As a result of 50 years of publishing work on the cutting edge, Leonardo has become the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts, design and humanities on science and technology.
Dante wrote "Nature is the art of God", and we feel the art of nature here at Djerassi. The old master wrote The Divine Comedy while in exile from his daily responsibilities in Florence, while modern master of science-based fiction Andy Weir (The Martian) channels what Dante called "forza", or the force of action, in his thrillers. I'm feeling a kinship with both authors as I construct my new book Continental Shift during this Leonardo-Djerassi residency in exile.
This year I started to use computer fluid dynamics software, or maybe better said misuse, in my art practice. So far, I have been feeding data from specific environments in technical CFD software, creating a series of simulation situations and then projecting the results back on the very same physical environment (here link to a previous work). The idea of this process was to evoke a transcendental, psychedelic and poetic relationship to the environment by means of technical and quantified imagery.
A little bit about the first performance of the "Harmonic Roots Series" we presented last night in the Artist Barn - with Sebastian Perez and Dasha Lavrennikov .
These winners happen to be women but were selected simply because they most represented Steve Wilson's ideas with the quality and breadth of their work. Equally important were their philosophies of searching for what was needed for society's advancement in the education of the next generations (Ramirez) and looking for the roots of the meaning of art in distant cultural pasts (Brady). In each case, the two women stood out above all as confident, hard-working and skilled in their work. Above all, they each had a vision and a determined path.
