Artist Victoria Vesna will be visiting DXARTS on Friday, Feb 21. Dr. Vesna is Professor of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. She is also Director of Research at the new Art, Media, and Technology program at Parsons New School for Art and Design and recently served as senior researcher at IMéRA (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, 2011-2013). She was one of the first students to earn a Ph.D. from the Planetary Collegium (then known as CAiiA+STAR), founded by Roy Ascott.
Vesna's work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. She has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, including representing Yugoslavia at the Venice Bienale in 1986 and more than seventy group shows. She has published over twenty papers and given 100+ invited talks in the last decade. Vesna is editor of the volume, Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, U Minnesota Press, 2007) and more recently Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy (Intellect Press, 2011), which includes an essay co-authored by DXARTS faculty member Edward Shanken and Duke art historian Kristine Stiles.
Vesna is a serial collaborator. She forms partnerships with scientists to research subjects such as nanoscale science, which she then interprets in interactive video installations and other artwork. Her collaborators have included nanoscientist Dr. Jim Gimzewski and neuroscientist Dr. Siddharth Ramakrishnan.
Dr. Vesna will lead DX500 Experimental Research Seminar at 10:30-12:20 in 221 Raitt Hall, which is open to all affiliated with the program. She will then meet individually with DXARTS doctoral students at the Fremont Fab Lab.