Research Colloquium talk – Shapes Of Emergence: Experimental Physics And New Media Art

Talk Overview

Scientists and artists have always been fascinated by the variety of shapes and patterns that compose our visual world, and have naturally built representations of it, either poetic or realistic. Whether in the development of perspective painting with geometry, of virtual reality in digital art with military simulation technologies, or of satellite communication and the self-driving car inspired from science fiction, art and science have constantly influenced one another. In this talk, I will present Shapes Of Emergence, my recent and ongoing work as a physicist in an art residency at MANA Contemporary and the University of Chicago, where the frontier between my artistic and scientific sensibilities are blurred. In Shapes of Emergence, I explore the duality between nature and the artist’s workflow via projected visual narratives with live self-emergent shape experiments. Here, the laws of nature impose their own time frame, pushing the artist to observe and “curate” punctually, as opposed to building iteratively. This combination of artistic and naturalist approaches can drive the development of novel technologies and scientific knowledge, bringing an alternative and complementary workflow for academic research and science communication.

When: Friday, October 18, 1-2:00pm

Where: CDM Theater 708

Who: Dr. Baudouin Saintyves, Artist in Residence, High Concept Labs in MANA Contemporary

Now the colloquium talks are live-streamed and available on YouTube!

Speaker bio: Baudouin Saintyves is a physicist and a visual artist. He is currently an artist in residence at High Concept Labs in MANA Contemporary, Chicago (Institutional Incubation Program), and at the University of Chicago in the James Franck Institute (Jaeger Lab). He earned his PhD in physics from Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Before moving to Chicago, he did his post-doctoral training first at Harvard University and then at MIT, where he was awarded a CAMIT grant (council for the art at MIT) to support his art and science practice. He studies how physics explains self-emergent patterns in nature through fluid mechanics, material science and statistical physics. He explore their relationship with the artist creative workflow, by the development of technologies that allow their integration in audio-visual immersive narratives, with real-time projections of live experiments.