(I=)UNIVERSE is a STEMarts Lab production in collaboration with Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Festival, Milagro Middle School and multiple departments at Santa Fe Public Schools, including Art, Science, Technology, and Native American Student Services. Together they coordinated an intensive, hands-on workshop that included digital technology, particle physics, and Native-Western science connections. Experts in all of these fields served as contributing scientists, artists, and storytellers throughout the project. The project included a 2-week workshop with 70 students led by an interdisciplinary team: STEMarts founder/artist, Agnes chavez, Milagro art teachers, Megan Avina and Grace Mayer, Dr. Nicole Lloyd-Ronning, LANL astrophysicist, Shane Wood, QuarkNet staff/ particle physics instructor, Steve Tamayo, Lakota artist/cultural specialist, as well as virtual visits from Geneva with Dr. Steven Goldfarb, CERN physicist and from Austria with Tagtool founder/ artist, Markus Dorninger.
• Innovation EXPO: Full STEAM ahead! A re-imagined and innovative take on the traditional school science fair. Student live painting performance at the Santa Fe Convention Center. February 13, 2020, 5:30pm-7:30pm.
American Corner@University of Lisbon Faculty of Letters (FLUL). I will be working with Humanities students from the ‘Cultural Creative’ program to design a community outreach project based on a relevant social topic. The 2-month project will culminate with a sci-art projection installation at the American Corner space that will raise awareness to the social topic explored and outline next steps for implementing the community project. Learn more.
Two years ago I joined Andrea Polli and the Social Media Workgroup (SMW) as an Americorps VISTA. “Did you know that President Kennedy introduced the idea of VISTA to Congress in 1963? Or that many of the best-known anti-poverty programs, including Head Start and Credit Unions, were expanded by VISTA members? VISTA has been on the forefront of ending poverty in America for 50 years.” Check out the Americorps website to read more about this important program.
In 2014, SMW received its first Americorps/VISTA grant to launch the STEAM NM initiative: Building Capacity for STEAM(Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and the Arts) Education in New Mexico. Now renewed and expanded for its third year with VISTA, our STEAM NM core group includes SMW along with five partners: UNM STEM Collaborative,The School of Architecture + Planning and COSMIAC; the CNM Fuse Makerspace, and The PASEO/STEMarts in Taos. My role as the Taos VISTA is to innovate and network STEAM initiatives in Northern New Mexico. It has been an exciting year that has led to new local and global partnerships to expand youth opportunities in our communities. Read more about it on the Social Media Workgroup website and stay tuned for 2017 programming.
I’ll be joining a discussion on the future of the arts on November 18, 2016 at #CreativityConnects w/ a great panel of art leaders and creative thinkers. Be sure to follow!
Listen in on what creative thinkers from across the country and across sectors say about how creativity manifests itself in different fields and how we can make more tools, resources, and opportunities accessible to those who want to pursue a creative life. On November 18, “In Pursuit of the Creative Life: The Future of Arts and Creativity in America” will explore these topics and more. Watch the live-stream of the panel sessions starting at 10 am on arts.gov! #CreativityConnects
10:00 am Framing Panel: The Here and Now of Arts and Creativity
@creativecap – Suzy Delvalle
@STEMartslab – Agnes Chavez
@shirletteammons – Shirlette Ammons
@mica – Sammy Hoi
We are excited to announce that the launch of a STEAM Innovation Lab at the Taos Integrated School of the Arts in Taos, New Mexico is underway. STEMarts Lab founder, Agnes Chavez, is working with Richard Greywolf and Megan Avina Bowers to design a STEAM Lab that will launch TISA students and teachers into the 21st century.
For the past three years TISA has participated in the STEMarts Lab youth program@The Paseo Youth program where students have gotten a taste of this unique STEAM approach. They experience cutting edge technologies and science through the lens of new media artists, and collaborate with the artist to create participatory art for Taos’ exciting new festival, The Paseo. In 2015, NY based artist, CHiKA, engaged students in a video mapping marathon that was part of the festival and this year students worked with The Illuminator, an art collective that works with light projections as a means of political expression, environmental transformation, and public discourse. We will integrate an ongoing series of Projecting Particles workshops in collaboration with ATLAS@CERN that will keep students abreast of the latest discoveries in particle physics, and through art, better understand how these discoveries expand our understanding of who we are and our place in the universe.
We have partnered with TWIRL to integrate their exciting STEAM activities, and are looking forward to collaborating with other emerging Maker spaces and activities to create a community-focused laboratory for exploration. The STEAM Innovation Lab at TISA will continue to offer these unique interdisciplinary collaborations but will also provide teachers with year long opportunities to learn about and integrate cutting edge technologies into their own curriculum topics.
Some unique features of the Lab include, A 21st Century Materials and Resource Library, a multi-functional space that allows for multiple intelligence exploration, and a VR biofeedback room that focuses on social emotional intelligence. The TISA STEAM Lab will have a strong emphasis on science concepts, creativity and innovation, personal reflection and growth, and social practice as the foundation to all technological explorations. For more information contact learn@sube.com.
