t-art magazine / volume 1

t-art magazine / volume 1

SPRING 2021

t-art magazine exists at the intersection of art and technology to create a dialogue between the two seemingly disparate fields.

By bridging the gap between artists and innovators within the Penn community and beyond, our publication explores the collaborative potential to push the boundaries of art and design, particularly in a digital context.

Cover design: Magnus Allan Avery Givens Nardone t-artmagazine.com

Dear Reader, We are so excited to introduce you to our publication, t-art magazine. We founded t-art after having felt the lack of a creative community on campus and of discussions surrounding art and design from the perspectives of technology, politics, and culture.

The magazine evolved from an idea I had at the end of my first year in college, to our digital platform, and now into our first print issue. We are so grateful to our team for believing in this group and for their tremendous work over the past year and a half. Although we couldn’t include all of their writing, you can read more of their stories on our website.

Editor’s Letter

This volume is thematically organized into four sections that comprise a selection of our articles since the start of 2020.

Through the lenses of digital media, political activism, and the changes brought on by the pandemic, ‘Changing Spaces: Where is Art Now?’ explores shifts in the way we create and experience art. ‘Design & Science’ focuses on the interdisciplinary development of new mediums and technologies and how they impact our society and visual culture. We have spoken with artists and designers who use their craft to promote learning and education, from art and mathematics to the marine world, as well as shape our social discourse and communities, included within ‘Conversations: Creators & Innovators’. Encompassing impactful writing on music and exhibitions, ‘Essays & Cultural Commentaries’ looks at how artistic discourse enables us to revise the stories that history has conventionally told and to reframe them for the future. Magnus Allan, Adrianna Brusie, and I curated this first volume of t-art, with artwork from talented artists on our team and outside, and we are so happy to share their impressive work. Thank you to our team and to the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation for making this publication possible through your funding and support.

French curator and art critic, Nicolas Bourriaud writes in his Introduction to Post-Production, that “artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives.” I like to think of our publication in this way, as making connections between fields, questions, and people, in an effort to find new spaces of conversation.

Eleanor Shemtov, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief t-art magazine / volume 1

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Contents 4

Changing Spaces: Where Is Art Now?

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The Process of Emerging AVERY GIVENS NARDONE

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Looking Outside the Gallery: How Context Shapes Political Contemporary Art EMRE GULER

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Broadening the Reach of Activism: Eco-Art SAVANNAH NAIB

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Blockchain’s Novel Democratization of Art JANELLE SCHNEIDER

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Museums and Activism: Why We Need The Museum Now More Than Ever ASHLEY SNIFFEN

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Design & Science

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What Is Corporate Memphis and Why Is It Everywhere?

SRIYA CHOPPARA

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Photoshop’s Past & Future VICTORIA GRZESIAK

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The Blackest Black and Viruses Made of Glass MEHMED CAN OZKAN

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Redesigning Medical Technology: Leah Heiss SHELBY ABAYIE

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Conversations: Creators & Innovators

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Danny Simmons: On Creating Connections & Studio Time ELEANOR SHEMTOV

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Marco Santini: The Mural of Brotherly and Sisterly Love SONIA SHAH

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Alex Rex: Materialize the Immaterial!

ALAN JINICH

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Professor Robert Ghrist: How Art, Math, and Engineering Propel Visual Learning MEHMED CAN OZKAN

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Lily Simonson: An Artist-At-Sea DARYA BERSHADSKAYA

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Essays & Cultural Commentaries

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Rediscovering Blackness in the Aesthetics of Country Music WES MATTHEWS

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Jessica Vaughn: Individuality, Space, Race, and Labor in Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful ASHLEY SNIFFEN

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Freedom and Love in Aaron Taylor’s Icarus WES MATTHEWS

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Transformations of the Invisible: Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration ADRIANNA BRUSIE

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Bit Bodies MAGNUS ALLAN Alan Jinich, Finding Parking, photography, 2019

Table of Contents

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CHAN

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Changing Spaces

As our world becomes more digitized, the way in which we both create and experience art has changed.

Both public and digital art provide access to broader audiences outside of institutions and traditional art spaces. Some artists explore new ways of advocating for environmental protection and sustainability through representing the striking beauty of our natural world.

Serena Liu, Untitled, photography, 2020 4

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N Puma x The Fabricant, ‘Day Zero’ 100% digital capsule collection, Spring/Summer 2021

While many artists have found innovative approaches to create meaning through finding new contexts for their works, the importance of having an online presence has never been greater. From social media to NFTs, the digital realm is now a critical aspect for artists to consider as they work to establish themselves as artists. With the expansion of the conditions of art and the centrality of digital media, artists and cultural institutions must reevaluate the content and meaning of their work in relation to its presentation.

Changing Spaces

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The Process of Emerging Words Avery Givens Nardone

Multimedia artist Avery Givens Nardone shares the challenges and dilemmas of emerging artists who are trying to find their way in the art world.

I consider myself an emerging artist: I am early in my career, and I have shown and sold my work, but galleries and collectors probably don’t know who I am. As such, I keep my eye on calls for emerging artist shows, but I never meet their qualifications. Each gallery has their own definition of who qualifies as emerging. One call asks for artists ages 18 to 21, one for artists with 10 to 15 years of experience, and another for artists with at least 750 followers on Instagram.

I believe there’s potential for these titles—whether emerging, mid-career, or established—to help artists grow. As they stand however, these titles mostly benefit collectors; they can buy art before the artist finishes emerging, and their prices go up.

These collectors can sit on these pieces until the

artist’s value goes up, creating a monetarily valued collection they can sell at a profit, without necessarily a benefit for the artist. Younger artists have taken to Instagram to create accessible portfolio-esque accounts. It would seem understandable for galleries and collectors to consider this a reasonable measurement of success, then adding a high follower count as a requirement for show prospectuses.

Various creative jobs also consider an applicant’s follower count as a credential in the hiring process.

Kelly Micca, another emerging artist, described her frustration of being encouraged to apply to teach a workshop, only to be told she needed more online followers, “what am I supposed to do to get those followers? Beg? Hashtag? Dm everyone and spend all my time getting followers than actually painting?”

While many of us are frustrated with the link between social media and gaining real life success, an online presence is undeniably good advertising. “I wouldn’t say that the amount of followers on a given platform is entirely indicative of one’s professional achievements, but I do consider social media to be an invaluable marketing tool. With the absence of in-person art opportunities due to COVID-19, I found that most art vendors heavily relied on apps like Instagram as a means for sales and self promotion” explained Jane Bond, another emerging artist. Jane sold her first work in October through Instagram, and sold over 50 works since then just through direct messages. Kelly also considers Instagram to be a professional tool, as galleries and previous buyers follow her and are continuously updated on the work she has available, adding you “can’t really advertise works for cheaper”.

Jenny Wan, The Process of Emerging, illustration, 2021 6

Rob Roesch, an established artist, explained that selling and buying comes down to social interaction. He believes that “as soon as you call yourself an artist” is when you emerge, and your journey begins. Rob, like t-art magazine / volume 1

Jane and Kelly, doesn’t put stock into the number of followers as a measure of success, and instead suggests to focus on the interactive aspects. While it’s certainly possible (and increasingly popular) to network online, in his opinion the best social interactions come from apprenticeships. Apprenticeships allow less experienced artists to meet and build relationships with more established artists, often resulting in a mentorship.

The established artist would not only help the emerging artist decide which chances are worth taking, but provide opportunities usually only available to artists with longer resumes.

As an emerging artist myself, I want to take the next steps to build a sustainable career.

However, the emerging artist shows I have qualified for and participated in haven’t greatly impacted my career as a whole.

While my work did sell at these shows, they provided a small momentary boost in sales and a handful of new Instagram followers.

Although it did give me confidence and experience, I didn’t create meaningful connections with collectors or gallerists. I ended up feeling like I was just one face out of the dozens of other hopeful artists, and that by the next day any conversation I had with a buyer had been forgotten. Perhaps this comes from the massive number of emerging artists, compared to the smaller number of collectors and galleries. Even with DIY spaces and smaller gallery spaces opening, it seems that showing in a blue-chip gallery is the clearest step on the ladder towards becoming an established artist.

Blue-chip galleries tend to show the work of midcareer and established artists, these works aren’t risky to purchase because their value has already been determined. Rob advised me to apply for summer group shows over emerging artist shows, as this is when gallerists take note of who is selling and who’s marketable, while emerging shows tend to be more of a gamble for potential buyers.

A big part of being an artist is finding your authentic voice. It’s a relatively common struggle throughout Changing Spaces

Avery Givens Nardone, Untitled, oil painting, 2019

the emerging artist and recent art school graduate communities. There’s a huge temptation to make work that falls into trends for the sake of selling. But by focusing too much on the career aspect of being an artist, it’s easy to stifle your original voice. “Follow your bliss,” Rob advises me, “let your inner freak out.”

Early in an artistic career is the time to experiment with a variety of styles and methods, to search for one that truly fits. Jane labels herself as a visionary artist, creating “vibrant, transcendental portraits and psychedelic paintings that embrace metaphysical journeys through creative expression”. She has found a label that reflects her, while being mindful of her choice of language and the content she advertises.

“I think that like any business, it is vitally important to establish an image that is authentic and true to your values and interests.” She observed the social media presences and marketing strategies of her artist role models, to learn which strengths of her own to highlight. This method has not only contributed to her own success but also integrated her within a community of artists working in a similar style. “I’d religiously stalk 7

the art Instagram account of John Speaker because his sales promotion strategies were flawless… He sells out of his entire stock every time there’s a new release [...] It’s actually hilarious to admit this because he and I are actually friends now.”

Jane further explains, “finding this niche has been pivotal for my art career because for the first few years of classical fine arts training, I felt my artistic ability was solely judged on my capacity to replicate real life onto canvas. While I am able to create highly rendered, realistic portraiture, my role as an artist shouldn’t be reduced to a human photocopier,” causing me to reflect on how I haven’t found my niche.

I experimented throughout my time in art school but struggled to find what feels like my own voice. My own Instagram feels like a mash of too many styles, jumping from realistic pencil drawings to figurative sculpture, then portrait painting and onto abstract works. But I get authentic joy from all of these methods, none particularly over another. Perhaps I’m still in the experimentation stages of my career. Still, choosing the next step is overwhelming. There’s an infinite number of directions to go at this point and at least as many methods to succeed. Is my lack of a label beyond just emerging holding me back? Have I not explored enough? Each piece of advice I have received is valuable, but if the roads to success vary as much as the standards of “making it” do, how can I know which to follow? I’ve been told it’s obvious to experienced artists which emerging artists are going to make it professionally. As an emerging artist, however, my own path remains unclear to me, and I am caught trying to untangle the complexities and contradictions of the art world. I hope that with guidance and a lot of effort, along with every other emerging artist, I will find my way and build a solid career.

Alan Jinich, Sand Tiles, photography, 2018 8

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Changing Spaces

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How Context Shapes Political Contemporary Art Words Emre Guler

Examining engaging public artworks by Simone Leigh, Ai Wei Wei, Jenny Holzer, and Kerry James Marshall that combine art and activism.

Earlier last year in November, Penn made headlines with the installation of a monumental sculpture by acclaimed artist Simone Leigh at the campus corner of 34th and Walnut Streets. The piece, titled “Brick House,” stands 16 feet high and is cast in bronze.

Depicting a Black woman’s head atop a round structure, Brick House explores the complicated history of Black female identity in America while elegantly fusing human form with architectural elements. The newly debuted work is part of Leigh’s series called Anatomy of Architecture, in which, as the name suggests, body and architecture come together to further engage with ideas and objects of Black femininity, reflecting the artist’s interest in the African diaspora’s historical and contemporary realities.

There is much to discuss about Leigh’s œuvre and Anatomy of Architecture specifically, but more than the work itself, the presentation and context of the work now on Penn’s campus was what sparked the most discussion. Speaking to Penn Today, President Amy Gutmann stated that the installation of Brick House neatly aligns with Penn’s commitment to combatting racism and racial discrimination in Philadelphia and beyond “as we redouble our collective efforts to confront issues of racial justice.”

Many also noticed the timely installation of the sculpture as the University was bolstering their efforts to nurture discussions of racial injustice during the University’s Year of Civic Engagement, regarding the move as simply paying lip service rather than implementing an actual change. A fair share of Penn’s student body and many student organizations have argued that Penn could be doing 10

much more for the underrepresented communities in Philadelphia’s surrounding neighborhoods, so the recent installation highlighted by the University was deemed an incentive of “performative activism” by many. However, the meaning of the word “performative” is entirely subjective, especially when it comes to taking genuine, impactful action to advocate for change in our communities.

Nevertheless, the Penn community ended up discussing the installation of a work about Black American identity, and Penn’s role in taking sincere action to combat issues of racial inequality, much more than discussing the work itself. This is not anything new. When it comes to art that captures your attention, makes an important statement, and resonates with you, the space and context in which the work is exhibited takes on more significance. When works are exhibited in public spaces, the boundaries between the audience and the work are blurred, and we think about the art in relation to its presentation.

Especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic that greatly impacted our communities, it is now more important than ever for works of art that challenge our understanding of our society, bring attention to critical issues, or advocate for change, to be presented outside of a well-lit gallery space. 2020 showed us innovative ways of presenting art and for using a platform of artistic narrative to express a political statement.

This relationship between the message and the context of art is a critical and powerful one. Racial injustices in many parts of the world, international responses to refugee crises, the 2016-2020 US Presidency, and many other fiercely-discussed political issues sparked great t-art magazine / volume 1

Changing Spaces

Simone Leigh, Brick House, bronze, 2019 Photograph by Eric Sucar 11

response in the world of artivism — a portmanteau of art and activism first used academically in an article from 2008 on Chicanx artivism). Most of these great works were not necessarily presented in a well-lit gallery space, but outside the designated spot for art, raising questions about the purpose and the place in society that political or non-political art “deserves.”

The role of the artist as an activist is a very powerful and sometimes a necessary role for many, as the goals of contemporary art and its often conceptual nature can sometimes turn the audience to a puzzling discussion of the validity of contemporary art. This connection of art and activism is a nuanced one that is not always so easy to execute. I have gathered some of my favorite works of political art outside the usual gallery space where art and activism merge and result in something powerful.

Medusa Across the Courthouse This October, the sculpture that embodies a reimagined vision of the Medusa myth was installed in New York City. Named Medusa with the Head of Perseus, the sculpture was created by Luciano Garbati in 2008. The seven-foot sculpture of Medusa overturns the ancient Greek myth and depicts the Gorgon as an avenging victim of sexual assault that hunted down and decapitated Perseus. And today, it’s situated right across the street from the Manhattan Supreme Court where Harvey Weinstein stood trial.

The sculpture was created as an homage to female empowerment and the #MeToo movement of holding assaulters accountable, and the installation of the work in the NYC park, facing the courthouse also follows that message that the work intends to communicate. However, many have questioned whether this statue of a naked, idealised woman created by a male artist actually embodies the message of the #MeToo movement, or why Medusa is not holding the head of her rapist instead of Perseus.

Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Life Jackets in Berlin This is my favorite example of political art with a great message but a not-so-great (or accurate) execution. Ai Weiwei, an artist mostly known for his activism and his unapologetic and outspoken stance, made headlines in 2016 with an installation in which he attached 14,000 orange life jackets used by refugees to the columns of the Berlin Konzerthaus. Ai collected the jackets from his trip to the Greek island of Lesbos where Syrian refugees fleeing from their homeland across the Aegean Sea were on their way 12

to Europe. The installation sparked a great amount of discussion surrounding the refugee crisis, but again, context matters. And the context Ai chose for his life jackets was certainly perplexing for at least some part of his audience. Intended to be a critique about governmental impact on the refugee crisis and the discussion around the value we attach to human life, the installation is located in the center of a symbol of Germany’s embracement of refugees since the 17th century, and Ai’s choice of staging an installation of this nature in Germany has been criticized by many, raising the question of why the piece wasn’t staged in countries that have taken in fewer or no refugees.

Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise Installation artist Jenny Holzer became known in New York City in 1977 with her series of anonymously posted sheets of text known named Truisms where she essentially used words as the primary medium of her art that she presented to a large and broad audience, capturing the viewer’s attention with this context. This objective is most evident in her project in which she used LED lights in public spaces such as Times Square and expressed that “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.” The Hope Issue Kerry James Marshall’s body of work is all about painting it black. His mission is to make Black people and Black culture more visible in the art world, hoping that his works find their way into museums in the future so they can be exhibited alongside works of art that often lack Black presence.

Artists such as Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico made cover art for Vogue in the past, and for the magazine’s September 2020 issue named “The Hope Issue,” Vogue reached out to Marshall and commissioned a painting of a Black woman in an Off-White evening dress (the artist was required to choose a dress by one of four Vogue-selected designers for their subject to wear) in front of a penthouse terrace.

We are not used to seeing Marshall’s paintings where he uses three different shades—carbon black, iron oxide black, and ivory black to paint his vision of “unapologetically Black” figures onto the canvas. Yet presenting this beautiful painting of hope outside the gallery and distributing it via the rather unorthodox medium of a Vogue cover definitely brings home the point of how important the presentation is when it comes to art that makes a statement. t-art magazine / volume 1

Museums and galleries have always been catalyzers by bringing people closer to art. They can be more relevant than ever in engaging with political art amid the pandemic through innovations in how they exhibit artwork — in order to connect their audiences to thought-provoking works in meaningful, exciting ways.

Looking outside the gallery, we should recognize and appreciate the importance of not only the political statement of the artwork, but also the how, when, where, and why of the artwork that is bound to its contextual nature, as the artist that embodies the role of the activist challenges ideas, institutions, and the status-quo through new channels.

Changing Spaces

Ivy Williams, I am a Man, 2019

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Eleanor Shemtov, Helsinki, digital collage, 2020 14

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Salinas #3, Cádiz, Spain, 2013 photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

Broadening the Reach of Activism: Eco-Art Words Savannah Naib

Changing Spaces

With forest fires raging, sea levels rising, and the global loss of biodiversity due to climate change, artists including Edward Burtynsky and Jason deCaires Taylor advocate for the environment in impactful ways.

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When emotions are too strong for words or repeating the same call to action in conferences or daily conversation has become exhausting and frustrating, we turn to other forms of expression. For this reason, art has played a powerful role in many social movements throughout global history. With forest fires raging, sea levels rising, storms increasing in frequency and intensity, and the global loss of biodiversity, it is clear why so many artists are now focusing their efforts on environmental conservation and protection. The idea of protecting and safeguarding the planet from big business and its toxic pollutants has been around for decades, but in recent years the need for action has become gravely apparent.

From the start, art took the stage, manifested in the form of signs held at protests, some accompanied by witty captions and others letting the art speak for itself.

Children hold signs speaking to their uncertain future, young adults passionately display their anger and disappointment with governments and businesses,

and older protesters write questions demanding why they have had to fight so long and hard for necessary change. Greta Thunberg’s unwavering work has given rise to several posters featuring her message or image. The creativity accompanying this art inspires a wide variety of emotions, from puns giving a needed laugh to images of iceless polar bears devastating enough to bring about tears. It comes as no surprise that protest art is only the beginning of the impact that art has had on the environmental movement, functioning as the backbone from which other, more professional, art forms have grown.

While perhaps the most well-known artist in this field is Robert Smithson and his piece Spiral Jetty (2005), there are many other artists deserving of attention with equally important messages. Artists’ inspiration from the natural landscape, animals, and humans’ interaction with both of these entities is timeless, creating a clear path to incorporating climate change in this creative world.

Alberta Oil Sands #14, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007 photo © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto 16

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Edward Burtynsky is a renowned photographer who captures our society’s collective impact on the Earth through several projects and three films. His commentary on the images is often brief, letting the sites speak for themselves. The observer knows the photographs are of degradation if not destruction, but the images remain captivatingly beautiful, drawing admirers from beyond the environmentallyminded community. He travels across the globe, from oil sands in Alberta, Canada, to the striking juxtaposition of green, developed Scottsdale, and the barren neighboring Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation, to shipbreaking in Bangladesh.

His use of color is often most striking, both from nature itself and from the waste of human industrial activity, highlighted against the surrounding natural ground. Burtynsky’s photographs have been featured in the National Gallery of Canada, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Art Gallery of Ontario among others, drawing in people spanning across a plethora of professions and ages.

He did not frame the exhibits as an exposure of anthropogenic demolition until the Anthropocene Project, which allowed for these diverse crowds, yet he was able to leave viewers pondering exactly what impact they have had on the environment in order to maintain a certain lifestyle. The Anthropocene Project is his biggest collaboration and has received the most attention. It is named for the belief of geologists and other scientists that a new epoch, the Anthropocene, has begun due to human activity becoming the most defining force on the planet. The project is multidisciplinary and focuses on a variety of man-made issues, including climate change, the overwhelming presence of plastic, and unprecedented rates of deforestation and extinction. The goal of Anthropocene is to share the scale and depth of our collective impact, inspiring both fear and awe at human ability to drive environmental change, a critical feature that has accompanied all of his works and exhibits.

where to place these sculptures is highly methodical and selective, involving a search for optimal conditions for coral growth yet that are far enough downstream from real coral reefs to avoid tourist disruption of these natural and fragile ecosystems. Creating new reefs is critical, as approximately 75% of global reefs suffered bleaching-level heat stress between 2014-2017, with 30% under mortality level stress. The way Taylor arranges the sculptures often shows people mimicking normal poses or actions of everyday life, giving them a somewhat haunting appearance and warning us of the prospect of rising sea levels.

Another eco-art approach, called ecopoetic art, re-envisions the natural world through often working directly with the environment to preserve it. Jason deCaires Taylor has brought to life an altered view of reality by mixing human forms and coral reefs, effectively redesigning the seafloor. Taylor works in sculpture; he mainly creates rough, unrefined human figures out of marine-grade cement, allowing the sculptures to be submerged and function as an artificial reef. In this way, he lets nature become a part of his artwork, as the base grows coral and eventually fish adopt the manmade structure as their new habitat. The decision of

These are two of many artists in the emerging field of eco-art who use very different approaches and levels of integration to highlight their shared underlying concern for environmental degradation. Art is a highly effective method for starting discussions about sustainability, as it brings people together from all backgrounds and viewpoints. From signs at protests, to the exhibits and artwork of professional artists, art will undoubtedly maintain its crucial role in environmentally-focused social movements and continue to find new ways to express the intrinsic value of our natural world.

Changing Spaces

Eleanor Shemtov, Helsinki, digital collage, 2020

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Blockchain’s Novel Democratization of Art Words Janelle Schneider

What the development of blockchain technology means for the accessibility of art and fashion today and in the future.

As our world becomes progressively digital, new technologies are constantly emerging and changing the ways in which we interact with the art world. In recent years, the revolutionary potential of blockchain has emerged. Notably, blockchain is transforming both the fine art and fashion industries, making them increasingly accessible to people around the globe.

Blockchain, defined simply, is a chain of blocks, or digital information, which are stored in a chain, or public database. Each block stores information about a transaction, including the date, time, and value, records the people involved in the transaction, who are identifiable by unique digital signatures, and documents a unique code, or “hash”, making each block distinctly identifiable.

Within the world of fine art, blockchain offers new ways of creating, buying, and selling art. While digital artwork can easily be replicated and distributed without its creator’s consent, artwork can be registered on the blockchain allowing artists to prove their ownership. Blockchain further creates a platform on which collectors can track the ownership history of art, helping them avoid purchasing forged creations. By registering a piece of art, the details and characteristics of the work can be stored in a time-stamped block. Firms, such as Blockchain Art Collective, facilitate the authentication of an artwork’s unique identity, allowing buyers to confidently invest.

Beyond verifying authenticity, art investors use blockchain to sell shares of artwork as a financial good. The firm Maecenas, with the goal of making art accessible for everyone, is the first platform on which buyers can trade shares of fine art. This liquid market allows consumers to invest in pieces of fine art in the hopes of making a profit. Additionally, by purchasing shares of art, investors can enter the art world at a more affordable price.

The Fabricant x Dapper Labs, Iridescence, digital couture, 2019 18

Blockchain has also advanced the boundaries of the fashion industry. Using blockchain, designers can create a unique footprint for each material and product they produce. Some designers have even begun to create digital fashion experiences.

The Fabricant, a digital fashion house based in Amsterdam, has pioneered digital-only fashion that t-art magazine / volume 1

The Fabricant x Dapper Labs, Mary Ren “wearing” her Iridescence dress, 2019

is worn and traded in virtual realities. They envision a future “where fashion transcends the physical body, and our digital identities permeate daily life to become the new reality.”

Their first piece “Iridescence” was purchased for $9,500 and marks a historic moment in the world of traceable, tradeable, and collectible digital fashion.

While we are seeing the rise of NFTs, The Fabricant was an early pioneer in the digital creative space with their innovative and environmentally sustainable, non-physical fashion model. For those hoping to sport their own digital couture, The Fabricant offers pieces that are completely free to download in the spirit of a truly democratized and accessible fashion industry. According to the Fabricant, this transformed fashion industry is moving humans towards the next level of existence.

including in fashion. While those embracing blockchain often profess its democratizing power, the true effects of this are questionable. Although fine art and fashion may become more accessible for some, those people will likely be those with technological access, a surplus of time, and an interest in the industries. Thus, the expansion of consumption will likely be restricted to a niche group.

However, this marginal change may be indicative and foundational for more expansive endeavors ahead.

This leads us to question, will blockchain allow the zeitgeist of our time to truly infiltrate and shape often exclusive and elite industries? Or will blockchain’s role in creative fields simply fade like one of the many swift and fleeting trends occupying the short attention span of a digital age?

With the rise of blockchain, fine art and high fashion are becoming increasingly accessible. Blockchain has both a pragmatic function in the authentication of art and offers great potential for visual creations, Changing Spaces

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Eleanor Shemtov, Untitled, silkscreen print, 2019

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Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017. Photograph by Adrianna Brusie

Why We Need the Museum Now More than Ever Words Ashley Sniffen

Museums must leverage technology for the common good to activate change. They should remind us that our past, while tied to the present, does not define our future.

Now, more than ever, we need the museum. The COVID-19 pandemic has promulgated questions regarding the operation of artistic institutions throughout the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City closed its doors on March 13 and reopened at the end of August, with new visitor guidelines mandating the wearing of masks and socially distancing from others. Before its closure on November 20, the Philadelphia Museum of Art employed similar restrictions, asking visitors to Changing Spaces

purchase tickets in advance for designated time slots and enforcing temperature checks upon entry. While these safety features aim to protect and look after the well-being of visitors, we must also ask what the priority of the museum ought to be in these strange times: physical safety for in-person visits, activism relating to the current social climate, or, perhaps more optimistically, both.

Now is a time when cultural institutions can either close down and turn away social progress, or they can 21

act as beacons of hope which promote both equity and equality. We cannot ignore the present state of our country, nor can we ignore the fact that such institutions are struggling monetarily as a result of the pandemic. A recent American Alliance of Museums survey indicated that 33% of museums in America are not confident that they will stay open within the next year, with 56% of respondents reporting that they only had enough resources to support staying open for the next six months. These numbers are bleak and force us to consider what the world would be without the arts and institutions that preserve our past and the beauty and pain imbued within it.

Art museums showcase the works of individuals who challenged the status quo and who we have interwoven with the fabric of history. There would be no museums without such individuals who diverged from the norm and followed their own paths. At their best, our museums celebrate their achievements and remind us that it is those who question the workings of society who spark social change. Museums remind us of our own ability to inspire change in the world and to bring about new ideas that diverge

from established norms in order to make the world a better place. In this way, the institution of the museum should strengthen its identity as a communal space that brings to light the ills of society and fights for the preservation and equality of all people.

Should museums serve as activists? How should they engage their audiences? Technology has the ability and reach to further connect the public with cultural institutions, and it is the responsibility of these entities to respond to current events and engender meaningful conversations regarding the state of the world.

In certain ways, the pandemic has democratized the consumption of art. Museums have initiated online discussions pertaining to salient social and political issues and the virtual format has extended these conversations to people throughout the globe. Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art leads Mindfulness sessions each week to further ground people within this moment in time, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art has developed virtual programs for children to encourage artmaking in a time of lockdown and uncertainty.

Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses, at the Dia:Beacon, 2019. Photograph by Eleanor Shemtov

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In the midst of such social and political uncertainty, how can and should museums respond? Since last March, we have missed the special experience of walking through a museum’s galleries, an experience that cannot be matched virtually. Has the physical space of museums become a more symbolic entity to us as a result? Perhaps the answer lies in one perspective of the duty of the museum to disseminate knowledge to the public. The most remarkable, thought-provoking exhibitions essentially arise from an engagement with the present. Perhaps one of the most important current exhibitions in Philadelphia is the Mutter Museum’s Going Viral: Infection Throughout the Ages, which underscores the methods through which people have understood infectious diseases throughout history.

Connecting our past with our present may be the only way in which we can understand and shape our future. Curation methods and practices that consider the issues burdening our society can allow for the development of exhibitions that challenge our ways of thinking and help us forge a path towards a heightened understanding of our individual and collective place in the world.

As we have seen, cultural institutions have wronged the public throughout history by representing select, privileged artists and, as a result, completely dismissing the achievements of others. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed in order to combat the maledominated world of art by creating artworks that shed light on museums and galleries that included female artist representation of 10% or less within their institutions. The recent past has showcased a heightened awareness of representation of all people within the visual arts, with particular exhibitions such as 30 Americans showcasing the art of contemporary African American artists. Nevertheless, museums are responsible for shedding light on diverse artists in all facets of their collections. Individual actions, such as those seen in the collective of the Guerrilla Girls, can change the manner in which museums respond to curation and artist inclusion. People at large change history for the better. Museums should feel obligated to respond to the will of society as individuals bring to light social issues.

While attempting to showcase the works of certain artists, museums can make mistakes. A controversial Philip Guston retrospective was recently postponed out of fear by museums that audiences would misunderstand Guston’s works depicting Ku Klux Klan figures, which Guston intended as a form of

Changing Spaces

criticism of racism and bigotry. The postponement sent shockwaves through the art community, with the former curator of the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Michael Auping claiming, “The irony is that, if ever there was a poignant time to have these Guston images shown, it’s now.” Curators interpreted the show’s postponement as a critical deficit in the ability of museums to respond to possible criticism, out of fear of being questioned or called out by the public.

Nevertheless, it is these engagements with the public that drive forward contemporary conversations regarding art, politics, and social identity. Museums should feel emboldened to do better when people respond or question their exhibitions, for these interactions enable us to understand our history and learn from mistakes of the past. It is the duty of the museum to present controversial art in a manner that does not support subject content but rather educates about the past while denouncing racism, sexism, and classism. Museums need to be cognizant of the social atmosphere within the country when individuals go about curating shows. By understanding the public and choosing to showcase works that can generate profound conversation about how and how not to act, the museum can retain its ability to incite positive change from established ways of thinking.

Artistic endeavors uplift communities, and art museums need to leverage our increasingly technologically-reliant world with the knowledge they can offer to educate the public, remind us of our shared humanity, and to demonstrate that we are not alone.

Museums are more than physical entities; they are beacons of achievement for different artists and of knowledge for our communities across social, economic, personal, and interpersonal levels. We need to turn to these institutions in times of distress like these, to both learn from the mistakes of our past and to understand how we can build a framework for the future. In this vein, the museum must turn towards us, too, in the quest to understand what exactly the public wants and needs.

We need cultural institutions to fight for the common good of the people. A system that chooses to uplift the public rather than divide us, whether through actions or passivity. We are living in a time where the artist and curator must activate the foundations of social change together. It is the role of the museum to lead conversations and curate exhibitions that relate to our present day, to remind us that our past, although inextricably tied to the present, does not define our future.

