Päivi Maunu

Dates: 21-31.8.2019

Project: Biomimeticx2 is creating a link between visual art and bioinformation on a site-specific project named the Cloud Garden in Panama.

The plan is to focus in a miniscule, 1 square meter area which will be called the Cloud Garden in Panama. The art work is a continuation of The Cloud Garden in Harakka island in Helsinki founded in 2015.

The project will transform into Community Art when we are kindly requesting other conference members to provide images from the milieu of conference e.g. via Google Drive.

Bio: Päivi Maunu is a visual artist living and working in Helsinki, Finland. She graduated as an environmental artist from Aalto University in 2011. Maunu is a multidisciplinary artist practicing Performental Art (a combination of Environmental Art and Performance Art), that she has established and advanced further since 2010.

She has participated in several international performance festivals such as Live Action Venice, Venice Biennale 2015, 2017 Preview Week and environmental conferences such as Digital Naturalist Conference in Thailand in 2018.

Päivi Maunu is a one of the founding members of art and research groups Nature&Art Post Scriptum (NAPS) and Biomimeticx2.

Kitty made a comic

I’m learning how to use Procreate, and I thought I’d use it to flesh out an idea that’s been on my mind lately. I’m going to try to make a longer comic about yarncrafting during Dinacon!

-Kitty Kelly/WellReadPanda

Kris Casey – Beginning Endless Forms

August 12-19th. Kris Casey is a visual artist and creative researcher from Chicago, IL. Her work draws heavily from various fields of philosophical and scientific inquiry, including evolutionary developmental biology, bio-aesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, and genetics. Her research and practice examines relationships between biology and technology, natural and artificial, material and immaterial, subject and object. Her paintings can be seen as assemblages or accumulations of natural and technological elements whereby the biological concepts of mutation, contamination, decay, generation, emergence and metamorphosis become modes of inquiry into the production of novel forms.

Stephanie Rothenberg

Dates: August 13-26

Hello! I am Stephanie, an artist and prof from Buffalo, NY. I will be experimenting with sensors and creatures for a larger project that looks at biology as technology and living machines in extreme landscapes. I am going to try and harness the aggressive energy of crocodiles to power the blockchain.

www.stephanierothenberg.com

Jonathan Hefter

August 1st – 16th

Project: I’ll be creating 3D digital models of local flora using photogrammetry that others can then use in their own works. With any luck, I’ll have the Dinalab OpenScan device humming away, if it isn’t already.

Bio: I’m a New Yorker with a taste for going far off the beaten path. I’m also the founder of the edtech company, Neverware, and a former firefighter. I will be travelling the world to learn more about how technology is created, used, and disseminated in different communities. Dinacon will be my first destination, followed by Berlin, and then parts unknown. Collaborators and co-travelers welcome.

Grace Grothaus

Dates: Aug 25-31

Project: The Future Within, a sculpture series inspired by Karel Capek: “the future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ (seed); already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future.” Onsite I will be continuing fieldwork in which I find, photograph, and create 3D models of seeds via photogrammetry. The lowland rainforests of Panama form a critical junction of North and South America and are so biodiverse they contain many tree species they even today are not yet part of the taxonomic system. Due to climate change, sea level rise, and anthropogenic habitat disturbances, many may even go extinct before they are scientifically known. Future seeding is an ongoing sculpture series created from the 3D models made in the field; attempted sculptural catalysts of discussion. Upon completion, each 3D printed seed sculpture will also contain a simple electronic circuit that activates an audio recording when touched. Audio artist and composer Felipe Rossi will be assisting in the field audio recording.

Bio: I am a visual artist working in physical computing and other forms to create immersive installations and performances as well as interactive paintings and sculptures. Engaging with themes of environment and technology, I produce my artworks towards the creation of moments of reflection about human agency and balance with the built and natural environment. Right now I am a MFA candidate at the University of California, San Diego where I reside with my dog and many plants.

Peter Marting

Dates: 5-8, 11-14 Aug 2019

I am a behavioral ecologist currently based in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. I have a passion for artistically expressing research, and will be developing a piece that conveys how soil nutrients affects Cecropia trees and their symbiotic Azteca ants.

Carolina Gómez

August 1st – August 12th

I am a biologist in love with bees! My passion for these amazing insects has created in me a huge curiosity about the mysteries of their sensory systems. With the help of flashlights, cardboard, tape, plastic hoses, cameras, and some other common stuff, I’ll be creating bio-crafts to conduct olfaction experiments and to understand more about these cuties we call bees!

As part of the Dinacon Team, I’ll be helping and be your guide to find your way to creativity!

Lucinda Dayhew

August 8 – 22 (approx.)

Hi, I am an artist originally from the subtropics (Sydney), now living in Berlin. I have been researching and making work on the subtropics, tropics, and rainforest ecosystems in recent years, as well as on global patterns and flows of food distribution and certain ubiquitous edible and inedible materials used in mass produced and niche products (plastics, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, gemstones). I make rhythmic objects with text, sound, sculptural assemblage and video, forming repeat patterned motifs for performances and installations, which I use to explore behavioural patterns and systems of labour, energy expenditure, depletion, and exchange. The work often has an absurd or humorous bent.

I plan to work on both a video and a sound work at Dinacon where I’ll make field recordings as well as voice recordings and additional post processed sound with rainforest flora as original sources for larger food crops as a focus. I am interested in the encroachments from the rainforest at Gamboa onto the human built settlements at its fringes where Dinacon takes place, (the Gamboa baseball field and playgrounds, for example) and the reverse process that took place historically, the Panama Canal as a massive human intervention that cut through the forest and landscape, as well as the changes that are taking place now. Human and non human interactions in urban and human made environments within subtropical and tropical landscapes is an area of interest and I will research these topics and seek feedback during the conference where I hope to talk to Dinacon’s field biologists and other local residents as well as Digital Naturalism’s neighbouring biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. I also wish to make on-site sculptural assemblages incorporating forest and local food packaging debris, and to use the wood workshop and 3D printer to make sculptural forms using found rainforest and fringe objects as a basis. I will also be researching for an experimental novel I am writing that takes place in various towns and cities in the shifting and expanding (as the globe warms) geographical bandings of the tropics and subtropics. Additionally, I am very interested in birdsong and will make field recordings of the Gamboa rainforest birds.

I am looking forward to meeting you all and finding out about your projects and potentially collaborating with you!

Studio portrait photo by Walker Esner at The Wassaic Project with a few leafy additions from me.

More info: lucindadayhew.net

Mary T. Miller

Dates: August 25-31

I am a writer, musician (Dezmediah), social worker, and amateur programmer. At Dinacon 2, I’ll be writing an electronic literature piece, which will write automatic poetry or prose using words said at Dinacon.