even consciously so you learn from everybody really kind of observe but ultimately it's about finding your own voice okay thank you thank you and i think this is a good point to to close the finding your own voice exactly speaking of the voice i mean i would i think we all would love to finish with hearing and seeing a bit more of the project itself but the alien stardust so i don't know if this can be the last thing we do together so it feels like let's do it let's do a short alien stardust meditation let me let me just pull it up if you have headphones please put them on and so it goes thank you so much thank you thank you so thank you so um for the for this version that we're doing um that was a little teaser for this version that we're doing we're actually um going to give people a sound file and the ar file so regardless of what kind of connection you have you actually are still having a shared experience that will be another layer to all the sounds we've been really experimenting with that and it's pretty cool because no matter what the connection is whether it goes up or down which is part of it really you have a sound that's going from your desktop so it's a kind of a solid sound and it really does require headphones because all the sounds that i told you about the layering you're feeling them kind of going all around you well there it is thank you so much bye for joining and for the questions