Paz & Ben: Week 1

Introduction to Paz

Paz Tornero is a Ph.D. in Art, Science and Technocreativity at Complutense University of Madrid. Her thesis The Technologies of Creativity: Connections between Art and Science in Contemporaneity, is about the relationship between art, science and creativity from 20th century to present and it explores new art forms that incorporate technological and scientific aspects.

She has an MA in Fine Arts and Digital Arts from Pompeu Fabra University and a MA in Fine Arts from Polytechnic University of Valencia. She also studied at Carnegie Mellon University. Paz was a visiting fellow at Harvard University as well as MIT. She teaches seminars and writes about science, digital art, technodance and technocreativity. She has presented video and interactive works in multiple forums, and is a visiting professor at University of Caldas, Colombia. She has taught as a professor and researcher at University San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), and was recently a visiting researcher at Institute of Microbiology at the USFQ were she was researching on the digital artists’ role in the age of climate change and the economic crisis by developing research on new aesthetics and matters regarding the meaning of Bio Art and connections between science, arts, and technology. She is also very much interested in ecology and sustainability, connectivity and Intelligent Environments (IE), and biomarkers from an artistic perspective. Paz is currently based in Spain.
 

Introduction to Ben

Benjamin Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the frontiers of storytelling and technology. Born in Ithaca, New York, he studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art in 2013.

While teaching at MICA and working in the thriving art communities of Baltimore, Ben honed his idiosyncratic love of science fiction, art, and technology into an expanded form of storytelling that merged fact and fiction to create interactive adventures. His projects use the camp and escapism of popular fiction to entertain, but rely on site-specific research and audience engagement to bring conversations back to the real world and it’s myriad problems. Time travel, robots, shrink-rays, and alternate timelines have all appeared in his work, but always with a self-aware nod and the hope of creating new media experiences.

Ben recently moved to the geographical center of Pennsylvania where he is engaged in several interdisciplinary teaching projects at the Pennsylvania State University. He is developing courses for a new online degree program focusing on interdisciplinary design, and is co-teaching a course on the history of anatomical illustration that explores the interlocking histories of illustration, medicine, and technology.

The overlaps of art and science have been a consistent interest for Ben, who organized a program at Johns Hopkins University called Research Remix that partnered university researchers with local artists. His ongoing project Foggy Bottom Microobservatory is a public sculpture and research hub that focuses on wild microflora, and their use in natural fermentation. The project has expanded the definition of site-specific sculpture by hosting workshops, brewing wild-fermented beer, and maintaining a diligent web presence. Several of Ben’s interdisciplinary projects will be included in "Under the Scope," an upcoming exhibition at Goucher College focusing on artists engaged with scientific practice.