A new initiative, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Nina Katchadourian’s work has often looked at the relationship between the human and natural worlds, questioning our assumptions about those two terms and where we draw the line between them. Older works (such as Mended Spiderwebs, Natural Car Alarms, and Animal Crossdressing) will be discussed by way of providing background to the artist’s most recent animal-oriented piece, a complex multi-channel video and sound environment entitled Zoo. Shot in zoos all around the world between 2001 and 2008 (and ongoing), Zoo tries to ask what it is that we desire from and what we project onto the animal-human relationship. Both questions come under a particular kind of compression in the zoo environment.

Nina Katchadourian’s lecture follows a talk by anthropologist Laurel Braitman on September 14, also focusing on human-animal relationships.

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Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California, and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the ICA Philadelphia and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, featured a solo show of works made in Finland and the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in 2008. Katchadourian received her BFA from Brown University in Visual Art and Literature and Society, holds an MFA from UC San Diego, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Posted on August 30, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In this talk, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.

Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellows Lin + Lam.

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Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and has she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.

Posted on August 30, 2010

The Vera List Center launches its fall 2010 season with a new lecture series, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons. Focused on “Art and Science,” the series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Tatiana Lyubetskaya, the first lecturer, introduces the major concepts that form the basis of scientific thinking such as data, model, assumption and proof before examining specific cases of interdisciplinary scientific investigations in the fields of geology, geochemistry and geophysics illuminate. The common ground between these subjects is found in the principles of mathematical analysis, which allow processing and manipulating different kinds of information in order to construct theoretical models describing the behavior of complex systems. The fundamental problem of determining the chemical composition of the Earth and its applications in different Earth sciences serves as an example. Theoretical modeling of geological processes such as mountain building and erosion will be examined as it illuminates the ways in which a scientific problem is formulated and how possible solutions are constructed and tested.

Lyubetskaya whose own background includes the sciences as well as the visual arts – she received her PhD in geophysics from Yale and is a MFA graduate at Parsons – launches this new lectures series. The second speaker, on September 7, is mathematician Jennifer Wilson.

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Tatiana Lyubetskaya graduated from Moscow State University in 2000. In 2000-2003, Lyubetskaya worked as a researcher at the Oceanology Institute in Moscow and participated in the BEAR EUROPEPROBE project. She received her PhD in geophysics from Yale University in 2010. Lyubetskaya was awarded the William Ebenezer Ford prize for research in mineralogy in 2008 and the Elias Loomis Prize for Excellence in Studies of Physics of the Earth in 2009; her papers are published in the American Journal of Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research and the Journal of Petrology.

Posted on August 24, 2010

Historian, philosopher and filmmaker Peter L. Galison delivers the fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture. Galison is Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is author of several books among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) and Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003), and the producer of two films, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000) and Secrecy (2008). In 1997, Peter Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Named after one of the university’s most influential art history teachers, this lecture series honors John McDonald Moore’s contribution to the university’s intellectual life. Moore taught art history and criticism at The New School from 1968 until his death in 1999. His classes were famously popular for bringing the vision of an artist who is also a scholar to his students.

Posted on June 7, 2010