- 27 March:
Archive for the ‘Baltan Sessions’ Category
BALTAN SESSIONS # 2 – Art, Science and Evolution.
| 20/03/2013 16:00 to 18:00 16:00 to 18:00 |
Van Abbemuseum, Auditorium (Stratumsedijk 2, Eindhoven, back entrance)
20 March. Start: 16.00
Entrance: free
* We offer a unique 10 Euro discount during the Baltan sessions for the book “Bullet Proof Skin – Exploring Boundaries by Piercing Barriers” by Jalila Essaïdi for only 15 Euros. Buy your signed copy on March 20!
(img: Jalila Essaïdi)
“A project that embraces both art and science and balances on the border of imagination and reality. Which is perhaps the most exciting place to be – as a scientist and as an artist!“ - Robbert Dijkgraaf
Book presentations
Baltan Laboratories explores the possibilities and boundaries of the merging of Art and Science with two compelling book presentations by Jalila Essaïdi and David Rothenberg. Both speakers reveal their fascination for the arts and the natural world through their unconventional research practices, which enable the ability to comprehend the unexplored behind nature’s genius.
Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi will present her book “Bulletproof skin, Exploring Boundaries by Piercing Barriers” about the project 2.6g 329m/s. As one of the three winners of the Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Awards, Jalila Essaïdi (1981) created a piece of ‘bulletproof’ skin. For this purpose spider silk, proportionately many times stronger than steel and made by transgenic goats and worms, was seeded with human skin cells and has grown into a ‘bulletproof’ human skin. By creating this ‘bulletproof’ human skin Essaïdi wants to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety. With this work she shows that safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof.
Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg (USA) presents his a talk based on his book ‘Survival of the Beautiful: Art,Science and Evolution’. An exciting and almost hallucinating book about why nature is beautiful and how art has influenced science. Artists get inspiration from nature, but can we say that nature itself creates art? Survival of the beauty starts with a walk in an Australian forest. A bird has built a beautiful sculpture of twigs, blue feathers and blue cutlery. It’s made by the male to entice a female to mate. A biologist explains that the bird in case of shortage of material won’t hesitate to kill a blue bird just for its feathers. Even with humans killing for your art is rare. This bird, says Rothenberg, gives food to the thought that art in a pure form can be created by animals other than humans.
About Jalila Essaïdi
Jalila Essaïdi is a BioArtist who uses Biology and the Life Sciences as an artistic medium. Her artwork is about the recognition of the transience of matter and a human desire to keep and hold. Jalila Essaïdi studied Bioart at Universiteit Leiden and is the founder of BioArt Laboratories. The project received an honorary mention of Prix Ars Electronica 2012. This was truly a “bullet heard round the world”— Jalila’s story was immediately picked up by the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, CNN, EuroNews and the BBC.
Watch Jalila at CNN: https://www.youtube.com/v/lcQbMMyJ6bI
About David Rothenberg:
Rothenberg has written and performed on the relationship between humanity and nature for many years. Taking inspiration from Charles Darwin’s observations that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg dives into the mysteries of why we create art, and why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty. Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, on making music with birds, that was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Watch the BBC documentary “Why Birds Sing”, after a book by Rothenberg
BALTAN SESSIONS #2 – Performance
| 19/03/2013 19:00 to 23:00 |
David Rothenberg performs Music From Nature.
“A sense of virtuosity traveling all over the world.” John Cage
Location: Ketelhuis, Ketelhuisplein 1, Eindhoven.
When: Tuesday 19 March. 19.00 – showtime 20.30
Entrance: 14,- Euros including tapas.
Baltan Laboratories and Ketelhuis present an entertaining evening with music and food. Highlight of this evening is “Music From Nature” performed by David Rothenberg (USA).
He is a rarity who is both a high praised musician/composer and a famous eco-philosopher. He plays music like he writes, playful and curious. He wonders why nature is beautiful? If you can play a duet with a bird? Or how come the music of a whale has the same patterns as that of a nightingale?
David Rothenberg has long been interested in the musicality of sounds made by inhabitants of the animal world. He has jammed live with lyrebirds, broadcast his clarinet underwater for humpback whales, and covered himself in thirteen-year cicadas to wail away inside a wash of white noise. In this concert he presents a musical trajectory through several of his favorite species, revealing their distinct and evolved aesthetic senses in an attempt to show that music can reach across species lines, from human to animal, and back.
Rothenberg has written and performed on the relationship between humanity and nature for many years. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, on making music with birds, that was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
As part of the evening, Restaurant Ketelhuis presents pinchos and tapas including locally made biological cheeses, homemade sausages, self produced olive-oil and freshly baked bread from the bakery downstairs. For reservations email: reserveringen@ketelhuis.com of via +31 6 87 24 73 48 with subject “Music from Nature”.
