ARTWORKS
Lexygius Sanchez Calip, Three Actions, 2021
Three Actions are gifts, presents that underscore trauma, uncertainty, impermanence, and energy of constant change. They hold a fragility that makes me feel worthy and unworthy at the same time. They speak of the things I see and don’t see, of the ones I acknowledge and often overlook. They are expressions of my liminal affairs with time, space, and place that constantly traverse within the cracks; romances that occur within thresholds that briefly open for me to pass through. They are lexes of delicate memories that are always ever fragile, for once it has gone, like life, it never comes back the same as it was.
Laura Hyunjhee Kim, LIVING LAB: Soul (Re)cycling with Raccoons in Human-Time, 2021
Soul (Re)cycling with Raccoons in Human-Time (Video, 2020) is a single-channel video project that is part of an ongoing experimental practice-based research series titled “Living Lab.” A Living Lab focuses on the body as a feelosophical medium and a somatic laboratory for art-in-the-making. As a multimedia artifact of the “Living Lab,” Soul (Re)cycling with Raccoons in Human-Time was created while in self-isolation during the pandemic. The piece was inspired from taking short nightly walks around the block and sharing moments of pause, locking eyes with numerous nocturnal scavengers in the neighborhood dumpster. The work positions a (non)human raccoon as a speculative fitness instructor and playfully remixes zoological studies with language from the tele-fitness industry, specifically that of indoor cycling classes and live stream workout products. By embodying the persona of a raccoon, speaking to and from them on “how to survive in human-time,” the (non)human performance becomes a complex site for tending to an improbable future, troubling the fragility of timescales — which time are “we” ready to survive in and whose survival are “we” preparing for. In short, the project intends to explore the indeterminacy of cohabitation-in-the-making for survival: the absurd processes of anthropomorphizing that helps humans reimagine kinship with nonhumans and the necessity to share resources and maintain a balanced relationship with all (non)living beings in the biosphere for coexistence.
Patricia Olynyk, The Dutch Suicide from The Mutable Archive
https://vimeo.com/481452979
password: MA2020 (The Dutch Suicide is the first video at this link, which includes other segments from The Mutable Archive.)
The Mutable Archive is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, multi-media project that exposes the role of assumption and subjectivity in science. Research and narrative storytelling are united in the interrogation of an anatomical collection, split between two continents. In the first video performance, artist Buzz Spector reads a script about a Dutch suicide in the collection. While the grey Dutch weather exacerbates the pain experience of the subject, the ocean is a tonic and a wish that the lapping waves brought her strength, energy and vitality before her untimely demise. The piece culminates with the restorative energy of the tide, lapping hypnotically on the shore and with the promise of new life.
Ed Osborn, Waybriar, 2020, Single-channel video, stereo sound. Running time: 35:32
Demo clip with edited excerpts: https://www.roving.net/video#/waybriar/
Five minute continuous excerpt: https://vimeo.com/607817711
Waybriar is built from a video and audio recording of a slow walk through a meadow in upstate New York. It is one of a series of pieces in which close listening and viewing is used to navigate site and place in an idiosyncratic manner. In them natural spaces are documented in both micro and macro scales, focusing on both small details and long timeframes. This approach results in recordings that are not traditionally representational, but instead reflect the experience of moving into the sites’ geographies in personal ways. Here a single, uninterrupted infrared shot is used to explore the site visually, while the audio from it is processed to slowly shift away from a depiction of real-time acoustic field to an impressionistic representation of a soundspace derived from the explorations of the site.
Meredith Tromble, Eating Light, 2021 Single-channel video, stereo sound. Running time: 4:16 Work in progress. Eating Light v.1 is in progress, please do not share this link outside SLSA. The password is “joule”. Thank you!
PASSWORD: joule
Plants from my neighborhood star with Donna Sternberg & Dancers in this video, dancing through the transformation of energy into matter that we call photosynthesis. With the structure of an explanatory science video and a heart inspired by one of Joseph Beuys’s blackboard drawings, it puts different kinds of knowledge together in my own way.
