COLOR LIGHT MOTION SERIES

METABOLIC SKIES

Patricia Olynyk is an artist, writer, and educator whose work explores science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of the world. In 2007, she was appointed inaugural director of the unified Graduate School of Art and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University. She is Producer of the Creative Disturbance Podcast Series, Emergent Habitability, a program that explores the dynamic entanglement of humans, technologies, and cultural systems.

Olynyk also co-chairs the Leonardo NY LASER Talks program in New York with Ellen K. Levy. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and museums internationally, including the Los Angeles Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne, the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Ars Electronica, Linz, Vienna Art Week, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writing is included in Public Journal

CURATING IMMERSIVE WORLDS: AI VISIONS, SPATIAL NARRATIVE, AND SPECULATIVE MEDIA ARCHITECTURES

A rethinking of the New Media Architectures (NMA) conceptual framework emerges as media arts research and technology continue to evolve through a series of curatorial investigations situated at the intersection of art, design, education, and immersive virtual environments (IVE) research. This presentation explores a journey through the language of experimental media design practices and speculative spatial systems that examine the future of artistic production, technological and sensory culture, and interdisciplinary research.

The presentation frames an Art, Architecture, and Media Arts & Sciences research practice grounded in immersive design-engineered environments, computational worldmaking practices, and augmented media curatorial experiments. A range of creative research collaborations will be discussed, from investigations developed through the AlloSphere Research Facility to exhibition and community engagement initiatives presented through ACM SIGGRAPH conferences. The presentation will also reflect on a continuing series of online dialogues initiated at the beginning of the pandemic that explored AI, architecture, emerging

VISUALIZING DURATION: A QUANTUM PERSPECTIVE

This presentation offers an artist’s perspective on the fascinating interplay between science and fine art, particularly exploring the roles of duration, observer, chance, and uncertainty. Throughout the 20th century, radical experimental artists have challenged the fundamental questions brought to the surface by quantum mechanics, highlighting the invisible forces at play. Here, the observer is integral to quantum physics, becoming part of what is observed, shaping the visualisations of the elusive quantum phenomena.

Drawing examples of two artists, Thomas Wilfred, and Takis from the David Bermant Foundation, and artwork from Dr. Paul Thomas’ own practice, he will discuss the concepts of duration from a quantum perspective in connection to related visualising phenomena. The artworks create visual sensations and expressions of the immense complexity of visualising the invisible, ineffable, and intangible.

Dr. Paul Thomas, Honorary Professor at UNSW Art and Design and founder of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Art Research as well as the founder and series-chair of

SHAPING EXPERIMENTAL ARTS 1982-2025

CAROL PARKINSON, Executive Director of Harvestworks, NY, for 37 years since 1987, has focused on the development of experimental artworks that explore sound, data, and other emerging technologies. Parkinson’s professional services include panel participation at the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parkinson is the Executive Producer of the New York Electronic Art Festival, a series of workshops, concert performances, and exhibitions centered on art and technology. Parkinson is a founding member of TELLUS, the Audio Cassette Magazine, a cassette–based magazine of experimental music and sound art published between 1982 and 1996.

In her talk, Shaping the Experimental Media Arts in New York City, former Executive Director and current Board Member Carol Parkinson will discuss works from artists in the collection, including Blue Morph by Victoria Vesna in the New York Electronic Art Festival (2011), Alan Rath in The Interactive Show

TENDER BODIES: HYBRID MEDIA + VERDANT KIN

Isabel Beavers (they/she) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles working at the intersections of new media, ecology, and collective action. Across artistic production, curatorial practice and teaching, their research challenges us to imagine adaptive climate futures–ones that rely on alternative modes of knowing as structures for living. Embodied and site-specific research are central to their practice through which they have explored Arctic sea ice melt, plant and human adaptation to wildfire in the American west, deep sea mining, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and eco-feminist re-imaginings of Western mythologies.

Beavers’ work on deep sea mining was recently included in Getty’s 2024 PST Art + Science Collide as part of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean. Beavers is the Artistic Director of Supercollider LA, and the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS at Harvey Mudd University. Through artistic practice, teaching, and curating, they foster communities of care and experimentation,

Composer JOANN KUCHERA-MORIN is Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media systems content and facilities design. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of Professor Kuchera-Morin’s creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. Scientifically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture—abstract higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow. Artistically, it

VAL RAVAGLIA is Curator, Displays and International Art at Tate Modern, London, and Curator of Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet. They assisted with the complete rehang of Tate Modern’s Collection Displays in 2015-16 and have curated numerous collection display rooms since 2012. They co-curated the Tate Modern exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992 (2021-2023) and led the touring Tate exhibition The Dynamic Eye: Beyond Op and Kinetic Art. They were the Assistant Curator for the 2017 Turbine Hall Commission by SUPERFLEX and Tate Modern’s Nam June Paik retrospective. Their research interests include the intersections of art, science, and technology, as well as non-anthropocentric philosophies and the posthumanities.

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FRANCESCA FRANCO, PhD, is an independent curator, art historian, and producer based in the UK and Italy. Her research on the history of early computer art and its pioneers has been widely published and translated. Her recent books include Generative Systems Art

AMBER STUCKE is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. She identifies her work within ideas of social relationships situated between artistic research, science and imagination. Through materials of sound and language, performance, installations, embodied and appropriated drawings, scientific prints and DIY artist books, her research interests include questions of symbiotic and rhizomatic relationships, Native American ethnobotany, local knowledge systems, plant-human relationships, evolutionary biology, consciousness, and the appropriation of visual scientific classification structures.

Since 2019, her interdisciplinary practice advocates for the preservation of Native American language, which is inspired by her early and continuing relationships with both Anishinaabeg and Lakota Sioux from growing up in the Chicago Metropolitan area.

Stucke holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has also had additional studies at Goldsmith’s College in London and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, CA),

In the Belly of the Beast – Southern California Art, Technology, Science and Society Nexus – A Historical Landscape

MARKO PELJHAN is a distinguished artist, researcher, and professor whose work spans the fields of art, technology, and science. Born in 1969 in Slovenia, he has significantly contributed to new media art through his innovative projects and research. Peljhan co-founded the arts and technology organization Projekt Atol in 1992 and played a crucial role in establishing the Ljubljana-based new-media laboratory Ljudmila a year later.

One of his most notable projects is Makrolab, an autonomous communications and research laboratory focused on weather, climate, telecommunications and migrations research, First presented at Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Makrolab has since operated in various locations around the world, including Western Australia, Venetian Lagoon and the Scottish Highlands. Peljhan’s work often addresses themes of surveillance, geopolitics, and environmental issues. Among others he co-founded the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation in 2002 and in 2008 with

Ingeborg Reichle | Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Sculptures and Living Machines

INGEBORG REICHLE is a Berlin-based contemporary art historian and curator at the intersection of art and technoscience. In 2004 she gained her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University Berlin with the dissertation Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer 2009). In recent years she served as Professor in the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and as founding chair of the Department of Cross-disciplinary Strategies (CDS), where she designed an integrated BA study program on applied studies in art, science, philosophy, and global challenges. Recent curatorial projects include the sci-art program NaturArchy at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, the European Commission’s science and knowledge service and the sci-art program NanoARTS by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In 2022 she joined the Board of Trustees of the ZKM Center for Art