Brian Korgel of the UT Austin | Portugal program has co-curated an art exhibition

6 Feb 2017

Science and art collide at the Omnibus Filing exhibit, an art installation located at UT’s Visual Arts Center.

Omnibus Filing is an exhibition of artworks, inventions, prototypes and cross-disciplinary research. It showcases a new approach to innovation that combines arts, sciences and engineering in a fully collaborative process. The exhibit is the result of an ongoing three-year project between chemical engineering professor Brian Korgel, visiting art assistant professor James Sham and artists Daniel Bozhkov, Steven Brower and Patrick Killoran. The exhibition is now at the Visual Arts Center in UT Austin, Texas. The exhibition is free and will be open to the public until February 24.

Date: January 27 - February 24
Venue: Visual Arts Center, Mezzanine Gallery

Featuring: Daniel Bozhkov, Steven Brower, Patrick Killoran, Brian Korgel and James Sham

To know more about the exhibition visit the Visual Arts Center website: http://utvac.org/exhibitions/omnibus-filing and read the Omnibus Filing Booklet in http://korgel.che.utexas.edu/korgel-group/Omnibusfiling.pdf .

About the Exhibition

Omnibus Filing interactive exhibit was named for the legal term describing a collection of unrelated ideas brought together in a single patent application.
With a mandate to inhabit a variety of research environments, each artist in this exhibition was introduced to a number of scientists and embedded into unfamiliar contexts to produce these projects.
The exhibition’s premise began with the idea that artists are everyday innovators, whether they invent a new way to use a material or create machines and processes to realize visions. The outcomes are diverse, a product of three years of ongoing dialogue and research. 
Acknowledging that both the laboratory and the innovation process could vastly benefit from interdisciplinarity’s creative disruption, Assistant Professor James Sham and Dr. Brian Korgel devised a program called Rapid Design Pivot, which embeds artists into laboratory environments to conduct creative projects alongside and in collaboration with IT researches. The artists in the exhibition have worked in various laboratories from 2016-2017 with the mandate to collaborate, cross-pollinate, and catalyse innovation with UT researchers and scientists.
By training the artists in the basic skills required to function semi-independently within the laboratory environment, the effects and outcomes have been widespread and varied in nature. Some projects materialize as contemporary art installations while others manifest as research papers, prototypes and demonstrations of emerging technology. Releasing artists as a radicalizing presence in the laboratory, research trajectories pivot drastically.
Exhibits include a robot that drops seeds to write out robot-related poems, wearable boots wirelessly paired to speakers that squeak loudly in response to movement and a scientific manuscript printed on a stack of full-sized blankets on the floor where visitors are encouraged to relax.

About the Artists

Daniel Bozhkov’s is an artist based in New York City who employs a variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, and works with professionals from different fields using different strategies to activate public space. Bozhkov’s exhibition records includes shows at the Queens Museum, in New York, the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the 9th Istanbul Biennale. Bozhkov is also the recipient of many honors including the 2007 Chuck Close Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome.

Steven Brower’s diverse projects involve fabricating various aerospace artifacts including space suits, planetary landers, and a lunar excursion module permanently installed at the Seattle Museum of Space Flight. Brower’s multifaceted and expansive work appears in educational contexts, film and television productions, galleries and museums. BPL, a fictitious aerospace company founded by Brower for art purposes, ultimately became a legitimate business entity, having succeeded in multiple cross-disciplinary research efforts with scientists and government entities.

Patrick Killoran’s work addresses consumerism’s effect on conceptions of public space. Much of his work explores the inevitable contradictions that arise with the terms “public space” and “public art”, in the realm of products and behaviors of consumer culture. Killoran’s distinguished exhibition history includes numerous international exhibitions, including Everyday, the 1998 Biennial of Sydney, Wanås 2000 in Sweden, and the Part of the Story at the With de Witte in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Killoran lives and works in New York City.

About the Curators

James Sham’s cross-disciplinary practice focuses on interfacing technologies and material processes from a variety of disciplines within a contemporary art practice. Sham’s work involves multiple areas of focus including pigment extraction and using eye-tracking technology to study interpretation in deaf culture. His work has been exhibited in many international venues including White Box Gallery, in New York City; European Cable Network Broadcast, in Germany and France; the Ellensburg Film Festival, in Seattle; and the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, among others.

Brian A. Korgel is the Edward S. Hyman Chair in Engineering and T. Brockett Hudson Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He directs the Industry/University Research Center (I/UCRC) for Next Generation Photovoltaics, the Emerging Technologies area of the UT|Portugal program and serves as Associate Editor of the journal Chemistry of Materials. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UCLA in 1997 and was a post-doctoral fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland, in the Department of Chemistry. He works at the intersection of nano & mesoscopic materials chemistry and complex fluids, tackling problems in lithium ion batteries, photovoltaic devices and medicine. He has given more than 260 invited talks and has published 240 papers. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Alicante in Spain, the Université Josef Fourier in France and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He has co-founded two companies, Innovalight and Piñon Technologies, and received various honors including the 2012 Professional Progress Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and election to Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).