Events Calendar

Lost in Fathoms: A conversation on art and science collaborations at dawn of the Anthropocene

Speaker: Anaïs Tondeur & Jean-Marc Chomaz, Visual Artist & Director of Research at CNRS in Paris, France

Talk Title: Lost in Fathoms: A conversation on art and science collaborations at dawn of the Anthropocene

Abstract: Anais Tondeur and Jean-Marc Chomaz will discuss their practice art and science and reflect on a year of collaboration which led to the project LOST IN FATHOMS, an art and science investigation around the disappearance of an island. This series of installation is exhibited at GV Art Gallery from October 16th to November 19th, 2014.
In 2012, at the very point where two continents collided, the island of Nuuk disappeared without a trace. At the same time, the 34th International Geological Congress advanced a new era - the Anthropocene: an age where mankind has become a global telluric force. Was the disappearance of Nuuk Island a one-off or a direct consequence of the emergence of the Anthropocene? In one year of research involving the oceanographic fluids laboratories of Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole Normale Superieure (FR), and Cambridge University (UK), this project set out to investigate the causes that led Nuuk Island to disappear from the horizon line.
They will discuss how this project challenges our perception of oceanic and geologic time scales and human's impact on the environment and ways this research explores the narrative and profoundly human nature of science through the looking glass of the fiction.

Biography: Anaïs Tondeur is a visual artist who works and lives in Paris. She has been commissioned as an artist in residence at the Hydrodynamics laboratory (LadHyx, CNRS, Polytechnique School) (2014-2013, FR), Les 26 Couleurs in their Centre for New Media Arts (2013, FR), Audax Textiel Museum (2011, NL), the Cité Internationale de la dentelle (2011, FR). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions in Paris and London and group exhibitions shown nationally and internationally. She graduated from the MA Mixed Media at Royal College of Art in 2010, after completing a BA (Hons) in Textiles at Central Saint Martins in 2008. Anaïs Tondeur is represented exclusively by GV Art gallery, London.

Jean-Marc Chomaz is Director of Research at the CNRS, Professor at École Polytechnique, Chair of the LaSIPS department of University Paris-Saclay and associate editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. He is Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001), Churchill College (2008) and received the silver medal of CNRS (2005) and the Ampère price of the French Science Academy (2012). His works on soap films, global instability of real flows, vortex breakdown, zigzag instability and turbulence cascade in stratified flow are largely referenced. In 1992, he co-founded the Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique and initiated art and science collaborations that has led to more than twenty installations realized in collaboration with ten different artists which have been shown in France and abroad.

Host:

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Valerie Childress