Buiiding the projection cube maker station. Cade Harris and Melanie Redmond
Buiiding the projection cube maker station prototype. Cade Harris and Melanie Redmond
Designing the projection cube geometry.Aryana and Melanie
Projection mapping tests. Netlogo coding by Drake and Code.
Projection mapping tests. Netlogo coding by Cade, Drake and Code.
Projection mapping tests. Netlogo coding by Cade, Drake and Code.
Invent Event at Enos Garcia April 23, 2016.Twirl Event
Invent Event at Enos Garcia April 23, 2016.Twirl Event. Student led
Invent Event at Enos Garcia April 23, 2016.Twirl Event. Student led
STEMarts LAB Projecting Particles coding team sponsored by ATLAS Experimet at CERN, in partnership with Tracy Gallighan at Taos High School. The team has designed and built a unique projection mapping station for the Invent Event. April 23 12-5m at Enos Garcia Elementary.
We are exploring Netlogo, ‘a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena. NetLogo is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of “agents” all operating independently. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from their interaction. ‘
I played with this code a little during my residency November 2016 at Santa Fe Art Institute. I am collecting real-time migration data of immigrants and refugees video mapping their movements on to structures inspired by power lines connecting across the landscape. The above images are from the prototype for a large scale “cube” installation. I am exploring agent-based modeling for the data visualization.
ATLAS at CERN partners with Agnes Chavez, Quarknet and The Harwood Museum to bring a unique physics + art opportunity to Taos High School students. This event is sponsored by ATLAS Experiment, The Harwood Museum and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Special thanks to Carla Chavez, Biology teacher at Taos High School and Megan Avina Bowers, teacher at Taos Integrated School of the Arts (TISA). On March 18 and 19, students participated in the International Masterclassto delve into particle physics as a kick off to the 3-day Teen-Led Projecting Particles workshop. The week long event culminated with students coordinating and documenting a physics-inspired projection. They then presented on their experience as part of an Artist Talk at The Harwood Museum, which showed the physics-inspired installation, Origination Point, by Agnes Chavez, Marcel Schwittlick and Robert Schirmer. In addition, lead students visited TISA to do a presentation to younger students sharing what they learned about art and physics.
What is the International Masterclass?
From the CERN website, ‘Each year in spring, research institutes and universities around the world invite students and their teachers for a day-long program to experience life at the forefront of basic research. These International Masterclasses (link is external) give students the opportunity to be particle physicists for a day by analysing real data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This year’s edition will attract more than 10,000 high-school students from 40 countries, celebrating the 10th edition of the initiative. As part of this workshop, Taos was conferenced in with students from Medellin, Colombia, Santiago, Chile and Notre Dame, London to compare the results of their investigations.
The Visiting Guest Teachers
Michael Wadness, a high school physics teacher from Medford High School near Boston with a doctorate in science education, lead the exciting International Masterclass at Taos High School on March 18,19.
Sally Seidel is a professor of physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico and presently works on the ATLAS experiment in high energy physics. Sally came from Albuquerque on March 19 to do a presentation and lead a discussion with students on particle physics concepts and ATLAS.
About the Sci-Art integration
After a two day immersion with experts in particle physics, students began the exploration of projection art as a medium of expression and communication. The three-day workshop March 22-24 was led by three teens that participated in the workshop in December 2015. They lead a group of new students to explore a projection art iPad tool called Tagtool. Together they will storyboard, design and document a live projection on to a building inspired by the physics concepts. Special thanks to Markus Dorninger, collaborating partner and developer of the Tagtool app.
Learning by Teaching
During the workshop students presented a PowerPoint to share their experiences as part of an Artist Talk at The Harwood Museum along with artist/facilitator, Agnes Chavez. Students visited Taos Integrated School of the Arts (TISA) and presented to over 70 students from different classrooms. They shared what they learned about particle physics and how it informed their art. These new additions to the Projecting Particles workshop deepened the students understanding of the physics concepts and developed valuable leadership and communication skills.
Understanding the Higgs Field Concept– Nice visuals and effects make the concepts easy to understand. Filmed before the Higgs was discovered but still good for understanding basic concepts.
I am gearing up for my research stay at CERN, leaving Taos on March 1, 2015. Dr. Steve Goldfarb, physicist and Educational Outreach Coordinator at ATLAS has been collaborating with us on the Projecting Particles workshops. He is now preparing a series of visits and tours that will provide a crash course and immersive experience in particle physics. The Large Hadron Collider will fire up after a 2-year technical stop and I will be there for the big day.
On the CERN website they explain that, “For the first time on 9 December 2014, the magnets of one sector of the LHC, one eighth of the ring, were successfully powered to the level needed for beams to reach 6.5 TeV, the operating energy for run 2. The goal for 2015 will be to run with two proton beams in order to produce 13 TeV collisions, an energy never achieved by any accelerator in the past. CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer says. “I’m looking forward to seeing what nature has in store for us”.
