Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 09 April
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. However, if we’re asking who’s out there, we need to be ready with our response in return. What defines our humanity? How do we communicate the artistic experience of our world? Most importantly – who gets to decide? Artists, thinkers, bloggers and your average extraordinary person have never had a chance. In the face of such overwhelming power and scale, individuals can feel incapable of influencing a richer and more robust reading of our collective moment in time. Can you?
In this event, presented in partnership with Aphids, Willoh S. Weiland, director of collaborative art project Forever Now, curator Jeff Khan and astronomy Associate Professor Chris Fluke throw the universal definition of humanity’s art open to everyone for input.
Art & us.
The nature and meaning of art has been hotly debated for centuries, but in this new series for 2014, the Wheeler Centre explores the impact of art in a variety of contexts. We look at how artistic practice fits in to the many diverse aspects of everyday life, as well as how its context has a direct effect on the realms of inspiration and creation.
Featuring
Elizabeth Finkel
For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Finkel has been a science writer for scientific and lay audiences including serving as a correspondent for the American magazine Science, and an associate editor for Cosmos magazine, a popular science magazine that she cofounded. In June 2013, she was appointed the next Cosmos Editor in Chief.
Finkel received a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Melbourne. She spent five years at the University of California, San Francisco, studying the genes that transform a mushy egg into a shapely embryo.
In 2005, Elizabeth’s book Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science was published by ABC books. The book won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award and the Australian Government Eureka Award for promoting the public understanding of science.
Her second book, The Genome Generation, was published in January 2012 by Melbourne University Publishing.
Willoh S. Weiland
Willoh S. Weiland is an artist, writer, curator and the Artistic Director of Aphids.
Currently, Willoh is directing the Aphids project Forever Now, the third in her trilogy of works investigating the relationship between art and space. Forever Now is an international project, a response to the Voyager records of 1977, which will see the curation of a new 21st Century golden record. It is preceded by Void Love and Yelling at Stars.
Other Aphids work in-laboratory are Game Show and The Drive-In Project, both large-scale interdisciplinary works created with community arts groups to be presented in early 2014.
Past Aphids projects include a national tour of Thrashing Without Looking, a live-cinema and performance work experienced through virtual reality goggles; Computer Boy, a contemporary performance work commissioned for Performance Space, Sydney; Fever Beach and Exile, interactive digital artworks for the iPhone and iPad and Atelier Edens, a research project investigating the creation of cross-artform works in remote areas.
Willoh has made work for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Next Wave Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. Residencies include an Asialink residency in Beijing, 2009 and Splendid Arts Lab and Visible City, Melbourne 2010. Willoh co-directs the laboratory space Head Quarters and is a member of the Field Theory. She has presented guest lectures on her arts practice and Aphids at RMIT, Swinburne and Deakin University.
Christopher Fluke
Associate Professor Christopher Fluke is an astronomer with the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. His research interests include gravitational lensing, astronomy visualisation, and the use of novel technologies to improve how astronomers work.
Chris is a highly experienced science communicator who speaks regularly to school groups and the public about astronomy.
He coordinates the 3D AstroTour school program at Swinburne, teaches an online subject on the History of Astronomy for Swinburne Astronomy Online, and was the voice of the Big Bang in Void Love - an online soap opera about space featuring Australian entertainer Kamahl!
Jeff Khan
Jeff Khan is a curator and writer working across the visual arts, performance and dance. He is currently Artistic Director of Performance Space, Sydney, and has a particular interest in site-specific and socially-engaged practices.
Jeff was the Artistic Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival from 2007-2010, and was Guest Curator of NEW12 (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2012) and Primavera 09 (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009).
As a writer, Jeff has contributed texts to numerous publications, journals and artists’ projects. He was a member of the Australia Council Dance Board from 2009-2011 is a current Board Member of Chunky Move.