Leonardo@Djerassi 2016 (Scientific Delirium Madness 3.0) | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo@Djerassi 2016 (Scientific Delirium Madness 3.0)

From the gallery introduction by Djerassi Executive Director Margot Knight: "Selected from more than 200 applicants and nominees, 11 artists and scientists arrived in July 2016. A biotechnologist, two biologists, a physicist and a geologist plunged themselves into the work of a visual artist, a media artist, a composer, a choreographer, a playwright and a poet. And vice versa. The boundaries between them ebbed and flowed. They wrote together, danced together and biohacked together. They ate together, shared living spaces, blogged about their experiences and offered their work to the public during our annual Open House/Open Studios. Ultimately, they created—together—new ways to think and talk about their practices. They left as lifelong friends and colleagues. They will change the world—we just don’t know exactly how yet."

SDM 3.0 Gallery

2016 Residents

Contemporary Dancer and Choreographer
Media Artist
United States
Creative Technologist
United Kingdom
neuroscientist, cartoonist and illustrator
United States
Composer
United States
Geologist
United States
Choreographer and Interdisciplinary Arts Researcher
Germany
Writer, Maker and Educator working in Opera, Theatre and Performance
United States
United States
Visual artist
United Kingdom
Choreographer/Physicist
United States
Biologist
United States

Blog Posts from the 2016 Residency

By Paulina Sierra

By Paulina Sierra

...

By Aiyesha Ghani

July 9, 2023 (?)

It's hard to believe that we're almost halfway through.

It seems as though we have only recently arrived.

Despite our disparate origins and...

By Paulina Sierra

By Paulina Sierra

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By Paulina Sierra

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By Gloria Florez

On a winter's morning in Lovett Bay, NSW, I find myself preparing my suitcase for the life-...

By David Stork

I'm sitting in the Bowes Art Library at Stanford University, between my two scheduled office hours for my course Science, Technology,...

By Jenifer Wightman

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By Jenifer Wightman

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By HaeinKang

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By Brian House

Macrophones is one of those art+science projects that starts with a hypothesis and then requires an awful lot of labor getting the whole...

By Jenifer Wightman

 

...

By Brian House

While I'm here at Djerassi, I'm working on my Macrophones project — essentially huge microphones that pick sound far below our range of...

By Brian House

Everything is light and air here, we look down on the clouds over the ocean, they stretch out to cover us in mist each night and then recede again each day. Innumerable hawks hunt gophers in the...

By Jenifer Wightman

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By Jenifer Wightman

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By Jenifer Wightman

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By Jenifer Wightman

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By Lisa Rosenberg

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By Jenifer Wightman

 

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By Patricia Alessandrini

Using the Little Bits Korg Synth Kits and sensor elements, Weidong Yang and I constructed an installation entitled A little bit of noise and protyped a system for sonifying...

By Michael Koehle

...

By Kathy High

When artist Weidon Yang and I were preparing for the Open House installation of our interactive project "Sharing" (with a beating heart that you could hold in your hand), we solicited the help of...

By Katharine Haake

As we enter our last days here at Djerassi, I think it’s safe to say that a shift has occurred in all of us, even as the omnipresent marine layer of the first couple of weeks moves out to hot blue...

By Kathy High

...

By Weidong Yang

This is a fun little exercise of surveillance and surveillance technology.

By Weidong Yang

Deep fake

Fake news has been on the news a lot these days. How easy is it to make one yourself? It turns out to be really easy, as easy as how people generated gossip in the past. You...

By Vidhu Aggarwal

...

By Alexandra Kleeman

When our session ends at Djerassi, we're asked to leave behind an artist's page as a memento of our visit.  Because one constant of my time on the ranch was seeing lizards, I thought it would be...

By Doris Monica Iarovici

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By Derek Lee McPhatter

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By Vidhu Aggarwal

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By Katharine Haake

Some years ago (before GPS), my friends and I stopped at a Forest Service office in the Trinity Mountains of Northern California to inquire how to cut through to the nearby Siskiyous, which lay to...

By Leah Dyjak

The history of this place is like the fog, thick and enchanted. At one moment we are enveloped in its mystery, its care, the next the sun breaks through and we can see outward again. We are all...