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Design & Science It has never been easier to design. Technological advancements introduce new platforms that have made creating graphics accessible to nearly everyone who has access to a digital device. Innovative medical devices focus on human-centered design to develop beneficial wearable technologies. With these new tools, we expand our understanding of the boundaries of design, as the field begins to take on new meanings and functions of its own. Simultaneously, many critics recognize that with the growing role of digitization, aesthetic trends have risen and so much of design today has started to look uniform.

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G I S N Design no longer solely revolves around the goals of the maker, but also around the relationship between the audience and the novel avenues through which they experience design. Looking at how designers and scientists are bridging these fields promotes a dialogue about how the connection relationship between the two takes on a unique life of its own.

Top: Marzia Micali, Unpredictable Bodies, photography, 2020

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What is Corporate Memphis and Why Is it Everywhere?

Words Sriya Choppara

It doesn’t take an artist’s eye to recognize this common style used all over commercial art.

Where does it come from, and what does it suggest for the future of design?

If you’ve ever stepped foot in an Apple store, you’ve probably noticed the large, softly glowing graphic panels spanning every wall. You may recall Yukai Du’s vibrant and flat illustration from your last visit. Its candy-like color palette and the sharp silhouettes drawn with unusually rosy skin might have caught your eye. The art style used by Du, commonly seen while scrolling through Facebook or viewing the Google Doodle of the day, is not unfamiliar to you. This illustration style has been dubbed the corporate art style, or more pejoratively, ‘Corporate Memphis’.

Characterized by solid coloring, geometric shapes and cartoonish figures with disproportionately lanky limbs, Corporate Memphis has become increasingly ubiquitous since it was first popularized in 2017. While it debuted as a space-filler in social media, websites and SaaS (software as a service) products, the style can now be found as images accompanying website articles and on magazine covers. The style is well received by the majority of consumers and has become the go-to choice of illustration style in marketing and user interfaces. However, its omnipresence has spurred criticism for its apparent shift away from more intricate, detailed illustrations to what critics deem to be generic and uninspired.

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The exact origins of Corporate Memphis are unclear.

Some credit its creation to Alice Lee, an independent illustrator who partnered with Slack to design 40 illustrations for their website and platform. She has remarked that she was influenced by Mary Blair’s Disney concept art in the process of creating these warm and whimsical figures. Others credit BUCK, the design firm that created the style guide, illustration, and animation system called Alegria for Facebook’s ecosystem. Corporate Memphis is also said to be the illustrative analogy to the 80’s post-modernist design movement Memphis. Corporate Memphis’ geometric forms, along with its highly contrasted and bold color style are similar to that of Memphis furniture designs.

Additionally, the way figures are warped in Corporate Memphis is reminiscent of how Memphis designers depict everyday objects in unusual ways.

Considering past trends in graphic design, the art style’s current ubiquity was inevitable. Take your phone’s interface, for instance. With every update, app icons have taken one step forward to a minimalistic, simplified, and flat look. The days of skeuomorphism are long gone. Big Tech companies have increased their demand for Corporate Memphis illustrations. Additionally, the progression to a minimalistic finish is evt-art magazine / volume 1

Sriya Choppara, Corporate Memphis, illustration using Icons8, 2021

ident in how several corporations have revamped and decluttered their previous busy and detailed logos.

There are several reasons why there is such mass appeal for simplified design, and why the Corporate Memphis style has flourished in particular. For one, the illustrations of people are often inclusive to the extent that some resemble anthropomorphic aliens.

But no matter their appearance, people can see themselves in illustrated figures with skin as purple as a plum. The cheery color palettes and the characters reminiscent of childhood cartoons only add to their charm. The simple vector art has just the right amount of detail to please the eye while one swiftly skims through social media or lengthy policy updates.

Corporate Memphis is flamboyant. It’s spirited. It’s joyful. It’s most certainly prepossessing to the general public. But it’s exactly these elements that warrant greater scrutiny. Illustrations in the style, with its aggressively friendly expressions, portray a world that is uncannily utopian. The deliberate oversimplification in Corporate Memphis can give a false sense of security in situations where the opposite behavior should be observed. While it may not be obvious, the bubbly style can make consumers subconsciously lower their guard and lure them in. For instance, Design & Science

Corporate Memphis is often strategically placed in predatory subscription terms or privacy agreements.

This smart marketing ploy for firms may have negative repercussions for users.

Other benefits that corporations receive from using Corporate Memphis are far less sinister. It is convenient for graphic designers to work in the style using vector art which makes illustrations easily scalable, animated, and replicated. Graphic designers are able to quickly alter designs according to the whims of their clients. The generic appearance also makes it simple for startups on a budget to use premade assets to accompany a wide variety of texts. Its homogeneous appearance lends to a sleek and professional look at a small price point. Not to mention, graphic designers don’t need a particularly high level of skill to create rudimentary assets in the style.

That isn’t to say that it’s impossible for illustrations in the Corporate Memphis style to be unique. While Corporate Memphis has very distinctive features that make art of its genre appear similar, it is wrong to say that it lacks creativity. Take Slack versus Facebook’s illustrations, for instance. The fluidity of lines, color palettes, proportions, textures, digital brush choice and methods of shading make a world of difference.

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Editorial illustrations with elements of the style are evidence of how artists have put their own spin on it.

Illustrator Jing Wei’s characters have consistently thick limbs, a rich color palette, and distinctive eye shape.

Her experience in printmaking is clearly an influence on her commercial art. Illustrator Alex Eben Meyer uses colors so bright they seem to pop out of the screen and overlays shapes to mimic paper collages.

While it is more likely that these illustrators drew with the intention of echoing Art Deco or Minimalism, the solid coloring and jointless limbs parallel Corporate Memphis’ key attributes.

So what is the future of Corporate Memphis?

Despite criticism that it is generic, or even lazy, the decision of several companies to invest in and use it in their visual branding is a sign of its appreciation by the majority of its audience. While its appeal may come with questionable implications, it is also hard to argue against its radical inclusivity and how it allows many to easily project onto the cartoon-like figures. It is important to consider it a warning sign when it accompanies consequential texts like terms and conditions, but I appreciate its style and love to see how different artists put their own spin on it. In the light of its pervasiveness, I am keen to believe many are fond of it too. Whether its influence is seen in accompaniments to editorials or fillers to bedeck empty space, Corporate Memphis’ sweeping popularity will not disappear any time soon.

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From top, left to right: Anya Miller, Juxtaposition I, digital collage, 2019 Alan Jinich, Ants (4/10), composite, 2016 Elyssa Chou, Blueprint, drawing, 2019 Design & Science

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Photoshop’s Past and Future Words Victoria Grzesiak

Exploring the shifting role of one of design’s greatest digital assets.

Photoshop is by far the most widely-used and successful image editing software created. It has changed the entire process of image manipulation, launching a new industry. Today, over 90% of the world’s creative professionals use the software.

Before the onset of Photoshop, graphic design was a manual process. Editing a single image would take a few days, often requiring meticulous planning with a team of designers and typographers. These graphic designers usually developed black and white layouts that would be overlayed with instructions for the printer. To create these layouts, designs would attach various elements with rubber cement, utilize french rulers to create curves, and take up to 24 hours just for a type change. This video from LinkedIn Learning does a great job of outlining this pre-Photoshop material process.

Photoshop was developed in 1987 by two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll. Thomas Knoll was a Ph.D.

student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in Computer Science. He acquired a Macintosh Plus and was soon surprised that he could not display grayscale photos on its monochrome display, so he decided to code a solution. John Kroll worked within the cinema visual effects industry at this time and was impressed by his brother’s grayscale solution.

John convinced him to take his programming a step further to develop it into a full-fledged image editing program. Afterward, Thomas took a six-month leave of absence to create this software, which he originally named ImagePro – and soon, Photoshop. The brothers worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute the program with an image scanner, and only 200 copies of Photoshop were ultimately sold and shipped with Barneyscan.

John later traveled to Silicon Valley to demonstrate his program to engineers at Apple and to Russell Brown, then art director at Adobe. At that time, Adobe’s main source of revenue was PostScript, Victoria Grzesiak, Desktop, illustration, 2020

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a software that translated shapes, colors, fonts, and sizes into mathematical equations that could be interpreted by any printer or device. Adobe already had a place in the design world, but it did not yet offer an image editing software. The Kroll brothers eventually won over Adobe executives, and Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990.

This version has some of Photoshop’s most famous tools, including the lasso, blur, sharpen, fill, magic wand, and eyedropper. Here’s a video of John Kroll demonstrating the capacities of Adobe Photoshop 1.0. Then, the list price for Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was $895, and it was available only for Apple computers.

Photoshop 2.0 was released in 1991, introducing the paths feature, as well as supporting CMYK and EPS rasterization. This version required double the RAM of the first version and was still exclusively available for Macs. A year and a half later, Adobe Photoshop 2.5 was released, supported both by Macs and Windows, making it one of the first cross-platform software.

For this to be possible, the entire code behind the program had needed to be rewritten for the Windows operating system. Later on, Adobe Photoshop 3.0 brought forth one of its most iconic features: layers.

To learn more about each version of Photoshops, this article explains major developments in each version.

In 2013, Adobe changed its pricing structure — instead of purchasing Adobe Photoshop within the Creative Suite on one local computer, Adobe decided to introduce a subscription-based model. This allowed a single customer to have the program on multiple devices. Another benefit of this subscription model is that users did not have to purchase new versions of the software with each update.

Additionally, depending on the plan purchased, the user can gain access to additional design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign.

This model later transitioned into the variety of plans available today.

Adobe has already begun to introduce Artificial Intelligence within the program with the “select subject” function. A clever algorithm is used to determine which pixels are likely included in the main subject of the page. Photoshop will include more of these algorithms in the future to guess viewers’ intent and make the image-editing process more efficient for those who already have experience with the software.

designers who have been using the program for years don’t know the full capacity of the application. When there are infinite options available, it becomes difficult to know where to start or what to look for.

Today, there are multiple Photoshop alternatives available for beginner artists and elite designers alike. Some of these alternatives including Procreate, Rebelle, Photopea, and Sketch. Many Photoshop alternatives focus on improving the digital painting experience, while others focus on UX/UI design or offer free online image editing services.

Adobe Inc., Photoshop logos, 1990-1991, 1996-2002, 2012-2013

Photoshop’s ultimate replacement may not even come as an application but as a real-time editing tool. An article by Jennifer Smith discusses the potential of real-time image correction. “Researchers from MIT and Google have demonstrated real-time corrections which can be applied to improve an image in less than 20 milliseconds right at the time a picture is captured.” This technology could be applied to live streams and broadcasts without the viewer’s notice. However, the existence of deep fakes already threatens the transparent spread of digital information. Perhaps a real-time image editor would alter our perceptions of what is real, challenging what we know to be true and beautiful in life. If the world began to seem more beautiful or engaging onscreen rather than off, who would ever disconnect?

Photoshop is not a perfect application, but it has had a tremendous impact on contemporary image culture, advertising, and the art world, through its possibilities for unbounded creativity and potential. For now, Photoshop will remain a staple among designers, but as technology advances and becomes more integrated with our lives, so too will this software.

If Adobe Photoshop has one major flaw, it’s the intense learning curve of the program. Adobe tries to alleviate this pain by offering short onboarding tutorials and recommending users solutions to complex issues through its online forum. However, even graphic Design & Science

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Serena Liu, waiting, photography, 2019 32

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The Blackest Black and Viruses Made of Glass Words Mehmed Can Özkan

At the intersection of art and the biological sciences lies the search for new materials and innovative ways of creating art.

What do the Yin and Yang, goth subculture, funeral clothes and elegant gowns (like the one Penelope Cruz wore at the Oscars last year), the legendary tuxedos of James Bond, and the car that absorbs 99.965% of light have in common?

If you are an optimist, it is the combination of all colors. If you are a pessimist, it’s the lack of any at all, and if you are a skeptic – is it even a color? The color black, or the vast concept of it, continues to bring, culminate, and express a variety of meanings in our lives. As Tokyo-born, gothic fashion artisan with

an overt passion for black, Yohji Yamamoto, puts it in Fashion’s Poet of Black: YAMAMOTO, a New York Times piece by Suzy Menkes, “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy – but mysterious. It means that many things go together, yet it takes different aspects in many fabrics. You need black to have a silhouette. Black can swallow light, or make things look sharp. But above all black says this: ‘I don’t bother you – don’t bother me.’”

We are at a point of indispensability that has led to the personification of black; it transcends a simple

Luke Jerram, SARS CORONA, photography Design & Science

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Luke Jerram, E-coli, photography

compound composed of a bond between Silicon and Oxygen atoms, altered with chemically engineered additives to be perfectly clear and malleable. Jerram allows the glass to gain form and life, as it resembles different viruses and cells that cover the surface of the Earth. One of his sculptures folds into the spike proteins (S-Protein) of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind COVID-19, to bend the light, refract it and project science brilliantly to the world of art. There are many projects that are exemplary in this team effort, where chemistry especially excels as a dualwielded asset, being both a source of inspiration and a mediator of artistic expression through a variety of natural and engineered materials.

In 2019, MIT engineers developed a material that led to the accidental discovery of a black coating that was ten times blacker than what was previously said to be the darkest black. Vertically aligned, nano-sized “forests of carbon-nanotubes” absorb most of the light that is shone on it and trap it, before converting it into heat, which is minimally radiated in the infrared spectrum — part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is invisible to the human eye.

Luke Jerram, T4 Bacteriophage, photography

noun or an adjective to embody a character. It should not come as a surprise to see the pursuit for the creation of the “blackest black” assemble voices across art and design, as well as experts of science and the physical world.

It is essential to understand the tremendous potential of physical and biological sciences intersecting with art. Science not only serves as a great source of inspiration but dictates how different materials are shaped by the tools of the artist and how light interacts with an artwork, such as a painting or sculpture, and the shadows that are formed. The collection of sculptural models in Glass Microbiology,

by Luke Jerram, is a great example of this type of interplay between light and form, and similarly chemistry, biology and the visual arts. To create his sculptures, he uses Silicon Dioxide — a sand that is a major component of glass and is a chemical 34

The way it looks in the nanoscale is that homogeneously sparse “antennae” of thin carbon nanotubes protrude vertically, like tall trees, at angles less than twenty degrees from the normal. These nanotubes welcome the incident light in a variety of ways: a portion of the rays are reflected, some are transmitted, and others are absorbed. When light hits a nanotube, the reflected and transmitted lights continue deeper into the forest, where they encounter other nanotubes. This cycle continues until almost all of the light has been absorbed and an insignificant amount reflects back.

As highlighted in an article by Jennifer Chu for MIT News, Diemut Strebe, an artist in residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology, along with scientists from the same research group have worked together on an art piece. They covered a $2 million, natural 16.78-carat yellow diamond, mesmerizing in its shine and cuts, in the black material mentioned above. The coating they obtained was so dark that in the photos taken in front of a black background, the coated diamond, or rather the silhouette shaped by it, can be made out as a somewhat black hole floating in space.

In the same article, Brian Wardle, one of the engineers for the project, suggests that the dawn of interest in black materials dates back to long before the Renaissance. He notes the importance of researching black for the development of emerging technologies in space and in the optical sciences. t-art magazine / volume 1

Finding ways to create blacker coatings is essential for observing our universe, as they allow telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope to reduce stray light inside their optics, which hinders the quality of images captured. These newer coatings would allow for the more optimal absorption of internally reflected light. Previously, Vantablack, a commercial product formulated by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom was promoted as a coating observably much blacker than the black paint used in the Hubble telescope. When a light was shone on the Hubble paint, it was visibly reflected by a small amount, while no trace of light could be seen when it hit the Vantablack. You might also remember hearing about the “Black Beast” Vantablack BMW car, painted in the light-absorbing black. Although it is difficult to imagine, the MIT coating that was developed is much more absorbent. Wardle also adds that the “blackest black is a moving target”, highlighting in a confident manner the research-oriented approach to the question, as someone will likely find a blacker material.

