Following up on the thoughts echoed and reverberated during the first day of encounters in October, a new set of voices coming from different disciplines, from network and social theory to art history and anthropology come together on November 23rd. They open up the discussion towards what it is to be ON AIR, revealing the myriad material and immaterial, visible and invisible architectures we are embedded within.These conversations, introduced by Bruno Latour, will investigate ways of decentralising and decolonising our way of thinking as a species, hoping to overcome human exceptionalism, towards new forms of activism and the building of common worlds.

 

The conversations are in English.
Introduced by Tomás Saraceno.
Curated and moderated by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin.
Keynote by Bruno Latour.
With: Albert-László Barabási, Bronislaw Szerszinski, d’bi.young anitafrika, Fernando Ferroni, Vincenzo Napolano, Lisa Randall and Estelle Zhong Mengual.

 

“The spider’s canvas”, Evan Ziporyn
Evan Ziporyn, composer and director of the Center for Art, Science and Technology of MIT, imagines a new piece for ON AIR, in which an ensemble plays together in a spider web.
“We play in the canvas of the spider, using sonification of 3D models and 2D images in the harmonic language of Just Intonation. Rather than playing with the spider herself, we are using her webs as the basis of our music, reading her scores, using her geometries as the foundation for our vibrations, she provides us a soundscape through which we can wander”. A collaboration between MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (Professor Markus Buehler, director).
With : Christine Southworth, bagpipes, guitars & eBows, visuals/projections. Isabelle Su, interactive environment design and real-time data processing

Co-produced by the Festival d’Automne à Paris.

These conversation sessions are made possible thanks to the support of

 

 

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Participant Biographies

Albert-László Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and College of Computer and Information Science, as well as in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Channing Division of Network Science, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Barabási’s latest book is Network Science (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His work leads to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999, and proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological, and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.

 

Fernando Ferroni is Full Professor of Physics at the University of Rome Sapienza and President of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) since 2011. Member of the Governing Board of Science Europe. He has focused his scientific studies on experimental particle physics, starting his research at CERN Laboratory at the LEP accelerator. Since 2004 he has been working on neutrino physics, with an experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories called CUORE and with an innovative project (Lucifer) on the same subject financed by the European Research Council as an Advanced Grant. He is the author of several hundreds of articles in scientific journals, he has served as member in numerous international scientific boards, and chaired many committees in the field of high energy physics. Being aware of the major role that science communication plays in nowadays society, it’s many years that he is committed to spreading and promoting the dissemination of scientific culture.

 

Bruno Latour is now emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the Experimental Programme in Political Arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. Since January 2018, he is a Fellow at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for two years as well as professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. He is member of several academies and recipient of six honorary doctorates, as well as recipient of the Holberg Prize in 2013. He has written and edited more than twenty books and published more than one hundred and fifty articles.  

 

Lisa Randall is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science on the physics faculty and studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University. Her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in our current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. Randall’s research also explores ways to experimentally test and verify ideas and her current research focuses in large part on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter searches and models. Randall has also had a public presence through her writing, lectures, and radio and TV appearances. Randall’s books, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World were both on the New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books of the Year.
 

Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Tucumán, Argentina. His oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research, informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering; his floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment. In 2009, Saraceno attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Ames. That same year he presented a major installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and was later awarded the prestigious Calder Prize. He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others. His work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, and is included in the collections of MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others. Saraceno lives and works in and beyond the planet Earth.

 

Anna-Sophie Springer is an exhibition maker, writer, editor, and publisher. Since 2011, she directs the boutique publishing imprint K. Verlag in Berlin, advancing new forms of the “book-as-exhibition.” In her research-based practice, Anna-Sophie works with cultural and scientific archives and collections to produce postdisciplinary ecologies of attention and care. With Etienne Turpin, she is principal co-investigator of Reassembling the Natural, an exhibition-led inquiry into the natural histories of the Anthropocene, and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series, published by K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

 

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK.  His research crosses the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities in order to situate the changing relationship between humans, environment and technology in the longer perspective of human and planetary history.  His current work focuses on the Anthropocene and planetary evolution. As well as interdisciplinary academic publications, outputs also include mixed-media performances, art-science exhibitions and events and experimental participatory workshops.  He was co-organiser of the public art–science events Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance (Lancaster, 2000), Experimentality (Lancaster/Manchester/London, 2009-10), and Anthropocene Monument (Toulouse, 2014-2015).

 

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, founding director of anexact office, his design research practice based in Jakarta and Berlin, and co-founder and research coordinator of User Group Inc. LLP, a London-based, worker-owned cooperative building open source software for humanitarian coordination, disaster response, and environmental monitoring and advocacy. With Anna-Sophie Springer, he is principal co-investigator of Reassembling the Natural, an exhibition-led inquiry into the natural histories of the Anthropocene, and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series, published by K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

 

d’bi.young anitafrika is a playwright-performer, director-dramaturge, and scholar. One of 200 Canadian artists to receive a New Chapter Grant to produce her critically acclaimed environmental dub-opera entitled Lukumi: A Dub Opera, her other awards include: Canadian Poet of Honor, YWCA Woman of Distinction in the Arts, Mayor’s Arts, Vital People, KM Hunter Theatre Award, and The Golden Beret Award. She is an internationally celebrated arts-educator, Founding Artistic Director of the Watah Theatre, and instigator of Spolrousie Publishing, a unique micro press which publishes original works by Black and QTIPOC creators. A Toronto Leadership Lab Fellow alumni, she is the originator of the creative leadership praxis and intersectional liberation framework—the Anitafrika Method—which has been utilized by The Stephen Lewis Foundation, The Banff Centre, U of T, MaRS, the Women’s College Hospital, among other institutions globally. She is the published author of seven books, nine plays, and seven dub albums, and she has toured her work internationally. Addressing issues of gender, sexuality, race, class, and the human experience through her vast field of artistic knowledge, she is currently pursuing postgraduate studies in London, UK, where she is researching her Anitafrika Method and Theatre of Ritual-Self-Recovery as outgrowths of Dub Poetry and African-Caribbean Theatre.

Estelle Zhong Mengual is a former student at the ‘Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon,’ and possesses a doctorate in the History of Art (Sciences Po Paris). She is a member of the pedagogic commitee of SPEAP, Master in Arts and Politics, created by Bruno Latour at Sciences Po Paris. She is currently working on ways in which contemporary art can enrich our relationships and sensitivity to the world around us, in the context of the ecological crisis. She is the author of “L’art en commun. Réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique” (Presses du Réel, 2018) and the co-author of “Esthétique de la rencontre. L’énigme de l’art contemporain” (Seuil, 2018). She also co-directed the work “Reclaiming Art. Reshaping Democracy” (Presses du Réel, 2017).