Projects – STEAMplant

STEAMplant supports the creation of interdisciplinary projects; these projects range from art installations that showcase science research and technology, to research studies which use the tools of science to investigate the creation of art and architecture. Each project culminates in a public engagement event, installation, product, or publication. Below is a list of our currently funded and completed projects.

To learn more about what types of projects we fund, click here.

Time traveling through ancient art, materials and technology

Sirovich Family Residents – Gary Cullen & Katelin Fallon

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Eleonora Del Federico & Diana Gisolfi

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“Time traveling through ancient art, materials and technology” will combine art, chemistry, and history in the re-creation of an ancient Roman fresco. Specifically, this project will give new life to a fresco found in the ruins of Pompeii at “The House of the Gold Bracelet,” preserved in time by Mt. Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D. Using historically accurate natural materials and chemical techniques, this project will not only revive and reveal the highly technical art of the fresco, but will serve to highlight and celebrate the customs and culture of this lost city.

The Unforseen

Sirovich Family Resident – Pamela Breda

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Agnes Mocsy & Ira Livingston

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The Unforeseen is a project which focuses on the interconnections between science, creative thinking, and imagination with the goal of generating an artistic discourse on our role as human beings wondering about the origins of Earth and the universe at large.

In particular, this project will explore the so-called “Simulation Theory,” i.e. the idea that the entire universe is a simulation, a software inside some gigantic computer operating machine, or a program generated by an external civilization, or A.I. system.

Exploring this theory from an artistic perspective, “The Unforeseen” will present a parallel to experienced daily interactions with simulations and virtual realities. This project asks: What are the ethical and philosophical implications of Simulation Theory? How does it relate to our approach to reality, which is highly mediated by technology and simulation softwares? And ultimately, where are the boundaries between the real world and the mediated one?

In order to answer these questions, a series of video works combining documentary footage and CGI animations will be produced and presented as large projections in a final exhibition, creating an immersive installation that will engage the viewers and prompt them question their own reality principles.

Contesting Space: Envisioning Urban Futures Through Data and Virtual Reality

Sirovich Family Residents – Ayodamola Okunseinde, Salome Asega, Mala Kumar & Mariama Jalloh

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Caitlin Cahill & Daniel Wright

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Iyapo Repository, in partnership with Pratt faculty members Caitlin Cahill and Dan Wright, is developing and curating a speculative lab and resource library called Contesting Space. With a focus on envisioning emancipatory urban futures, this project will initiate a series of interventions around the ideas of reclaiming space and reimagining a more inclusive city for the next generation. Contesting Space will take place in three stages: the creation of an archive of qualitative and quantitative data, conducting workshops with long-time community, activist, and youth groups focused on imagining urban futures “beyond gentrification,” and an exhibition including a VR environment that will visualize the results from our data collection.

To The Core of Me: A Hike Play

Sirovich Family Resident – Jeremy Pickard

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen & Jennifer Telesca

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To The 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 Residents – Jasmine Grace & Ayodamola Okunseinde

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Charles Rubenstein & Che-Wei Wang

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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 & Lisa A. Banner

STEAMplant Professional Collaborators – Sarah Nunberg

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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 oeuvre.

Song Searching

Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Ami Cai

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen, Basem Aly & Jennifer Telesca

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Humpback whales are some of nature’s most majestic creatures. These immense marine mammals undertake epic annual migrations, feed cooperatively, form local cultures, and interact socially using songs transmitted over thousands of kilometers. What would it feel like to be a humpback whale experiencing today’s increasingly human-dominated world? Song Searching is a video game designed to give players the experience of being a humpback whale.

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Higgins Hall Thermal Comfort Study

Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Nathan Bataille

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Gabrielle Brainard, Cristobal Correa, Jessie Braden & Daniel Wright

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How are you feeling right now? Are you too hot? Too cold? How does the environment and your physiology affect your experience of a building? To answer these questions, Architecture Professors Gabrielle Brainard and Cristobal Correa installed a network of temperature and humidity sensors in a studio in Pratt’s Higgins Hall.

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Metric Units for the Solar System

Sirovich Family Resident – Sara Morawetz

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Mark Rosin & Joseph Morris

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Metric Units for the Solar System is an exploration of our relationship with the systems of ‘standardized 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.

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Space Within Spaces

Sirovich Family Resident – Joseph Morris

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Agnes Mocsy & 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 cosmic 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 Curran Terian Design Center detecting stellar rays.

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Licio Isolani Study Archive

Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Miriam Clayton

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Cindie Kehlet & Lisa A. Banner

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.

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Poetics of Our Universe

Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Adriana Green

STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ariel Goldberg, Daniel Wright & Christopher X. J. Jensen

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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?