As Professor Wardle reminds us, materials and techniques continually arise from scientific research and discovery. Science, as well as art, are ever evolving and changing at a rapid pace. The tools provided by this development of new ideas in a widerange of fields work to expand our understanding of artistic possibilities and provide fresh opportunities to turn the abstract into the concrete. Science and art both inform each other symbiotically in their search to gain new insight and knowledge. New science encourages experimentation in thought, material, and technique and artistic endeavors push mediums to new limits.

Elyssa Chou, The Blackest Black, digital design, 2020 Design & Science

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Redesigning Medical Technology: Leah Heiss Words Shelby Abayie

Dr. Leah Heiss offers a new aesthetic approach to designing medical technology and redirects agency back to the wearer.

Medical innovations have saved the lives of millions of people around the world. However, in focusing on the science and technology behind life-saving devices, the aesthetics of the pieces have been left behind. In reality, these gadgets are often clunky and conspicuous, in contrast with the sleek, glossy machinery we see in countless films about a future world of innovation. To rectify this issue, Dr. Leah Heiss, an Australian RMIT University lecturer, researcher, and designer, creates human-centered wearable technologies.

Heiss’s focus on user-centered design stems from the insecurities faced by individuals with health issues and the attention-grabbing devices used to administer medication. In a 2013 Design Matters: Melbourne International Design Week showcase, Heiss asserted that the role of the designer is “to try and empathize with the final user” and to “be in their

shoes when designing.” As she put it, “as a designer working in this field, I have to trade places with these people. I have to experience their joy, their pain, their humiliation, their stigma and do something with it.”

This goal motivated Heiss to design several pieces of medical jewelry, such as the world’s first self-fit modular hearing aids known as Facett. The aid is reduced to a core, which controls the settings, and a rechargeable battery module. Instead of using disposable batteries that are hard to change, especially for consumers with arthritis or other health issues, users can magnetically click the core and battery module into place. The aids also have a rich sound with its input filtered through 96 output channels.

To gain insight on how her hearing aids were used, Heiss studied 25 users to learn what it’s like to live with a disability and rely on technology aids for work.

Leah Heiss for Blamey Saunders hears, Facett, 2018. Photograph by Matt Harvey

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She learned that the stigma associated with a disability is still alive and well. As a result, she sought to design a device that would immediately and consistently challenge public perception. Disabled people don’t want to be pitied or seen as outsiders. They want to be treated like the average person, and for this to occur, the stigma surrounding their disability must be broken. Heiss chose to model the hearing aids after crystalline structures because society automatically associates crystals with high value and universal desire. The design challenges preconceptions associated with hearing aids.

Aside from functionality, the Facett aid shifts the perception of hearing aids from a symbol of disability to a symbol of desirability. The aids are sleek and modeled after the facets of crystals. They come in several colors including white, rose gold, black, silver, and more. Heiss drew influence from the mineralogy collection in the Museums Victoria located in Melbourne, Australia. The collection has minerals from nineteenth-century Europe, America, and Australia. It consists of 52,100 palm-sized specimens, including 1,200 faceted gemstones, making it the largest, most diverse mineral collection in Victoria, Australia.

The gems from the collection differ vastly in appearance, which makes for a thorough study of gem structures. For instance, the Gypsum specimen M 31511, is white and has several jagged facets. In contrast, the specimen Elbaite M 46126 is deep green and has the shape of a long prism with several ridges.

As a result, Leah Heiss 3-D printed around 200 models of Facet during the development of her pieces.

In 2007, Heiss also designed light-weight, wearable diabetic jewelry that allows users to administer insulin using nanotechnology. Heiss sympathized with the plight of these teenagers and their urge to feel normal, despite their illness. Many teenagers are already concerned with outward appearances and looking “cool,” and having a medical illness that requires consistent treatment is not necessarily easy for them. Consequently, some teenagers try to avoid embarrassment by administering insulin in the bathroom, away from prying eyes.Thus, Heiss began working on functional diabetic jewelry with Nanotechnology Victoria, where she immediately saw several design issues. For one thing, the jewelry could weigh several pounds. In a speech made at the Melbourne International Design Week convention, Heiss said that no one wanted to use a “giant blue rocket launcher in a metal suitcase” It had to be practical and conspicuous. A huge device that has to be wheeled around in a suitcase is off-putting to the average person, especially for teenagers.

Design & Science

Leah Heiss, Diabetes Jewelry, Nanotechnology Victoria, 2008 Photograph by Narelle Portanier

Along with researchers at Nanotech Victoria, Heiss succeeded in designing an insulin distribution device able to fit in the palm of one’s hand. The necklace is an applicator for a NanoMAPS insulin patch that painlessly distributes insulin throughout the wearer’s body. The patch is a discreet 10x2mm circular disc with several small needles attached to its surface, and it is kept in place through a simple and elegant ring. No longer does the user have to sneak off to the bathroom to administer life-saving medicine.

Through collaborations like these between designers, scientists, and researchers, individuals with illnesses can feel more comfortable and empowered. As Heiss has expressed, medical jewelry will one day redirect the agency of disclosure back to the user, allowing them to reveal its hidden functionality, or leave it as an aesthetic ornament.

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This work explores new ways of perceiving the human image, changing the definition of forms through sculptural abstraction. Using a white wall as a blank canvas, the body becomes volume, space, and ink, with colors defining movement, performance, and change.

The chosen forms and poses investigate geometry, sexuality, and the contrast between masculinity and femininity.

— Marzia Micali

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From left to right: Prineshia “Jordan” Newbold, Don’t Look At Me While I’m Pretty, photography, 2019 Chae Kim, Bittersweet, photography, 2020 40

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Eleanor Shemtov, Au Souk, digital collage, 2019

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T O A R E

C R E S

& IN N O

& O R T S A S

Art has become an innovative medium that allows creators to propel visual learning, portray the hidden parts of our environment, and shape social discourse. We have spoken to several artists whose artwork inspires reflection and change, as they bring together communities and highlight how art and meaning-making are an inherent part of everything.

VATOR

R

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N I N & O

Conversations

VATO

DANNY SIMMONS MARCO SANTINI ALEX REX ROBERT GHRIST LILY SIMONSON

RS

Conversations: Creators & Innovators

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Danny Simmons: On Creating Connections and Studio Time Words Eleanor Shemtov

Philadelphia-based artist and founder of Rush Arts Gallery, Danny Simmons explores connections between us, geographic place, and frames of time.

Danny Simmons at home with his collection of comic figurines

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With the layering of overlapping, dynamic organic forms, Danny Simmons explores connections — the ones between us, geographical places, and frames of time. Based in Philadelphia and originally from Queens, New York, Danny Simmons Jr. is an abstract painter and the co-founder and President of Rush Arts Gallery, as well as the founder and Vice President of Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, which focuses on providing arts education to underserved youth and creating exhibition opportunities for young, emerging contemporary artists. Simmons gave me some of his time as we spoke over the phone about his art practice and Rush Arts, the influences of his family and living in New York, and how empathy brings us closer to implementing social change.

In his most recent show, Danny Simmons… Studio Time, at InLiquid Gallery, Simmons presents a collection of works that he created since the start of the pandemic. Being in the studio this past year helped him to process what was happening; his studio became a place where he felt grounded and safe, as he painted and wrote every day. During this time in isolation, he has continuously explored his creative impulses, as he makes artworks that speak to each other and to our current moment.

Simmons became a full time artist in 1988 and has been a largely self-taught artist since the beginning. “My mother, she was an amateur painter, and when I was a kid she used to bring me home art supplies and teach me to paint. And that’s where I got my start at. I came from a particularly creative household, my father was a writer and educator; he used to recite poetry, and I would see my mother painting all the time,” he tells me.

“I think my love of creating images came from early on the recreation of comic book images, I was an avid comic book reader as a child, as I am now. And so I’d recreate the Hulk and Thor you know like most kids or some kids I guess, just redrawing what Kirby drew.” On whether there’s still a connection between his passion for comic books and his art practice, Simmons expresses, “I think all the stuff I do in my life is connected. I don’t think there’s any direct influence, visual keys that influence my paintings, but I think looking at art visually both in galleries or in comic book paintings is always stimulating, although you don’t always take inspiration from it. I don’t always take inspiration from my comic books, but I think I take being connected to art. So I won’t see a comic book page and say oh, I like that combination of colors or this and that. But after I read a comic book, I will be filled with the love of the art, which would help with me creating art. I think that’s the best way to explain it.”

Conversations: Creators & Innovators

Danny Simmons, Wat in Da Blu Blazes, oil on canvas, 2020

Simmons describes how he found his way back to painting in his early 30s, “I had been writing mostly poetry, and I’d written a novel that wasn’t published.

I was trying to write another one, and I got writer’s block. And I had a paint kit somebody had given me I think just laying around, so I picked it up and started painting and the thought occurred to me that even if I wrote something, the chances of getting it published wasn’t huge, and I thought it would be easier to get someone to look at something then to sit down and read a whole book. So I started painting and it became for many years my primary mode of expression and I would write a little poetry now and then, but until I started my first book that was published, I didn’t really see poetry or fiction writing as my vehicle, I saw painting as it. Now I sort of see them both as equal vehicles, although I still lean towards painting a little more.”

In 2004, Simmons published Three Days As The Crow Flies, a fictional account of the 1980’s New York art scene. He juxtaposes poetry and prose with his paintings in I Dreamed My People Were Calling But I Couldn’t Find My Way (2007), The Brown Beatnik Tomes (2014), Deep In Your Best Reflection (2015), and The Return of Two Dick Willie (2018). The Brown Beatnik Tomes became a collaboration between Simmons and jazz bassist Ron Carter, with a live performance at BRIC House in Brooklyn and its recording for a CD album with Blue Note Records.

In some of Simmons’ work he has combined the use of paint along with textiles. “Part of my visual 47

Danny Simmons, Tis all that and more, textile artwork, 2014

cues and that I did get inspiration from is the art of Africa or indigenous arts all around so long before I used any of the fabric, I would note the patterns.

I’ve taken actual visual cues to morph them but recreate patterns, some of the textiles from Ghana, the repetition of patterns, body paintings from Africa and other parts of the world. All of those show up in my paintings so at some point, I saw a piece of fabric, and I guess this was around 2012 or 2011, I decided to glue it down on the canvas, but my thought was can I work this stuff in not just as a separate thing but as a part of the flow of the painting. You know I wanted it to be seamless, that it flows from the canvas, the textile, to the paint, then maybe back to the textile – and so I started exploring that more and more.” This introduction of fabric into his work lasted “for about five years in various ways and then it just stopped.

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And that had happened a lot over my career that phases of my art would come in, they morph in, and then they just stop and I move on to something else.”

Danny Simmons refers to his painting style as “NeoAfrican Abstract Expressionism”, and in the past, he has spoken about some of his artistic influences, ranging from Dali to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. He expressed in a past interview with The Trove that when he discovered Lam, he “looked at his work and said ‘that’s the real stuff, he’s who Picasso wanted to be.’ Picasso got the form right but not the spiritual aspect. All those Europeans who appropriated African art were intellectual but I felt Wifredo Lam.” He began to represent the evocative circular forms that come up in many of his paintings after a time of having created more representational works. t-art magazine / volume 1

“I always loved body painting and the way dots are used in this, that, and the other. And at one point early in my career I was struggling for a way to get past modernism or figurative abstraction. I first started with figurative abstraction and I couldn’t find a way to represent indigenous or African cultures in my paintings without a figure and it came upon me that a dot and repetitions of dots would do it.” The dot he realized connects to African heritage and roots, and he began to communicate this form through his paintings. In Studio Time these forms in his compositions create bridges between tradition and our present — shaping connections across time and geographical space. “For me [the dot] would retain the necessary feeling, the aboriginal beginnings of art and also lead me into more modern painting. So that’s how I did it, it was like oh I discovered that as a vehicle to get from figurative abstraction to pure abstraction. And then I looked at the dot as being a point of spiritual focus,” recalls Simmons. Through his practice, Danny Simmons weaves in his sense of spirituality into his canvases. “I think that art is a connector, and that it connects people, so I’m conscious of that when I’m creating artwork. I see all of this as being tied together. Spirituality is very important because that’s the major way we connect with each other, through conversations. We also connect on a deeper, more spiritual level. With that, I think it’s important that I think about art in terms of being a spiritual connector.”

When I ask about his creative process and how he brings together different mediums, Simmons talks about how in very few works did he completely collage textiles. About 3 or 4 years ago, he stopped using textiles and he laughs, “I’ve got boxes and boxes of textiles here, just sitting around now. But there are two paintings where I put a little bit of textiles on the edges of them, it was a triptych I did and on two of the smaller ones I just used a little bit of textiles and it works.” Looking at his work, you can sense intuitive movement and the addition of paint strokes in tones that vary between ochre and dark greens to reds, black and white. In an essay, Howard McCalebb ties Simmons’ expressive visual language and artistic process to the styles of Jazz artists Charley Parker and Miles Davis. The prolific artist’s work further extends to music through his role as cocreator of the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, which won a Tony award for its Broadway version.

Having grown up in New York, the greatest influences on him and his approach to art making came from his parents, “in two different ways because they did two different things for me. My mother, not because Conversations: Creators & Innovators

she was a painter but because she was so encouraging of me becoming an artist. My father didn’t have anything against it, he was one of those, yeah being an artist is great, go get a job and then you can paint on the side. And my mother actually said this to me, which started me on my path as a full time artist, she said ‘Go ahead and be an artist, nobody will let you starve.’ I was a social worker and I told her that I was disillusioned with the job, but more than that I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. And so I was talking to her about that and I told her I think I’m going to quit my job and just paint. And when she told me that, she was talking not just about her or about my father, she was talking about my brother who had become big in the music

Danny Simmons, Linked Up, oil on canvas, 2020

industry by then, and she was really figuring that my brother had my back and go ahead and do what I had to do and don’t worry we’ve all got your back. That was really, really important to me. So I think that one statement was the most influential and most powerful thing that happened to set me on this path.”

More broadly he explains, “beyond that being in the artistic midst of New York, making friends and looking at art and conversations, and just the relationships that I developed with other artists and the whole art field, was inspiring. We’d talk a lot about art, we’d hang out and since I wasn’t formally trained, this is where I learned a lot about other artists, reading, and going to galleries – where I got my push and strength to continue to be an artist.” I tell him about having grown up in the East Village myself and feeling that its energy and culture had a large impact on me and my own art 49

making and he adds, “I spent a lot of time down there when I was a teenager, around St Marks Place and around the Lower East Side and the East Village so that was very influential too during the 60s and early 70s. You could always find me down in the village and I went to NYU too.”

“Living in Philadelphia has given me more time to create, you know in New York City I was doing so much more than just being an artist,” he reflects. “I was on 4 or 5 boards of directors at the same time, I was doing a lot of activities always in the arts but not as much work as I could for myself. And it was one of the reasons that I moved, I couldn’t figure a way out of being so connected to the whole Brooklyn art scene and movement and I could never get enough time to spend in my studio.”

Danny Simmons, Going Viral, oil on canvas, 2020

In 2014, Simmons was included by Brooklyn Magazine among the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture, and he has served on the boards of The Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and Long Island University. Through all aspects of his life he has been a strong proponent of the arts and has spoken about his desire to ensure that the arts institutions he has been a part of are “responsible and responsive to” their communities. “And so moving to Philly gave me more studio time, and I knew a lot of people here who were in the arts, particularly Raphael Tiburino and his family; they were all artists, and so I fell right into the arts community as soon as I walked in the door.”

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Danny Simmons… Studio Time, his newest exhibition, reminds us of how important our connections to one another are — the importance of keeping in touch and checking in with each other. Of the paintings, he says: “Those forms started out for me mostly as bigger representations of dots – you know the orbs, always touching, over-linking, always leading down a path or doing something – circles, dots, and orbs have become my primary mode of expression in the last 10 years I would say. But when the pandemic hit, I was more conscious of figuring out what these things meant to me during this period of time, these points of spiritual reference, these points of connectedness between human beings, and so by painting and staying focused on expressing how I felt about connecting with other human beings — the lack and the wanting to connect with other people.

And also the repetition of circles in a lot of them sort of represented that I had time to make these connections, so I was busy looping things in between, and in and out of them. Studio Time really was about that: I had studio time to focus my thoughts, centered around one theme and to be creative about how I expressed what I was feeling and what I was taking in from the world and what the world was feeling around me.

