faculty

California Nanosystems Institute
in collaboration with UCLA Design | Media Arts
Art | Science Lab

July 7 - July 18, 2009

Art Science Faculty

Faculty

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and professor at the Department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She is also director of the recently established UCLA Art | Sci Center and Lab and the UC Digital Arts Research Network. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her most recent installations - Blue Morph, Mood Swings and Water Bowls - all aim to raise consciousness around the issues of our relationship to natural systems. Other notable works are Bodies INCorporated, Data mining Bodies, n0time and Cellular Trans_Actions.

Victoria has exhibited her work in 18 solo exhibitions, over 70 group shows, published 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the recipient of many grants, commissions and awards, including the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and the Cine Golden Eagle for best scientific documentary in 1986. Vesna's work has received notice in numerous publications such as Art in America, National Geographic, the Los Angeles Times, Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times (Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil) and appears in a number of book chapters on media arts. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales, is the North American editor of AI & Society, and is the author of Database Aesthetics.

John Carpenter is a graduate of UCLA Design | Media Arts. He received a Bachelor's in Science from the University of Arizona in 2001 with a specialty in molecular and cellular biology. His experiences include collaboration with Scott Fraiser and David Kremers at the Biological and Brain Imaging Center at CalTech. Additionally, John has worked with Morphosis Architects and is currently working on biological data visualization.

Gil Kuno is also a graduate of UCLA Design | Media Arts. Previously a pre-med student, Gil presently has close ties to the alternative music scene in the United States and Japan. In 2006, he was named one of the top ten best artists in digital media in Japan.

Heider Raisol is a graduate student in Professor James K. Gimzewski’s research group in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Heider became interested in collaborative efforts of the Art | Science center through his interactions with Professor Gimzewski and close collaborator Professor Victoria Vesna. He is particularly interested in how current visual and audio art work relates to current emerging scientific technologies. His research project involves the development and prototyping of novel atomic force microscopes with the primary goal of increasing image resolution and acquisition speed. The ultimate hope of the project is to be able to observe biological systems with greater detail to understand how fundamental chemical interactions dictate global cellular response.

Carlin Hsueh (pronounced Carlene) will be a third-year graduate student at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She hails from southern California but spent four years at Berkeley for her undergraduate career. She currently works in the Gimzewski group in the physical chemistry division working on AFM imaging of in situ cleavage of DNA for gene expression profiling. She hopes that the results of this study will have a promising application as an alternative approach to development of predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine. Before attending graduate school, Carlin spent some time teaching high school students the joys of chemistry. She enjoyed getting to know her students and sharing how chemistry can be used and seen in their every day lives. Carlin herself is fascinated with merging the artistic and practical perspectives of chemistry and looks forward to sharing that experience.

Lis Evans is a UCLA Architecture graduate student. She holds a B.S. in art and design and a minor in neuroscience from M.I.T. Prior to pursuing her master's, she gained a diverse background in design and research in several architecture firms, an architectural book publishing house, and a San Francisco based magazine. She is particularly interested in how design education can further humanitarian causes.

Click here for a list of other participating faculty members.