Einstein a Go Go

Today’s show features guests from the Super Human: Revolution of the Species symposium.

Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary treatise  ’The Origin of Species’, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turns the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future. This high-calibre event boasts a program of invigorating and inspiring keynote lectures alongside presentations of cutting-edge collaborative research projects engaging with the Super Human themes: augmentation, cognition and nanoscale interventions.

Questions that the symposium will address include:

How do scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge intersect with human and social bodies? Does art serve simply as a representational tool for the sciences or is there more to the picture than that? Does research into bodies and their systems offer an insight into aesthetics, or is it confined to the purely functional?

Guest 1: Barbara Maria Stafford

Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Her work has consistently explored the intersections between the visual arts and the physical and biological sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era. Her current research charts the revolutionary ways the neurosciences are changing our views of the human and animal sensorium, shaping our fundamental assumptions about perception, sensation, emotion, mentalimagery, and subjectivity. Stafford’s most recent book is Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2007. (http://www.barbaramariastafford.com/)

Guest 2:  Vicki Sowry

Vicki has worked in screen production, industry development, new media and television for twenty years. Her primary focus over this time has been establishing and delivering professional development programs for filmmakers and artists in partnership with industry. As art science Program Manager at the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) she manages a suite of initiatives supporting collaborations between media artists and scientists in Australia and internationally. (http://www.synapse.net.au/, http://anat.org.au/projects/77)
 
Interviews were arranged through the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT).

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Direct podcast download: Einstein-A-Go-Go-20091122.mp3