UCLA Art|Sci Center Presents ‘Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption’

Immersive, interactive installations, artist lectures, walkthroughs, and live performances and videos by 13 artists—including Bill Fontana’s site-specific installation Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame and the Dachstein Glacier; Katie Grinnan’s sound sculptures The Sensitives; Anna Nacher’s soundwalks; and performances by

artists such as Patricia Cadavid, Amber Stucke, and Sholeh Asgary—will activate the UCLA campus to engage audiences in deep reflection on the climate crisis.

Organized by co-curators Victoria Vesna, UCLA Art|Sci center director, and Anuradha Vikram, Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption includes seven sequential exhibitions presented between September 14, 2024, and June 7, 2025, as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

The exhibition and related public programs will be held in multiple campus venues, including the Art|Sci Gallery in the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) building on UCLA’s South Campus; the EDA in the Broad Art Center on North Campus; Sage Hill Native Plants & Wildlife Habitat; the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden; Royce Hall; and the UCLA Nimoy Theater operated by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption builds from four years of research by eight artists-in-residence at the UCLA Art|Sci center: Sholeh Asgary, Patricia Cadavid, Bill Fontana, Yolande Harris, Anna Nacher, Joel Ong, Iman Person, and Robertina Šebjanič. Their projects will be joined by installations and performances by local artists Katie Grinnan, Rachel Mayeri, Christina McPhee, Amber Stucke, and Nina Waisman.

“Our goal is to highlight artists and scientists who have developed long-term collaborative relationships with one another,” said co-curator Victoria Vesna. “In this exhibition, we use sound to join the disciplines of art and science and to foster a deeper understanding of our many interconnected environments and cultures.”

PST ART, formerly Pacific Standard Time, is the largest art event in the United States. This year’s iteration will engage audiences throughout Southern California in the theme Art & Science Collide. With the support of nearly $20 million in grants from Getty, dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will present more than 80 exhibitions and a wide spectrum of programs, traversing such topics as climate change, Indigenous knowledge, artificial intelligence, the burgeoning field of eco-acoustic art, and more.

Through Atmosphere of Sound, participating artists and scientists propose to engage human bodies through vibration and exploratory learning as a means of achieving deeper empathy with the environment and with other species.

“Our approach to this project is informed by the work of feminist scientific philosophers including Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway,” Vesna said. “We seek to connect artists and art lovers, scientists, students, performing arts patrons and local families with concepts of vibrant matter and intercellular communication on a global scale.”

Atmosphere of Sound kicks off with Bill Fontana’s outdoor sound sculpture Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame and the Dachstein Glacier, which will be amplified from UCLA’s Royce Hall from September 14 to October 5, 2024. This work threads audio feeds

from Notre-Dame’s dormant bells and the Dachstein Cave in Austria, layering these soundscapes into a poetic statement on climate disruption and the fragility of human culture. Fontana is an American composer and media artist who has developed an international reputation for his pioneering experiments in sound.

The official opening event takes place Saturday, September 14, from 2–4 p.m. outside Royce Hall and will feature a conversation with curators and a soundwalk with Fontana.

Following Fontana’s exhibition are six sequential exhibitions in the Art|Sci center’s gallery, located on the fifth floor of UCLA’s CNSI building.

• October 4 to November 2, 2024: Katie Grinnan’s The Sensitives and Amber Stucke’s Talking to Plants
• November 15 to December 14, 2024: Robertina Šebjanič’s CO_SONIC 1884 km2
• January 10 to February 1, 2025: Yolande Harris’s How You Shimmer: Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles
• February 14 to March 15, 2025: Iman Person’s Memory Garden and Patricia Cadavid’s Kanchay_Yupana// and Electronic_Khipu
• April 4 to April 26, 2025: Joel Ong’s In Silence . . .
• May 9 to June 7, 2025: Sholeh Asgary’s Qanat and Ghatel, and Sholeh Asgary + the Ad Hoc Collective for Improvising’s Mourning Technologies for Future Griefs
• All exhibitions are viewable by appointment between 2-5pm on Thursdays and Fridays and 12-3pm on Saturdays. Entry is free to the public.
• Visitors are encouraged to visit the Atmosphere of Sound website and download the project app to assist in navigating between venues. The app includes wayfinding tools with parking and metro information; meditative soundwalks recorded by Atmosphere of Sound artist Anna Nacher; access to the Atmosphere of Sound radio station, which will stream sonic artworks and interviews with artists and scientists; and detailed exhibition and program information.
• “Atmosphere of Sound provokes the central question: ‘If the scale and complexity of climate change exceeds the limits of human perception, how can artists represent it?’” said co-curator Anuradha Vikram. “The project examines how sound-based artists, responding to the climate crisis, have found a unique point of entry to this representational challenge. Sound art, as a medium, evades and challenges the certainty often associated with the sense of sight. The inherent ambiguities of sound can help audiences understand the rapidly shifting state of the climate and its effects on the physical world.”
• The Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption exhibition and program of artist lectures, symposia, and performances, as well as a 250-page full color publication featuring seven original essays (est. print date September 2024) has been generously supported by the Getty PST ART initiative.

