Time traveling through ancient art, materials and technology
Sirovich Family Residents – Gary Cullen and Katelin Fallon
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Eleonora Del Federico and Diana Gisolfi
The Unforseen
Sirovich Family Resident – Pamela Breda
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Agnes Mocsy and Ira Livingston
Contesting Space: Envisioning Urban Futures Through Data and Virtual Reality
Sirovich Family Residents – Ayodamola Okunseinde, Salome Asega, Mala Kumar, and Mariama Jalloh
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Caitlin Cahill and Daniel Wright
To The Core of Me: A Hike Play
Sirovich Family Resident – Jeremy Pickard
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen and Jennifer Telesca
Core of Me: A Hike Play is a literal journey through trees, in which an audience experiences a performance while guided on a hike through the woods. Inspired by ecological, anthropological, and indigenous perspectives on climate change, To The Core of Me explores a moment in the short life of an anxious human and the long life of a forest, both attempting to come to terms with our new, turbulent reality.
The hike-play is made up of two scripts. The first script is a fictional narrative that follows a human confronting climate anxiety while traversing contemporary urban life. The second script, interwoven into the first, reveals the climatic events experienced by trees– and the cultural events they witnessed– over hundreds of years.
The hike-play is modular; it changes based on the history of the place where it is being performed. Rehearsals are conducted simultaneously with research: our creative team will partner with local scientists, historians, and indigenous leaders to understand and honor the history of the local forest.
Audiences will experience the performance moving with and around them: actors enter from a distance; narrative is passed from guide to guide; musicians accompany for a spell; there are stretches of silence where the drama of the woods is theater enough.
Breath Consciousness
Sirovich Family Resident – Jasmine Grace
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Charles Rubenstein and Che-Wei Wang
Artist Jasmine Grace’s residency collaboration with designer/architect/artist Che-Wei Wang and electrical engineer and Professor, Dr. Charles Rubenstein is an interactive, public art installation that will translate peoples breath into a multi-sensory experience using light, sound and movement. As participants blow into a sensor, a visual and musical symphony will be created through a large scale luminous pinwheel, enabling people to not only feel, but also see and hear the effects of their breath in the moment.
Breath Consciousness, explores how particular breathing rhythms can impact one’s emotional state, in a novel and engaging way. We each have a collection of neurons in the brain stem that allow our breathing to impact and regulate our alertness, attention and stress levels, alongside higher-order behaviour and thinking functions in our brains.
This experiential work encourages participants to look both outwards and inwards to encounter the effect of their breath in an enlightening mind body experience. As each breath brings the pin wheel to life, with it comes an invitation for participants to consider the importance of mindful deep breathing in our daily lives and how it can help one to recalibrate their mind and body, to a more calm and peaceful state.
Light, Color, and Science: Licio Isolani Sculptures from the 1960s
Sirovich Family Resident – Renato Miracco
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Cindie Kehlet and Lisa A. Banner
STEAMplant Professional Collaborators – Sarah Nunberg
Licio Isolani was an Italian-borne sculptor, a long-time associate professor at Pratt Institute, and a pioneer in cross-disciplinary art as a member of the 1960s group Experiments in Art and Technology (founded by Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Kluver of Bell Labs). Collaborating with Dr. Renato Miracco (an international expert on 20th century Italian art), Pratt Institute art historian and curator Dr. Lisa Banner, conservation scientist Dr. Cindie Kehlet, and conservator Sarah Nunberg will analyze the contents of Isolani’s notebooks and artworks through the lens of analytical instrumentation such as X-ray fluorescence and infrared spectroscopy.
Like Lucio Fontana, Burri, Scarpitta, and other European artists working on the international scene, Isolani realized that painting and sculpture alone were not enough to express a modern concept. The composition of his materials (fiberglass imbedded in resin), the use of familiar materials in new ways (sandpaper and window screens as mats), the creation of kinetic sculptures, and the creation of technology that could make art “happen” were among Isolani’s preoccupations as an artist. Isolani’s work further involved the use of light, space, and time through performance.
This project will culminate in the creation of a book about the science, art, and technology of Isolani’s artistic ouvre.
Song Searching
Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Ami Cai
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen, Basem Aly, Jennifer Telesca
Higgins Hall Thermal Comfort Study
Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Nathan Bataille
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Gabrielle Brainard, Cristobal Correa, Jessie Braden, and Daniel Wright
Working with Mathematics Professor Dan Wright and SAVI Lab Director Jessie Braden, Correa and Brainard will analyze and visualize the results, generating insights by combining data about people and buildings, and seeking novel ways to represent non-visual phenomena like comfort. The project also has a pedagogical aim, engaging students in hands-on learning about building science by using the school as a living laboratory to make abstract scientific concepts more real.