On the story of how he started Rush Arts, he tells me it began before Rush. “It really starts with me looking for exhibition space for my own work, not being able to find it. There weren’t many Black artists showing in SoHo at the time, there were very few Black galleries in New York City that represented the work of Black artists, so I decided to open a gallery or give a show.

And so I was giving shows at independent places here and there, and eventually I opened a gallery in my home. I had a brownstone, and I created my first gallery, the Sanctuary Gallery, on the first floor, with what I would call a grant from Russell [his brother], to renovate it with lights and remove walls and just create on the ground floor gallery space there. So I did that and ran that for a couple of years and then I hooked up with some guys in Tribeca and we ran a gallery called Annex. That required money to pay the rent, and we didn’t sell a whole lot of art although it was a great cultural experience at the time and hundreds of people would come to openings – it was just amazing how much stuff was done. But I knew I was not an art dealer, but I knew for the reasons I started doing this, I had to present art because I had to create a space for emerging artists and artists of color.”

With his brothers, Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons and Joseph Simmons, popularly known as “Rev. Run” of Run DMC, he organized a t-art magazine / volume 1

fundraiser near Houston Street at The Park Building.

“We raised $250,000, and I started the foundation and we opened a gallery in Chelsea. And then we started the children’s program and that was 25 years ago in 1995, so it’s been a long road – I’ve done all of this daily since then, I’ve never been an employee, this has always been a philanthropic effort, donating my time.

People are like you don’t get paid for this? I’m like no, never got paid for this. I am paid in so many ways other than monetarily. And it feels like as I do this, the universe is giving me back because quite frankly, I’ve never needed anything. I didn’t feel like there was so much of a sacrifice because my needs were met.”

a place at all. And I think Rush played a role in that – a lot of the big artists that are out on the scene now, Kehinde [Wiley], Mickalene Thomas, Simone Leigh, all of them got their start at Rush, so you know when there was no other place for them to go.”

While he feels Rush’s programs are best experienced in person, through the pandemic he says, “we’ve been doing virtual programs since April, we immediately switched to virtual kids programs on Saturday mornings that have been ongoing, except for now I guess it’s on Zoom and now we’re getting kids from all over the nation. We do, you can look this up on YouTube under Rush, we do Rush Tales, self-driven artist studio visits where we give artists a stipend, and they walk through their studio and talk about their art. We publish artists of the week, we do profiles of different artists, and we also have one or two group discussions, and we’re about to launch our first virtual show. Our doors are closed to the public, but we’ve been busy and I think we’re gonna do appointment-only a couple of days a week for this virtual exhibition, because we’re gonna have it up on the walls in the gallery. We might as well let one or two people in at a time to be socially distant.

On how things are evolving in the art world right now, Simmons speaks about how everybody is attempting to meet the current moment as galleries, museums, and institutions are creating virtual pathways for people to look at art. “Every museum has some sort of activity going on, so I think what should be important and what I think is going to be important for Rush and for other people is to continue some aspects of virtual because it expands your audience.

We’re having some kids drop in from California, and all over the country, even Jamaica sign in to our virtual art classes, so I think the world will be changed a little bit by this because I think that virtual art dealing will become bigger. I often see that galleries and museums are becoming more attuned and open to diversity. We’re seeing a lot of artists of color being shown, we’re seeing a lot of curators being hired so I mean the art world that I started Rush in 25 years ago has changed significantly, not that there’s not a need for independent galleries for people of color, but the need is so much less than it was when I couldn’t find Conversations: Creators & Innovators

Kids at a Rush Arts Saturday morning class

Rush became a platform where some of today’s big Black artists first showed their work, including LaToya Ruby Frasier in 2008 and Toyin Ojih Odutola through an exhibition in 2011. The same year, Rush’s fifteenyear anniversary exhibition showed the works of Sanford Biggers, Wangechi Mutu, Kalup Linzy, Renee Cox, Odili Donald Odita, and Mickalene Thomas among many others. Rush Arts Philly opened in 2016 in Logan, North Philadelphia, with a show called “Power, Protest, and Resistance: The Art of Revolution”, looking at the intersection between art and social action and the potential for bringing about change. Highlighted on Rush’s website, their goal is “to build a community-driven art space that provides opportunities to both local artists and curators, focused on community revitalization and relevance to the people of the surrounding neighborhoods, and arts-based educational opportunities for local youth who can benefit from them the most.”

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Danny Simmons has advocated for the arts on a political level, and as I asked him if he feels artists have a responsibility to be involved in political conversations, whether related to injustices or arts education, he explains, “I would not use the word responsibility because that puts a lot of burden on people – I think artists have a great vehicle to be influential in those realms, but you know to tell somebody they need to have their art or their voice directed in that way, I don’t think it’s helpful – I think it’s something you have to feel, it’s not a mandate that artists become political in their views or the way they do things. I am, a lot of my friends are, but a lot of people aren’t or are afraid that espousing any views, will they alienate collectors, museums, or institutions.”

He adds, “there are people who say I can’t say that online because I’m scared what my gallery will think.

People are protective, so they try to remain neutral unless sometimes they get cornered, but some artists are reluctant to publicly be political about the times.

I think they should, artists have a wonderful voice that connects directly to people, but I would never be dismissive or critical of someone who didn’t.”

Through looking at his work and especially when hearing him talk about it, something that resonates with me is empathy. And Simmons shared his thoughts on how empathy is important today for moving social justice forward. “If you can’t feel another person’s problems and you can’t see how that affects you, then you really can’t advocate for something now can you. I mean, you have to really be able to put yourself in another person’s shoes in order to really be able to affect change.

Sympathy is fine, it’s like donating $25. Empathy is being involved in some way and trying to make change.

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So I think artists are particularly that way, about just being alive in the world, living in the world artists are empaths, they take in a lot and they feel a lot. So I think artists really need to explore empathy. The general public you know, really the reason that all these -isms go on is a lack of empathy. They see themselves as “other”, and they can’t see themselves in the position that other people are in or that they put other people in. So you know, they don’t have the feeling necessary to connect with that other human being.

And then if you can’t connect with them, you don’t necessarily see them as a human being, as equal to you. They are something over there, and you’re

“

Sympathy is fine, it’s like donating $25. Empathy is being involved in some way and trying to make change. So I think artists are particularly that way, about just being alive in the world, artists are empaths, they take in a lot and they feel a lot.

“

Simmons later tells me about a few specific exhibitions led by Rush that felt really meaningful for him.

“Early on we did a political show called Gorillas in the Midst. It was about political art, and more recently, we held We Hold Up The Sky, of women artists in and around Philadelphia mostly that was really powerful. We did another show, one I reprised that I had done in New York before, called I Kan Do Dat, which was basically exploring different ways of looking at abstraction, and the other show that I was thinking of was Hoodoo, and it was about spirituality in art. I touched on a lot of the things that move me and most of the shows I helped, especially We Hold Up The Sky, Pauline McCall she curated that.

something over here. If you can’t connect your humanity to their humanity, then there would be very little change that happened.” In the Empathy Exams, author Leslie Jamison writes, “empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” This might be what we need more of these days, and through his art and the initiatives he has led, Danny Simmons’ work is a powerful reminder of that.

With a new book, Red, out this spring, along with a current exhibit in Atlanta with the September Gray gallery, Simmons is going to have another exhibition in the spring in Atlanta with Town + Culture gallery.

“Then in September, I’m gonna have an exhibition with African artists, exploring the pathways between African Americans in Africa and how we cross influence each other at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, the other artist is Tafa, and we’ll be exploring those connections in Houston.”

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From top to bottom: Adrianna Brusie, Untitled, photography, 2019 Eleanor Shemtov, Helsinki, digital collage, 2020 Danny Simmons:Creators On Creating Connections and Studio Time Conversations: & Innovators

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The Mural of Brotherly and Sisterly Love Words Sonia Shah

Marco Santini designs colorful murals that bring us together, reminding us of what unites us and bridging a gap in our histories.

Artist, muralist, and designer Marco Santini aims to spread positivity, love and inclusion through his work. Based in New York City, he maintains a bright, colorful geometric style as he dabbles in different mediums including spray paint, markers, collage, and digital art. Through speaking and working in schools, Santini encourages children to channel positivity through artistic expression. Starting from the One

Love logo he developed, his most prominent work is a series of love-themed murals with the word “love” written in many languages.

The artist’s current project, the Mural of Brotherly and Sisterly Love in Philadelphia, is a step toward his goal to create a mural in all 50 states. Painted on a tall, slender wall in the beautiful, calm neighborhood of Fairmont, on the side of a new residential complex,

Amy Newman, Portrait of Marco Santini, photography, 2018 54

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Santini’s mural is certainly the most colorful sight in the nearby radius. With multiple levels of scaffolding and a week of work shortened to a few sunny days by the upcoming rain, Santini has a challenging project ahead of him. This particular mural came to be as a result of a chance encounter, perhaps channeling some positive forces. Santini had just mentioned someone from his town who he hadn’t seen in over 10 years in a conversation, and a few hours later, that person reached out to him on Instagram, saying, “I have a project for you.” In Santini’s words, “If this isn’t manifesting, I don’t know what is.”

Can you share a bit about your background in art and your journey to becoming a working artist?

I was always messing around, I felt really lucky in terms of my parents. When I was growing up, they wouldn’t really ask me what I was doing, but rather ‘why’ I was doing it. I felt that slight distinction at an early age really cultivated an understanding of vision, creativity and purpose. So I was messing around with art my whole life, and I ended up tearing my hamstring senior year of high school. I was going to play football in college and that kind of finished my career. I really turned to the arts as a way to help me heal and stay focused on something. I would go in every day after school and get lost in the colors and paints.

Marco Santini, Mural of Brotherly and Sisterly Love, 2021

Santini went on to study linguistic anthropology at Brown, which he later brought back into his art by incorporating language into his works. It wasn’t until later in his life, he tells me, that he found his “life’s purpose to spread love and positivity.”

something that draws you in. I feel really lucky that when people see my work, it draws them in, it’s like “oh there’s a heart, oh there’s my language, oh what else is in there?” It’s like the more you look, the more you see. I like to describe it as the “where’s Waldo” of art. Every time you see it, you see something different.

Regarding “love and positivity,” you really turn to these key words to describe your work very often.

Could you expand more on how that became the crux of your work and what that means to you.

Santini’s One Love design “features the word love in over 80 languages, to symbolize that there is more that unites us than divides us.” Quite the visual emblem of his message, he has created many renditions of the One Love logo. Its aesthetic and purpose comes through in his mural work as well. He tells me, “and so in 2018, I came up with this One Love logo. At least in New York City, it was really tense in terms of the political emotional climate, and so I created this logo with the word love in over 40 different languages, and I put it up illegally in the streets and just wanted to get it out there. And within a few months, I was being asked to do this at weddings, charity events, birthday parties, and even schools invited me—and it was a really powerful message that despite all our differences, there’s something that unites us. Seeing the love language, your love language, really brings us together. When I create murals like this, when I create designs, I put Turkish and Armenian next

In 2018 I was super in love with my then girlfriend, I was constantly being inspired and felt so positive despite all the negativity around me. You are what you think, you are what you spend time doing, and by surrounding myself with all these positive, brightly colored geometric designs, I felt like I was manifesting them and thinking about those which helped me to get to the next level personally, professionally, and emotionally. I thought it would be helpful for other people to be surrounded by those.

And so, I wanted to make a really specific distinction that I wasn’t going to go in a hallmark or kitschy direction. There are many versions of the heart, and the heart is an overplayed and overused motif—and so with my heart, I wanted it to be not just a heart, but Conversations: Creators & Innovators

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to each other. I put Arabic next to Hebrew next to German. I’m putting English usually next to Russian and Ukrainian. And it’s this idea that despite all of our differences, we have this common word that is shared among all these different languages.”

How do you see art as a response to politics and a way to address issues?

My art definitely rose because of that, but I like to think that my art is nonpartisan. Despite what you believe, you can see this as something you can relate to. My biggest mural before this one was at a church in East Harlem on Museum Mile. I convinced the church to let me paint the word love in 100 languages on this wall that connects them and a food pantry.

I found this as a very eye opening moment where people of a specific religion or specific thought would walk by and see love in many different languages.

And despite your single viewpoint of the world, being open minded and understanding of all those other cultures I feel is important to help us understand this greater good that we’re all a part of.

Can you discuss the aesthetic of your work and use of language?

I think I’m just excited by colors and trying to bring that to the world. One thing I wanted to say about my last design, and even this one—I like to think of it as a ‘religion of love’, and this is kind of the stained glass, street version of it. I like to say my religion is love, half joking but half serious. I felt, how can I know what my religion is, how can I know that my ideas are the one?

And I feel like opening my eyes [...] has brought me into understanding, we are all connected in this form of consciousness rather than a specific viewset. And so, hopefully my art says that. I’ve spoken to a lot of people, both Turkish and Armenian who at first seeing their languages next to each other takes them a step back, but then they see it and kind of understand it, and that understanding is powerful. I feel like seeing [that] bridges a gap in history that has been really difficult and continues today, and seeing how that can happen is my sense of showing how we can be a better humanity together.

There’s something special about placement and public work—what’s special about public art to you?

I love creating anywhere and everywhere. Creating in open, outdoor areas where people are walking by, people from other buildings are looking down as I’m painting… it has a more open-ended, inclusive nature, which I really strive for. I really appreciate the 56

From top left: Marco Santini, East Harlem Wall of Love, 2020 Marco Santini, Mural of Brotherly and Sister Love, 2021

idea of creating, especially murals, for everyone to appreciate. You walk by, it catches you by the corner of your eye and you see it and stop. People can appreciate it on a regular, daily basis, rather than a once-in-a-while, exclusive version.

What happens after your works are complete?

The more difficult the piece, the longer it stays up. If it’s lower to the ground, people can either tag it or paint it.

Is that natural wear and tear something that you accept as the nature of the work?

Yeah, I think that the beauty of street art, murals and graffiti work is that you never know how long your work is gonna stay on the streets. And it really shows this appreciation for something that may not be there always and to enjoy it while it lasts. In that sense, it’s this acceptance of the ephemeral nature of humanity and creation in general. When I really think about it, it makes me smile. t-art magazine / volume 1

“

I’ve spoken to a lot of people, both Turkish and Armenian who at first seeing their languages next to each other takes them a step back, but then they see it and kind of understand it, and that understanding is powerful. I feel like seeing [that] bridges a gap in history that has been really difficult and continues today, and seeing how that can happen is my sense of showing how we can be a better humanity together.

“

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Alex Rex: Materialize the Immaterial!

Words Alan Jinich

German designer and artist Alex Rex is bringing material back into the world of sound — and we’re not just talking vinyl.

Alex Rex has a desire to bring material back into the world of sound– and we’re not just talking vinyl. Before getting his master’s degree in Industrial Design at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany, Alex worked as an apprentice organ builder and freelance designer. Some of his past projects, including “Sound Writer” and “Stereo”, explore the world of sound and its materialization in media, such as vinyl. As you can see in his portfolio, there is something particularly intriguing about the objects he builds. They scream out to us, “play with me!” His master’s thesis, AURA (Audio Reactive Artistry), is no exception. Using Arduino as a robotics tool, AURA is an open source project and art installation that transforms sound into physical motion of objects. We wrote to Alex to hear more about this exciting project and his involvement in the DIY world of Arduino.

What inspired AURA? I have always been fascinated by the power that music and sound have on our feelings and moods.

Sound is already a spatially perceptible impression.

However, it cannot be experienced in all senses.

With AURA I transfer sound on to other senses. The modular open source setup allows the creator to decide for himself to which senses he wants to transfer sound with AURA. He can transport sound into visible movements, but the transfer into tactile or haptic experiences is also conceivable.

What do you find meaningful about the visualization of music through motion? Does it expand the way we can define music?

