August 24 – December 14, 2024
Getty PST: Art x Science series
"Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty"
Curated by David Familian
Beall Center for Art+Technology
University of California
Irvine, CA
New interactive artwork commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology’s Black Box Projects residency program for Getty PST, a Getty Museum initiative with arts institutions across southern California.
Laura Splan will be included in Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology as part of the 2024 Getty PST: Art + Science Collide Series. Splan is currently a Black Box Artist-in-Residence at the Beall for research and production for a new interactive installation entitled Baroque Bodies (Sway), a sensory encounter exploring entanglements between molecular bodies and the built environment. Her interdisciplinary project connects emerging epigenetic research on environmental influences on gene expression with computational biology research. Working in collaboration with scientists and technologists, Splan is creating an interactive installation with video and sound. Signifiers of both micro and macro worlds will invite embodied explorations of the "natural" world that are situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological, autonomous and interconnected.
Evolutionary biology, meteorology, neuroscience, and robotics are just a few examples of the complex systems that artists engage with in the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty. Complex systems are dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable. They are characterized by chaos, feed-back loops, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Future Tense features both emerging and established contemporary artists who utilize the concepts of complex systems in traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics, and data visualizations. The exhibition includes work by Ralf Baecker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Clare Rojas, Theresa Schubert, and Laura Splan, as well as new works by Newton Harrison, Chico MacMurtrie, Lucy HG Solomon & Cesar Baio collective, among others commissioned through the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects artist residency program. Exploring complex systems at various levels, from microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale, the goal of Future Tense is for audiences to understand how complexity functions within individual works of art while also appreciating the beauty, intricacy, and wonder of each complex system.
Laura Splan will be included in Future Tense: Art, Complexity and Uncertainty at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology as part of the 2024 Getty PST: Art + Science Collide Series. Splan is currently a Black Box Artist-in-Residence at the Beall for research and production for a new interactive installation entitled Baroque Bodies (Sway), a sensory encounter exploring entanglements between molecular bodies and the built environment. Her interdisciplinary project connects emerging epigenetic research on environmental influences on gene expression with computational biology research. Working in collaboration with scientists and technologists, Splan is creating an interactive installation with video and sound. Signifiers of both micro and macro worlds will invite embodied explorations of the "natural" world that are situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological, autonomous and interconnected.
Evolutionary biology, meteorology, neuroscience, and robotics are just a few examples of the complex systems that artists engage with in the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty. Complex systems are dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable. They are characterized by chaos, feed-back loops, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Future Tense features both emerging and established contemporary artists who utilize the concepts of complex systems in traditional media and new technologies such as computer modeling, robotics, and data visualizations. The exhibition includes work by Ralf Baecker, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Clare Rojas, Theresa Schubert, and Laura Splan, as well as new works by Newton Harrison, Chico MacMurtrie, Lucy HG Solomon & Cesar Baio collective, among others commissioned through the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects artist residency program. Exploring complex systems at various levels, from microscopic organisms to the totalizing implications of global warming on a planetary scale, the goal of Future Tense is for audiences to understand how complexity functions within individual works of art while also appreciating the beauty, intricacy, and wonder of each complex system.
Baroque Bodies (Sway) is a sensory encounter exploring entanglements between molecular phenomena and the built environment. The project uses emerging epigenetic research on environmental influences on gene expression along with computational and digital technologies to connect micro and macro worlds. Working in collaboration with scientists and technologists, Splan is creating an interactive audiovisual installation that invites visitors to explore AI-generated landscapes reflected on the surfaces of proteins in a 3D nucleosome model.
Technology Collaborator: Danielle McPhatter
Science Collaborators: Hannah Lui Park, Adam Lamson
...biophysicist Adam Lamson is collaborating with artist Laura Splan in a project the two of them call ‘Sticky Settings’...From giant tapestries that present maps of DNA in colorful, tactile formats, to otherworldly animations set to music, their art invites a non-scientific audience to literally walk into the processes our own cells are undergoing every day...
...Interdisciplinarity is the foundation on which artist Laura Splan conceives her work...Through her practice, science is moved out of the laboratories while keeping its axioms and experiments present...A number of its mechanisms are paralleled with the cultural dynamics that inhabit our everyday lives, putting a magnifying glass on the interconnections that exist between diverse fields of knowledge...
Project Support Provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, NEW INC Artist Residency at EY, Onassis ONX, Simons Foundation
