Science theme in art festival!

The AxS Festival

Taking the theme of fire and water for this year’s investigation into how art intersects with science and vice versa, the festival, put on by the Pasadena Arts Council, offers several showcases for visual art inspired by outer space, dance that reflects on the desert, sound art curated by multimedia artist Steve Roden, and conversations about toxic water and wildfires.

It’s the right festival for a city studded with such premiere science institutions as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, as well as artistic gems that include the Dance Conservatory of Pasadena, the Art Center College of Design and the Armory Center.

“When you put an artist and a scientist together,” LeMoncheck said, “it’s about being in the moment and looking to the future. Artists and scientists have ideas and inquisitive minds all the time. Commissioning new work allows for that fertile territory where new ideas can happen, the kind that can transform lives or the world.”

For Roden’s "Ignite/Flow" showcase, taking place Friday night in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at the Art Center, the artist and arts council member was excited by the opportunity to simply let three of his favorite artists (composer Mark So, multimedia performance artists Yann Novak and Robert Crouch, and visual/sound artist Carole Kim) interpret the festival’s theme in three radically different ways.

The works include painting, sound installation, drawing and performance.

It’s that push/pull between art and science that plays out in "Worlds," a show curated by Stephin Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design. The objects and imagery of the show, opening Thursday, come from humans, spacecraft and robotic documentarians and runs the gamut from sculpture and large-scale installations to data visualizations, NASA spacecraft imagery and actual meteorites.

A quick perusal through the images wouldn’t tell a viewer whether a robot or a human is behind the creation. It’s a deliberate blurring that gets at the crux of the work: the ideas.

The most compelling intellectual ideas of our time are originating in science — in biology, bio-engineering, theoretical physics, astronomy — ideas that challenge and affect our concept of ourselves, our world and worlds beyond.

If you think of art as an aesthetic embodiment of ideas rather than just as an object made to look like what art is supposed to look like, then science is certainly a new art.

The reception of "Worlds" will kick off with a discussion with Mike Brown, author of “How I Killed Pluto, and Why It Had It Coming.” The show will continue through Jan. 15, 2012.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/10/fire-and-wat...