Gail Wight, Homage to the Wind (after Albers), 2012 (excerpts) 5:09 (full length is 16:09)
Note to viewers: Please be sure to set the quality to 720p under the settings icon in the lower right (it looks like a gear)! Working on making this automatic before actual conference, but for now it has to be changed manually.)
http://stanford.edu/~gailw/Wight_Projects/Homage.html
These videos borrow the structure of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square. In the 1950s, Albers was questioning how we see color, using juxtaposition and setting to challenge what we think of as “yellow” or “gray” or “green.” Using his structure of nested rectangles, I wanted to challenge my own presumptions about my environment. What do I think of as “sky” or “ocean” or “trees”? These short videos are studies to that effect. What emerged was not what I’d expected. Each of these five sections – sky, grass, ocean, tide pool and trees – revealed themselves to be portraits of the wind. So much of what I was seeing – color, texture, granularity – was moderated by the constantly moving atmosphere. The presence – or absence – of the wind could not be extracted from my experience. In one sense, these videos became studies in learning to see the invisible.
The Witches Collective, The Whispering Giant, 2021 (audio with video)
The Whispering Giant is an audio/video celebration of Earth’s most ancient inhabitant, a massive quaking aspen found in Utah called Pando. Overgrazing by cattle and deer has severely damaged this clonal colony in recent years, but thriving healthy sprouts have been discovered within fenced-off sections of this forest-like organism. While sunrays absorbed by green and yellow leaves can be observed visually, the sound of water nourishing trunk interiors can be audibly perceived through amplification. The clicks and pops heard within this lengthy 40 minute track – alluding to the approximately 80,000 years Pando has been spreading out like a forest—are a digital simulation of the sound of a tree drinking water.Each project by The Witches—Kate Rannells, Eliza-Phelan Harder and Giuliana Funkhouser—hopes to re-enforce our interconnectedness with trees. Giuliana Funkhouser will represent The Witches at SLSA.
Participant Bios
Ed Osborn (Co-Chair), Brown University
Ed Osborn works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. Osborn has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, and Arts International and been awarded residencies from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Het Apollohuis (Eindhoven, Netherlands), STEIM (Amsterdam), and EMPAC (Troy, NY). He has presented his work at SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), the singuhr-hörgalerie (Berlin, Germany), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), Artspace (Sydney, Australia), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), MassMOCA (North Adams, MA), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, Northern Ireland). He is Associate Professor of Visual Art and Music at Brown University (Providence, RI).
www.roving.net
Meredith Tromble (Co-Chair), San Francisco Arts Institute (SFAI)
Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer who makes installations, drawings, and performances, often in collaboration. Her curiosity about the interaction of imagination and knowledge has led to a number of art/research collaborations, including the Vortex series of interactive artworks with geobiologist Dawn Sumner and multi-media dance with choreographer Donna Sternberg. Her work has been widely presented at venues ranging from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis, to National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C and BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn. Her recent publications include Interspecies Communication, PUBLIC Journal #59. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies/Art & Technology at SFAI. www.meredithtromble.net
Devavani Chatterjea (Respondent), Macalester College
Devavani Chatterjea, Ph.D., MPH is a professor of biology Macalester College and an immunologist who studies the development of T cells, stromal cell signaling in the bone marrow and the roles of mast cells in the initiation of inflammatory pain. Before returning to academia to run her own lab, she worked in the research immunology division of Genentech, Inc. Chatterjea is the associate director of Macalester’s Program in Community and Global Health and is particularly interested in the development of curricula and programs that bring public health education into the context of undergraduate liberal learning. She also explores the use and application of immunological metaphors and frameworks of thought to issues of socio-cultural identity. Her recent work includes collaborative explorations in poetry, performance based ways to communicate her scientific interests. She develops and teaches innovative courses in immunology, immunological research methods and global environmental health, and also serves as the Associate Director of the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching at Macalester. Chatterjea received her BA from Holyoke College, and her PhD from Stanford University.
