NY LASER in-Person Rendezvous Event

In conjunction with the College Art Association

EVENT INFO

When: Saturday, February 15, 2025, 2:00 - 5:00PM ET

Where: LevyArts: 40 E 19 Street, #3R NYC

Space is limited, so please RSVP here or email eklevy.nyc@gmail.com; note that late admittance past 2:30PM cannot be accommodated.

The NY LASER program is a series of lectures and presentations on art, science, and technology-related projects and an affiliate of Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology (ISAST). Ellen K. Levy, PhD, artist, writer, and co-editor of the "Science and the Arts since 1750" Routledge, Taylor & Francis book series, and Patricia Olynyk, artist, writer, and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Washington University co-chair the NY LASER program to foster high-level dialogue on topics of leading interest to a network of artists, scientists, humanists, and scholars.

This special event on Saturday, February 15, 2:00 - 5:00PM will be held in conjunction with the College Art Association Annual Conference and will feature presentations by Barbara Larson, Sonia Shechet Epstein, and Charissa Terranova. 

Barbara Larson is professor of nineteenth century art history at the University of West Florida.  Her research is based on the intersection of science and visual culture.  She is author of The Dark Side of Nature:  Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon and co-editor of the three volumes: The Art of Evolution; Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History; and Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe. She edits the series Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century for Routledge, U.K. and is co-editor with Ellen Levy of the series Science and the Arts since 1750. Larson’s talk: The Establishment of Art History as an Academic Discipline in the Context of the Natural Sciences will focus on how art history was able to find its place as a respectable academic discipline by aligning itself with advances in the natural sciences and positivism in the nineteenth century.  It will discuss the adherence to scientific ideas by Europe’s first art history chairs from German-speaking states to Great Britain.  

Sonia Shechet Epstein is a curator, writer, and editor working at the cutting edge of science and cinema. She is Curator of Science and Technology and Executive Editor, Sloan Science & Film at Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, where she has worked since 2015. Epstein’s tall will illustrate the related development of cinema and medical imaging devices—beginning with X-ray technology, the first instrument to visualize the inside of the living body. It will span historical and contemporary works highlighting how artists, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, have grappled with the materiality of medical imaging tools to challenge the gaze embedded therein. Such artists include Barbara Hammer, Mona Hatoum, Peggy Ahwesh, Liz Magic Laser, Jeamin Cha, and Leslie Thornton.   

Charissa N. Terranova is an environmental humanist reframing the history of art and architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch of human-driven climate change. She researches the role of nature, biology, and biotechnology in the history of art and design. She is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas where she teaches courses on past and present avant-gardes, modernism, and contemporary bio-, interspecies, and feminist eco-art. Terranova will talk about her latest book, Organic Modernism: from the British Bauhaus to Cybernetics (Bloomsbury Press, 2024), a transdisciplinary study of "organicism," the holistic idea that maintaining the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. After briefly recounting the making of the book, she follows the red thread of organicism through British art-sci-design cultures 1930-1970. 

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 Leonardo community and Washington University in St. Louis.

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