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 visible systems.
Respondents
ELLEN K. LEVY, a multi-media artist and writer, is a past president of the College Art Association who explores interrelationships among art, evolution, and complex systems. Levy highlights them through exhibitions, educational programs, publications, and curatorial opportunities. Levy has exhibited widely and was recipient of an AICA award and an arts commission from NASA following a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences (1985). She has exhibited her art in such landmark exhibitions as Weather Report (Boulder Museum, cur Lucy Lippard), Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (Field Museum, Chicago, adv. Martin Kemp), and the second Moscow Biennial. Her art has been reviewed in The New York Times, Issues (published by the National Academy of Science), and many other publications. She was guest editor of CAA’s special issue of Art Journal (spring 1996), the first widely distributed academic publication on contemporary art and the genetic code. Before earning her doctorate (University of Plymouth, UK, 2012), she was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences (Skidmore College, 1999). She has taught at The New School and Brooklyn College and was special advisor on art, science, and technology to the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Levy and Charissa Terranova are co-editors of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design: From Forces to Forms (Bloomsbury Publications, 2021). With Barbara Larson, Levy is co-editor of the “Science and the Arts since 1750” book series, Routledge Press.
NENE HUMPHREY was born in Portage, Wisconsin and has lived in New York since 1978. Her work explores loss, the neurobiology of emotion and the beauty inherent in both. The integration of art and science is fundamental to Humphrey’s practice. As a long-term artist in residence at New York University’s LeDoux Lab, she collaborates with neuroscientists to depict the seemingly infinite space of emotion and memory as it is processed in the brain. This work includes, drawing, field recordings and videos, and is integrated into performances, installations, sculpture and video works. Humphrey has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Sculpture Center, New York, NY the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, Mead Museum, Amherst, MA, Palmer Museum, PA, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, NY. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, Brown Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Dora Maar Foundation, Watermill Arts and Anonymous was a Woman among others. Her work has been written about in numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America and ArtNews, Sculpture Magazine, and Hyperallergic.