With the invention of the phonograph (about 150 years ago), sound loses matter. At the latest since the 1920s and the invention of electric loudspeakers, 58

Portrait of Alex Rex

the place, the action and the time at which sound is produced disappears from focus. Sound is now reproducible everywhere, anytime, without effort.

When I walk through the city today and hear a piano from an open window, I might rather hear only the played recording of a piano. Nearly 150 years ago it was different, it was definitely a pianist playing a piano, at this very moment, in this very place, occupied with the action of playing the piano. The irrelevance of action, place and time of the sound production through the reproducibility of digital media today is strongly perceptible. The tendency towards haptic media is on the rise again. (Since 2006 vinyl sales figures have been rising in Europe).

This desire for materiality in the world of sound that has become material less is something I encounter with AURA. AURA is an attempt to bring the material back into the world of sound. However, not by re-staging the real sound source, but by a further creative interpretation of itself. t-art magazine / volume 1

It seems to me that installations like AURA could be wonderful additions to live concerts. How do you envision altering it for different types of concerts and musical genres?

FANCY – Printer is to print a chair in under 1 hour. Of course, with such a big 3D printer you can also do other artistic projects. Let’s see what we will do with it in the future.

AURA is the open source system that offers low-budget / mid-budget possibilities to transform sound into movement of matter. This setup offers the creative user every possibility to intervene himself. To decide what is moved, how it is moved and how it is triggered by sound. For my exemplary design IN THE WOODS (“The moving sticks”) slow monophonic music pieces and performances are suitable. However, the stepper motors can of course move other objects differently.

In any case, the installation and the movement must be well matched to the music in order to ensure an immersive effect of the spatial performance to the music. Someone has already sent me a draft of AURA in which he controls water taps by the stepper motors and thus materializes music in water.

When did you become involved in the online DIY community? How’d you get into it?

“

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Actually, I’m not very active in the open source community at the moment. I do too many projects to maintain an online community intensively unfortunately! I would like to be more part of it. But I rather spend my time doing new projects than hanging out in online forums. So I have to find out how I can combine this better in the future. But I still think it’s great that people with similar interests can exchange ideas so intensively worldwide. I grew up in the 90s with 56k modem internet and I still remember how slow everything was back then. Even exchanging high resolution pictures was hard. Nowadays it is no problem to share 4k videos worldwide. This speeds

The irrelevance of action, place and time of the sound production through the reproducibility of digital media today is strongly perceptible. The tendency towards haptic media is on the rise again.

How are robotics influencing the art world? Do you have colleagues that also use microcontrollers like Arduino?

Robots will have a great influence on the art world in the next few years – or have had this influence for a few years already. Already at the Ars Elektronika in Linz 2019 I could see a lot of robot art projects. Many projects shock you or even make you fear an over automated future. But robots only become really shocking when you don’t even notice them anymore.

So when they have already become part of our everyday life. Then I find it really dramatic, because in this dependency we are already becoming almost cyborgs. I mean, actually we have already become cyborgs through our daily use of smartphones. And this will become even stronger in the future through the influence of robots. I often work together with the people from HUGE FANCY (instagram: @hugefance) . You should check them out. It has not so much to do with music, but they are building a huge 3D printer and other projects that are done a lot with RASPBERRY PI or ARDUINO. The goal of the HUGE Conversations: Creators & Innovators

up the information exchange enormously. Projects are getting faster and faster, bigger and bigger. Is it just a question of whether with the flood of projects the relevance of these will be lost at some point?

With AURA I started to work with the open source community and to place a projectthere myself. But I am still a bit overwhelmed by the many platforms and possibilities. It’s just all quite a lot out there on the internet. And it is not gonna get less!

One last technical question: Could you have split the frequencies of the audio source through a software instead of using the Spectrum Shield? If yes, what are the advantages to using the Spectrum Shield?

Hi cool, a technical question! … Yes, I certainly could have used software. But then I would have had to switch to a RASPBERRY or another more complex microcontroller. But I wanted to keep it with the Arduino as basic as possible and use as many readymade components as possible. Better more parts – less digital code. Materialize the Immaterial!

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Marzia Micali, Unpredictable Bodies, photography, 2020 60

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Professor Robert Ghrist: How Art, Math, and Engineering Propel Visual Learning Words Mehmed Can Özkan

“What if we developed ‘math courses’ into a branch of art, pouring into it all the skill of a playwright, composer, or director? What an incredible impact on a person this could make!”

The task of teaching the abstract concepts that appear in the lines of axioms, theorems, numbers, and shapes that govern the world has baffled many instructors of Math for millennia. The polymaths of the ancient world, with their interdisciplinary perspective, noticed patterns in geometry and the structure of nature, and they shaped it to their will using lines and a compass. They continue to awe the academics and curious minds of the modern world with their hands-on approach to math.

Professor Robert Ghrist — Penn’s own “Professor. G” — is the Andrea Mitchell University Professor of Math & Electrical/Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He has led many passion projects, including creating hand-crafted books, with the mission to make math more accessible to people around the world. An especially significant example of this is his Calculus BLUE YouTube video series created from his home studio. Within the series, he combines Math instruction expertise with self-taught computer animation and color theory, complete with a sense of story and flow. The well-curated, colorful teaching tool is complemented by a vintage soundtrack and a balanced level of humor and wit.

Through Calculus BLUE, Professor Ghrist reinvents virtual math instruction and makes math accessible and free during the pandemic. I would like to thank Prof. G for his time, humble work, and contribution to the arts and sciences.

What is your main goal as a teacher? What inspired you to start this project?

Most mathematics teaching is viewed as a means of raw information-transfer, with replication as goal.

Conversations: Creators & Innovators

Elyssa Chou, Portrait of Robert Ghrist, chalk pastel, 2020

How unfortunate! My primary goals as a teacher are first to inspire — to show the universal beauties of the subject I’m teaching. With sufficient inspiration and motivation, the student wants to learn the hard details and participates actively in the information-transfer portion of learning. My secondary goal is to shepherd: I care about the *people* in my class, and I want to play a supporting role in their stories.

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The calculus BLUE project was begun in 2015 when I had a vision of how a modern revision of the calculus curriculum could use video to illustrate truths and applications that are normally untaught or unlearned.

This is intended as the third(!) in a sequence of beginning calculus course vide-texts. I began with BLUE (multivariable calculus) as this would be the most challenging part artistically. I’ve been working steadily on this and other video-texts for half a decade, and there is long way left to go.

What is your background in art and what do you do in your free time?

I never took art besides drafting. I went into mechanical engineering as an undergraduate with the hope of doing mechanical design. This was before CAD (computer-aided design).

I had negative potential as a child: I never learned how to hold my pencil properly in kindergarten, and, as a result, my handwriting was illegible throughout school. My father made me practice my writing until my teachers could read it. While a college student, I discovered William Blake and immediately tried replicating his extraordinary admixture of art, poetry, & calligraphy. That was my only semi-serious study of art ever, and it was purely on my own. Any spare time I have is usually spent cooking or reading, with an occasional video game, depending on what’s new.

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How would you describe your work and how is it intertwined with Electrical Engineering?

I have a great many responsibilities at the university; besides my teaching and research, I am faculty co-director of Penn First Plus, Penn’s support structure for FGLI students. I am very committed to helping all our students reach their potential with as much support as possible. My making math videos is definitely a side-gig. I built a studio in my home in 2018 to do the art, filming, & compositing. I am so happy that this helps my students, as they are my top priority, but this is definitely a passion project.

My position at Penn is split between Math & Electrical/Systems Engineering. As a PIK professor, I love not having to answer the question “Which are you? A mathematician or engineer?” I am both, and happy to be so. I love teaching classes both in math and in ESE. This is such a wonderful job.

What type of skillset have you acquired that allows you to produce your work and do you have any recommendations for others?

In my mathematics research, I am a topologist. Topology is the study of abstract space. That is indeed abstract, but my specialization is to find applications of such abstractions. Being a topologist requires deep contemplation of visual mathematics. Much of my research begins as a picture in my mind’s eye, t-art magazine / volume 1

and the hard work is to flesh out the algebraic details that support the geometric intuition. Such a skillset is great for making video, but it’s still a long climb. For the calculus BLUE project, I spent several months focusing on nothing but font design; then a few more on color theory & design layout; animation was the hardest thing to learn by far, but audio engineering is a close second. It’s all pretty difficult to be honest: there’s a reason why movies cost many millions of dollars and require vast teams of specialists.

However: we’re still at the dawn of the age of videos for learning. We’ll look back on the educational videos on YouTube from this past decade like we look back at Pong or Asteroids [two iconic video games from the 1970s]: good for its time, but technically and artistically immature. What this means is that there is so much potential for individuals or small groups of people to produce videos to teach X that is the bestin-the-world. It can be done for cheap (for now) and there is so much room for new ideas that may set the trends for times to come.

What was the hardest challenge in this project?

I’m tempted to answer this with a lovely little story of perseverance through trials — a tidy hero’s journey, with a happy-ever-after ending. I’m afraid the truth is less ideal. When I was young, I prayed to God to have the opportunity to forge beauty & truth like Blake, even if it meant suffering. It took decades, but I got that wish: I’ve found my purpose in life and it’s teaching mathematics through art in motion. With that clarity came the suffering: I get up at 4am to program, record, composite, and encode every day, and every day I feel like a failure. I can’t stop, and I can’t rest, and I can’t attain the Vision that I keep aiming for. This isn’t quite hell, but it’s certainly not heaven. I am suspended between the two. I don’t like admitting that I feel a constant dread of defeat and failure, but I like lying about it less. It does help a bit when I learn that somebody found it helpful. Thank you for this interview.

What do you believe your career in math has brought artistically, that a traditional art path might not have?

A work of visual art can move you — you can stare at it and contemplate it, finding new details & meanings.

A work of cinema or a play can absorb you for hours: the synthesis of visual and auditory input can fully immerse a viewer in an entirely different mode.

What about a math class? We think of things such as worth sleeping through, typically. Ah, but think: you spend a solid 24 hours over the course of a semester watching lectures, then another 100 hours thinking over it, working out problems, internalizing it all. What if we developed “math courses” into a branch of art, pouring into it all the skill of a playwright, composer, or director? What an incredible impact on a person this could make!

Think — all the ingredients of great art are there: eternal truths, celestial beauty, societal utility, and you gain real skills by engaging with the artwork.

We’ve not yet seen anything close to the creation of the math course as a novel art form, but, as with my mathematics research, I can imagine the as yet unrealized result.

What advice would you give to young artists and scientists who are pursuing unconventional approaches to their fields?

As a college student, I doodled for fun. As a TA and then a starting professor, I drew little fun notes for my students. This was never serious & only ever for fun.

If you had told me that these activities would lead in an unbroken line to the most important of all my professional works, I would have marveled. I still do.

My advice: never give up something that you do for fun. Keep it alive, even if in the background, no matter what you do.

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From top left to right: Robert Ghrist, Hop Fibration, digital render, 2020 Robert Ghrist, Hamiltonian, digital render, 2020 63

Lily Simonson, Cinder Cones Seep, McMurdo Sound, acrylic on canvas, 2018

Lily Simonson: An Artist-at-Sea Words Darya Bershadskaya

Following her expedition along the California coast, Lily Simonson brings back sights from the ocean floor and its vibrant life.

One of the most decidedly challenging endeavors that resonates with any amateur artist is trying to take a picture of the moon on your phone. Second to that is taking a photo of ocean waves and realizing that no matter how hard you try, the product will never capture the enormity and ephemeral nature of the deep sea. According to the National Ocean Service, more than 80% of the world’s oceans remain unmapped and unexplored despite covering more than 70% of the planet’s surface; considering statistics like these are humbling because they remind us just how small we humans are in the world we live in.

They also make me feel overwhelmed — how can we discover more? Autonomous underwater vehicles?

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Sonar technology to map seafloors? How about through artwork? For artist Lily Simonson, the answer to that question was becoming an Artist-at-Sea with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, allowing her to travel on an oceanographic expedition along the California coast in an effort to bring back methane seeps to viewers like you and me.

The Schmidt Ocean Institute is one of several institutions of its kind dedicated to furthering global marine research by making at-sea expeditions accessible for all oceanographic scientists and engineers. Most deep-sea exploration equipment is expensive and manufactured in small quantities, and few people are able to get themselves to the middle t-art magazine / volume 1

of the ocean on their own. The Schmidt Ocean Institute provides researchers with the technology and informational support needed to make meaningful discoveries at sea, and most importantly, they have a ship for these trips.

The research vessel Falkor is where Simonson completed her Artist-at-Sea fellowship in 2018, but several years prior, she contributed to developing the initial vision for the program. In 2013, Lily Simonson participated in a panel for the Schmidt Ocean Institute, focused on how they could improve outreach efforts to scientists and artists about this new program — at the time, she also met Peter Girguis, a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and head of a lab that studies deep sea microorganisms. “He had an expedition that was going to be funded and supported by Schmidt, and he had an extra berth on the ship, so an extra spot, which I was invited to take.”

Artist-at-Sea is a project within the Schmidt Ocean Institute that seeks to create deep connections between artists and scientists so that they can tell important stories about our oceans in ways that are both meaningful and palatable for interested audiences. “A lot of the public doesn’t find scientific research to be accessible or easy to understand or as something that is relatable. And so by embedding within the scientific group and making art based on their discoveries, I wanted to translate some of the research or pique a viewer’s interests in that research and transport them to this world you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Going all the way to the bottom of the sea: you can’t do that without crazy equipment. You can read about the ocean and watch documentaries, but only art can evoke a whole atmosphere and create a transformative experience for the viewer,” she told me, as she clarified the unique importance of artwork in science, two fields that are typically seen to lie on opposite sides of an academic spectrum. Simonson explained that while the program is no-strings-attached in terms of the types of projects artists have to complete on their time aboard Falkor, they are encouraged to connect with the scientists on the ship and incorporate aspects of the scientific discoveries into their artwork.

While Simonson’s own project with Artist-at-Sea began in 2013, it wasn’t her first oceanographic exploration. “I started early on in my career looking at preserved specimens, so working with scientists in their labs on the ground. And then by getting to know them, I started getting invited to join research expeditions… Once I started working directly with Conversations: Creators & Innovators

scientists, I wanted to work from observations, I wanted to look at the specimens I was painting rather than work from previously taken photographs.

And once I got to know the scientists studying these things, I became more interested in the actual research happening and all the discoveries constantly being made in the deep sea. These areas of our planet have not been well explored, so we’re always discovering something new. The experience of discovery and research and being in the field became much more a central subject matter for my work.” Simonson has been working with scientists for a decade now, but she told me that throughout her life, she has always been interested in a variety of fields — including psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy — and she wanted to be an artist because to her, it meant taking intangible ideas and bringing them into the material world in a beautiful, physical way. In fact, this is why for her undergraduate studies, she decided not to go to art school but instead to a research institution like UC Berkeley. A decade into deep sea exploration, Simonson has had the chance to go on ships with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and worked with researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The Nautilus,

Lily Simonson, Spectralscape 1, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2014 65

and the 2014-15 National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which took her to Antarctica for three months to scuba dive beneath the sea ice and paint a world many of us won’t ever see so closely ourselves. “I like to work from direct observation because with painting, you have the opportunity to convey so much detail, but when working from a photo, you don’t get to choose the details that you can highlight.”

Simonson’s project focused on methane seeps, a point in the ocean floor where rocks release methane, a greenhouse gas, into the water above.

There are many types of ocean seeps that release a variety of byproducts like petroleum, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide. Methane seeps, also known as methane vents or cold seeps, hold a critical link in a unique food chain of biota that do not rely on the sun to fuel photosynthesis and do not require plants to sustain the chain. “There are a bunch of organisms and bacteria that live off the methane itself. No light at the bottom of the sea, right, so there’s this whole food chain where creatures turn that methane to energy. Bacteria eat the sulfur and methane and then animals directly eat the bacteria,” she explained.

Studying cold seeps provides scientists with a rare understanding of the biomes that support a variety of ocean species, and as ocean floor litter and chemical contaminants threaten the fauna, the ability to see how marine organisms respond to these processes will give insight into how ocean life will evolve alongside climate change.

