Are art and science two completely different, unrelated areas of learning?
Some people may think so, but the researchers, professors and students in the Science Technology Arts + Creativity (STAC) and WetLab programs in New York University’s groundbreaking Gallatin School of Independent Study know that art and science have been intertwined for centuries.
— an announcement from the Bruce Museum
On Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022 at 7 p,m,, via Zoom webinar, the Bruce Museum will present The Future of Art/Science: Teaching in the Living Laboratory, a look at how one of America’s premier universities uses student-driven creativity and entrepreneurism as well as a makerspace, workshops, and even the waterfront of Governor’s Island in New York Harbor to explore the latest concepts in immersive art/science learning.
Speakers will include three NYU professors (Cyd Cipolla, Ph.D., associate director of science, technology, arts and creativity and administrative director of the Gallatin WetLab; Karen Holmberg, Ph.D., scientific director of the Gallatin WetLab; Eugenia Kisin, Ph.D., artistic director of the Gallatin WetLab).
Photo by Nate Dorr
Ceramic piece by WetLab students Rhea Barve and Kris Waymire.
Also on on the list of speakers are three current students and/or alumni: (Troy Gibbs-Brown, environmental arts theorist; Annick Saralegui, scholar of regenerative futures; and Blair Simmons, adjunct faculty, Interactive Telecommunications and Interactive Media Arts programs, NYU Tisch School of the Arts).
Bruce Presents co-producer and NYU Gallatin alum Leonard Jacobs will moderate the event.
If You’re Attending …
To join this online, live-streamed Zoom webinar, visit the Bruce Museum website and click on the Reservations button to sign up. Tickets are free for Bruce Museum Members; $20 for non-members.
“It’s so exciting to encounter a group of people in a university setting who are exploring the latest concepts in immersive art/science learning with such a gift for experimentation and discovery,” said Bruce Museum Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director Suzanne Lio.
“The STAC program at NYU is really the definition of interdisciplinary, sitting at the crossroads of science, technology, arts and creativity as it cultivates and shapes the next generation of innovative artists and scientists.”
Panel Discussion Members
Cyd Cipolla is a scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, with a focus in intersectional feminist theory and radically inclusive, accessible, queer technoscience.
Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, the Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics and Women’s Studies, an Interdisciplinary Journal. She is a coeditor of Queer Feminist Science Studies (UW Press, 2017). Cyd founded the Dismantle series, a program promoting meditation on material and philosophical meanings of disassembly which is entering its third iteration this year with Dismantle/Co-Create.
She teaches courses and mentors student research in art-science tinkering, feminist, queer, indigenous and anti-racist science studies, and the ethics of artificial bodies and minds, as well as overseeing Gallatin’s entrepreneurial project funds. Cyd is always and forever interested in pedagogy at the intersection of science and the humanities, breaking down the boundaries between crafting and engineering, and facilitating playful engagements between human and non-human machines.
Troy Gibbs-Brown is an artist and ecological researcher, investigating the human relationships to the environment. Troy’s work intersects with disciplines such as ecosystem forecasting, art theory and curatorial studies, ethics and philosophy, and urban greenery maintenance.
His research aspirations reside in marine and Arctic systems and their interactions with remote regions. He is particularly interested in amplifying the environmental knowledge of indigenous and other marginalized populations to unify the human perception of the natural world. In 2021, Troy conducted independent undergraduate research on Hudson River habitat suitability, as well as a co-curated digital exhibition on experiences with climate crises.
Karen Holmberg is an archaeologist who specializes in volcanic contexts to examine the long-term experiences humans have had with environments that change unpredictably.
She is interested in how the past can aid understanding of the environmental challenges and crises of the 21st century, particularly in the Global South. Holmberg received her Ph.D. from Columbia University after which she taught at Brown and Stanford Universities.
Her doctoral work was funded by Fulbright, Mellon, and Wenner-Gren awards. She is the recipient of awards including a Creating Earth Futures award from the Geohumanities Centre of Royal Holloway University and the Leverhulme Trust, Make Our Planet Great Again award to collaborate with the Laboratoire de Géographie Physique at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, and the This is Not a Drill award through the NYU-Tisch Future Imagination Fund that utilizes public pedagogy to address the intractable social problems of the climate emergency through technology, the arts, and critical thinking.
Some recent science outreach activities include an appearance as a volcano expert on a new Disney+ game show for children that teaches science and critical thinking skills, The Big Fib; an immersive art-science piece, Double-Sided Immersion, at ZKM gallery in Karlsruhe, Germany as part of the ‘Critical Zones’ exhibition (May 2020 to January 2022) curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel; and co-directorship of the New York Virtual Volcano Observatory on Governors Island as Earth science outreach.
Holmberg currently directs interdisciplinary field projects examining past environmental changes and future volcanic risks on coastlines in Patagonia (Chaitén, Chile) and near Naples, Italy (Campi Flegrei); closer to home, she researches the radically transforming past and future coastlines of New York City.
Eugenia Kisin is an assistant professor of art and society whose research and teaching on Indigenous contemporary art foregrounds decolonization and environmental justice in the United States and Canada. Kisin’s forthcoming book, Aesthetics of Repair, considers art’s role in contexts of reparation and transitional justice.
A visual anthropologist by training, she is editor of film and exhibition reviews at Visual Anthropology Review, and teaches interdisciplinary “slow looking” methods in art history and cultural anthropology. She is also co-director of A Museum for Future Fossils, a transnational field school for curating and education on environmental issues in collaboration with community knowledge holders.
Blair Simmons is an interdisciplinary, multimedia artist, researcher, storyteller, and technician. She is interested in logic, language, structures, patterns, maps, math, arrows, analysis, arches, queerness, bodies, organics, and opposites. Her research often materializes into objects and performances. She has taught at CultureHub’s CoLab, Harlem School of the Arts, Children’s Museum of the Arts and is currently teaching at NYU’s Interactive Media Arts program.
Annick Saralegui graduated from NYU Gallatin 2021 with a concentration in Regenerative Futures. Annick’s interests span from art, biodesign, environmental anthropology, and synthetic biology. She is passionate in using biology and technology to devise solutions for sustainable product applications. She currently works in Growth Strategy and Marketing at Ginkgo Bioworks, a bioengineering company.