Hands-on, Minds-on: Informal STEAM Learning

ROBIN GOSE has been a STEM educator for more than 20 years, in both classroom and museum settings. She joined the MOXI team in November 2017 during its inaugural year as Santa Barbara’s newest hands-on science museum and destination for families. In this role, she oversees the museum’s operations, finances, fundraising, outreach, and programming to ensure alignment with the organization’s mission, “to ignite learning through interactive experiences in science and creativity.” She also cultivates relationships with supporters, business and civic leaders, schools, community partners, media, and more to further promote MOXI as a world-class institution for informal science learning.

Robin came to MOXI after three years as director of education at Thinkery in Austin, Texas where she cultivated the pedagogical vision of the institution and oversaw all programming, exhibits and facilities at the latest iteration of what was once the Austin Children’s Museum. Robin’s passion is to

Creating in an Elastic Umwelt

LIZ PHILLIPS is a New York-based artist that has been making interactive multi-media installations for the past 50 years. She creates responsive environments sensing wind, plants, fish, audience, dance, water, and food. Sound is her primary descriptive material. Audio and visual art forms combine with new technologies to create elastic time-space constructs.

Phillips has exhibited interactive sound installations at art museums, alternative spaces, festivals, and public spaces. These include; The Academy of Natural Sciences, The Milwaukee Art Museum, Queens Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Spoleto Festival USA, the Walker Art Museum, Ars Electronica, Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, The Kitchen, Rene Block gallery and Frederieke Taylor Gallery. Phillips has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nam June Paik, Heidi Howard, Earl Howard, Simone Forti and Robert Kovich. Her work was presented by Creative Time, the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM Japan, and

Floating Reflections

CRISTINA ALBU is an art historian, educator, and writer focusing on crossovers between contemporary art, cognitive sciences, and technology. She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Albu is the author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2016) and the co-editor (with Dawna Schuld) of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Her writings have appeared in scholarly anthologies (e.g. Nervous Systems, Hybrid Practices, Framings, The Permanence of the Transient, Crossing Cultures) and journals (e.g. Afterimage, Artnodes, Camera Obscura, and the Comparative Media Arts Journal). At UMKC, Albu teaches courses on global contemporary art, participatory and site-specific tendencies, museum studies, and the role of emotion in art reception. She is currently working on a book which charts how artists have paired neurofeedback technology with sounds and video images to cultivate an embodied understanding of our entanglement in more or less

Motion as Sentience and the Pygmalion Complex

Considered an innovator in the field of interactive and immersive narrative, New York-based artist TONI DOVE creates hybrid performance, installation and screen-based art that fuses film, game or instrument-based interaction with experimental theater. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using technologies such as motion sensing or machine learning to connect with on-screen characters.
Projects include Spectropia: feature length live-mix movie performance: premiered: Wexner Center for the Arts; REDCAT, LA Nov 2007; EMPAC, Troy NY, 2008, the Kitchen, NYC, 2010, Roulette, NY, 2012. Lucid Possession, a live mix music cinema performance, a co-production with Issue Project Room, Roulette and HERE, premiered in NYC in 2013 after a preview show at Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. An interactive cinema and robotics installation ‘The Dress That Eats Souls’, premiered in a survey of 20 years of Dove’s interactive work “Embodied Machines” at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, 2018.
Dove

Otto Peine’s Light Ballet

ANN McCOY is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019. She taught art history, the in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome,

Using low-tech tools like homemade projectors and a camera obscura, TED VICTORIA creates illusory images and installations known for their lifelike qualities. For example, with Infestation(2009), Victoria transformed a museum facade into an aquarium brimming with sharks; it was actually projections of brine shrimp swimming around in small aquariums on the inside of every window. Likewise, in a series of intricate projections mimicking boxed displays, Victoria questioned perceptions of reality: what appeared to be framed objects (a ring, a feather, a pair of pliers) in motion were actually reflections of the objects’ image created on glass, made possible by a hidden construction of lights, timed motors, lenses, and mirrors. The effect is that the isolated objects—truly seeming as if they were contained in the boxes—come across as simultaneously disconnected from reality and very real.

KRISTIN JONES maintains both studio and public practices, working collaboratively across disciplines to create site-specific, time-based projects that frame natural phenomena against the built environment.  With a deep commitment to public projects and the belief that art is a powerful vehicle for urban renewal and environmental awareness, Jones has spent her career creating large-scale collaborative works for the public domain. Jones was a member of the ‘Dream Team’ for the master plan for Hudson River Park. She has devoted more than 16 years to the founding of the Rome-based non-profit TEVERETERNO. By partnering with a treasury of artists, colleagues and the City of Rome to raise awareness of the Tiber River, Jones directed and facilitated programs for its protection and revitalization. Her installations, works on and paper and time-lapse photography have been exhibited internationally.  Jones holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She is

JAMES WINES is the founder and president of SITE, an environmental art and architecture organization chartered in New York City in 1970. He is the former Chairman of Environmental  Design at Parsons School of Design and a Professor of Architecture at Penn State University.  His architecture, landscape and public space projects are based on a site-specific response to surrounding contexts. Prof. Wines’ educational philosophy advocates ‘integrative thinking,’ as  a means of including multi-disciplinary ideas from outside the design profesions. He has  written seven books on art and design, including ON SITE-ON ENERGY – Scribners & Sons  1974, DE-ARCHITECTURE – Rizzoli International 1987 and GREEN ARCHITECTURE – Taschen Verlag 2000. He has designed more than one hundred and fifty buildings and  environmental art works for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He is the  recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime  Achievement, the ANCE Annual Award for an International Architect (Italy 2011) and the  Chrysler Award

SALLY WEBER is an independent light artist based in Oakland, California. Weber grew up in the Northeast, earning her Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She trained with Otto Piene, Director of the Center and a founder of Group Zero, and Harriet Casdin-Silver, a pioneer artist in the development and artistic uses of optical holography.

Weber’s interest in light inspires her work using optical and digital holography, video, dimensional photography, and laser installations. Her work focuses on revealing the immediacy of the essential natural forces underlying life and the patterns that interconnect them. She has produced numerous public art installations and private commissions and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX, the Museo of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, the Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary, and the Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany.

Sally Weber in conversation with Victoria