“I wanted to make paintings based on these structures in the ocean floor that are formed as a byproduct of the bacteria that eats the methane and sulfur: carbonate structures. The bacteria create these 3D rocks, formations that look like sculptures in all types of shapes. It’s not clear why they form in this way, but this is what I planned to paint,” Simonson said of her thought process going into the Artist-atSea program. Once the expedition was underway, her creative process was twofold: first, she made a smaller painting of what she observed directly in the field. Once she got back to her studio in Los Angeles, she then used those paintings as studies for larger, mural-sized paintings. The original, small takes were made using more common acrylic paints, but the final large-scale paintings were made using blacklight fluorescent paint, which is translucent in bright light but acquires a luminous quality when in the dark and lit by special blacklights. “I use a glazing technique that’s loosely-based on Renaissance glazing techniques where, instead of mixing together the colors on your palette, you put lots and lots 66

Lily Simonson, Spectralscape 1, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2014

of thin translucent strokes on the canvas. Those overlapping layers add up to create the final image on the canvas.” Glazing allows Simonson’s paintings to glow in a way they wouldn’t have with just one or two single layers of paint because the blacklight is allowed to travel through the different paint strokes and bounce off the different layers, allowing for a greater sense of depth and dimension on the canvas.

“I also like the reference to 1960s psychedelics and ‘90s rave culture [that the blacklight paints give] because the subjects I paint are so wild and the environments themselves and creatures all seem like a hallucination…they’re so unlike anything we see in our day-to-day lives…So my style isn’t super hyper realistic or hyper detailed, but…the deep sea is like a parallel universe, and I really love the experience of a viewer not knowing if they’re looking at something real or imagined and then understanding that it is something real and it’s wild.”

Lily Simonson’s work aboard the Falkor with Peter Girguis ultimately culminated in six mural-sized paintings in her exhibition, Lily Simonson: Painting the Deep at Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History. Her paintings speak to a deep appreciation for the history of artists and scientists collaborating: “I’m inspired by artists being scientists and vice versa. Like John James Audubon or Maria Marien, these artists who explored new areas and discovered new species and showed those discoveries through their paintings.” More recently, Simonson is collaborating with Victoria Orphan, a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies how marine microbes interact with one another.

Her paintings will showcase these chemosynthetic microbes and will be installed as part of an immersive 3D exhibition. t-art magazine / volume 1

Chelsea Cheng, Yu, digital illustration, 2019 Conversations: Creators & Innovators

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Essays & Cultural Commentaries

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Art is a form of manifestation. Part of what makes it so appealing and valuable is its ability to envision and create new realities, beyond what we individually experience on a daily basis. In a world of growing inequalities, art plays the further critical role of imagining new realities in which individuals can thrive beyond systems of oppression.

Artistic discourse encourages us to ask important questions about our histories and to reconsider and reframe narratives for the future.

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ME Yuwen Wong, Music, illustration, 2019

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Rediscovering Blackness in the Aesthetics of Country Music Words Wes Matthews

Country music has a long and distinguished history of Black musicianship, but it has been largely erased over the years. It’s time that we remember and honor this history and its important legacy in modern music.

When I ask people in my age range—around 18 to 25—to describe their music taste, there is one answer that I’m usually unsurprised to hear: “I’ll listen to any genre but country.” The specific exclusion of country music has become routine in my circles—not necessarily because the music is bad, but because

it has never really had any importance in our lives.

For many of us growing up, it was never played in the house, in the car, or at family gatherings. This complete lack of exposure made it almost irrelevant in this way. It made it seem like the genre simply does not belong to us.

Yuwen Wong, Rediscovering Blackness in the Aesthetics of Country Music, illustration, 2020 70

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artistic merit has always rested in the hands of people who knew music as a social contract that was communal and binding, united under the authority of honest self-expression. Filled with romantic ballads about home and nostalgia, these people created a sound that truly belonged to them. Black participation was not only common during these early years—it was essential in forging the identity of what would become one of the nation’s most celebrated genres of music.

Today, country music is overwhelmingly associated with and credited to the poor white South. Through the whitewashing of its history, record labels and artists alike have been able to brand the genre as exceptionally non-Black, a singular invention of white Southern genius. Over the years, this historical rewriting along with constant racial coding has resulted in lost appeal among Black audiences. The de facto racial divide is a tragedy of modern music that is rarely ever questioned, upheld as a status quo

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For several decades now, country music has fallen out of favor as a genre of the Black American musical pantheon. Few Black folks that I know personally would proudly identify as lovers of the genre, and even fewer would name it as their favorite genre of music. Like many of us, I grew up under the impression that country music is synonymous with Black invisibility, rife with the humiliating feeling that I don’t belong in that musical space, and that my presence is not only unwanted, but adamantly denied. In the grand sphere of American culture, there are countless sites that Black people, aware that we are not welcomed, decide not to enter. It is almost intuitive, essential for our survival in a nation that thrives on leveraging space as an accessory of white supremacy. But even from a young age, I learned that country music was completely antithetical to my cultural heritage. I, too, left it alone, believing it was never made for me in the first place.

How can we maintain Black ancestral memory, even while trapped in spaces of erasure? How can we ensure that their passions constitute a legacy that will not be soon forgotten?

It took some time for me to reconsider. At the advice of my older family members, I began to listen to more country music, especially turning to the inceptive hillbilly-era of the 1930s and 40s. Immediately, I was able to draw the connection between the sounds of traditional country and the sounds that Black musicians have long played with. The Black stylistic influence on country music was clear, and it was present in every way—instrumentally, vocally, performatively. This was a revelation, and it motivated me to dig deeper and get to the core of a trend that is clear as day: the debt of gratitude that the country genre owes to Black musicians has never been paid.

We have been largely erased from the picture.

Country music stands alone in American culture as one-of-a-kind. It was never wildly popular in the American mainstream, even after the explosion of marketing and rebranding of the genre. It was never the life of the party like jazz, nor was it ever the darling of middle-class Black culture like soul. This was never a part of its mission; in its prime era, country music was the prized possession of Southern folk culture. It is the amalgam of several styles of American folk music—blues, bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Irish sounds all greatly influenced the genre. Its Essays & Cultural Commentaries

of American music. As a result, the racial diversity of the genre has suffered greatly.

From the outside looking in, it can be hard to restore Black stories back into collective memory. Sometimes I think of my paternal great-grandfather, a man now memorialized in my family’s lore. Born in 1910 in rural Louisiana, he moved north as a young man for better employment opportunities, and to escape the existential danger of being Black in the Jim Crow South. He brought one possession with him: a self-fashioned banjo, a dear instrument he held onto for the rest of his life. Every night before he went to sleep and every morning before he began his labors, he would pluck a country ditty on his banjo, gently humming the melody of a familiar song, almost as some form of meditative prayer. For him, music was more than mere entertainment. The son of poor fieldhands and the grandson of slaves, he always remembered the hymns of his early life, sung to relieve the emotional strain of everyday life. Resounding from callused hands and makeshift guitars, music was a way to glean a lasting sense of self-worth, the essential proof that life holds meaning even amid great suffering. His music was his pride, and pride was a form of undying resistance against a society designed to 71

strip him of basic dignity. Through the tradition of country music, he had the sacred power to preserve his upbringing, his customs, his memory—all working towards reaffirming of his identity. As long as he performed this work, he knew that his identity could never be swamped or stripped away by the outside.

One thing is certain: there will always be large disconnects in the passing down of Black culture from generation to generation. Much of this is owed to the fact that the Black American struggle transforms over time, though its history is calcified within the ongoing project of survival. Generations after my great-grandfather, I can’t say I have any particular connection to 20th-century Black Southern culture aside from what has been passed down to me. With the meteoric rise of younger genres—namely rock and hip hop—and with a growing detachment from the pastoral lifestyle, it makes sense that the Black country ethos would slowly fade over time. These cultural shifts are unstoppable, but they do pose some major problems: choosing to remember music history isn’t just something we do for our own good.

It’s an essential part of our duty to those who came before us. The remembrance of music can be our guide to remembering people, and the many conditions that sowed their lives with both uniqueness and unity. When we preserve the value of music over time, we also eternalize its makers, opening the door for their contributions to reach their full impact.

There are fundamental struggles we have to face.

How can we maintain Black ancestral memory, even while trapped in spaces of erasure? How can we ensure that their passions constitute a legacy that will not be soon forgotten? I think it begins with learning to love what they loved, learning to see what made them feel seen. I can’t help but think of old country music as a sacred heirloom from a not-sodistant past, one that connects me with the likes of my great-grandfather and all of his family. And through my memory of him, my deep reverence for the soundscape he grew up with, I am filled with the same faith he stowed away in his music. The Black legacies of country music deserve stewards of a new generation who are willing to tap into this faith and marvel at the sight of its possibilities. So often, the pride of Black Americans fades in the thickets of time, hidden behind the veil of revised histories. But through memory, the constant process of revisiting and reclaiming our rightful place in history, I know our stories will survive all time—like the lyrics of one unforgettable song.

Right: Eleanor Shemtov, First Impressions, 2019 72

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Jessica Vaughn

Individuality, Space, Race, and Labor in Our Primary Purpose Is To Be Successful

Words Ashley Sniffen

Through her new exhibition, Jessica Vaughn asks us to think about our identities in relation to the workplace and to redefine our own versions of success.

Jessica Vaughn, Unwritten Rules Are a Fact, video installation, 2021 74

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Born in Chicago 1983, Vaughn is a 2011 Penn MFA graduate and multimedia artist currently living in Brooklyn. Her art focuses on transcending power structures of quotidian labor spaces; she often employs readymade objects relating to her hometown to both question bureaucratic hierarchies and to relate to her own social history.

Vaughn’s exhibition opened in March at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work spans the entirety of the first floor of the Institute and highlights both new works and past creations, all under the theme of “Success” dominating workplace culture and marginalizing the lives of workers in a world where objects and office spaces are massproduced and depersonalized.

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the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as source material. Painting Sets 1-4 engages directly with laws, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, created to stop discrimination in the workplace; these drawings depict the government’s shortcomings and lost promises, of the absence of women and people of color from the government’s own work force. Again, Vaughn engages with visual irony to promote stark realities regarding the workplace culture of the United States, of the marginalization of people throughout history within industrial spheres.

Vaughn’s art is so compelling in its diversity of substance and structure. By developing art through multiple mediums, she highlights the diversity of her own discourse, of the nuances ofmarginalization and “success” that alter each working life. She capitalizes on the political and social influences of the workplace by employing mass-produced, discarded materials which force us to take in the objects that we are familiar with seeing each day.

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Jessica Vaughn’s Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful is an examination of life dominated by something greater than the self, a reminder of marginalization, and an intermingling of notions of space, race, and labor.

Diversity will manage us and retention means having the best talent perform to the maximum; make sure that something that is not relevant to their actual performance does not derail this individual.

Upon walking into the exhibition, the viewer’s temporal-spatial reality is altered. The floor is lined with plush, red carpeting and the wall bears a television screen that depicts a variety of phrases relating to productivity in the workplace. With Vaughn’s repurposing of employee training videos, we are forced to encounter the ironies and facts of the corporate world: DIVERSITY WILL MANAGE US AND RETENTION MEANS HAVING THE BEST TALENT PERFORM TO THE MAXIMUM; MAKE SURE THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEIR ACTUAL PERFORMANCE DOES NOT DERAIL THIS INDIVIDUAL.

With this color digital video installation playing on a loop, we must reckon with office workers who are rendered marginal in these corporate spaces, as well as with the loss of the self and a more singular “identity” that occurs when a person is considered a cog-in-the-machine rather than a powerful entity in her own right.

How does an office space remove the personal from daily, habitual interactions with others? Vaughn’s drawings in the next gallery space grace the walls and draw inspiration from decommissioned reports from Essays & Cultural Commentaries

How can a bus seat serve an artistic statement?

In South Beach Blue No. 036, Boomer Gray #341, and Dark Blue, Vaughn cuts patterns out of fabric scraps used for public seating on the Chicago Transit Authority to conjure the removed spaces from seats for passengers. The titles of these works originated from the color swatches of the manufacturers from which she collected them. By creating negative spaces, Vaughn forces us to consider those who both rode on this transportation system each day, as well as those who were integral in the mass production of the system in her Chicago hometown.

My favorite work in Vaughn’s exhibition was Irrational Rests, a sculpture created from 103 LED lights, aluminum, and a DMX controller. Referencing the concept of time and the design of our lives around an already man-made system of hours, Vaughn invokes the unit of time by developing this sculpture of a gridded lighting fixture. The work functions on a cycle of 24 hours and yet runs opposite to the sun, shining the brightest not during the day, but in the middle of the night. This work is poignant not only because it references our capitalist culture in which productivity is measured by the amount of hours worked in the 75

artificial lighting of office spaces, but it also references America’s past history, during which companies tracked their workers based on the movement of the sun throughout the day before the standardization of clocks. Through this sculpture, Vaughn calls into question the regimentation of our lives around work and around the concept of productivity rooted into our daily routines by standardizations of time, of the manner in which we regulate our days.

In our current, technologically-masterminded age, Vaughn’s sculptures and paintings are evocative of the Penn atmosphere. They remind us of our competitive culture, of our willingness to “succeed” when success itself might be defined by something that revokes our “humanness” in favor of working and achieving like machines. Who are we, Vaughn seems to ask through her work, if we define our own success and productivity based upon the dealings of an industrialized world?

All of us should consider these implications of a standardized, regimented life in relation to our own happiness. Who are we, in the end, if we are not defined by an office system, by the standardization of our days?

It seems, to me, that Vaughn is asking us, through her art, to define our own humanity and to redefine our own version of success, not based upon the values of a system, but rather on our own desires and happiness.

Jessica Vaughn, Irrational Rests, sculpture, 2021

Views of Jessica Vaughn’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia 76

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Freedom and Love in Aaron Taylor’s Icarus Words Wes Matthews

With his album Icarus, London-based singersongwriter Aaron Taylor reimagines the tale of the titular figure, allegorizing the story through the lens of love and loss.

In one of the most well-known tales of Greek mythology, a boy receives a pair of beautiful wax wings handcrafted by his father so that he may fly away to escape certain doom. The boy, Icarus, is warned by his father to not fly too close to the sun, as the heat will cause the wax to melt and the wings to falter, but also to not to fly so low that he might collide with the earth. He must learn to balance himself and navigate the between-space in order to fly safely.

Unconcerned by his father’s advice, Icarus takes off into the limitless skies and never looks back, ascending higher and higher until he treads into dangerous territory. He soon flies so close to the sun that the wings do, indeed, melt away, leading to his tragic fall from thousands of feet in the air.

Desperately flapping his naked arms, he plummets into the sea and drowns instantly, leaving his father to grieve the loss of his beloved son.

humanity, is the composer of his own undoing. The sun is his irresistible tempter, the proverbial apple of Icarus’s eye that he simply cannot deny nor avoid as he sets his sights on ascending higher in the sky. His fate is sealed from a single, fragile moment in which he either forgets or actively ignores the fact that the merciless heat of the sun will ultimately doom him,

The story of Icarus is generally regarded as a classical tragedy, a cautionary tale revealing the dangers of hubris and vanity. Icarus, overcome with a lust for danger and desire to test the limits of his

With his most recent album Icarus, London-based singer-songwriter Aaron Taylor reimagines the tale of the titular figure, allegorizing the story through the lens of love and loss. On the album, listeners get 36

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Yuwen Wong, Icarus, illustration, 2021

and that, once his wax wings inevitably melt and he begins to fall, there will be no one able to save him.

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minutes of self-reflective lyrics, neo-soul-inspired harmonies and arrangements, and a rollercoaster saga of a man coming to terms with love as both a kind of redemption and tragedy. Taylor, a vocalist specializing in lush and memorable arrangements, draws his listener into his soundscape by being unafraid to show just how complicated true love can be, constantly weaving together narratives in which his own human limitations get in the way of experiencing love at its most ideal. On “Flowers,” he sheepishly extends a bouquet of flowers to his lover as atonement for his romantic shortcomings. On “Wanna Be Close,” he expresses frustration over the state of a long-distance relationship, yearning to be nearer to his loved one and for the intimacy of physical touch.

