A Joint LASER: LASER New York and LASER CYLAND present “International Media Festivals and the Evolution of Transcultural Communities”
Event Info
Where: I.C.A. Yerevan, Institute for Contemporary Art
📍47 Avet Avetisyan St, Yerevan
The event will also be livestreamed (zoom)
When: Friday, September 1st at 8pm (Armenian time) (12pm EST NYC). Find your timezone here
Speakers: Ellen K. Levy, Patricia Olynyk, Sargis Hovhannisyan
Moderator: Natalia Kolodzei
We are witnessing the development of many new local digital communities and international media festivals in art and science. Along with showcasing interactions between, and the politics of, technology and culture—technoculture—at least part of this growth aspires to develop effective, collaborative responses to the pressing social and environmental issues of our time. Given the severe reality of our varied situations, many digital communities aim for common solutions that may elude us. This LASER panel will discuss some of the ways artists and curators are attempting to re-imagine our precarious future by reconciling often-opposed values, (e.g., intrinsic vs. instrumental values of art; local vs. global concerns). Examples will be drawn from a diversity of art communities and festivals.
CHAIRS: Anna Frants and Natalia Kolodzei
The Leonardo LASER Talks in New York City are curated by Ellen Levy and Patricia Olynyk.
SPEAKERS BIOS
Sargis Hovhannisyan - artist, director of the Nikolay Nikoghosyan Cultural Foundation(Yerevan, Armenia), curator of the International Gyumri Art Week (Armenia) and independent projects. From 2013 to 2019, He worked as a lecturer at the Gyumri Branch of the Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia. He has participated in various exhibitions: group, individual, art festivals, artist exchange programs, international biennials in Armenia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Austria, France, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Georgia.
Ellen K. Levy, PhD, is a multimedia artist and writer who has explored complex systems since the mid-1980s. Levy, a former College Art Association president, highlights them through exhibitions, educational programs, and publications. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Her installations explore the unintended consequences of technology, drawing on images, including from NASA, from whom she received an arts commission, and from the US Patent Office database. In the latter, one may find inventions such as the nuclear chain reaction and, in its wake, grandiose solutions for the prevention of toxic radioactive fallout. Levy and Terranova co-edited D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design and Architecture (2021, Bloomsbury), and she now co-edits an art and science book series for Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
Patricia Olynyk’s work investigates science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of the world. Olynyk is the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, Co-chair of Leonardo/ISAST’s LASER Talks program in New York, and Medicine + Media Arts Fellow at UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Palazzo Michiel, Venice; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; the Los Angeles International Biennial; The Brooklyn Museum; and the National Academy of Sciences in D.C. Olynyk’s writing has been featured in Public Journal, the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Leonardo Journal, and Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics (Actar Press).
Moderator:
Natalia Kolodzei, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, is a curator and art historian. Ms. Kolodzei is Executive Director of the Kolodzei Art Foundation (a US-based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit public foundation established in 1991), and, along with Tatiana Kolodzei, owner of the Kolodzei Collection of Eastern European Art, containing over 7,000 artworks (paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photography, kinetic and digital art) by over 300 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Ms. Kolodzei has curated over eighty art exhibitions in the US, Europe and Russia. She is an author and editor of multiple publications and organized and contributed to symposiums and panel discussions for universities and museums worldwide, including co-chair Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) CYLAND Talks. In 2010 she was a member of Culture Sub-Working Group under the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission.
SPONSORS:
The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 50 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks