The sci-art avant-garde explores artificial intelligence, waste, and the patriarchy: The 10 Science in the Arts winners

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Instanbul, Turkey in 1985. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.

He is working in the fields of site-specific public art with parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/visual performance with immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence. He holds a master of fine arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, master of fine arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as bachelors of arts degree with summa cum laude in Photography and Video.

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based as well as paradisciplinary and as much post-colonial as post-digital. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is currently the first artist-in-residence at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL) and its Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting, non-human agency and transcendence. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures.

The crux of Chow and Lin’s practice lies in their methodology of statistical, mathematical and computational techniques to address global issues since 2009. Through a typological, photographic approach, Chow and Lin’s projects are driven by the discursive backgrounds in economics, public policy, media, and further augmented by exchanges with specialists from those fields. Their works have been referenced by the World Bank and showcased at biennales and museums internationally. Their works are in the permanent collection of the MOCP Chicago, CAFA Museum, Beijing and Thessaloniki MOP.

Sougwen Chung is an artist and (re)searcher. Her work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. In 2019, she was selected as the Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts & Sciences.

Brandon Clifford develops creative approaches to the world’s most pressing problems. He identifies contemporary blind-spots by mining ancient knowledge that holds resonance with topics of today. Brandon is the director of Matter Design and an associate professor at MIT. Brandon received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Georgia Tech. Brandon has received prizes such as the American Academy in Rome Prize and a TED Fellowship. Brandon is dedicated to challenging default solutions by making things that disrupt common practices.

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. Daisy is currently a resident at Somerset House Studios, London, and is working on a major new commission for the Eden Project for 2021.

Charlotte works at the intersection of art and science. She has grown her own tumour, recorded music onto DNA and seen her heart beat outside her body. She has had ten international solo shows and over one hundred and fifty group exhibitions. Charlotte has been resident at the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Hubrecht Institute. She has won the Bioart and Design Award, Netherlands, the H20 British Council commission, Argentina and the Alternate Realities Commission, UK. Charlotte is currently a lecturer at The Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University.

Olga Kisseleva (RU) approaches her work as a scientist. She calls upon collaborations with exact sciences, biology and geophysics and she proceeds with experiments, calculations and analyses, while strictly respecting the methods of the scientific domain. She has had major exhibitions in Modern Art Museum (Paris), KIASMA (Helsinki), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) Fondation Cartier for contemporary art (Paris), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), NCCA (Moscow), as well as Biennales of Dakar (2002), Tirana (2003), Moscow (2011), Istanbul (2013) and Venice (2019). Olgas works are present in many of the world’s most important museum collections, including, the Centre Pompidou, Louis Vuitton Foundation, ZKM, Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the NY MoMA. Olga Kisseleva teaches contemporary art in the Sorbonne University of Paris, she is the head of Art & New Media program and Founding director of Art&Science International Institute.

Andrea Ling is an architect, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of design, fabrication and biology. Her work focuses on how the critical application of biological and computational processes can move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones. She is the 2020 S+T+ARTS prize winner for her work as the 2019 Creative Resident at Ginkgo Bioworks designing the decay of artifacts in order to access material circularity. She graduated from the MIT Media Lab, Mediated Matter group, where she was a research assistant on the Aguahoja project. Andrea is an architect with the Ontario Association of Architects and a founding partner at designGUILD, a Toronto-based art & design collective. She is currently an A&T fellow at the Institute of Technology and Architecture at ETH Zurich.

Harry Yeff, better known by his stage name, Reeps One is an English beatboxer, composer, artist and new media artist.

By 2019, Reeps One completed his third artist residency at Harvard University and is currently part of the Experiments in Art and Technology program at Bell Labs. Reeps One produces work as a response to an ongoing investigation into the evolution of the human voice, art, and technology.