November 19, 2022, Mesa, Arizona, USA / Online
LASER ASU-CYLAND: FERMENTATION
Chaired by Jenny Strickland
November 19, 2022, 1:30 pm (Mountain Standard Time)
ASU MIX Center, Sound Stage 117, 50 N. Centennial Way Mesa, AZ 85201
LASER ASU-CYLAND: Fermentation will bring together 1 artist, 1 scientist, and 1 art historian/curator for a discussion around fermentation through the dual lenses of art and science. The conversation will take place at ASU’s Emerge–A Festival of Futures: Eating at the Edges.
LASER ASU-CYLAND: Fermentation will take place at the Emerge Festival in Mesa, Arizona. This year’s festival explores our relationship with food and what that will look like in a future with severe environmental challenges.
SPEAKERS
Anne Marie Maes (BE) is an artist and researcher with an extensive track record in socially engaged art projects that strive for greater awareness about the fragility of our natural environment and for the adoption of strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. She has worked extensively with communities on urban agriculture, the creation of connected urban green corridors and the installation and monitoring of innovative beehives. This translated into documentaries, participatory art works and installations. In parallel, Anne Marie Maes has been exploring the living world for creating a new aesthetic and novel materials such as fabrics based on bacteria, algae and plants. This has also lead to a wide range of art works and installations shown in prestigious galleries and museums. A third strand of Maes her art practice focuses on digital technologies. With her art collective she pioneered in the 1990s a range of innovations for peer-to-peer telecommunication networks, web content creation and environmental monitoring. In the 2000s she worked with AI researchers and robotics engineers to embed intelligence in her bee-related installations and more recently she has been exploring augmented reality and semantic web technologies to raise awareness of the fragile ecologies in the North Sea.
Sara El-Sayed has a joint position as the Co-Director of the Biomimicry Center and Assistant Research Professor at the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. El-Sayed has a doctorate in food system sustainability, specifically on regenerative food practices in arid regions, and a master’s in Biomimicry both from ASU. She also has a Biomimicry Professional Certificate from Biomimicry 3.8. She held a postdoctoral position at the School for Future innovation and Society, in Public Interest Technology. Her research interests include exploring ways to have more regenerative and net-positive local food systems, she is currently involved in the local Arizona food space. Previously she worked as a researcher in Biomimicry and microbial geographies. She is the co-founder of several enterprises in Egypt. Nawaya is a social enterprise working as a catalyst to transition small-scale farmer communities into more sustainable ones through education and research. Dayma an LLC responsible for outdoor Environmental Education, teaching young adults about Biomimicry and local Egyptian communities. Clayola is an LLC producing low-tech irrigation systems. She is an avid traveler, nature lover, and enjoys tasting foods, cooking and interacting with people through food experiences. Sara is on the board of Slow Food, an international movement that started in Italy aiming to safeguard local food cultures and traditions and does so by promoting Good, Clean, and Fair food for all.
Natalia Kolodzei an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, is a curator and art historian. Ms. Kolodzei is Executive Director of the Kolodzei Art Foundation (a US-based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit public foundation established in 1991), and, along with Tatiana Kolodzei, owner of the Kolodzei Collection of Eastern European Art, containing over 7,000 artworks (paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photography, kinetic and digital art) by over 300 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Ms. Kolodzei has curated over eighty art exhibitions in the US, Europe and Russia. She is an author and editor of multiple publications and organized and contributed to symposiums and panel discussions for universities and museums worldwide, including co-chair Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) CYLAND Talks. In 2010 she was a member of Culture Sub-Working Group under the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission.