[ITA] Dal 9 al 15 Aprile sono a Toronto e Ottawa, invitato da ArtSci Salon, dal Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies dell’Università di Toronto (quello che conferisce le Fields Medals, l’equivalente del Nobel per i matematici), dall’Ambasciata d’Italia e dall’Istituto Italiano di Cultura, per partecipare a una serie di eventi collegati dall’argomento “Emergent Form”. Sono felice e onorato di presentare le mie ricerche anche in Canada e di incontrare alcuni colleghi e amici con cui affrontare questi temi.

La presentazione recita (in Inglese):

[ENG] From April 9 to 15 I’m in Toronto and Ottawa, invited from ArtSci Salon, The Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, University of Toronto, the Italian Embassy in Canada, the Italian Institute of Culture, to participate to a series of events connected to the topic “Emergent Form”. I am happy and honoured to present my research also in Canada and to meet some colleagues and friends to deal with these topics.

The presentation says:

What is Emergent Form?

Emergent Form is an interdisciplinary multi-part event featuring discussions, performative lectures, performances and guerrilla exhibitions in Toronto (Apr. 10-11-12) and Ottawa (Apr. 14).

Nature teems with self-organized forms that seem to spring spontaneously from the smooth background of things, by mechanisms that are not always apparent. Think of rippled sand on a beach or regular stripes in the clouds. Plants, insects and animals exhibit spirals and spots and stripes in an exuberant riot of colours. Fluid flows in amazingly regular swirls and eddies. The emergence of form is ubiquitous, and presents a challenge and an inspiration to both artists and scientists. In mathematics, patterns appear as solutions of the nonlinear partial differential equations in the continuum limit of classical physics, chemistry and biology. In the arts and humanities, “emergent form” addresses the entangled ways in which humans, plants animals, microorganisms inevitably co-exist in the universe; the way that human intervention and natural transformation can generate new landscapes and new forms of life.

With Emergent Form, we want to question the idea of a fixed world.

For us, Emergent Form is not just a series of natural and human phenomena too complicated to understand, measure or predict, but also a concept to help us identify ways in which we can come to term with, and embrace their complexity as a source of inspiration.

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONCEPT
Tue. Apr 10
6:00-8:00 pm
The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences,
222 College Street
Toronto M5T 3J1
RSVP

  • Pier Luigi Capucci, Accademia di Belle Arti Urbino. Founder and director, Noemalab
  • Charles Sowers, Independent artist and exhibit designer, the Exploratorium
  • Stephen Morris, Professor of of Physics University of Toronto
  • Ron Wild, smART Maps

ANATOMY OF AN INTERCONNECTED SYSTEM
Wed. Apr 11
6:00-8:00 pm
The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences
222 College Street,
M5T 3J1 Toronto
Anatomy of an Interconnected System
A Performative Lecture with Margherita Pevere, Aalto University, Helsinki
RSVP

Thu. Apr 12
5:00 pm
Cabinets in the Koffler Student Centre
214 College Street
Toronto
Anatomy of an Interconnected System part II
An exhibition by Margherita Pevere

Margherita Pevere is “fascinated by the connection between humans and nature, and how the pervasive introduction of technology into all aspects of our lives is affecting this relationship. Her work puts living organisms and technology in the spotlight to incite the debate over where our “hyper-technological era” is headed” (from Clara Rodriguez Fernandez, Memories Encoded in DNA and Biological Reliques, 2017).
Anatomy of an Interconnected system is a performative lecture that focuses on the human-nature interconnection in the frame of the emergent environmental crisis. It is structured in two parts – a lecture and a participative performance – which aim at manifesting the transient concepts underpinning the human-nature complex.
Margherita Pevere’s performance will be site-specific, making full use of the space at the fields Institute and treating the audience/participants to a few surprises.
The memories and material gathered during the performative lecture will join Pevere’s recent work, leading to an installation which will open the next day in the Koffler Students Centre.

BIOPOETRIX – CONFIGURING AI
Thu, 12 April 2018
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
The Luella Massey Studio Theatre
4 Glen Morris Avenue
University of Toronto
Toronto, M5S 1J1
RSVP

A collaboration between the ArtSci Salon at the FIeld’s Institute, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL) / Institute for Digital Humanities in Performance (idHIP) and the International Performance Series of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.

6pm
Performance: “Corpus Nil. A Ritual of Birth for a Modified Body” conceived and performed by Marco Donnarumma (Canadian premiere)

6:30pm
LAB dance: Blitz media posters on labs in the arts, sciences and engineering as represented by our panel below

10 min. intermission

7:10pm
Panel: Performing AI, hybrid media and humans in/as technology

Panel participants:

  • Dr. Marco Donnarumma, Dr. Doug van Nort (Dispersion Lab, York U.), Jane Tingley (Stratford User Research & Gameful Experiences Lab (SURGE), U of Waterloo), Dr. Angela Schoellig (Dynamic Systems Lab, U of T)
  • Panel animators: Dr. Antje Budde (Digital Dramaturgy Lab) and Dr. Roberta Buiani (ArtSci Salon)

Followed by a reception at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (496 Huron St.) 8:15 – 10pm

Tickets are by donation; 100% of donations will go towards covering Marco Donnarumma’s artist fee.

