[ISEA2022] Paper: Roberta Buiani, Ilze Briede (kavi) & Lorella Di Cintio — Emergent: A post-pandemic mobile gallery

Abstract

Full Paper. Session: Educations and Societies / Multisensory installation and immersive storytelling

Keywords: Emergent life, mobile gallery, postpandemic gallery, multispecies communication, relational aesthetics

As the world slowly reopens to social gatherings, we ask how we should reinvent the as a multipurpose mobile object in dialogue with the city and its human and non-human dwellers.

This project emerges form a series of reflections about the state and the potentials of the arts and their exhibition spaces in post-pandemic times. The pandemic of 2020-21 forced many galleries and museums to shut their doors for several months or forever. These closures have created a void in social gatherings and cultural events, urging artists and cultural workers to rethink ways of making, exhibiting and bringing their work to the general public. Now that the world slowly re-opens to social gatherings, we wonder whether we should re-invent the role of the gallery as an enclosed space alltogether, by freeing it from the constraints posed by its traditional spatial and cultural configuration (real and virtual),and redesigning it as a multipurpose mobile object in dialogue with the city and its human and non-human dwellers. This choice is in part inspired by the first artworks and specimens this gallery will carry: a project at the intersection of art and science exploring “new life forms,” that is, living and imagined organisms emerging from digital, laboratory, and environmental contexts. The mobile gallery then acquires a new meaning: it is not just a new safe exhibition space, but also a space where emergent life is both debated and created, as well as an emergent “life” on its own.

Working in the artist-curator role, we are proposing a post-pandemic mobile gallery, which will contain a variety of artworks by invited artists. Roberta Buiani, Ilze Briede [Kavi] and Lorella Di Cintio are the Emergent collective. The members’ educational and creative backgrounds are wide-ranging in scope. They are melding together the artist as researcher, the artist as academic and the artist as curator.

  • Roberta Buiani, Ph.D. Buiani has received degrees in Modern Literature (Italy), Art History (Canada), and Communication and Culture (Canada) and teaches at York University and the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and is co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her creative practice and teaching navigate the intersection of art and science.
  • Ilze Briede [Kavi], Ph.D. student. Briede has received degrees in Chinese language and culture studies (Latvia), Digital Media Production (UK), Interactive Media (UK) and Visual Arts (Canada). Her creative practice and teaching navigate the realm of bio-physiological sensing and human-computer co-creative practices.
  • Lorella Di Cintio, Ph.D. Di Cintio has received degrees in Environmental Design (Canada), Architecture (US) and Media and Communications (Europe) and teaches at X (Ryerson) University, The Creative School, School of Interior Design, Canada. Her creative practice and teaching navigate the realm of design activism and interiority.