https://www.macalester.edu/biology/facultystaff/devavanichatterjea/
Dawna Schuld (Respondent), Texas A&M University
Dawna Schuld is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University. Her research concentrates on points of intersection between art, technology, and biology, with an emphasis on how the perceptual phenomena of human experience are implemented in art. She is the author of Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity (The University of California Press, 2018), and co-editor (with Cristina Albu) of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). For her work, Dr. Schuld has been awarded Dana and David Dornsife Research Fellow at the Huntington Library Pasadena, California and a Senior Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. http://directory.arch.tamu.edu/people/40086
Lexygius Sanchez Calip, Independent Artist
Lexygius Sanchez Calip is a Filipino-American art practitioner and scholar. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Schafer Gallery at the Fort Mason Cultural Center, and the Diego Rivera Gallery in San Francisco; The Brickton Art Center and The Hairpin Art Center in Chicago; the Bliss on Bliss Art Projects in New York and Bogota Colombia; The Metropolitan Museum, the Jorge P. Vargas Museum, the Ateneo Museum of Modern Art, the GSIS Museum of Art, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila among others. He is a Freeman Foundation Fellow, a recipient of the Anne Bremer Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, the Excellence in Sculpture and Services to Humanity Award, the Excellence in Scholarship Master of Arts Thesis Award from the San Francisco Art Institute; and an awardee for the Murphy Cadogan Art Awards in San Francisco. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New Genres under the Presidential Merit Scholarship, Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art under the Trustee Scholarship, and the Master of Arts degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art under the Graduate MA Full Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. He currently lives in San Francisco CA.
http://www.lexygiuscalipart.com/
Giuliana Funkhouser for the Witches Collective, Independent Artist
Trans-disciplinary artist Giuliana Funkhouser combines soundscapes and visuals to produce story driven installations. A preoccupation with populations and ever-shifting news affected by the consequences of climate change, emerges throughout her work, as in installations considering recent “natural disasters” in her home, Puerto Rico. Funkhouser completed her MFA/MA at the San Francisco Art Institute focusing on Art & Technology and The History & Theory of Contemporary Art in 2020. Her collaborative work with The Witches (Eliza Phelan-Harder and Kate Rannells) have been performed and exhibited at the Laundry Gallery, the Center for New Music and Fort Mason in San Francisco, CA. She is the band manager for Red Culebra, a collaboration led by Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez and has also worked as a multi-media artist in game design. https://www.facebook.com/UCL.MAL/videos/-giuliana-funkhousers-research-project-aftermath-is-a-max-patch-interpreting-var/234393511715752/
Laura Hyunjhee Kim, University of Texas at Dallas
Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a Korean-American multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Kim has shown work around the world, recently including the Transfer Gallery, Pioneer Works, Telematic Media Arts, Harvestworks, Bienal Internacional de Curitiba, Athens Digital Art Festival, Centro Cultural São Paulo, and The Wrong Biennale. Kim’s music video art SHARING IS CARING received the inaugural ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013) and her short feature video Marvelous Miramol was the first moving image to receive the Wisconsin Union Directorate Art Committee’s Sally Owen Marshall Best in Show Award (2010). In 2019, she received the New Media Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and also the Black Cube Video Art Award for her video Cricket World. Kim is the author of Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, which was published by The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms (June 17, 2019) and the coauthor of Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-tales of the Digital Afterlife with Mark Amerika, published with Open Humanities Press (November, 2019). http://www.lauraonsale.com/
Patricia Olynyk, Washington University of St. Louis
Patricia Olynyk’s photographs, videos, and installations investigate science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of science, human life and non-human life, and the natural world. She is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Helmut S. Stern Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan and a Francis C. Wood Fellowship at the College of Physicians, Philadelphia. Olynyk has held residencies at UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department, the Banff Center for the Arts, Villa Montalvo, California, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Her work has been featured in Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel, Venice; the Los Angeles International Biennial; The Brooklyn Museum; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; and Museo del Corso, Rome. Her solo exhibitions include: Sensing Terrains at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., Dark Skies at the Art I Sci Center Gallery at UCLA, and Transfigurations at Galeria Grafica Tokio, Tokyo, Japan. In addition to serving as Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, she is Affiliate Faculty, Center for Humanism and Ethics in Surgical Specialties at the School of Medicine, at Washington University in St. Louis and she is currently Medicine + Media Arts Fellow, UCLA. https://patriciaolynyk.com/
Gail Wight, Stanford University
Gail Wight is a new media artist whose work fuses art with biology, neurology, and technology. Her exhibition record includes nearly two dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and Centro Andaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Spain. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Her work has been discussed in the books Art and Science Now and Information Art by Stephen Wilson, Art in the Age of Technoscience by Ingeborg Reichle, Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle, and Kunst nach der Wissenschaft by Susanne Witzgall, among other publications. She is a Professor of Art Practice at Stanford University, with a focus in Experimental Media. https://web.stanford.edu/~gailw/