By Lydia Nakashima Degarrod

I brought to Djerassi recordings of over 400 memorable REM dreams of more than 300 residents of the Bay Area of San Francisco that I had made over a period of 5 years as part of my anthropological...

By Doris Monica Iarovici

Yesterday, July 5th, was the anniversary of Pamela Djerassi’s death. Her brother Dale joined us for dinner here in the hills, and moved some of us to tears with his remembrance. Pamela...

By Kathy High

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By Vidhu Aggarwal

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By Alexandra Kleeman

On one of my afternoon walks around the Djerassi grounds, I see a bright scrap of red set far back in the hunch of a thorny bush.  The color draws my eye, but as I crouch down to look close, it’s...

By Derek Lee McPhatter

Random news reading Science.com --> Washington Post --> Google News-ing, and then on the radio. Keep encoutering this topic:

Dark Energy is a force that makes the universe expand...

By Katharine Haake

I'm writing now from my studio at Djerassi, looking down the green hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains that roll all the way to the ocean below. When it’s clear, you can see the water, which most of...

By Doris Monica Iarovici

My third day in residence at Djerassi, I join fellow residents Wei and Daiane in their Tai Chi practice. I have only previously tried Tai Chi once, for twenty minutes, when it was part of an...

By Barbara Berrie

By David Goodsell

...

By Thomas Skalak

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...

By Thomas Skalak

WATCH. A new landscape artwork at Djerassi ranch. This work was constructed by subtractive writing on a historic Djerassi ranch sign bearing the bullet holes of bygone days of exuberance. It...

By Alan Bogana

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...

By Anna Yermakova

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 .

By Sarah Brady

By Sonia Sheridan

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...

By Sarah Brady

Since my time at Djerassi, one cannot help but admire the beauty of lichen, following their tangles and patterns. It is everywhere, growing on and over things, pale green strings. Each pattern unique...

By Barbara Berrie

The maquette for my sculptural installation completed, I turned to making a larger version: five and half inch square faces. Since I’m working with cubes, the sized is not doubled, but cubed; of...

By David Goodsell

I had a moment of terror yesterday.

By Barbara Berrie

Even though I think I know all about it, a really solid grasp of the distinction between the additive and subtractive primary colors and their separate, nuanced properties can feel just beyond my...

By Barbara Berrie

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By David Goodsell

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By Thomas Skalak

Waking to strong offshore breezes, I created a new photographic work, mindful of Nick's observation in The Great Gatsby that "... man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,...

By David Goodsell

I met a fox today, hiking home on the Ridge Trail. This is our first truly sunny day at the Djerassi Ranch, and I chose, perhaps unwisely, to pack a lunch and go exploring for natural pigments. On...

By Eliot North

 Scientific Delirium Madness, Djerassi 2018. An Essay


Here on the ranch, on the western side of the Santa Cruz mountains, the sea mist begins its slow roll back towards the Pacific...

By Thomas Skalak

While writing a novel at Djerassi, I've been drawn sideways to create a phootographic work capturing the creative fire and awe induced by this place.

By Thomas Skalak

As a writer of a novel, experiencing the first week of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program has been both distracting and provocative.

By Sonia Sheridan

A 2018 fellowship has been awarded to Sarah Rosalena Brady, a 2018 UCLA Media Arts graduate.

By Katharine Hawthorne

The following are a selection of the wishes for the future generated by audience members who attended my performances of Between the Wish and the Thing at the Boulder International Fringe...

By Ken Eklund

"When the world ended, in April 1784, the shrapnel spread far and wide. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a piece, a BIG piece, had landed on the Djerassi property, but I was." Art in the...

By Adria LeBoeuf

Even the gophers struggle

Tunnelling in dense caked dirt.

Fissures grow deeper

Widening the space between the plaques of dry brittle grass 

The matter straining,...

By Patrice Le Gal

Focusing light at the bottom of a tea cup is an every day experience, but a precise observation of the light pattern shows a very simple but singular bright curve with a clearly recognizable...

