● POSTPONED: Visual Culture Program Event
Defining a Visual Practices Lab
New Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
This public workshop will explore the essential role of diverse visual practices in driving innovative art-science-society collaborations. Visual practices—formalized methods of representing and interpreting subjects—are employed across a wide range of disciplines, both within and outside academia. The workshop will feature visual artists who will present model projects they are developing in collaboration with environmental scientists, farmers, technologists, bioindustry experts, government officials, community representatives, activists, and fellow artists. Discussions will focus on the value of visual practices that embrace intuition, creativity, and the unknown to generate new insights and address complex environmental, technological, social, and political challenges.
Schedule:
9-9:15 Hillary Mushkin, Welcome and Introduction
9:15-10:15 Robby Herbst
Multiple Intelligences in Interdisciplinary Art and Collaboration
Artist/writer Robby Herbst will walk around the theory of multiple intelligences in interdisciplinary art as displayed both within his sphere of research (activist practices, avant-garde art, and art + tech. incubators) as well as in his own practices.
10:15-11:15 Maya Livio
Lossy Landscapes
Computational technologies increasingly render environments aesthetically and materially—imaging, sounding, and twinning them while making some worlds reproducible and foreclosing others. In this talk, Livio will introduce her research and practice on technology for conservation and interrogate the value of the unknowable in art-science-society collaborations.
11:15-12:15 Gabriel Kahan
Dependently Arisen
Gabriel Kahan uses artistic reification and interconnected thought to remake governing systems in a changing world. He will discuss the last five years of his work with government agencies in and around Los Angeles fostering flexibility through creativity.
12:15-1:30 Lunch for presenters
1:30-2:30 Brooke Singer
Phytophilia: At the Intersection of Problem Solving and Lovemaking
Brooke Singer will present on Carbon Sponge, a multi-year collective research practice and interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, farmers, agroecologists and educators to understand soil from the inside out and rethink land stewardship more generally.
2:30-3:30 Courtney Fink and Phil Ross
Concept-Plan-Action: Growing a novel art and science organization
Courtney Fink and Phil Ross will share how their early experiences working in art and science organizations has led to the creation of Open Fung, a non-profit that is simultaneously producing art and applied research into fungal genomics. Courtney and Phil will individually and in conversation go deeper into the past four years of work towards building this new entity, their understanding of art and science as a form of creating meaning, and the far reaching constituencies they are growing through their work.
3:30-4:30 Susan Barnet and Jane Watt
Methods of Making; Case Studies on Art-Science-Community Labs
UK Senior Lecturers and Practicing Artists Dr Jane Watt and Dr Susan Barnet present their work within a spectrum of lab models from those based predominantly within art practice to those sitting within the academic institution. This collaborative duo, known as Blast Radius, interrogates methodology within a visual practices lab. They consider questions about what and when things are controlled, can/does flexibility have a role to play, and what about the accidental, the organic/intuitive.
4:30-5:30 Hillary Mushkin
Groundwater: A Visual Practices Lab Pilot Project
This talk will focus on "Groundwater", a pilot for a new Visual Practices Lab at Caltech focused on the loss of centuries-old groundwater in California Central Valley. The project includes interrelated research components developed in collaborations with activists, earth scientists, computer scientists, a political scientist, an historian, artists and designers.
5:30-6 Discussion
6:30 Dinner for presenters
Presenters:
Courtney Fink (she/her) works in the expanded nonprofit arts field as a steadfast champion of visual artists and the organizations that center and support them. Her hybrid practice merges creative process with strategic implementation and is informed by responsive open source frameworks as models for exchange, connection, collaboration, and shared experience. For 30 years Courtney has employed a spirit of openness and generosity to draw national attention to and build capacity in the visual arts, passionately advocating for the role of creative expression in broader cultural contexts. Courtney is the co-founder and artistic and deputy director of Open Fung (2022- present), connecting her work supporting artists with that of building a sustainable future. She was co-founder and executive director of Common Field (2012-2020) and executive director of Southern Exposure (2002-2015). She co-founded the Warhol Foundation Regional Re-granting Program in partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, laying the groundwork for the Foundation's revered national program, currently active in 36 cities and regions.
