I visited the NSW Art Gallery in June this year (2021) for an exhibition of Hilma af Klint's visionary art. I was looking for that glimpse of a world that she had devoted her life to. Af Klint said she had no idea what she was painting, she just received a “commission from Amaliel” and let it come through. Apparently the invisible wants to manifest through the artist to us, giving us these glimpses. Surely, I wondered, af Klint’s enticing emanations are an invitation to us, out of love, not to copy her, but to feel the invitation strongly enough to find our own way to the threshold where the connection can take place…

BHSAD, 2018

This paper is a discussion of the ways the American artist Mark Dion approaches to the dominating anthropocentrism of modern science. The study is based on three artworks that demonstrate key transitional moments of Dion's art practice. The paper opens with the examination of On Tropical Nature (1991), the artist’s pivotal early work. The first chapter will posit that, in the frame of this work, Dion empowers the functional site of the forest, displaces the taxonomic system, activates a fictional character of an amateur scientist, and, based on representation of nature in botany, establishes his way of conducting artistic discourse about social and cultural stereotypes. The second chapter moves to The Library for the Birds of Antwerp (1993), and focuses on the artistic manoeuvre that evaluates the connection between living beings and their representations, viewed through the prism of the interplay of zoology and art. This vision explores the possibilities of the structurally constructed distance between human and non-human. In this part, the progression of Mark Dion`s strategy, including the urban functional site, the open-endedness strategy, and the viewer inclusion will be outlined. The third chapter concentrates on representing the order of the human past as a science related subject, as the next multi-factor move that emerged in Mark Dion`s Dig series. The chapter focuses mainly on one of the most debatable artworks, The Tate Thames Dig (1999). It will be argued that such fields of humanities as art, anthropology and archaeology, featured by this artwork, are producing a new synergy in the field of reconceptualisation of the anthropocentric doctrine. Conclusively, the development of a river as a functional site and a performing science related activity there, will be foregrounded.

whoever brought me here has to take me home

Toulu Hassani's paintings and sculptures are deeply rooted in abstract, post-minimal art practices. This essay examines possible traces of the heritage of Islamic art in her works both based on the artist's country of birth (Iran) and the affection of abstract painters canonized in the European Modernist tradition (like Paul Klee and M.C. Escher) with Islamic heritage in the Mediterranean. What derives from this double analysis is an understanding of Toulu Hassani's art as sharing a deep common interest of several strands of abstract art in the visualization of a mystical experience of "flow". This essay was written for the catalog "Whoever Brought me Here has to Take me Home", concluding the artist's New York residency at ISCP and accompanying two exhibitions: 28. November 2015–17. January 2016 Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst: „Before the Night is Gone” & 17. October – 20. December 2015 Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim: "One of us Must Know".

European Scientific Journal, 2013

The present study calls into focus the poetic art promoted by the "new poetry" which appeared during the second half of the 20 th century, known as concrete poetry or visual poetry. While globalising the possibilities of expression and communication of poetry, the "verbivocovisual" poetic formula offers itself as a theoretical model which redefines already established methods of producing and receiving the lyric text. It propounds an experiential-expressive model which broadens information on the materiality of language. Several examples of visual poems (in Portuguese, French and Japanese), which are subject to analysis in this study, attempt to certify that two apparently extremely different cultural universes, that use arbitrary signs in their script (the West) or pictorially meaningful signs (the Far East), might meet somewhere beyond their linguistic borders in the form of visual poetry. Its poetics may finally give birth to "common universal poetry", semantically governed by innovative rules. The result of this analysis, undergone from an interdisciplinary perspective that joins the linguistic-semantic method with those given by cultural semiotics and art history, may materialise through the recovery, within the perimeter of the modeled world proposed by visual poetry, of the recurring motif which could be called "the moving line".

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2022

This article considers scientific data and methods taken as a vocabulary for a visual language of poetics, shaping an artistic practice exploring the liminal poetics of space, time, science and mythology, equally considered. These artworks focus on the moving image as an immersive, architectonic construct, one that makes it possible to blur the boundary between space and time. They are cinematic environments that create a space of spatial and temporal ambiguity, open to the performative role of the viewer in composing the unfolding narrative. The artworks presented here began in the crossover between art and science, technology and society, exploring topics and incorporating methods from each area. Transdisciplinary processes play a critical role in this artistic research. These works reflect cinema approached as a multimodal field of possibilities in which montage motivates movement and focus through this field, creating a participatory composition of sight, sound, movement and memory that immerses viewers by actuating somatic perception. Shape, scale, immersion, interactivity, simultaneity, embodiment, implementation and the manipulation of time create concrete metaphors that echo the multivalent content of the works: a collaboration with 300 tropical spiders to create a Kino, then letting the audience walk freely among them (or the spiders freely among the audience); an immersive environment enacting the space-time of glacial ice to experience the time of a different form of matter as somatosensory experience; a journey through the human history of the Moon, transcending time, political ideologies, realities and cultures as an encompassing field of simultaneous views and sounds; performing a 2000-year-old act of Thessalian magic on the skyline of Hong Kong. Combining the technological tools available to cinema and science, contrasting magnifications and speeds of observation reveal a material poetics beyond appearance. The artworks presented here elaborate the details of cardinal subjects, diving deep into fundamental domains to unravel the cultural implications embedded within the aesthetics of their data artefacts.

Museums and Digital Culture

This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how working in digital media affords new opportunities and multiple ways of connecting to the viewer, and reaching vast numbers of people across the globe, traveling from the gallery to the public square, in particular, Times Square and the Internet, showing that the life of a digital work can have multiple states of being. Gannis emphasizes the cultural positioning of digital spaces in physical places where diverse large public audiences can experience the work and where the artist can feel the pulse of public reaction and interaction. A feature of her work is her expression of self and gender through digital manifestations of persona, being and social consciousness, that take very original shapes and forms, images, colors and animations that merge into digital interpretations of self and the surrounding world revealing her creative imagination and sense of poetry used to convey new narratives embedded in her work and life (Fig. 19.1).