| dc.description | Biography: Roberta Buiani is an interdisciplinary artist, media scholar and curator based in Toronto. She is the co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and a co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her work explores how scientific and technological mechanisms translate, encode and transform the natural and human world, and how these processes may be re-purposed by relocating them into different venues. Her work is mobile, itinerant and collaborative. She brought it to art festivals (Transmediale 2011, Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Brazil 2013), community centers (the Free Gallery Toronto, Immigrant Movement International, Queens), science institutions (RPI) and the streets of Toronto. Recently, with The Cabinet Project she proposed an experiment in "squatting academia”, by populating abandoned spaces with SciArt installations. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University (CAN). For more information and to read her publications go to http://atomarborea.net | |
| dc.description.abstract | Despite being in full sight, many cabinets and showcases at universities and scientific institutions lie empty or underutilized. Located at the entrance of science departments, in proximity of laboratories, or in busy areas of transition, some contain outdated posters, or dusty scientific objects that have been forgotten there for years. Others lie empty, like old furniture on the curb after a move. The ceaseless flow of bodies walking past these cabinets – some running to meetings, some checking their schedule, some immersed in their thoughts – rarely notice them.
The neglect of these cabinets seems to confirm well-established ideas about science institutions as recluse spaces where secrecy reigns, and communication with the outside world is either underappreciated or prohibited. But at a closer look, this is not the case: those seemingly ignored and neglected cabinets have compelling stories that speak to their mobility, their past uses and their owners; laboratories in their proximity burst of excitement and boredom, frustration and euphoria, their machineries being constantly fabricated, rethought, dismantled or replaced; in these laboratories, individuals, objects and instruments come to life in complicated ways. These objects, human relations and stories are forming complex ecologies that are very much alive.
Yet, these ecologies are destined to remain hidden to public view unless we find new ways to reveal their intricate intersections. In this paper, I offer an analysis of The Cabinet Project (Apr.6 - May 15, 2017), an ongoing initiative whose goal is to uncover these affective and material ecologies through a distributed exhibition, which turned 10 cabinets scattered around the University of Toronto into art installations. Instead of bringing the lab to the gallery, the project moves the gallery to the institution, close to the lab. The project offers an alternative reading to the official narratives regarding science and its alleged reclusive nature, by using site-specific art and science collaborations, and a series of simple mobile applications (geolocation and QR codes) to fetch and establish connections between the institution, its protagonists (human, non-human and more-than-human), and with the general public. The main goal is to recover the forgotten links between the academic institution and the fabric of the city it inhabits. At the core of the project is the realization that when dealing with interactions with human and more-than-human objects, instruments and organisms, and with places of such unexpected complexity, it is only through an hybrid digital and analog, in vivo, somewhat performative approach that one can hope to acquire a better sense of, and to imagine the sometimes evident, sometimes hidden, sometimes imagined entanglements emerging from official narratives, closed doors, and semi-empty corridors. | |
