SESSION 4 | LEONARDO@DJERASSI | JUNE 25 – JULY 30, 2024
A collaboration between Leonardo/ISAST and the Djerassi Program, Leonardo@Djerassi brings artists and scientists together to explore how science and art is connected as well as expand and transform the boundaries of their disciplines.
It includes a month-long residency, public and academic forums, published blogs and articles in LEONARDO/ISAST’s journal published by MIT Press. Learn more about this year’s residents on Leonardo’s website.
View what the Session 4 Resident artists are working on at our Open Studios on July 20th
ANTHONY ACCIAVATTI | LITERARY ARTS | NEW YORK, NY
Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of landscape and the history of science and
technology. He is the author of Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (2015), which is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. In 2016 the Foundation for Landscape Studies awarded Ganges Water Machine the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize. To write Ganges Water Machine, Acciavatti designed his own instruments to map the choreography of soils, cities, and agriculture across the river basin. In 2023, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired these instruments, along with his original drawings and photographs, for the permanent collection. He is the inaugural Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale University and leader of Ganges Lab at Collaborative Earth.
CORAL PEREDA | MEDIA ARTS | SAN DIEGO, CA
Coral is a research-based media artist and designer originally from Spain. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Photography and Design from Elisava Barcelona School of Design and a BA in Communication from IE University, Spain. Her work has been exhibited at Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona, at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Expo Art Fair, Twisted Oyster Film Festival, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, and at SIA Gallery in New York City. She has been featured in publications such as Vassar Review, the Present Tense Pamphlets edited by the Block Museum at Northwestern University and LoosenArt. Coral has been awarded the research fellowship Margaret Fuller from the Franklin Institute at the University of Alcalá for her research project on trauma and the female body in new media art. Coral has participated in the intensive digital fabrication course, Fab Academy at the Fab Lab Barcelona where she prototyped immersive installations and She has participated in residencies at the Arquetopia Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and at SÍM Residency in Reykjavik. She is currently a PhD candidate at UC San Diego where she explores the associations between artificial intelligence, embodiment and the occult through the lens of feminist media archaeology.
DAN PAZ | VISUAL ARTS | OAKLAND, CA
Dan Paz (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist working in lens-based practices across still to moving images. Their research is deeply concerned with the labor and lifecycle of images, spanning distribution and circulation, intellectual property, and the historical frames that encode information as metadata. Through material and archival inquiry Paz examines Latine (and global south) diasporic relationships to the US, alongside the converging realms of capture, architecture, and abolition. International and national exhibitions with recent solo exhibitions at Michigan State University and Entre Gallery in Vienna, Austria. Paz’s projects have been featured in Hayward Gallery London, UK; the 12th Havana Biennial, Havana, CU; The New Media lab and The Latinx Project at NYU, NYC; The Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; and Stoveworks, Chattanooga, TN to name a few. Paz is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies & Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis.
JULIE ZHU | COMPOSER | STANFORD, CA
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonist. Her work is conceptual and transdisciplinary, operating on an expansive definition of algorithm. Creative and ethical use of AI and machine learning in the arts is one of her research interests and the focus of her Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
RANRAN FAN | MEDIA ARTS | DANTON, TX
Ranran Fan is a device-maker and an artist who works in installation, new media and performance. They has presented their immersive installations in solo exhibitions in Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), Currents 826 (Santa Fe, NM), No Land (Santa Fe, NM), and Sanitary Tortilla Factory (Albuquerque, NM). Their work has also been included in group exhibitions internationally such as Academy Art Museum, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe Art Institute, Tamarind Institute, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (China), and Incheon Marine Asia Photography and Video Festival (Korea). They is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of North Texas.
ROB JACKSON | SCIENCE/CLIMATE | STANFORD, CA
Rob Jackson studies the many ways people affect the Earth. He collects scientific data to help shape policies and reduce the environmental footprint of global warming, energy extraction, and other issues. He’s currently examining the effects of climate change and droughts on forest mortality and grassland ecosystems. He is also working to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), which Jackson chairs. As an author and photographer, Rob has published a trade book about the environment (The Earth Remains Forever, University of Texas Press), two books of children’s poems, Animal Mischief and Weekend Mischief (Highlights Magazine and Boyds Mills Press). His new book on climate solutions (Into the Clear Blue Sky: the Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere) will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2024. A poet, he also has recent and forthcoming poems in the journals Southwest Review, Cortland Review, Cold Mountain Review, Atlanta Review, LitHub, and more. His photographs have appeared in many media outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today, US News and World Report, Science, Nature, and National Geographic News.
SANNA FOGELVIK | 3D ANIMATION | STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
Sanna Fogelvik (they/them) is a Stockholm-based artist and architect working both with 3D graphics and analog media, often using science as a starting point. Their work deals with nature and its relationship to the human body, encouraging a reflection on our own perception of the natural world.
SUE HUANG | MEDIA ARTS/SCIENCE | BROOKLYN, NY
ZANDER PORTER | CHOREOGRAPHY | LOS ANGELES, CA
Zander Porter (ザンダー・ポーター) is a US-American artist-cyborg based primarily in Berlin. Working between liveness and onlineness, ze interpolates (dis)identification and (dis)embodiment as phenomenological inquiries between surface, soma, portal, and psyche. Zander’s practices dissect and recompose attention and identity through gamification of gender, affect, interlocution, and subjectivity. Citing internet semiotics, hormonal technologies, corporeality, and surveillance paradigms with a mixture of curiosity, reverence, irony, and skepticism, Zander’s research critically exposes neoliberal orders of hyper-individualization and reimagines staged/documented ceremonies of the techno-social. Ze articulates byproducts (expressions, performativities) of this negotiation as (technogenetic, neuroatypical) matrices of queerer relationality. Zander has been a core member of XenoEntities Network (XEN), a platform for discussion and experimentation focusing on intersections of queer, gender, and feminist studies with digital technologies. Holding a high-honors BA in Art Studio (with additional coursework in Computer Science and Performance Studies) from Wesleyan University and an MA in Choreography from DAS Graduate School – Amsterdam University of the Arts, ze has worked or participated in residencies at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art (New York), Cité internationale des arts (Paris), Trauma Bar und Kino (Berlin), the Saison Foundation (Tokyo), National Institute for Space Research (São José dos Campos), and Leonardo@Djerassi (Woodside), alongside reception of disparate production and research grants or awards and participation in various exhibition and festival contexts internationally.