JOE DAVIS: the Mad Scientist of MIT?
| 04/11/2012 15:00 to 17:00 |
Baltan Sessions:
MIT’s artist/scientist Joe Davis (US) visits Eindhoven!
Sunday 4 November 2012
15.00 – 17.00 hrs.
Auditorium Van Abbemuseum, entrance via museumcafé.
Entrance: 5 Euro
This event will be hosted by Wiepko Oosterhuis.
Baltan Laboratories and BioArt Laboratories proudly present a sunday afternoon session with artist/scientist Joe Davis, College Tour style. This session is part of Shaking Science, a series of events in November, where life science meets society and society meets life science. The talk will cover some of Joe Davis’ motivations surrounding his own work in several fields and some of the practical problems he has encountered along the way. Davis will also touch on the lives and works of others. Through these examples he will focus on the implications for a whole new mentality in the study and practice of art and science.
Joe Davis is an artist and Research Affiliate at Alexander Rich laboratory in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and Artist-Scientist in the laboratory of George Church at the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He received his B.A. in Creative Arts from the Mount Angel College, Oregon, USA. From 1981 to 1990 he was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and from 1995 to 2008 a Research Associate at the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto. His research covers areas that include optoacoustics, microscopy, molecular biology, microbiology, and bioinformatics for the production of genetic databases and new biological art forms. He helped to pioneer fields in art and molecular biology and carried out several widely recognized contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and also created works such as Earth Sphere, a landmark at Kendall Square, Cambridge installed in 1989.
The film ‘Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis‘ will be screened at the exhibition “BioArt Not Stirred” a joint collaboration between BioArt Laboratories, MU, Verbeke Foundation, Holst Centre & Netherlands Bioinformatic Centre and Baltan Laboratories. More information about Joe Davis: Art As a Form Of Life
Don’t miss out on this special event! Limited seats available. Doors close at 15 hrs! This event will be live streamed by Openwebcast.nl. Use twitter #JDAVISVAM or join via Facebook to get involved!
Joe Davis gives a talk on nov. 4 in Eindhoven, NL
Baltan Session: The Tools Series #7
| 12/12/2012 to 13/12/2012 |
TOOLS SERIES: CD-ROM Hackathon
A workshop led by Ben Fino-Radin (US)
Wednesday 12 & Thursday 13 December 2012
time: 11:00 – 17:00
location: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
workshop fee: 15 euro for two days, includes lunch/coffee/tea
This hands-on workshop will present attendees with strategies for capturing and preserving the contents of CD-ROMs, and offer the skills and knowledge necessary for emulating obsolete hardware and operating systems in order to run, document, and interact with these materials.
The CD-ROM is a medium that occupies a particularly unique moment in the history of technology and artistic production. In the mid-90’s – the world wide web as a platform was not yet capable of providing the rich, immersive, multimedia experience that artists desired. Simultaneously, this period witnessed the proliferation of personal computers that came equipped with CD-r drives, causing CD-ROM art to flourish as a form of creation and distribution. Artists created very diverse works, ranging from virtual spaces to game-like experiments, interactive music environments to literature and hypertext presentations. Within an individual practice CD-ROMs often have a very special place: sometimes they are a unique interactive ‘exception’ in the career of the artist (Laurie Anderson, Michael Snow), other times they are part of a long series of works in different media (JODI, Antoni Muntadas).
These works face significant threats in terms of longevity and permanent access. The CD medium itself, especially artist-produced CD-Rs, is unstable, often not standing the test of time. Furthermore, the medium as a physical carrier is in the early stages of obsolescence – in the near future, more and more personal computers do not come equipped with optical media drives. Finally, the software contained on the media is often completely obsolete and will not function on contemporary operating systems.
Baltan Session: The Tools Series #6
| 30/05/2012 11:00 to 19:00 |
THE REMIXED BOOK
A workshop led by Alessandro Ludovico
time: 11:00 – 17:00 (workshop for max 10-12 participants)
17:00 – 19:00 public presentation of workshop results and drinks
location: Onomatopee, Bleekstraat 23, Eindhoven
A collaboration between Baltan Laboratories and Onomatopee
Image found at: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9gYNyo5RS2A/TbWRaFRwPMI/AAAAAAAAAAs/LK-trDy5eGM/s1600/scrapbook.jpeg
This workshop will focus on the ‘remixed book’ and the ‘digital scrapbook’. Participants will work together to find and scan sample chapters or parts from printed books (samples should mainly be chapters, or other printed materials of one page or more in length). They will then remix these samples into new publications. Other participants will work on ‘digital scrapbooks’. They will integrate printed scraps with digital ones (taken from the web or other digital sources and then printed) in the space of a classic scrapbook. The end results of the workshop will be one-off printed publications that reflect the hybrid nature of the printed medium and its relationship to the digital realm. (more…)