The focus of the inaugural CCA Biennial is the seemingly paradoxical extremes at which we live our contemporary lives and the effect of these extremes on the traditional role of art and visual culture. Entitled, "Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology" the 2014 CCA Biennial addresses the edges of human perception and the pioneering technologies that move perception into realms beyond the visible, where expected behaviors, physical laws and operations dissolve and intangible phenomena that become common sites of information and exchange. The focus of the symposium is on the ways in which artists have embraced and interrogated the new accessibility of nano scale science and its material innovations as well as how it continues to be inaccessible both physically and politically to the vast majority of the public.
The Symposium brings together Biennial artists, Cornell nano researchers, material scientists, faculty artist/researchers, student artists and independent scholars for a full-day of presentations and discussions of their work.
A highlight of the symposium will be Kimsooja’s presentation of her CCA-commissioned sculpture, “A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir” which was created in collaboration with Professor Ulrich Wiesner of Cornell’s Department of Material Science and Engineering. The artist, project architect Jaeho Chong, along with Professor Wiesner and his students, will discuss the nearly two-year process of their working together to bring the artist’s vision to life through innovations in nano scale science typically used in synthetic medicine and cancer research.
A full schedule of Symposium presentations and events can be found on the CCA’s web site.
