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reblogged from Art Works the Official Blog of the National Endowment for the Arts

March 1, 2011
Washington, DC

The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performing The Matter of Origins. Photo by Jaclyn Borowski

At the National Science Foundation building in Arlington, Virginia, an exciting conference has been taking place over the last two days on the intersection of life sciences and arts: Symbiotic Art and Science. Bringing together scientists and artists (and some who wear both hats), the conference looked at innovative collaborations that have taken place between the arts and sciences, and asked some important questions, like What motivated you to cross disciplines and how did you do it? Or, What do artists gain from working with scientists, and what do scientists gain from working with artists?

We have asked some of the participants to talk about their experiences in these types of collaborations, their experience with the conference, and their thoughts on some of these questions. We will run the guest blogs each week over the next month; to start us off is choreographer and dancer Liz Lerman, founding artistic director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Lerman has had plenty of experience in art/science collaborations: her piece Ferocious Beauty: Genome explored genetic research through modern dance and her new piece, The Matter of Origins, looks at physics inspired by her visit to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Here’s what she had to say:

Introductions at the Symbiotic Art and Science meeting took an interesting turn as one person after another acknowledged their split personality or hybrid research tactics. I found myself remembering…read more.

We’re very pleased to announce the moderators for Friday evening’s portion of Slow Networks, the 2011 iLAND Symposium at The New School. For more information on the Symposium, check visit HERE and HERE. We look forward to seeing you there!

Paul Besaw, independent choreographer, has a primary interest in the development of original dance/theatre works. With collaboration as a vital goal, he often works in a setting that includes composers, designers, theatre-makers, and visual artists. He is the founder and co-artistic coordinator of The Solo Workshop, a multidisciplinary group of artists exploring the solo mode and premiering new evenings of performance. He is also a founding member of New Agnes Orange, a performance collective devoted to original, collaboratively devised theatre projects. Paul holds a BA in theatre from Keene State College, and an MFA in dance from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Currently, Paul serves as associate professor of dance at The University of Vermont where he coordinates the dance program, and teaches classes in contemporary dance technique, choreography, and dance history.

Selene Colburn is an Assistant Library Professor at the University of Vermont, where she serves as Dance Liaison and Assistant. to the Dean of Libraries for External Relations. Her teaching focuses on the intersection of research and performance. At WGBH Educational Foundation, she was Project Archivist for the New Television Workshop Collection, which included over twenty-five years of seminal works of video art and dance. She has also worked in the archives of the Shelburne Museum, the St. Johnsbury Archives Collaborative, and the University of Vermont. Her performance works have appeared at venues such as the International Festival of Art and Ideas, the Bay Area Dance Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, and the Scope Art Fair

Adrian Ivakhiv is an Associate Professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, where he coordinates the graduate concentration in Environmental Thought and Culture. With a background in the arts (as a musician and music director) and in the study of religion, culture, and media, Adrian’s work features an interdisciplinary scope that cuts across the sciences and humanities, the theoretical and applied arts. He is the author of Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001) and Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and Executive Editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). He has been interviewed on Krista Tippett’s syndicated radio show “Speaking of Faith” (now called “On Being”), is on the board of directors of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, and blogs on environmental and cultural issues at Immanence.

Robert Sullivan is the author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, and The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. A contributing editor to Vogue, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. His work has also appeared in Condé Nast Traveler and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

iLAND recently announced that the theme of its spring symposium this year will be Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance And Ecology. The theme is clearly focused on two popular but rarely paired ideas. First, we have the idea of slowness, a pace that has captured the imagination of everyone from sustainable food advocates to poets in recent years. Mashed up against slowness is that ubiquitous 21st Century phenomenon: the network. From telecommunications to the tools we use to keep tabs on our friends, we look to networks for efficiency and speed. So what are these slow networks? And what do they have to do with iLAND’s devotion to productive collaborations between art and science in the realm of the environment?

Let’s start talking, shall we?

It’s been a few weeks since we posted the themes of the 2011 iLAND Symposium workshops. Now we’re pleased to follow up with some deeper descriptions of each experience! Take a look; it’s never too soon to start choosing which experience you’ll participate in during the symposium this year.

Stewardance
Stewardance is an ongoing project exploring how city dwellers make sense of their place in an urban forest through movement, dance, and collaborate street tree stewardship. Developed through an iLAB Fellowship by Jackie Dodd and Philip Silva during the spring, summer, and autumn of 2010, Stewardance continues to inspire alternative and innovative approaches to experiencing the community of trees found on any city street. This workshop draws on insights and experiences developed in Stewardance workshops to introduce participants to the urban forest in Greenwich Village. Participants will move deliberately and mindfully on a hike through the forest and dance through the labor of caring for an ailing street tree. Location TBA.

SIP
Combining the fields of dance, music, and architecture, Jennifer Monson, Maggie Bennett and Kate Cahill will share the processes they developed in last summer’s SIP (sustained immersive process)/watershed project. Workshop participants will engage in simple scores that interweave listening, observing, moving, diagramming and drawing. Concepts of scale, containment and transformation that emerged from the collaborator’s immersive research will be shared through an intimate series of creative exchanges. Location TBA.

River to Creek
River to Creek was a roving ecological study of Newtown Creek, a waterway that straddles the 
border of Queens and Brooklyn.  River to Creek explored and exposed the past and 
present natural history of the land around the Creek through scientific research, movement, and 
participatory sensory activities. The iLAB residency researchers and 
presenters Clarinda Mac Low, Carolyn Hall, Kathleen McCarthy and Paul 
Benney “discovered” Newtown Creek from June to October, 2010 and 
shared the area’s history and their research methods in public events 
focused on land/plants, water/fish and air/birds.  In this workshop the participants will discover the urban 
ecology of the grounds of Solar One at Stuyvesant Cove Park, 
observing its environment, wildlife, ecosystem and the juxtapositions 
of “urban” and “nature.” We will bring all into our research process and develop an idea for a public event using awareness 
exercises, physical explorations of the space, artistic projects that highlight the natural qualities of 
the area, and simple scientific data gathering to deepen the 
knowledge of the local ecology.

I finally edited our materials into a short sequence of images that reflect some ways that we were thinking about time, space, scale, perspective and movement. Be on the look-out for hard copies of The Flipbook. More details coming.