CHAIRS: Ellen Levy and Patricia Olynyk
NY LASER is a series of lectures and presentations on art and science projects, in support of Leonardo/ISAST’s LEAF initiative (Leonardo Education and Art Forum). Former LEAF Chairs, Ellen K. Levy, former IDSVA Special Advisor in the Arts and Sciences and Patricia Olynyk, Director, Graduate School of Art, Washington University co-direct these presentations to promote dialogue at the highest level among artists, scientists, scholars, and historians. Space is limited, so please rsvp by sending an email to levy@nyc.rr.com or olynyk@wustl.edu. There will be feature presentations by Shimon Attie, Allegra Fuller Snyder and Jane Stageberg.
Shimon Attie
Artist Shimon Attie uses a variety of contemporary media and technologies to mine the complex and sometimes fraught relationships between place, memory, and identity. Since 1991, Attie has realized thirty major projects in ten countries and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Rome Prize, and a Krasner Achievement Award. Attie will present several works that have used contemporary media and technology in innovative ways to engage pressing social, historical and cultural issues, including the design and installation of underwater light boxes in a Copenhagen Canal, to his project with Norman Ballard, which consists of an animated laser “write out” technology for a Lower East Side installation. Attie will discuss his recent projects: a multi-media installation at the St Louis Art Museum, which included a 6-channel video animation made from nighttime photographs of American cities taken by NASA satellites and a floating media Installation that circulated in the city’s waterways in the Fall of 2018.
Allegra Fuller Snyder
Allegra Fuller Snyder began her career as a performer with the Ballet Society NY and a choreographer at Bennington College. Since the late 1940’s, her work has focused on the relationship between dance and film. The maker of several prize winning documentary films on dance, which will be screened in May at Sundays on Broadway, Fuller was also a Core Consultant on the PBS series DANCING for WNET/Channel 13. As a recipient of several Fulbright Scholarships, she has conducted dance research around the world and recently returned to choreography and performance with "Spirit Dances 6: Inspired by Isadora.” She is Professor Emerita of Dance and Dance Ethnology and founding Coordinator of the World Arts and Cultures Program at UCLA, the Marion Chace Foundation lecturer for the American Dance Therapy Association, and recipient of an Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research Award from the Congress on Dance Research. Fuller will discuss her father, Buckminster Fuller and herself, in relation to their shared interest in "experience and experiencing."
Jane Stageberg
Jane Stageberg, Tim Bade and Martin Cox are principals with Bade Stageberg Cox Architecture, a NYC-based firm whose work spans from public and institutional projects to the design of spaces for culture and the arts. Their work explores linkages between concept and construction, idea and form, and unexplored territories. Award-winning projects include the Art Cave, a private museum in Napa, CA, the Grafted House in Great Neck, NY, and the renovation of the National Academy Museum + School on Fifth Avenue. Stageberg will present The Evergreenhouse, a place of interment that relies on nature's own decomposition process which naturally turns the deceased into organic matter. Using a ventilated, carbon-rich burial medium that ensures the complete decomposition of the human body within one year, the body's organic material enriches the soil of the Evergreenhouse. Deeply embedded in the philosophical concerns of how cultures, societies and countries deal with the problems of disposing human remains, the Evergreenehouse seeks a solution that is ecologically self-sustaining while respecting traditions of honoring the dead.
SPONSORS:
NY LASER is a series of lectures and presentations on art and science projects, in support of Leonardo/ISAST’s LEAF initiative (Leonardo Education and Art Forum). Former LEAF Chairs Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk co-organize these presentations on behalf of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts and Washington University in St. Louis, respectively.
LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website.
The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.