Event 2

Cornelia Bast was one of a series of short lectures at the symposium on “Arts based Research in times of Social and Climate Change” on campus on April 4^th. Her topic covered “Art Based Research on Dementia.”

Bast began her presentation with daunting statistics of 6 million Americans currently suffering from Alzheimer’s, projected to become 14 million by 2050. She discussed how people  with dementia have different worlds going on inside their heads and can’t always be in the “normal” world with their loved ones. Therefore, she helped create an invention for people to see the physical world in various perspectives to help develop empathy for those with Alzheimer’s and to empower them as well.

Bast discussing Alzheimer rates in America.

Bast used artistic values to come up with this. Additionally, she showed pictures of people  using her experiment and in workshops and doing activities with those suffering from Alzheimer’s. These activities included arts and crafts which culminated her art-based research to learn about dementia and help people.

Marisa Caichiolo talked about her program, “Building Bridges,” which helps build bridges and peace between arts and cultures. This includes residencies, exchange programs, and a traveling museum.

What I found most valuable from her talk was how important dialogue is to her. When linking different peoples and communities around the world, you must be able to have dialogue about social and political issues. Fighting and disagreeing is pointless, dialogue is everything.

Caichiolo showing desert dialogues about art and the world.

She then presented pictures of her trips to the desert, Mexico, Morocco, and South America. In Mexico, she had a discussion about how politicians and the environment influence artists. For example, she had a picture of bananas to show colonization or glaciers melting to depict global warming. This kind of art was a cool way to promote cross-cultural, global dialogue about climate change and important issues in the world.

Ina Conradi talked about her artwork which was based around developing a cross-cultural and global awareness, themes similar to those of Caichiolo. Her presentation, honestly, seemed a little harder to follow, but nevertheless, aesthetically pleasing and interesting.

She discussed her work and life in Singapore before showing some video of a woman trapped in a room, trying to escape. The picture was kind of blurred and looked like clouds.

Conradi showing the "cloudlike" image.

She talked more about how art and science both try to come closer to understanding how the world works, despite a difference in methodology. To blend the two, she showed her attempts to combine art with neuroscience to create artistic interpretations of emotions. This innovation can record brain signals and match emotional signals to music and other art forms.

Overall, these three short lectures were a nice way to build off of Gerald Bast’s keynote speech and give more cool insights to the blending of arts and sciences. I found these relevant to our course and interesting to learn from, especially because of the vivid imagery all three of these speakers used in their presentations.

Me with Gerald Bast, the keynote speaker, on April 4th.