ART & SCIENCE TRANSDISCIPLINARY LECTURES: TATIANA LYUBETSKAYA, GEOPHYSICIST
The Vera List Center launches its fall 2010 season with a new lecture series, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program at Parsons. Focused on “Art and Science,” the series captures the increasingly transdisciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic, and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts, and artists. All lectures are open to the public.
Tatiana Lyubetskaya, the first lecturer, introduces the major concepts that form the basis of scientific thinking such as data, model, assumption, and proof before examining specific cases of interdisciplinary scientific investigations in the fields of geology, geochemistry, and geophysics. The common ground between these subjects is found in the principles of mathematical analysis, which allow processing and manipulating different kinds of information in order to construct theoretical models describing the behavior of complex systems. The fundamental problem of determining the chemical composition of the earth and its applications in different earth sciences serves as an example. Theoretical modeling of geological processes such as mountain building and erosion will be examined as it illuminates the ways in which a scientific problem is formulated and how possible solutions are constructed and tested. Lyubetskaya, whose background includes the sciences as well as the visual arts received her PhD in geophysics from Yale and her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design–launches this new lectures series. The second speaker, on September 7, is mathematician Jennifer Wilson.
LOCATION:
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue
ADMISSION:
Free; no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
CONTACT INFORMATION:
vlc@newschool.edu and 212.229.2436
