Victoria Vesna
Founder + Director
Victoria Vesna
Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille (2011-2013). Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, more than seventy group shows, has been published in excess of twenty papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, Minnesota Press and most recently an edited volume entitled Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy). Intellect Press, 2011.
James
Gimzewski
Scientific Director
James K. Gimzewski
Jim Gimzewski is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles; Director of the Nano & Pico Characterization Core Facility of the California NanoSystems Institute; Scientific Director of the Art|Sci Center and Principal Investigator and Satellites Co-Director of the WPI Center for Materials NanoArchitectonics (MANA) in Japan. Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, he was a group leader at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he research in nanoscale science and technology for more than 18 years. Dr. Gimzewski pioneered research on mechanical and electrical contacts with single atoms and molecules using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and was one of the first persons to image molecules with STM. His accomplishments include the first STM-based fabrication of molecular suprastructures at room temperature using mechanical forces to push molecules across surfaces, the discovery of single molecule rotors and the development of new micromechanical sensors based on nanotechnology, which explore ultimate limits of sensitivity and measurement. This approach was recently used to convert biochemical recognition into Nanomechanics. His current interests are in the nanomechanics of cells and bacteria where he collaborates with the UCLA Medical and Dental Schools. He is involved in projects that range from the operation of X-rays, ions and nuclear fusion using pyroelectric crystals, direct deposition of carbon nanotubes and single molecule DNA profiling. Dr. Gimzewski is also involved in numerous art-science collaborative projects that have been exhibited in museums throughout the world.
Adam Stieg
SciArt Director Emeritus
Adam Stieg
nanopicolab.cnsi.ucla.edu/stieg
Adam Stieg serves as Director for the Sci|Art NanoLab Summer Institute. As a scientist and educator at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), his work focuses on developing integrated approaches to study material systems at the interface of traditional boundaries. Through the implementation of original experimental techniques, this research seeks to bridge the gap between our current understanding of nanomaterials and their fundamental properties with how these systems tend toward complexity at increased scales of space and time. Dr. Stieg’s research activities are augmented by active collaboration with artists and designers on various projects, installations, and public exhibitions that directly inform the scientific process and provide motivation to develop new educational content that conveys the need for creativity in innovation.
Ivana Dama
SciArt Coordinator
and Instructor
Ivana Dama
Ivana Dama studies Design Media Arts at UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture. Born and raised under a post-communist regime in Serbia, Ivana explores the infusion of technology with traditional art practices. While only a young child when the bombings began, images of the destruction still clearly permeate her mind. The memories of living in a small shelter, with the sounds of bombs and vibrations, contributed to her interests in sound and space ranging from microscopic, architectural, and satellite scale. Ivana uses the variety of media including audio visual installations, metal engraving as well as a range of open source software for creative coding.
Ivy Lovett
Instructor
Ivy Lovett
Ivy Lovett is an artist, designer, and avid doodler based in Southern California. Her work aims to integrate illustration into a variety of media, playfully weaving together themes of nostalgia, memory, and eclecticism as a way of exploring the relationship between the tangible and the digital. Aside from her main body of work, she is an active freelance graphic artist and multimedia instructor. She received her B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA’s School of Arts & Architecture.
Maryam Razi
Instructor
Gabriel Tolson
Instructor
Gabriel Tolson
Gabriel Tolson is an artist and researcher based in Los Angeles, CA. Originally a student of medicine, he works across sculpture, charcoal and installation forms to map the permeable flesh that separates organic bodies from their digital phantoms. His practice draws from early memories of queer internet chat rooms in order to understand the shape and movement of the networked self, accessing the algorithmic underbelly through ruptures in appropriated technologies. Gabriel studied photography at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem before completing his BA in Fine Arts at USC Roski.
Ariel Uzal
Instructor
Ariel Uzal
I am an artist and educator from Northern Patagonia, Argentina. Alternating between collective and personal perspectives, I reflect on privacy, social justice, death, identity, memory and human relationships, and explore these concerns in my work. I create installations and visual art combining custom software, electronics and audiovisual materials, exploring my interest in computation and its coexistence with analog and physical media.
Avery Collins-Byrd
Assistant Instructor
Avery Collins-Byrd
Avery Collins-Byrd is a current college student, going into their third year at the University of California Los Angeles pursuing a degree in Art. Avery is a Los Angeles native who grew up in South Central. They create works that are interdisciplinary, focusing on sculptural installation and performance. Using different mediums like movement, sound, video, and projection Avery creates works capturing ideas of Black indigenous spirituality, nature, race, and sexuality.
Eliana Gelman
Assistant Instructor
Eliana Gelman
Eliana is an interdisciplinary art student and researcher at the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art. From her background in cognitive science, she explores memory and perception through making physical and digital objects. She founded and runs Treehouse, a zine and collaborative art project based in Athens, GA.
Subin Lee
Assistant Instructor
Katharine Niles
Assistant Instructor
Katharine Niles
Katharine Niles is a medical assistant, researcher, and senior at Washington University in St. Louis studying biology with a concentration in neuroscience and the medical humanities. Katharine’s research is centered around medical ethics and she has been an instructing assistant for the course “Art of Medicine” at WashU for 3 years. In this course, she focuses heavily on questioning of how bodies from medical settings should be used in art while maintaining ethical boundaries, exploring the intersection of art and medicine and how they can influence each other. She hopes to attend medical school and aims to continue to teach about the medical humanities.
Rachel Youn
Administrator
Rachel Youn
Rachel Youn is an artist based on New Haven, CT. Working across sculpture and installation, Youn sources materials with a history of aspiration and failure through online secondhand shopping. Youn rescues electric massagers from suburban limbo, fastening artificial plants to the machines to create kinetic sculptures that are clumsy, erotic, and absurd. They received their BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is currently an MFA candidate at Yale University.
John Brumley
Instructor
John Brumley
John Brumley is an artist and researcher based in California. John’s work focuses on using mixed reality systems to promote collaboration in physical space, while engaging with digital skill sets, constant distractions, and hidden infrastructure. John has a PhD in Empowerment Informatics from the University of Tsukuba, MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA, and BA in music from UC Davis.