Yesterday's speakers and exhibition at UCLA Dickerson Art Center on "Art & Aesthetics of Artificial Life" was spot on! For a small exhibition, it was quality, to be sure. And, in this instance size didn't count. It was one day, about 11 speakers and only two small rooms of visuals, 3D and 2D. It was a jewel of a show.
A speaker that whose talk I enjoyed very much was mathematician Stewart Dickson (Disney), who displayed algorithmic sculpture by first showing a mathematical equation on a blackboard, then holding up the 3D image (and also with a braille texture so you could "feel" the equation). His own frustration with the "inherent flatness of two-dimensional displays spurred him to turn to sculpture and to new technologies for creating models of mathematical forms in their three-dimensional splendor." He uses a software system known as Mathematica and the new technology of stereolitholgraphy, which allows the designer to sculpt a plastic rendition of the equation and. Its called Plastic Math. (Ballistics particle manufacturing is another technology.)
Also Charles Ostman (Mondo, SFSU) exhibited his growing art as a combination of synthetic sentience, nanotechnology, biochip, and digital biota. The visuals were beautiful to look at. I enjoyed his presentation very much because it was jam packed with images and scientific language. A real confluence of art and science.
Other speakers who I was unable to meet where Yachiro Kawaguchi and Steven
Rook who discussed the artform of utilizing computational processes which
mimic the physiologies of living organisms and systems as a methodology for
"discovering" aesthetics content.
(Some other exhibitors who were not invited speakers were H.R. Giger, Karl Simms, Una May O'Reilly, Mamou Oshie, and others.)
I was delighted when Gary Zebington of Merlin in Australia (Stelarc) recognized me and introduced himself. (He is a charter signee of the Extropic Art Manifesto.)
Anyway, it was an exceptional show, and I'm really sorry that I missed Sarita Thakoor (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) who talked about 1st NASA/JPL Workshop on Biomorphic Explores for Future missions to Mars.
Natasha Vita More [fka Nancie Clark]: www.natasha.cc Transhumanist Art Centre - Home of Extropic Art: www.extropic-art.com **NEW** Transhuman Culture InfoMark: www.transhuman.org PRESS RELEASE: "We are transhumans ..." Meme Orbits Saturn in 2004!
"The best defense is an aesthetic offense."