By Anna Davidson

Starlight Concert at Djerassi 

By Ken Eklund

Wherein the operating instructions for the Djerassi artist-scientist residency come to you one random sentence at a time

By Katharine Hawthorne

The following are a selection of the wishes for the future generated by visitors to Djerassi's Open Studios/Open House event on July 16:

 

I wish we/I could learn from our/my...

By Katharine Hawthorne

I am making a dance that asks the audience to imagine the future.  The following wishes for the future were generated from my personal studio practice with dancer Elizabeth Chitty, as well as in...

By Adam Zaretsky

While we were in residence at  Scientific Delirium Madness a large fireball was seen in the sky over Palo Alto. Actually it was seen from San Francisco down to Los Angeles at the same time and it...

By Asa Calow
By Adam Zaretsky
By Juanita Rockwell
By Adam Zaretsky

Maya Spasova, London, UK. Visual Artist observed the centiSperm project and then took to drawing or channeling the lives of the centiSperm. Some are intertwined with each other. Some have wings. Some...

By Adam Zaretsky

Flight of the centiSperm David Bowen a collaboration with Adam Zaretsky So David Bowen came up with this idea of using the centiSperm as a data set for flying his drone....

By Weidong Yang

Twitter rain installation was created at the old barn during the Djerassi open house day on July 24th, 2016. The installation is part of a series of preliminary experiments, with the goal of...

By Adam Zaretsky

Electroporation, the making of centiSperm

 

By Adam Zaretsky

Centipede DNA Isolation A – Kill Centipede B – Mash with mortar and pestle

By Adam Zaretsky

 

Goals: To electroporate whole genomic DNA from a centipede into the center of human sperm.

 ...

By Adam Zaretsky

I remember that the word testament and testicles have etymological origins in common. Early swearing on the Torah was not always possible before the printing press. Often it was told that men...

By Adam Zaretsky

Pertaining to the castration of Uranus’ Penis by his son, there is the question of the meaning of the word foam. According to the mythos, Uranus’ penis was dropped in the ocean and the bubbles or the...

By Adam Zaretsky

Shevakadoo: body remainders, any part of a human separated from the main body, esp. referring to the taboo surrounding leftover flesh parts.

By Adam Zaretsky

“you can check lines 188-190 of Hesiod's Theogyny ‘they fell from the mainland into the much-surging sea, so that the sea carried them for a long time.’ Therefore, no reference to the place where...

By Adam Zaretsky

Ἑκατόγχειρες, Hekatonkheires also called the Centimanes or the Hundred-handers (Is Tartarus a castle analogy for Gaia's womb?)

By Matteo Farinella

I found this fog quote attributed to Joseph Conrad and I made a little sketch for it: “It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a...

By Matteo Farinella

Since I arrived at the Djerassi residency I have been particularly fascinated...

By Adam Zaretsky
By Adam Zaretsky

S

Got the electroporator to Djerassi Scientific Delirium residency... Considering using my sperm... And some centipedes" DNA... Wondering if you have any sense as to a DIY sperm salt rinse...

By Hannah Rogers

Dear National Science Foundation,

You were everything I ever wanted

when I was finishing my Ph.D. and I

have no idea why I didn’t pursue you...

By Hannah Rogers

I did not have a website for a long time. It’s not that I did not know how to make one or that I did not understand how important it was, it was simply that I did not know how to tell people who I...

By Adam Zaretsky

I am considering the option of using the centiSperm as a glaze. Not for cupcakes although that came to mind. After electroporating raw centipede DNA into the germ cells, they could be used as a...

By Luca Forcucci
By Guillermo Muñoz

  ...

By Laurel Shastri
By Eathan Janney

A few weeks ago Guillermo and I posted about our first foray into representing quantum dots...

By Allison Cobb
By Laurel Shastri
By Jordan Hochenbaum

Hi Leonardo readers! My name is Jordan Hochenbaum and I’m a professor at California Institute of the Arts, where I teach in the Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design (MTIID)...

By Eleni Sikelianos

What a rare privilege to be at work and walks here among such a wild profusion of intelligence, inventiveness and ethos. The poet Robert Creeley once said that you forge ahead, writing poems “because...

