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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.

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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.  

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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. 

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Visitors interact with Cyanovisions by Tiare Ribeaux and Jodi Stillwater. 

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What Does the Bot Say to the Human by Jiayi Young, Shih-Wen Young, Weidong Yang, Qilian Yu, and Bartek Klusek

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