February 21, 2007
VICTORIA VESNA
Interview
"Victoria Vesna (1959, Washington D.C. ) is an artist, a lecturer, and the chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, School of the Arts and Architecture . Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. Since the ‘80s she has been exploring digital and virtual worlds and the relationship between art and science.
New realities are generated by the meeting among artistic, humanistic and technological disciplines. Victoria Vesna is also the Director of the brand new UCLA Art|Sci Center and of the UC Digital Arts Research Network . She realized 16 personal works, she exposed hundreds of collectives, she published more than 20 researches and she has been participating in various conventions for years. She has an extremely strong and dynamic but also rigorous and creative personality. Her research is mainly aimed at exploring the relationship between art and science in an innovative and appealing way.
Victoria Vesna always works with researchers, artists and scientists. She recently collaborated with the scientist James Gimsewski ( Feynman Prize in nanotechnology in 1997, Physics Institute Duddell Prize in 2001, elective member of the Royal Academy of Engineering) with outstanding outcomes.
Silvia Scaravaggi: I would like to point most on what are your project nowadays and the way you are working on them. Talking about your recent activity on art-science and nanotech, how you and James Gimsewski started your collaboration? Why did you choose to go deep inside this matter?
Victoria Vesna: In 2001, I was co-organizing a conference called “From Networks to Nanosystems” with my colleagues from the UC Digital Arts Research Network ( UC DARnet ). Each campus had one lead person who was in charge of creating special interest panels – I organized a panel of Nanotech and Culture. My interest stemmed from studying natural systems and form, more specifically the work of Buckminster Fuller . Through that exploration, I came to find out about the discovery of the third carbon molecule, the buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball. I read a fascinating article by Donald Ingber about certain patterns reappearing in natural systems and the tensegrity systems where this molecule was brought up again. Then I found out that the microscopes they use to study molecules are not optical but “feel” the surface and then translate the data to image. This, in addition to the idea of building ‘bottom up' rather than ‘top down' is revolutionary and I found it very exciting." Continue reading VICTORIA VESNA'S INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE by Silvia Scaravaggi, DigiMag.
Posted by jo at February 21, 2007 10:24 AM
