During our monthly meetup, we honored those among us who are DOG fellows born in the Year of the Dog. We spotlighted distinguished artists and scientists including Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Adrian Martinez Tobon, Maria Jost, and Annick Bureaud, each connecting with us from various parts of the world.
Adrian Martinez-Tobón is an undergraduate student in the UCLA Design|Media department. His work inquires about the phenomenon of language and its relationship to mark-making and image-making, as well as topics like the ontology of art, philosophy of mind, and the built world. Currently, he is working on a body of work titled Building Worlds (That Fall Apart), which contemplates the sublimity and scale of human-made cities, environments, and paradigms. Upon finishing his undergraduate degree at UCLA, Adrian hopes to continue his artistic practice by pursuing an MFA and doing research.
Maria Jost is a Tacoma-based artist whose work is primarily influenced and inspired by the biological sciences. She creates small illustrative pieces using watercolor, ink and collage elements made from original illustrations, and larger installations using a variety of materials and digital editing techniques. In recent and in-progress projects, Jost explores innovative ways to create temporary or permanent installations that directly engage and impact viewers and community members. Newer work includes digital illustrations for a pop science book about cells and cellular processes, and Hidden Jewels, an multimedia brain health tool designed to support mental and somatic health. Topics of illustrative work and past projects include human uses and interactions with local flora and fauna, the cycling of energy and matter within an ecosystem, natural selection, the plight of marine organisms, and most recently, neurodiversity and brain health.
Annick Bureaud is an independent art critic, curator and event organiser in the field of art and technosciences. She wrote numerous articles and contributes to the French contemporary art magazine art press. She organised many symposia, conferences and workshops among which Visibility – Legibility of Space Art. Art and Zero Gravity: The Experience of Parabolic Flight, project in collaboration between Leonardo/Olats and the International Festival @rt Outsiders, Paris, 2003. In 2009, she co-curated the exhibition (Un)Inhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments, Festival @rt Outsiders, MEP/European House of Photography, Paris. In 2018, she curated the Bourges Bandits-Mages Festival Mending the Fabric of the World. In 2019, she published-curated the online hypertext video capsule about the artwork Neotenous Dark Dwellers – Lygophilia by Robertina Šebjanič. In 2020, she initiated The Traveling Plant project and ran the Roots & Seeds XXI.Biodiversity crisis and plant resistance project for Leonardo/Olats that ended in 2022 when the project More-Than-Planet started. She is the director-curator of Leonardo/Olats.
Gustavo Alfonso Rincon (Ph.D., M.Arch., M.F.A, B.Sc., B.A.) received a Doctorate of Philosophy from the Media Arts & Technology Program (MAT) working for the AlloSphere Research Group in the California NanoSystems Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His collaborative projects were exhibited at the ACMMM 2017 Conference at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, the ISEA 2017 Conference at Museo de Arte de Caldas in Manizales, Colombia, the ISEA 2019 Conference at the Asia Culture Center in Gwaungju, Republic of Korea, and SIGGRAPH 2020 Washington Convention Center in the D.C. (Virtual). The premiere opening exhibition of the Quantum Composition Research Series at The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation (MOXI), Santa Barbara, CA. Also exhibited collaborative works with the translab and published with the Four Eyes Lab at UCSB.
