Intersections
at the Leonardo/ISAST 50th Anniversary Convening
November 2019
San Francisco Art Institute
Fort Mason Center for the Arts
I was invited to curate this exhibition, film, and performance program in celebration of the Leonardo Convening, in commemoration of their 50th anniversary. Animated by their 50-year commitment to building bridges across the "two cultures" of art and science, in this show I traced several overlapping themes that emerged over these decades of artistic and scientific collaboration.
Though commonly thought to inhabit distinct worlds, these two cultures have long collaborated for common purpose. Motivated by deep curiosity, imagination, and a shared sense of wonder, artists and scientists ask questions of the material world: How does it work? Why does it matter? What happens if...? In light of the environmental and technological crises in our world, these questions take on a renewed urgency.
Bearing the lessons of the Anthropocene in mind - or the concept that we are in an era uniquely defined by human activity - this exhibition explored the interrelationship of humans and our environments, whether organic or algorithmic. Intersections showcased works that explore the entanglements of human and nonhuman actors.
No. 0, Anna Frants (Cyland Media Lab) installed at Intersections.
From the microscopic to the gigantic, the tangible to the ephemeral, we share our world with a thriving universe of atoms, data, bacteria, and code. Intersections engaged with scientific and technological developments that have shaped the past 50 years - including the camera lens, the data cloud, the waterway, the algal bloom, and the social network.
Visitors interact with Cyanovisions by Tiare Ribeaux and Jodi Stillwater.
What Does the Bot Say to the Human by Jiayi Young, Shih-Wen Young, Weidong Yang, Qilian Yu, and Bartek Klusek