Natural Ventilation Experiment with Stuart Dalziel, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge, UK, 2018. Tim Hyde and Jiayi Young.

Public Event Announcement:

The China Shop : Conversations between Artists and Scientists

Thursday, May 30, 2024, 4:30-6 PM, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

Free and open to the public | Download Event Poster | Link to Event Webpage | Parking and Directions

Co-Directors
Jiayi Young (Associate Professor, Department of Design, UC Davis) 
Tim Hyde (Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Art History, UC Davis)

Project Description

The China Shop is a two-year grant initiative supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) Office of Research. It is designed to enable interdisciplinary conversations to give rise to imaginative possibilities and catalyze innovative outcomes. Across the academic years of 2022-2023 and the subsequent year, we facilitate two artist-scientist pairings each. Each residency spans approximately 10 weeks. In addition to the laboratory exchanges, the project hosts a moderated public presentation and discussion at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis. During these events, the participating artists and scientists engage with the audience, sharing insights into their collaboration, creative processes, and ongoing projects. At the conclusion of the project, a publication will also be created to document the interactions and outcomes.

Residency Format

Each participating artist receives a $5,000 honorarium. A selection of available laboratories encompasses campus labs and institutions such as The Center for Mind and Brain, The Collaborative and Social Computing Lab, The John Muir Institute of the Environment, and The Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics, among others. Collaborating artist-scientist pairs operate within the structure of UC Davis’ 10-week quarter system, with the flexibility to engage either in-person or remotely. Visual documentation through photographs and videos is strongly encouraged whenever feasible.

Public Conversations

At the completion of the residency period, the artist-scientist duo engages the public in presenting their collaborative works or work-in-progress at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. The video documentation of the events is also a part of the Leonardo Art, Science, Evening Rendezvous (LASER).

2023-2024 Artist-Scientist Parings

Carrie Hott at the Center for Spaceflight Research (CSFR) with Stephen Robinson

Center for Spaceflight Research (CSFR)

The Center for Spaceflight Research, or CSFR, comprises four laboratories including the Human/Robotics/Vehicle Integration & Performance Laboratory (HRVIP), that take a transdisciplinary approach to investigate all aspects of human spaceflight from multiple viewpoints, from engineering to computer science to chemistry.  Stephen Robinson, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the CSFR, along with his three collaborators, Professors Zhaodan Kong and Sanjay Joshii and Assistant Professor Rich Whittle, aim to establish the center as the preeminent human spaceflight research laboratory in the U.S.

https://hrvip.ucdavis.edu | More on Spaceflight Research

Carrie Hott

Carrie Hott is an interdisciplinary artist whose research based practice focuses on technological mediation and systems that are difficult to access, visualize, or understand. She creates multi-media installations that incorporate sound or video into sculptural settings. Her work also takes the form of small scale publications and performative lectures. Hott has presented her work as part of exhibitions and projects across the country, most recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, the Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, as well as a permanent project, The Key Room, at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of the Artadia Award, a Cultural Humanities grant, and has had residencies at The Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mills College in Oakland and Beta-Local in Puerto Rico, among others.

https://carriehott.com

Leire Asensio Villoria & David Mah at Post Lab with Eric Post and Pernille Sporon Bøving

Post Lab

The Post Lab at the University of California, Davis, conducts research on ecological dynamics in time and space, and across levels of organization from individuals to ecosystems. Work in the lab focuses mainly on ecological consequences of climate change, with applications to wildlife conservation. Although most of the research is based in the Arctic, shared interests are broad and encompass other biomes as well. We are advocates of combining meticulous observation of natural processes, controlled field experimentation, and analytical modeling. The lab employs all three approaches to investigate the effects of climate change on life history variation and phenology, population dynamics, and community dynamics and stability. Integration of phenology, population-, and community dynamics, is a major focus of our long-term work at a field site near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.

https://postecology.net

Leire Asensio Villoria & David Mah

Leire Asensio Villoria and David Mah have been active in the production of creative works for the built environment as asensio_mah since 2002. Their works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Tallinn Architectural Biennale, the Grand Métis International Garden Festival in Quebec, and the NGV Melbourne Design Week amongst others. They have published their design research in the books: Systems Upgrade (2002, Actar) and Lifestyled (2016, Jovis) and Leire has also published Architecture and Waste (2017, Actar) with Hanif Kara and Andreas Geourgoulias.  

Leire and David are also educators and researchers in architecture as well as urban design at the University of Melbourne where Leire is co-lead of the ADD+F (advanced digital design and fabrication) Research lab and David is coordinating the postgraduate urban design programme.  They have previously taught at Harvard, Cornell and the Architectural Association in London.

https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/about/our-people/academic/leire-asensio-villoria

https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/about/our-people/academic/david-ma

2022-2023 Artist-Scientist Parings

Jiabao Li at the Center for Mind and Brain with Petr Janata, Joy Geng, and George (Ron) Mangun

Center for Mind and Brain

The Center for Mind and Brain (CMB) is devoted to supporting the collaborative work of world-class scientists from a broad spectrum of disciplines encompassing divergent social, biological, computational and medical perspectives. Understanding the mind is arguably the single greatest challenge in science, because that quest requires the human mind to understand itself. Scientists at the Center for Mind and Brain (CMB) are pursuing the most fundamental questions about how the human mind perceives, thinks, feels and acts. The fundamental question we seek to answer is: How does the mind arise from the biology of the brain? By solving these mysteries and answering these questions, we can develop new treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders and help people from all walks of live throughout the world achieve the enormous potential of the human mind. Scientists in the CMB study language, memory, attention, cognitive control, emotion, multisensory integration, music cognition, social cognition and visual cognition from cognitive neuroscience and developmental perspectives in healthy infants, children and adults, and in special patient populations. We also are leaders in the emerging field of translational cognitive neuroscience, which endeavors to translate basic science findings about the operation of healthy minds and brains into clinical research on mind-brain disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

https://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu

Lucy Solomon at the Hess microbiology lab with Matthias Hess

Hess Lab

The Hess Lab at UC Davis utilizes diverse omics, microbiology and molecular biology techniques as well as engineering approaches to address applied and fundamental aspects of microbial ecology. The goal of the Hess Lab’s research program is to elucidate how microbial communities and their individual components (i.e. cells and enzymes) affect their environment and respond to environmental changes at the atom to molecule to cell to population to ecosystem level. On the population and ecosystem level, microbiomes associated with the gastrointestinal tract are of particular interest. On the atom and molecular level, work in the Hess Lab has been centering on enzymes that are capable of degrading complex carbohydrates into less complex sugar molecules.

http://hesslab.com

Engagement and Advisory Committee :

Engagement Fellow:

Cris Gomez (MFA Design)

Project Assistants:

Tea Parker-Essig (Design)

Jullianne Nubla (Design and English)

Advisory Committee Members: 

James Housefield (Design)  

Branwen Okpako (Cinema Digital Media)  

Tim Choy (Science and Technology Studies)  

Darrin Martin (Art Studio)  

Katia Vega (Design)  

Petr Janata (Center for Mind and Brain)  

Andreas Albrecht (Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics)  

Matthias Hess (Microbiology)  

Rachel Clarke (Art, CSUS)  

Natalie Nelson (Pence Gallery)

Tanuja Mishra (Design)

Susie Kantor (Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art)


Art Works is the National Endowment for the Arts’ principal grants program. Through project-based funding, we support public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation, the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, learning in the arts at all stages of life, and the integration of the arts into the fabric of community life. Projects are large or small, existing or new, and take place across the nation’s 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.