UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance embraces collaboration for PST Art: Art & Science Collide

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance embodies the spirit of collaboration that runs through PST Art: Art & Science Collide, partnering with several arts institutions for co-presentations in UCLA venues and working with local schools beyond.

 Presented in partnership with Fulcrum Arts and Chapman University as part of part of PST Art project Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific as well as the 2024 Fulcrum Festival: Waves Upon Waves, a pair of performances from sonic artists William Basinski and Bethan Kellough on Thursday, October 17, 2024 at The UCLA Nimoy Theater sparks a powerful conversation between art and science.

With On Time, Out of Time, Basinki creates a one-of-a- kind sonic bed with recordings from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) that captured billion-year-old sonic impressions made by two colliding black holes. Kellough’s Still the Fragments Move is a new composition that follows the journey of ocean waves from sea to shore. Both pieces explore the profound connection between sound,

vibrations, and waveforms with the human body. The performance will be followed by a brief panel discussion with artists William Basinski, Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand, and experimental physicist Rana Adhikari, about their time together at LIGO at Caltech in 2016 and the artwork that resulted from this fruitful collaboration.

 CAP UCLA’s main PST Art project is a collaboration with REDCAT downtown.  In conjunction with the public programs of the Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide, CAP UCLA and REDCAT co-present Live Night: Cruising Bodies, Spirits, and Machines, a celebratory evening at the iconic 1,600-seat United Theater on Broadway on December 7, 2024. Featuring various experimental performances by rafa esparza, MUXX collective, among others. Live Night is inspired by REDCAT's PST Art exhibition, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which rethinks artificial intelligence through Indigenous, Brown, and Queer perspectives. The program was developed with support from Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City.

CAP UCLA is also partnering with the UCLA Art|Sci center, one of 10 faculty-led research centers in the School of the Arts and Architecture. The Nimoy Theater be home to videos and projections that tie into another campus PST Art project, Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption. From September-2024 through March 2025, audiences at Nimoy performances will be able to view works from Atmosphere of Sound artists on video screens inside the theater as well on the large external marquee screens that face Westwood Blvd, including images of waves crashing against Dachstein Glacier in Austria, and the bells of Notre Dame, a complement to Bill Fontana’s sound installation in Royce Hall, Silent Echoes: Notre- Dame and the Dachstein Glacier, which runs Sept. 14- Oct. 5.

On March 15, 2025 CAP UCLA will present at The Nimoy Sound and Science: From Signal to Noise in partnership with the Art|Sci center. Sound and Science: From Signal to Noise is a curated showcase of sound art performances created in collaboration with scientists from fields such as physics, biology, astrophysics and botany, designed to explore the vast landscape of auditory and visual experiences. Featuring an array of local and emerging experimental sonic artists working in ‘eco-acoustics,’ Sound and Science presents sound as a post-object art form.

Performances are intrinsically related to the artists' activist work, which addresses issues ranging from ecological and social to economic and racial. Be immersed in a unique auditory landscape complemented by live visual elements.

CAP UCLA also will engage hundreds of LAUSD students with the themes of PST Art through its K-12 education arm Design for Sharing’s in-school residency programs working with fifth-graders at Toluca Lake Elementary in the fall and second through fifth graders at UCLA

Community School in 2025.

Teaching artists will use two books as a jumping off point to consider the relationship between art and science–The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Both of these texts examine how words that describe nature and the environment are disappearing, and how future generations will not learn to value and “know” the natural world if these descriptive words are no longer being used.

 The residencies will focus on California and Los Angeles environments, students will create their own mini-books that reflect their own language, culture and environment. Another component of the residency is inspired by the artist/sculptor Garnett Puett and his living bee sculpture, Untitled (Apisculpture), 2024, part of the Breath(e) exhibition at the Hammer Museum.

In the fall Toluca Lake students will also attend a performance of Extra Ancestral at the Nimoy Theater, (a Los Angeles based artistic collective that explores what it means to honor culture and legacy and to be “good ancestors”) and visit the Hammer Museum for Breath(e).

Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST Art: Art & Science Collide, featuring 70 exhibitions and programs, this landmark regional event explores 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, visit pst.art.