Art and Science

This week in Tallahassee as part of Head Shoulders Genes & Toes, my curatorial project with the FSU College of Medicine

Thursday, Feb 28 7PM WJB G40
Joe Davis lecture: MNEMOSYNE'S PARADOX
As mythical mother of the nine classical muses, Mnemosyne was mother of all the
arts and sciences. By inference, she was the founder of all language too, since
she was said to have discovered the uses of the powers of reason and to have
given names or designations to all things. The languages of art and science of
molecular biology are continually reconstructed with names and determinations
for things never before seen or imagined. A paradox of reference is inevitably
encountered because we are constrained to use concepts and vocabularies
invented in the past to describe facts at hand. Obsolete paradigms tend to be
incorporated with the very ideas that have overturned them, leaving many people
automatically confused. Ethical and philosophical problems stemming from
inevitable misinterpretations plague artists and scientists who choose to
represent a universe we cannot now and may never completely understand. An
effort to sequence the genome of Malus sieversii, an apple shown to be
ancestral to all domestic cultivars is presented in this context.

                                                                     
Friday, March 1 7:30PM All Saints Cinema
Heaven+Earth+Joe Davis
Q&A with Joe Davis and director Peter Sasowsky following film
FREE and open to the public
Synopsis: Thirty years ago, a peg-legged motorcycle mechanic walked into the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. They had not returned his calls. The police were summoned. Forty-five minutes later he walked out with an academic appointment. Since then Joe Davis has sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, encoded poetry into DNA, and designed a sculpture to save the world. It’s a great life for a man driven by imagination – except when it’s not. No one pays him. He is evicted from apartments and labs. His uncompromising approach to art and life collides with the world’s banal requirements. This is a story of self-discovery, sacrifice and the complexity of human endeavor, of the price of art and the ecstatic joy of discovery.