(x)trees participated in the surprise PASEO 2020 Drive-thru Projection Experience that filled the historic Taos plaza in New Mexico with over 18 projections featuring PASEO alumni artists from all over the country. For this iteration of the (x)trees Agnes collaborated with coder, Roy MacDonald from Chile. Roy is now working on new interactive features that will be presented for the next showing of (x)trees in Lisbon, Portugal. Stay tuned!
PASEO 2020 artists: CHiKA, Motomichi, Ollie Bell, Sasha Von Dorp, Britney King, Corwin Levi, Ruben Olguin, Cristopher Cichocki, Agnes Chavez, Lionel Cruet, Nettrice Gaskins, Alison Johnson & Thomas Vause-Digital Ant Media, Morgan Barnard, Jennifer Nev-Diaz
Events
(x)trees@PASEO 2020
(I=)UNIVERSE: An intercultural sci-art exploration of the universe
(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.
(I=)UNIVERSE culminates=s with the following student performances, Due to COVID the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Festival was cancelled.
• 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.
STEMarts (x)change: Lisbon to New Mexico
POSTPONED DUE TO COVID
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.
SAP Lab: Artist residency and collaboration
Agnes will be starting an artist residency in 2022 at the SAP Lab in Lisbon, Portugal, collaborating with Catarina Pombo Nabais, philosopher and founder of the SAP Lab, ‘an innovative, experimental and interdisciplinary laboratory within the Center for the Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL). Their mission is for philosophy to deeply intertwine with science and art. It aims at integrating the work of scientists and artists with the conceptual analysis which philosophy is prepared to provide.’ Visit their website for more. Catarina will be facilitating research and discussions from diverse interdisciplinary and intercultural voices and they are working on several projects to explore at the intersection of ecology, art and philosophy.
Art, astrophysics and particle accelerators: NM artists at NASA and CERN
Date and Time
Fri, June 8, 2018
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM MDT
Doors open at 5:30pm
Art, astrophysics and particle accelerators: artists working with NASA and CERN – a Santa Fe LASER talk on interplanetary art, science and technology with New Mexico artists Richard Lowenberg and Agnes Chavez.
Biocultura will present the third Leonardo Art, Science, Evening Rendezvous (LASER) Talk in Santa Fe in conjunction with the Santa Fe Institute Interplanetary Festival.
Santa Fe artist Richard Lowenberg’s talk is titled “Info/Eco (An Arts/Sciences Exploration of the Information Environment as Ecosystem)”. Richard’s presentation will include an overview of works created as part of a 1974-1984 series of NASA/Arts collaborations, including the first artist’s use of satellite communications, use of bio-sensors by dancers in environmental performances, and performers participating in astronaut gravitational simulation experiments. Richard will also present two current 1st-mile / SARC (Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations) projects: “The Energy & Information Ecosystems of the Colorado Plateau: An Arts/Sciences Field Study” and “Eco-Value Scale”, an interactive public artwork and program to balance Earth’s economy.
Agnes Chavez will present her interdisciplinary work including a collaboration with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. She currently works as Artistic Director with CERN scientists and engineers at the Data Center designing a permanent installation that will visualize real time and statistical data from the Large Hadron Collider. Agnes’ colleague Johan S. Bonilla, PhD candidate at the Center for High Energy Physics, University of Oregon will join via Skype.
Richard Lowenberg is an artist, rural tele-community planner, environmental designer and eco-cultural activist. He has dedicated his creative life to investigations, understandings and artful realization of works presenting and collaboratively setting examples for ‘an ecology of the information environment’, with resulting opportunities for development of a culturally and ecologically rooted economy’. Richard’s ‘arts-sciences-society’ involvements include networking local-global communities and involvement in international arts/sciences initiatives over 50 years. Richard is founder of 1st-Mile Institute – SARC (Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations) which has collaborated with UNM, Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs, Santa Fe Institute, Leonardo, National Science Foundation’s SEAD initiative, The Internet Society, Cabine Voltaire (NL) and more.
Agnes Chavez is a new media artist, educator and co-founder of The PASEO festival in Taos New Mexico. She was an artist and Education Director for ISEA2012 and has been serving as an AmericorpsVISTA with Biocultura for the past three years developing the STEAMNM project in Northern New Mexico. She creates participatory experiences with a focus on particle physics, education and social practice. In 2009 she started the STEMarts LAB a project that applies the latest science research and technological innovations to arts and education through interdisciplinary collaborations.
Co-sponsored by Santa Fe Institute, with thanks to Currents New Media Festival.
For more information visit bioculturasantafe.com/events.
Albuquerque Wonder Cabinet: Tamarind Institute
Precision and Imagination, a weekend-long Wonder Cabinet, pitched squarely along the borderlands between Art & Science.
PARTICLE PHYSICS AND NATIVE AMERICAN COSMOLOGIES
April 20-22, 2018
This session featured Taos-based artist Agnes Chavez, who is currently collaborating with CERN to create an installation to visualize data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, with Greg Cajete, a Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo and the director of Native American Studies at The University of New Mexico, in a conversation about Chavez, her work, and its resonances with Native American cosmologies.
Building Capacity for STEAM: Americorps Project expands into 2017
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.
Origination Point Installation at The Harwood Museum
Current exhibit
February 12- May 1, 2016
Origination Point is a generative interactive projection installation originally exhibited at the 12th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba as part of the collective exhibit Entre, Dentro, Fuera/Between, Inside, Outside.
As part of Agnes Chavez’s Projecting Particles series and inspired by her research stay at ATLAS@CERN in Geneva Switzerland, this work explores new concepts about space, our origins in the universe and how matter was created after the big bang through the newly discovered Higgs field. In Origination Point, Chavez contemplates humanity’s shared subatomic origins in relation to her Cuban-American origins to express that we are more than the physical bodies and socio-cultural identities we construct.
Through a collaboration with artist Marcel Schwittlick, who programmed the code, Origination Point features images of self-generating ‘rocks’ that are transformed in real time exploring the evolution of matter and our wave/particle duality. The images are projected onto a wall of hanging fabric strips creating mesmerizing movements in rhythm with an interactive soundtrack. The interactive composition designed and programmed by sound designer Robert Schirmer includes sounds from NASA’s field recordings of outer space accompanied by terrestrial nature sounds. Through an interactive sensor the visitor moves rocks in and out of a circle on the ground. This process adds layers of water, space and earth sounds designed to shift one’s perception and emotional response to the projected visuals.
Agnes Chavez is a new media artist based in Taos, New Mexico. Inspired by particle physics, nature and technology, Chavez experiments with data visualization, sound and projection art to create participatory environments.
Marcel Schwittlick is a visual artist living in Berlin, Germany examining new possibilities of modern technology. He is interested in digital culture and its inclinations on society and is working in strong connection to various fields in the arts, forging a connection between physical and digital media.
Robert Schirmer is a sound designer and musician living in Berlin,Germany. His approach to sound and music is driven by improvisation and reduction. He’s often using field recordings and home-grown foley recordings.