Concept and event dramaturgy: Antje Budde and Roberta Buiani with DDL collaborators Sanja Vodovnik, Nina Czegledy, Berna Celikkaya, Richard Windeyer
Technical Director: Paul Stoesser
Event media interface design: Montgomery C. Martin (DDL)
TPA Assistant: Ross Slaughter
Event music design: Richard Windeyer (DDL)

Event supported by:

Italian Embassy in Canada; Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at U of T; Istituto Italiano di Cultura; Digital Dramaturgy Lab
community partner: BYOR

EMERGENT FORM AND COMPLEX PHENOMENA
Apr. 14, 2018
11:00 am-1:00 pm
Rossy Pavillion
National Arts Centre
1 Elgin Street
Ottawa K1P 5W1
RSVP

A creative panel discussion and surprise demonstrations
The world is a complicated engine. How can we make sense of it? How do artists and scientists turn its complexity into a source of inspiration?

Emergent Form and Complex Phenomena is the last event of a four-parts interdisciplinary series which took place in Toronto at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences on Apr 10-11-12. Consisting of talks, performances, workshops and exhibitions, the series reflected on the idea of “Emergent Form” not only as a series of natural and human phenomena that often seem too complicated to understand, measure or predict, but also as a concept that helps us identify ways in which we can come to term with, and embrace their complexity as a source of inspiration.

in the spirit of this event, we are venturing outside of the comfort zone of our familiar environment (the city of Toronto, our homes, our community) and we become unexpected “emergent forms” ourselves: what kind of discussion will we be able to evoke? in how many ways can we spell this concept? from what disciplinary perspective? as our special panelists share their findings, we invite artists, mathematicians, philosophers, academic and non-academics in Ottawa to join in the conversation.

With

  • Pier Luigi Capucci, Accademia di Belle Arti Urbino. Founder and director, Noema
  • Stephen Morris, Professor of of Physics University of Toronto
  • Margherita Pevere, bioartist, performer and PhD candidate, Aalto University, Helsinki
  • Marco Donnarumma, Artist and scholar in biophysical sound, Berlin

 

BIOS

Antje Budde
Prof. Antje Budde M.A., PhD (Humboldt-University Berlin) taught previously at Humboldt-University in Berlin and the Academy for Film and Television “Konrad Wolf” (HFF) in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. In 1990-1991 and 1994-1995 she conducted research and artistic projects in Beijing, China (Central Academy of Drama and National Experimental Theatre Company) followed by several short study trips to P.R. China. Prof. Budde works both in the academic and the artistic field of performance studies. Since 2005 she is cross-appointed at the University College Drama Program and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Roberta Buiani
is an interdisciplinary artist, media scholar and curator based in Toronto. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and a co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her work investigates how scientific and technological mechanisms translate, encode and transform the natural and human world, and how these processes may be re-purposed by relocating them into different venues. Her work is mobile, itinerant and collaborative. She brought it to art festivals (Transmediale 2011, Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Brazil 2013), community centers (the Free Gallery Toronto, Immigrant Movement International, Queens), science institutions (RPI) and the streets of Toronto. With The Cabinet Project she proposed a new “squatting academia” curatorial model, consisting in appropriating and re-populating abandoned spaces within the university with SciArt installations. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University (CAN). http://atomarborea.net

Pier Luigi Capucci
Pier Luigi Capucci (https://capucci.org) is a scholar, an educator and a cultural manager in the media studies, the arts, and the relations among sciences, technologies and culture. He has been a teacher in the universities of Rome “La Sapienza”, Bologna, Florence, Urbino, Lugano, and at the fine arts academies of Carrara and NABA-Milan. Since 2008 he has been a Supervisor at the T-Node Ph.D. Research Program of the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, of which since 2013 he is the Director of Studies. Currently he is a teacher at the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino and at the University of Udine (Dept. of Mathematics, Computer, Multimedia and Physics Sciences). He extensively and internationally published texts, essays and papers in books, magazines and proceedings, organized exhibitions and symposia, managed projects and participated to conferences worldwide. In 1994 he founded and directed the first Italian online journal, NetMagazine/MagNet, on the relations between arts and technologies. In 2000 he started Noema, a series of projects and an online magazine about culture-sciences-technologies interrelations and influences.

