Workshop

Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado)

Resident artist Lucy HG Solomon of Cesar & Lois

Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024
2-4 p.m.

Beall Center for Art + Technology

The UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology is pleased to host a workshop with Getty PST resident artist Lucy HG Solomon of Cesar & Lois in conjunction with the exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, presented in partnership with Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

RSVP HERE

Please join art collective Cesar & Lois on Saturday, November 2 from 2-4 p.m. in exploring their latest project, Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado), a living sculpture incorporating specimens from California ecosystems. Visitors will discover the magic of photosynthesis, breathe with microorganisms, and create art with living materials.

STEAM Ambassadors from California State university San Marcos (CSUSM) will guide guests through a series of art and science activities, including peering at fungi through microscopes; observing photosynthesis in real time; creating mini plant lights; and making symbiotic collages with local plant species.

The Hyphaenated Workshop is free and may be enjoyed by visitors of all ages.

Guests are invited to experience Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) outside of the workshop by visiting Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology through December 14, 2024. The gallery is open from 12-6pm, Tuesday-Saturday. Admission is free. Learn more at beallcenter.uci.edu/futuretense

Behind the Science:

Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) investigates ecological relationships at different scales — as interspecies exchanges and as part of planetary respiration. The artwork was produced in conversation with Kathleen Treseder and researchers at the UC Irvine Treseder Lab, which studies fungi’s role in ecosystems and global change. Live specimens included in the artwork were sourced from the mountain ecology surrounding Escondido, California. The project asks, if our technology were modeled from nature, might we begin to think of ourselves as nodes within a community of organisms?
 
“The whole planet is connected, and the behavior of one entity can dramatically affect living beings in other parts of the world. If you spend enough time with the sculpture, you will see on its screen how the CO2 you are breathing is changing the behavior and signaling of the microorganisms.” - Cesar & Lois

 

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, part of Getty’s 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, offers artistic frameworks for comprehending complex systems in the 21st century. The exhibition presents emerging and established contemporary artists who engage with complexity in myriad systems, including robotics, evolutionary biology, data surveillance, global warming, and bacterial intelligence.

Today, many scientists and scholars across disciplines agree that an understanding of complex systems is vital for studying a world where conditions, events, and phenomena are too entangled to be observed individually.

Distinct from scientific models which produce predictable outcomes, complex systems have feedback loops that can have emergent behavior that organizes into new patterns. It is this constant dynamism between order and chaos that produces the complexity and uncertainty that is visible in the art in this exhibition.

Cesar & Lois, Chico MacMurtrie, Laura Splan, Hege Tapio, and Gail Wight are premiering newly commissioned, transdisciplinary works under the Beall Center’s Black Box Projects, a residency program that facilitates collaborations between visiting artists and UC Irvine faculty researchers. Ralf Baecker, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, The Harrison Studio, Forrest and Lula Kirkland, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Julie Mehretu, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Clare Rojas, Theresa Schubert, and Pinar Yoldas are exhibiting existing paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore complexity.

This exhibition is organized by David Familian, artistic director and curator at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, with Gabriel Tolson, curatorial assistant. Special thanks to the Beall Center’s staff Jesse Colin Jackson, executive director, and Fatima Manalili, associate director, and to the staff of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts who supported this program.

Support for Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty comes from The Beall Family Foundation and from Getty.

Image (top): Cesar & Lois, Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado), 2024. Mycelial networks, living organisms, wood growth rings, glass vessels, soil, water, bio-sensors, custom electronics, lights, iron supports, and visualized AI on monitor, 50 x 53 x 49 inches. Courtesy of the artists. Commissioned by the Beall Center for Art + Technology’s Black Box Projects residency program.

Image (above): DaTA Lab’s graphic rendering of Cesar & Lois’s artwork Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) (2024) with planetary respiration diagram. Courtesy of Lucy HG Solomon.