Icarus is bound together by the majesty of the title track, which also serves as the album’s closer. At nearly 5 minutes long, “Icarus” is the song that sees Taylor truly embody the central character, taking the well-known narrative and styling it into a personal memoir. The song opens with a graceful piano progression followed by the whirling of orchestral strings. Singing in an uncharacteristically somber tone, Taylors launches into a verse that inserts himself into the midst of romantic drama. His first verse resonates with a faint sense of distress: “I flew too high, left fear on the ground / I touched the sky and never looked down / you were the light I couldn’t resist / I asked for love, I asked amiss.” The instrumental then soars with another riff of crestfallen strings, and Taylor’s performance strikes up a new energy for the chorus, as he proclaims, “I loved you as Icarus loved the sun (too close, too much) / now look at the state of us, what have we done? (we’re far too gone).” There is a silent triumph within these lyrics.

Even as he compares himself to a flawed character, there is no subtext of regret, no sense of self-pity.

This is the song of a man trying to string together a narrative of hope amid the ruins that he finds himself in, trying to justify his tragic fall by reminding himself—and the listener—of the power of love.

There are many ways to interpret the word hubris. One common interpretation: dangerous overconfidence, a foolish pride that transcends beyond the bounds of human possibility. But another, less-used interpretation defines hubris as a form of selfliberating passion, one that could result in disaster if it is left unbridled. In Aaron Taylor’s reimagining of the story of Icarus, he brazenly displays a kind of hubris that is far less condemnable and much more relatable. He plays the role of a lover who gives too much of himself to make a romance work, becoming obsessively enamored to the point of near selfEssays & Cultural Commentaries

destruction. This is the hubris that consequently brings him down, despite having only pure intentions in his heart. “I flew too high / such is desire.”

I’m interested in how this song chooses to be in conversation with the original tale, bringing out a new side of it. Perhaps the true tragedy is not Icarus’s pride, but that he was willing to accept fatal consequences in return for feeling truly free and fulfilled for a brief moment in time. The crucial question here is, what must we sacrifice in order to declare ourselves free? Certainly, to sacrifice one’s life seems too extreme, and that’s why we mourn for the naïve Icarus.

But we may also be happy that he was able to experience true bliss, or even envy his high-flying spectacular. Instead of characterizing Icarus as a disobedient, wayward child, we can see the humanity in his actions and understand what sparked his ascension.

Whatever the case, there’s a wide range of things we can feel when we view the tale in this light.

For one, I think this revision of the story would suggest that Icarus is not merely a cautionary figure, but one that we are supposed to relate to and empathize with. As Taylor expresses through his closing track, we may all very well become reflections of Icarus, flying carelessly through the skies of our greatest passions, thousands of feet off the ground and neglecting to look down. We may make the error of becoming caught up in the rapture of longing— which, although it feels right, could ultimately lead to the bitter heartbreak. This is the risk we play with as finite beings navigating the emotional space between love and loss. But, if the pursuit of our passions means danger, why do we continue to pursue, even in the wake of tragedy? Why do we continue to love, even when it could bring suffering, and so often does?

These are questions about the human condition that have stayed with us for the entirety of our existence.

This is also the primary interest of Taylor as he explores the concept of love through music: “Icarus” is a romantic’s fugue that both celebrates freedom and mourns the aftermath, confronting that very distinct form of sadness that fills us in the wake of an overpowering love. The message here is that as we move through life, we must not forget that we are all only human, and so we must devote ourselves to the task of finding emotional balance. But at the same time, we must be gracious and allow ourselves to truly experience that same giddiness that Icarus felt, as that, too, is a part of the course of life. We must find a way to be human and be wondrously free and still able to return from our flights of passion, refreshed and unscathed.

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Alan Jinich, Rama, photography, 2019 Essays & Cultural Commentaries

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Transformations of the Invisible Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration Words Adrianna Brusie

Artists impacted by the US prison system transform penal matter, space, and time into art. In doing so, they reclaim their agency to reshape the narratives of their stories.

We all know someone who has been affected by prisons. The United States leads the world with the highest incarceration rate of any country; over 2.2 million people, nearly 1% of the population, reside behind prison walls. Prison populations have experienced massive increases over the last 40 years, including a 500% increase as a result of law and policy changes, such as the War on Drugs of the 1980s. Minorities are far more likely to become victimized by the prison system, with Black people over 5 times more likely to be incarcerated compared to their white peers. Furthermore, studies have shown that increasing prison populations does not have any impact on increasing public safety or preventing violent crimes. Prisons cannot be separated from racism, classism, and the underlying social and economic conditions that emerge from capitalism.

As put by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prisons are “catchall solutions to social problems.”

One of the ways in which individuals are oppressed within the prison system is through penal time. Time becomes a tool used against those incarcerated. As we have seen by many well-known abolitionists such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis, penal time can also be reclaimed by those incarcerated, to transform what is used against them and give birth to something new. Where does art fit into this conversation?

Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University and guest curator at MoMA PS1, compiled a series of works by artists who have been affected by the prison system.

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Following the release of her book, her exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration gives voice to more than 35 artists and significantly shifts the conversation surrounding penal systems.

Fleetwood’s work is not a means of glorifying prisoners, but rather a way of exposing the hidden truths of what occurs inside prison walls and the systemic injustice of the carceral system. In doing so, her work allows them to tell their stories.

Prison art, or art made in prisons, differs from other categories of art in that artists do not hold the same agency that non-prison artists do. In many cases, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, the artist does not possess or have access to their own work, which means they are unable to see the circulation of their art. They are also in many cases unable to document their works, as Fleetwood noted in her book that she had interviewed artists who could only describe their practices, without anything to show.

This separation between the artists and their works imbues the latter with an additional narrative: the audience is able to see something that often, even the artist cannot.

In Fleetwood’s book, she describes many of the works as being in conversation with penal space, time, and matter. “Penal space” is defined as the prison itself, as well as the imposition of movement, disruption of family relations, and all of the dimensions upon which the prison system impedes.

One of the first pieces in the exhibition is by Tameca t-art magazine / volume 1

Cole, whose collage introduces the significance of penal space throughout the exhibition. Locked in a Dark Calm (2016) was made towards the end of Cole’s sentence after being angered by a correctional officer within the facility. The collage portrays a deconstructed face in the midst of a grey cloud to highlight the artist’s frustration that persists within the harsh confinement and the entrapment she experiences in the larger prison system. There is a noticeable displacement in how her facial features fit into the rest of the work, revealing how the prison system had disrupted her identity, leaving her desperate to escape. Her experience of making the work, as for many other artists featured in the exhibit, was a way for her to cope with her displacement and the horrible conditions of her imprisonment.

Fleetwood defines “penal matter” as the material conditions of imprisonment: both what prisoners possess and what they lack. Many of the works throughout the exhibit incorporate penal matter physically, and in doing so also show what is lacking.

Gilberto Rivera, a Puerto Rican artist and formerly incarcerated Bronx resident, achieves this in a mixed media collage. Constructed with prison supplies, An Institutional Nightmare is an abstract representation of prison life showing both the physical and psychological confinement of prison life. Fragmented layers of penal matter convey this confinement, down to the control of physical bodies — referenced by the prison uniform — and intellectual freedom — newspapers being the only form of access to the public.

Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, collage and graphite on paper, 2016. Collection Ellen Driscoll.

The intricate texture of the piece reveals Rivera’s desire to transform his mediums, which contrasts with the “stuckness” of the materials on the canvas, fixed onto the latter with floor wax. The use of this binding material signals the weight of captivity, as the artist references the physical architecture of prisons and the confinement of the body within the rectangular canvas frame. There is at once an immediate urge to break free and the limitation of that urge, working against each other to express the severe reality of the prison experience.

Other artists such as Sable Elyse Smith and Daniel McCarthy Clifford transform prison matter into three-dimensional shapes that take on new forms. In her sculpture Pivot I, Sable Elyse Smith takes stools from prison visiting rooms and arranges them into what resembles the star-shaped pieces of Jacks.

Referencing her own experience of only being able to contact her father while sitting on these stools, Smith repurposes what is used to punish the body into something that indicates freedom and play. Similarly, Essays & Cultural Commentaries

Gilberto Rivera, An Institutional Nightmare, 2012.

Piece materials: Federal prison uniform, commissary papers, floor wax, prison reports, newspaper, acrylic paint on canvas.

Collection Jesse Krimes.

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Installation view of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus

Daniel McCarty Clifford transforms hundreds of prison food trays into a large-scale sculpture as part of his research initiative the Leavenworth Project.

Fleetwood notes that the trays, representative of the ritual of eating, resemble not only those in prisons, but in schools, hospitals, and asylums, forming a critique against institutionalism as a whole. Holding the trays together with metal bars and frames, the work also resembles the hard-edged aesthetic and industrial structures of modern architecture that further broaden the artist’s critique of the repression of the physical body.

What ties many of the works of the exhibition together, beyond the context in which they are made, is their relationship to penal time. Fleetwood notes that many of the artists used extremely time consuming techniques, as a way of reclaiming time when it is used as a tool to punish them. Rowan Renee’s No Spirit For Me is a prime example of this: a material manifestation of her coming to terms with her father’s death in prison. The installation consists of prints of her father’s criminal case file on a variety of materials using lithography, weaving, and metalwork.

The ritualistic, time consuming, and labor intensive 84

process of printing each file onto new mediums and hanging them one by one became what Renee described as a way of tracking the failures of the justice system, while healing from the loss of her father.

Perhaps one the most provoking pieces of the Marking Time exhibition is Jesse Krimes’ largescale mural Apokaluptein 16389067. Made over the course of three years during the artist’s time in prison, the mural addresses the scope and longevity of penal time through form, scale, and production.

The work consists of 39 prison bedsheets which Krimes transfers hundreds of photos from magazine advertisements and other print media using hair gel and toothpaste. Krimes was imprisoned in Fairton along with Gilberto Rivera and Jared Owens, another artist featured in the exhibit. Together they formed an art collective, so Krimes’ use of penal time in his work invokes similar techniques and themes addressed in Rivera’s collages. Not only was this an extremely time consuming process due to its materiality, but the artist did not see the finished piece until he was released from prison. He was only able to see each panel individually as he sent them out one by one with the help of a few prison guards. Thus, the t-art magazine / volume 1

Installation view of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus

presented work and its laborious production cannot be separated from the conditions of the artist and barriers between him and his own art. Krimes’ work speaks on behalf of all prison artists regarding the extensive forces they must hurdle in order to even engage in artmaking, a practice that in itself is a form of freedom. The finished image is a landscape with surreal, fairy tale-like figures invoking the liberation that Krimes both experiences upon his release and sees in his final piece. The title of this piece further adds to this conjunction of imagery and production; the title refers to the Greek word apokaluptein, which means to “reveal” or “uncover,” followed by the artist’s prisoner number. This “uncovering” can be understood both as a reference to the materials and to the artist’s experience of “revealing” or “uncovering” his work only upon his release.

Like Krimes and his finished mural, prison art addresses the harsh realities of mass incarceration through its content, alongside its context and production. Without the efforts of Fleetwood and those who contributed to developing the exhibit, many of these pieces would have never been shown to the public or presented in a museum setting.

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As put by Fleetwood in her book, “to consider art by incarcerated people as existing outside of art discourses or institutions rehearses the violent erasure of being imprisoned.” Presenting works such as these in museum settings is not only informative, but a necessary step to democratize the art industry and bring underrepresented voices into the public discourse. And as we reflect on the themes that these works address, we realize that one of the most basic freedoms, self-expression through artmaking, is not always free.

In understanding Marking Time, it is important not to see these works through a pessimistic lens. Rather, it is an opportunity to take in the perspectives of one of the most marginalized and invisible communities.

In educating ourselves on the realities of the prison system, we begin to undo the generations of oppressive dialogue that originally built this system.

Activists such as Fleetwood remind us of the value in pausing to listen to overlooked stories. It allows us to learn what must be undone. As Peter Biehl expresses, “sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen?’ instead of simply reacting.”

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Bit Bodies Words Magnus Allan

A meditation on the current disconnect between the digital and physical worlds in the wake of the pandemic.

In Being Digital (1995), a seminal text about digital technologies and their possible future, Greek American architect and computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte introduces a dichotomy between “atoms” and “bits.” Atoms refer to the base unit of the physical world, whereas bits are the base units of the digital world. In the text, Negroponte argues that, as the world becomes increasingly digitized, atoms will become bits, and all forms of information that are now conceivable through atoms will soon exist in bitform. Twenty-five years later, as discs are replaced with streaming services, marketplaces go electronic, and the possibility of communication without some degree of tech-enabled channel becomes ludicrous, this prediction seems rather prophetic.

In a post-pandemic world, the distinction between atoms and bits will become increasingly pronounced,

and the framework may even be extrapolated beyond the scope of information exchange. As the fragility of our own atoms (read: human life) becomes unquestionable due to the virus, people may begin to notice how our atoms are on lockdown, while our bits are free to roam the world.

But as we begin to extrapolate, what is the extent to which everything can be digitized? Can we be digitized? What is stopping us from becoming bits that are uploaded to the cloud? (When you consider it, it’s rather uncanny that we venture out into society, exposing our fragile bodies to all kinds of risks, without backing ourselves up somewhere.) While we may conceive of certain functions to be uniquely “human,” there is an impressive array of so-called human characteristics that are not actually limited to atoms. For example, the fundamentally (and narcissistically anthropocentric)

Magnus Allan, Fluids #1, digital collage, 2020 86

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“human” sense of vision has already been conquered by technology, which is able to see more clearly, more totally, and from more advanced perspectives than we ever will via nonhuman agents like drones, satellites, microscopes, and more. Though there exist current insufficiencies in our self-upload and obstacles in our path to a purely bit-form existence, such as computers not being able to capture sensations like orgasms or the feeling of relieving oneself, we should probably start coming to terms with our atom-centric inferiority.

However, what if there are nonhuman sensations and phenomena that cannot ever be captured by bits?

Or at least, if they are captured by bits, the bit-form manifestation will never be able to do their atomic counterparts justice. This is the focus of my project.

In classical mechanics, there exists the notion of a rigid body: a continuous distribution of mass that has no deformation and remains constant in time regardless of any external forces exerted on the object. While such an object does not actually exist beyond theory, it piqued my interest in the underlying mechanics of phenomena that we may experience in the real world via atoms that may not be captured, converted, and uploaded to the digital world as bits. While these mechanical concepts are surely disseminated and even simulated through bits for scientific research and educational purposes, it seems to me that realworld sensations of physics are comparably harder to experience with bits than they are via atoms.

For my visuals, I repurposed rigid bodies from textbooks and scientific diagrams with the intention of giving them dynamic motion. While my theoretical reference point for resource collection is still digital, as these rigid (albeit fluid-looking) forms are appropriated from the Internet, they are very much rooted in the atomic world. Specifically, I chose the rigid bodies that most closely meet our layperson understanding of fluid, atomic structures, erased their scientific labels with photo-editing software, and brought them to life (albeit digitally) with different blur effects. The resulting images contain hazy atomic entities resembling physical sensations that have been captured in bits.

Not only do the collages capture the tension between atoms and bits and the insufficiency of our upload capacities, but they also invite the viewer to consider the inferiority of their own human vision.

Acknowledging that these digital collages were created on a platform whose computations are translated via pixels that allow their creator to make sense of what he is creating (and really mean nothing to the majority of human eyes without this necessary translation), we, as viewers, are also subject to an endless search for a non-blurry anchor or point of reference. We are disorientated and deterred by the presence of an atomic process that is truly familiar to us (movement of a physical object), but we cannot make sense of it in its current visual state.

Magnus Allan, Fluids #2, digital collage, 2020 Essays & Cultural Commentaries

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t-art exists at the intersection of art and technology to create a dialogue between the two seemingly disparate fields.

By bridging the gap between artists and innovators within the Penn community and beyond, our publication explores the collaborative potential to push the boundaries of art and design, particularly in a digital context.