Marco Donnarumma
Since the early 2000s, Marco Donnarumma has developed a deeply transdisciplinary expertise, drawing equally from live art, music, biological science, computation and cultural studies. He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Lab Berlin. His practice uses emerging technology to deliver artworks that are at once intimate and powerful, oniric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renowned for his focus on sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment. http://marcodonnarumma.com/

Stephen Morris
Stephen Morris is the J. Tuzo Wilson professor of Geophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto. His experimental research projects have included icicle morphology, the cracking of mud and rock, and the washboarding of gravel roads. Recently, he has assembled the largest collection if icicle images ever made. He is an award winning university teacher and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He sometimes presents his scientific photographs as art. He is the Scientific Director of the ArtSci Salon.

Margherita Pevere
With a visceral fascination for organic processes, Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher investigating leakyness and transformation of biological and technological matter. Her practice employs a unique constellation of installations, performances, visual and video works, collections of plant and animal relics, workshops, and collaborations with bacterial cultures.
Based between Berlin and Helsinki, Pevere is PhD candidate (Artistic Research) at Aalto University, Helsinki, where she collaborates with the transdisciplinary platform CHEMARTS. She is founder member of the Berlin advocacy group AG21c and member of the Finnish Bioart Society. Most recent exhibitions include the Article Biennial – i/o lab, Stavanger (NO); State Festival for open science and society, Berlin, curated by Daniela Silvestrin; Non-human agents, Art Laboratory Berlin, curated by Christian de Lutz and Regine Rapp.
Www.margheritapevere.com

Angela Shoellig
Angela Schoellig is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where she heads the Dynamic Systems Lab. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Aerial Robotics Research and Education (CARRE) at the University of Toronto. With her team, she conducts research at the interface of robotics, controls and machine learning. Her goal is to enhance the performance, safety and autonomy of robots by enabling them to learn from past experiments and from each other. Angela has been working with aerial vehicles for the past nine years and, more recently, has applied her motion planning, control and learning algorithms to self-driving vehicles. You can watch her robots perform slalom races and flight dances at www.youtube.com/user/angelaschoe.

Charles Sowers
Charles Sowers is an artist and exhibition designer based in San Francisco. He was exhibition director at the Willamette Science and Technology Center (WISTEC), Eugene, OR, and has been working as exhibition developer at the Exploratorium since 1998. The creator of numerous public arts commissions, Sowers’ work presents actual physical phenomena – often of striking visual beauty – that draw people into a careful noticing and interaction. His installations seek to provoke a sense of delight and wonder and reward extended observation. Sometimes this involves developing an apparatus to recreate and highlight some natural phenomenon observed in the world – the swirl of fog blowing over a hill, the formation of ice on a puddle, or flow of water and foam on the beach as a wave drains away. These things can fascinate yet often go un-noticed until pointed out.

Jane Tingley
Jane Tingley is an artist and a curator. She received her MFA at Concordia University in 2006, and is interested in how interactivity combined with art objects and installation can be used to explore contemporary experience. She is one of the founding members of the Modern Nomads and has participated in exhibitions and festivals in the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe – including translife – International Triennial of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, the Canadian Embassy and Gallerie Le Deco in Tokyo (JP), Festival Break 2.3 in Ljubljana (SL), Elektra Festival in Montréal(CA) and the Künstlerhause in Vienna (AT). She received the Kenneth Finkelstein Prize in Sculpture in Manitoba, the first prize in the iNTERFACES – Interactive Art Competition in Porto, Portugal, and has received support from a number of funding agencies, including the Manitoba and Ontario Arts Councils, le Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Doug Van Nort
Doug Van Nort is an artist, researcher, composer and performer. His work is concerned with issues of performance and sensorial immersion in technologically-mediated environments. His creative/research work has been supported and recognized by disparate sources including the NY Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the NY State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the International Computer Music Association (ICMA). At York University he has founded the DisPerSion (DIStributed PERformance and Sensorial immerSION) Lab, dedicated to explorations in distributed agency, improvisation and technologically-mediated performance. He also works as an Assistant Editor for the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press).

Ron Wild
Ron Wild is a western-Canadian Digital Artist currently working in downtown Toronto. Wild is known for his extreme mapping montage technique, which he uses to explore the divide between art and science and the interdisciplinary nature of human and natural phenomena. He is an emerging explorer at the art and science frontier, who bridges the divide between the two. His Maps has been exhibited in Toronto and New York City.
Recently, Wild has developed an interest in geometry and is currently studying Buckminster Fuller’s architecture and Leonardo Da Vinci’s modular bridges that could quickly and easily be assembled or disassembled, creating sculptures with fascinating mathematical structures. His recent exhibition, smARTcities is on display until July 6 at the Atrium Gallery in the Vaughan City Hall. Portfolio: https://www.flickr.com/photos/43694834@N00/