Undergraduate students at UMass Dartmouth’s Department of Art History

Time and Place of the Conference:
Claire T. Carney Library, Grand Reading Room; University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Thursday, April 10th from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Light refreshments will be provided during the conference at no charge.

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Kirsten Swenson, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell: “Critical Landscapes: Art in the Anthropocene”

Cutting-edge scientific and technological breakthroughs have indeed augmented artistic initiatives. Sometimes the material qualities and visual dimensions of a technological or a scientific achievement are conceived as art. Otherwise, they have become sources of inspiration for artists. For example, microscopic photography, which is used as a research tool for cancer and neurological disorders, is displayed as art in the Koch Institute Public Galleries at MIT. In her ongoing project Stranger Visions, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg translates discarded DNA found on city streets into 3-D portraits of the owners. Drexel University scientists and artists are collaborating by using 3-D printers to scan dinosaur bones and fossils. They hope to construct life-size replicas of these ancient animals, providing a more detailed and a much better understanding of how they might have moved and reacted to their environment.

It is with such collaborative efforts and symbiotic relationships between science and art that the separation between art, science and technology is gradually starting to fade away, destroying traditional black-and-white perceptions of art and design as creative pursuits, and science and technology as intellectual queries. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the arts and the sciences are not diametrically opposed. Rather, one could not exist without the other.