The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Conversations on Art & Sciences

This symposium will address recent discourses and practices that define our complex relationship with nature and culture in this political moment. The notions of fact and evidence have acquired an unprecedented level of fluidity – have we now entered the age of ‘post-truth politics’? How is the complicated relationship between art and science impacted by these cultural turns? How might contested notions of truth shape essential research questions and methodologies? The representations, policies, and lived experiences of climate change are a point of culmination for all of these concerns, and the focus of this event.

This event is free, non-ticketed, and open to the public.

9:30am-12:00pm WORKSHOP: Banner Making for People’s Climate March
Aram Han (Protest Banner Lending Library) will guide participants in creating protest banners for the People’s Climate March that will take place on April 29, 2017.

1:00-1:15pm Symposium Introduction: Tiffany Holmes

1:15-2:15pm Panel 1 – Truths: Searching and Researching

Each panelist will deliver a short presentation (titles below), followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Jim Sweitzer: Six Scientific Facts about Global Warming and a Question
Mick Tosca: The Effects of Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
Claire Pentecost: Truth or Consequences
Bryant Williams: Chicago’s Southeastern Environmental Task Force

2:15-2:45pm Mini-Keynote: Dr. Jason McLachlan, Associate Professor of Biology, Notre Dame University
Paleo-Ecology and Climate Change (the news from the bottom of a lake)

3:00-4:00pm Panel 2 – Interdisciplinary Frameworks: Representation, Data, and Knowledge(s)
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation (titles below), followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Andy Yang: The Potency of Partial Knowledge: An Anthropocene Exercise
Giovanni Aloi: The New Sublime: Interconnectedness, Meta-sublime, and Representation
Kathryn Schafer: Seeing and Knowing
Jeremy Bolen: Unresolved Energies

4:00-4:30pm Mini-Keynote: Dr. Julia Adeney Thomas, Associate Professor of History, Notre Dame University
Finding Ecologies of Hope: The Historians’ Task in the Age of the Anthropocene

4:45-5:45pm Panel 3 – Art and Activism Now: Resistance/Challenges/Productivities
Each panelist will deliver a short presentation (titles below), followed by a moderated panel discussion.
Marlena Novak: Envision. Empower. Enact.
Sara Black: 7000 Marks
Tiffany Holmes: Maternal Art Activism: Creative Clean Up
Lindsey French: Practicing Risk: Precarity, Community, and Resistance

5:45-6:30pm Closing: Parade of banners bound for People’s Climate March
Roundtable: Olga Bautista from Chicago’s Southeastern Environmental Task Force, will lead students in a discussion about creative activism. Faculty Moderator: Oliver Sann Student panelists: Maleny Lopez, Miguel Sanchez-Bastida, Shoa Alattas, Falak Vasa, Meredith Eugenie Leich, Joshi Radin

This symposium is co-sponsored by SAIC’s Departments of Liberal Arts and Photography

Image by: Ed Hawkins

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Tags: Andy Yang, Bryant Williams, Chicago, Claire Pentecost, Dr. Jason McLachlan, Dr. Julia Adeney Thomas, Falak Vasa, Giovanni Aloi, Jeremy Bolen, Jim Sweitzer, Joshi Radin, Kathryn Schafer, Lindsey French, Loop, Maleny Lopez, Marlena Novak, Meredith Eugenie Leich, Mick Tosca, Miguel Sanchez-Bastida, Olga Bautista, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Shoa Alattas, Tiffany Holmes