Metric Units for the Solar System
Sirovich Family Resident – Sara Morawetz
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Mark Rosin and Joseph Morris
Metric Units for the Solar System is an exploration of our relationship with the systems of ‘standardised units’ we have created to order society; examining the various tensions implicit in the function, perception and ultimately arbitrary construction of such formalisms. Extrapolating the original rationale for our own system of metric units, a new set of ‘natural measures’ will be constructed for each planetary body in our solar system – deriving a local ‘metre’, ‘second’, ‘kilogram’, ‘joule’, and so on for each that is reflective of the physicality of its environment. Metric Units for the Solar System is an investigation of the contextual biases embedded in our ‘standardised’ frameworks; asking the audience to consider that when we leave our planet and travel elsewhere, how then should we measure? Should we not offer other worlds agency in the construction and regulation of their own systems of standards? Is the application of Earth-bound measures to other worlds merely a colonial gesture?
A Space Between Spaces
Sirovich Family Resident – Joseph Morris
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Agnes Mocsy and Che-Wei Wang
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Joseph Morris’s STEAMplant residency collaboration with theoretical nuclear physicist Professor Ágnes Mócsy and designer/architect/artist Che-Wei Wang is an outdoor, public art installation that will interact with incoming stellar rays. Using muon particle detectors, which sense the effect of interstellar cosmic rays, the sensors will be mounted on the rooftop of Pratt Institute’s Juliana Terian Curran Design Center detecting stellar rays. The piece will then connect to a computer to process the incoming data and, with custom software and hardware, control a series of outdoor, hanging string lights suspended in the courtyard below. Based on the particle information gathered, a custom coded algorithm will articulate and abstract the data, creating a generative pattern choreographed with the fading and flickering of light bulbs hanging on string lights in the courtyard as stellar rays move around us in real time.
As a piece of contemporary art, the work engages concepts of space and place. It invites the viewer to consider some of the smallest interior spaces, the emptiness between atoms in our bodies as passing cosmic rays move through it, nearly all without touching a single bit of matter, and the huge scale of time and distance of their origin, exploding stars. The work’s physical objects and installation occupy space, but its sense of place is both negative and positive, voids and expanses with magnitudes of dimensionality.
Licio Isolani Study Archive
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Cindie Kehlet and Lisa A. Banner
Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Miriam Clayton
STEAMplant Professional Collaborator – Sarah Nunberg
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Italian artist and former Pratt Professor Licio Isolani (1931-2015) donated a collection of his work to the Department of Mathematics and Science before he passed away in 2015. This bequest was celebrated with the exhibition “A Strange Road of Materials” showcasing Isolani’s early sculptures and paintings. The Licio Isolani Study Archive at Pratt Institute was founded by Chair of the Math and Science Department Dr. Carole Sirovich and faculty member Dr. Cindie Kehlet, along with Dr. Lisa A. Banner, of the History of Art & Design Department, and Pratt’s Stockman Fellow Conservator Sarah Nunberg. Graduate student Miriam Clayton has was of the project as a Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow. She researched Licio Isolani’s career as an artist, and also assisted in organizing the collection and preparing condition reports, which are concise summaries of the overall physical condition of the works of art, including but not limited to their material descriptions and attributes, and an accounts of any repairs or treatments that are known. We performed X-ray fluorescence analysis on the sculptures demonstrating that Isolani primarily used dyes, rather than pigments in his fiberglass polyester resin sculptures. Further analysis using Raman spectroscopy will be performed to gain insight about Isolani’s choice of dyes.
Poetics of Our Universe
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ariel Goldberg, Daniel Wright, and Chris Jensen
Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Adriana Green
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In 2015, Adriana Green began developing a poetic manuscript excavating her personal history alongside institutional archival information about America’s reliance on the Atlantic slave trade. Her work asked the questions: As Black Americans, how can we engage with our history when that history is obscured or lost? What are the elements of an hauntological pedagogy? Can silence act as a language? As a writer, Green is interested in how knowledge is translated into language. Specifically, how do we talk about the unknown? Through epistemological conversations with physicist, Dan Wright, she further explored what it means to put language around dense, astronomical concepts, such as black holes. By examining the parallels in how we wrestle dense concepts into language, Green explores how language holds complex and traumatic histories. Her project also interrogated he realm of photography and she worked with artist and scholar, Ariel Goldberg, in discussing the role of photography in archival representations of the Black community. Asking, How does photography works as both a static and dynamic record of the past? What would it mean to trouble the notions of objectivity and subjectivity in an image? Green’s manuscript is scheduled for completion in early 2018 at which point she will submit it for publication.