Credit:

Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption is made possible through lead grants from Getty as part of their PST Art: Art & Science Collide initiative.

About PST ART: Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024, presenting more than 70 exhibitions from organizations across the region exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.

About the UCLA Art|Sci center: The UCLA Art|Sci center is dedicated to pursuing and promoting the evolving “Third Culture” by facilitating the infinite potential of collaborations between (media) arts and (bio/nano) sciences. Through the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture’s Design Media Arts Department and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), the center supports visiting research scholars and artists-in-residence from around the world. Through various lectures, mixers, and symposia, artists and scientists are brought together in order to mesh these cultures and inspire individuals to think about art and science as interrelated and a very relevant synergism of society. The Art|Sci center also hosts the Sci|Art NanoLab Summer Institute for high school students, introducing them to the vast possibilities in the field of art|science for the present and future generations. Art|Sci center is home to the Art|Sci Collective, an international group of researchers and creatives that develops projects, workshops, performances, and exhibitions that address social, ethical and environmental issues related to scientific innovations. For more information, visit https://artsci.ucla.edu/.

About UCLA and PST ART: With seven granted projects, UCLA’s expansive presence in this year’s PST Art demonstrates the university’s unique strengths as a research institution and the far-reaching impact of its research and creative endeavors. UCLA's involvement underscores its commitment to fostering artistic innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, showcasing what is possible when the worlds of art and science combine. Other UCLA-affiliated projects include exhibitions and events at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, a film series from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, a downtown arts exhibition commissioned and curated by

UCLA Arts Conditional Studio, and a live dance/multimedia event presented by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA).

About the Atmosphere of Sound Co-Curators:

Victoria Vesna
Victoria Vesna is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and
Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and Architecture and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work that can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations, she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior, and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, CAiiA_STAR, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students.

Anuradha Vikram
Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer and curator, and a Lecturer in Art at UCLA. Curated and co-curated exhibitions of note include 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial: ablaze with our care, its ongoing song (with Jackie Im) for Oregon Contemporary in Portland; Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children (2022) and Social Fabric (2013) for Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles; and Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport (2012, with Terri Cohn) for Mills College Art Museum in Oakland. Vikram is the author of Decolonizing Culture, a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Sming Sming Books, 2017). Their first novel, Use Me at Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023) uses speculative fiction to describe a near future where both automation and climate collapse are more advanced. Vikram holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Studio Art from New York University.

About the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture: As the premiere public arts school in the nation, the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) plays a vital role in the cultural and artistic life of the campus and the broader community. Guiding its mission is the belief that the arts are not only an essential part of the cognitive, critical, inquisitive life of a public research university, but the practice and presence of the arts are a cornerstone of the creative, innovative thinking and collaborative approaches that the 21st century demands. UCLA Arts offers leading programs in four degree-granting departments: Architecture and Urban Design, Art, Design | Media Arts, and World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Students have unparalleled opportunities to learn from and interact with distinguished faculty who rank among the most accomplished artists, designers, architects, performers, ethnographers, and scholars of our time. Grounded in an understanding of the profound interdependence between creativity and academic research, its innovative and rigorous programs

combine studio-based practice with critical studies and liberal arts scholarship—all within the context of a leading research university. In advancing this holistic approach to arts education, the school strives to motivate and empower its students to serve as cultural leaders of the 21st century. For more information, visit https://arts.ucla.edu.