Robby Herbst is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer who investigates avant-garde paradigms to expand cultural imaginations. Politics, language, ideology: the ways it manifests in bodies as expression, movements, sociality, history, and action. He was the instigator of the geographically sited critical-landscape projects of the Llano Del Rio Collective. Their 2021 collaboration with the Los Angeles Poverty Department premiered at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art. He's been awarded grants from the Graue Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Mike Kelley Foundation, The Danish Arts Council, and the Durfee Foundation. In 2023 he moved to New York after living 25 years in Southern California.
Gabriel Kahan works at the intersection of art, pedagogy, and collective intelligence. Between 2014-2017 Gabriel was a researcher and lecturer at MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology where he developed and taught courses around new media, analysis of the creative temperament, and the role of the arts in contemporary societies as a force for social change. His work has been shown at MOCA Cleveland, Film Festivals, the MIT Museum, and throughout New York City through the Public Art Fund. From 2018-2024, Kahan was a Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute where he developed a methodology to create more responsive and adaptive governance models and elicit trust between government and society.
Maya Livio (she/they) writes, makes media, and curates about the contact zones between ecosystems and technological systems. Her interdisciplinary research and practice have been featured in venues such as The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and NPR, and have been presented and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art (UK), Redline Contemporary, and Labocine, among others. She was the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence at the MAK Center and SOM Foundation and the 2023 Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Resident. Livio has curated new media at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) and old media at the Media Archaeology Lab. She holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, MA from the University of Amsterdam, and is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University.
Hillary Mushkin (organizer) is an artist and a research professor of art and design at Caltech. She is founder of Incendiary Traces, an art-and-research initiative to collaboratively reverse-engineer the politics of landscape visualization. She is also co-founder of Data to Discovery, a data visualization, art, and design group based at NASA/JPL, Caltech, and Art Center College of Design. Her art work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Freud Museum (London), nGbK (Berlin), and Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum (Mexico City). Her collaborations with Data to Discovery have developed into tools to increase scientific understanding of Mars, the earth's environment, and climate change.
Phil Ross is an artist, inventor and entrepreneur whose work is focused on the relationships between human beings and the greater living environment. He is Co-Founder of Open Fung, an organization that builds collective resources for advancing fungi technology, materials and the arts. Following a path at the intersection of art, design and biotechnology for over three decades, Phil began cultivating mycelium as a material for art and design in the 1990s. In 2013, he co-founded MycoWorks, a company that grows biomaterials out of mycelium, with clients that include Hermez and General Motors. Philip's creative work has been featured at The Nobel Prize Museum, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the 2016 Venice Biennial of Architecture. His curatorial projects include a history of bioreactor design for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Critter Salon. He received an MFA from Stanford University in 2000 and a BFA from SFAI in 1991.
Brooke Singer engages technoscience as an artist, educator, nonspecialist and collaborator. Her work lives "on" and "off" line in the form of websites, gardens, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and public art that often involves participation in pursuit of social change. She is Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, a former fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (2010-11), co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media (2002-2008) and co-founder of La Casita Verde (2013-). From 2018-2020 she was a research affiliate with the Groffman Research Group, Environmental Sciences Initiative, Advanced Scientific Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Dr. Jane Watt and Dr. SE Barnet are Senior Lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Suffolk. They have both worked as artist researchers for over 20 years in the USA and UK. Public engagement and site-specific work are at the core of their individual and collaborative practices. Barnet and Watt's collaborative practice Blast Radius (https://blastradius.uk/) seeks to prompt dialogue and use techniques and technical skills that cross disciplines – observing and recording a particular site.Through active field research, creative collaboration and exploration of archival materials Barnet and Watt aim to encourage dialogues and presentations in art practice to stimulate new ways of examining and understanding the landscape around us. They have developed a long-term research project Power House on Orford Ness, in partnership with The National Trust and are both co-investigators and part of the Leadership Team for ARISE (2024-28), a ground-breaking research project funded by UKRI which seeks to develop resilience within the UK's coastal seas and communities.