By Allison Cobb
By Guillermo Muñoz
By Allison Cobb
By Guillermo Muñoz
By Laurel Shastri
By Eathan Janney
By Tami Spector

On a walk during the first days here with four of my co-residents our conversation was peppered with references to authors, artists and movies.  This struck me as one of the ways that we were getting...

By Karl Schaffer

On Sunday at Djerassi we did an open rehearsal of our show Daughhters of Hypatia about the struggles of women in mathematics, but I find unsettling contradictions. I ended this year at the...

By Christine Lee

      Last night several residents and I were watching composer and scientist Eathan Janney perform an impressive improvisational piano piece. I recall the sounds coming from the piano as he...

By Kate Nichols
By Caroline Wellbery

Here's to my trial run as an artist-scientist (from my current writing efforts), an account of my attempt at research before I went to medical school: Luckily, another job opportunity came along....

By Allison Cobb
By Allison Cobb
By Laurel Shastri
By Eathan Janney

Last night a conversation emerged among a group of Djerassi residents about our feelings on cross-disciplinary interactions—especially between the arts and sciences. Each of us was chosen to be here...

By Caroline Wellbery

What is writing the story of one’s life if not a diagnostic exercise? We look at patterns, discard what’s irrelevant, and go through the old charts looking for early hints of trouble we’d once...

By Allison Cobb
By Eathan Janney

On Saturday I went on a morning run with fellow Djerassi resident and physicist Guillermo Munoz. As a result of a conversation about our respective fields of interest we decided to make a...

By Guillermo Muñoz
By Tami Spector

Early morning, 5:30am, cup of strong PG Tips in hand I step outside Middlebrook D and snap a picture of the landscape, writ-large, with my i-phone. The moon full, or almost full, up above the marine...

By Caroline Wellbery

The art of doing nothing   On arriving at Djerassi, I welcomed leaving productivity behind. I’d worked hard to jettison my usual obligations: teaching medical students, supervising residents,...

By Margot Knight

I am grateful to be able to add to Patricia Bentson’s welcome to Scientific Delirium Madness 2.0. If you don’t know me, I am the Executive Director of Djerassi Resident Artists Program. With each...

By Donna Sternberg
By Meredith Tromble

As Dawn and I were making the Djerassi version of our interactive, 3-D installation ...

By Dawn Sumner

The Dream Vortex, a collaboration between myself and Meredith Tromble, reached a new level during our residency at Djerassi. It is finally artistically interesting, with two scenes and several...

By Charlotte Jacobs

When most hear the name Jonas Salk, the man about whom I am writing a biography, they think about the polio vaccine.  In 1959, however, Sir Charles Percy’s “The Two Cultures,” became his bible.

By Ari Frankel

By Sasha Petrenko
By Dawn Sumner

Meredith Tromble and I have been working on the Dream Vortex for a bit over three years - or I should say we started the project three years ago.  We’ve made some progress but approaching the vision...

By Devavani Chatterjea

To enter another world you must first find an opening …baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it. - Charles Bukowski...

By Jim Crutchfield

Rather odd, but I find myself having to be an advocate for time. Things come into being through time. And so, to my mind, time is important. And, for that matter, time shouldn't need championing....

By Donna Sternberg

galaxyDetermined not to be cowed by my...

By Ari Frankel

I have finally chosen one of the 5-6 projects floating through my musical mind to focus on developing.  Or perhaps it chose me.  ...

By Laura

As you might expect, my job as the Resident Manager at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program is heavily influenced by the personalities and needs of the rotating artists in residence. Usually this...

By Meredith Tromble
By Donna Sternberg

 

By Donna Sternberg

tori-slideshowThe gift of time...

By Charlotte Jacobs

At breakfast an engineer tells me about his plans to write a book on the science of art materials, observations that will influence the way many of us think about art. While hiking in some of the...

By Meredith Tromble

...

By Margot Knight

Let the cerebration begin! I have only experienced 3 of the first 72 hours of Scientific Delirium Madness but the words and ideas and laughter are flying. A dream since I first...

By Anna Davidson

I use life forms as artistic media to comment on their phenomenal nature, bring intrigue to the species at hand, and illustrate the diversity of life. I propose the following  questions: How does...