In collaboration with the Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry invites you to a FarBar program with artist and filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, physicist Sidney Nagel (UChicago), and Ph.D. candidate in neurobiology Jennifer Ding (UChicago). The evening's conversation will center on crossover applications and understandings of optics within filmmaking, physics, and neurobiology. 

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, experimental ethnography and expanded cinema. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporate improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, on hurricanes and dreamwork, and irrational projection lenses.  Recent solo exhibitions include: Gosila, Der Tank, Basel; Nuevos Materiales, Museo Amparo; Safehouse, Sullivan Galleries, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, PAMM, Miami; Song Strategy Sign, New Museum; La Cabeza Mató a Todos, TEORética, San José, Costa Rica; MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México D.F. Recent group exhibitions include: Whitney Biennial 2017, NYC; Prospect 4, New Orleans; 8th Contour Biennale, Mechelen; Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie, CAPC-Bordeaux; Post-Military Cinema, Transmission Gallery/Glasgow International;  Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Guggenheim Museum, NYC. In 2017 she received the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Grant, she was 2016 USA Ford Fellow, and received a 2015 Creative Capital visual artist grant.

Sidney Robert Nagel is an American physicist and the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the Enrico Fermi Institute. His research focuses on complex everyday physics such as "the anomalous flow of granular material, the long messy tendrils left by honey spooned from one dish to another, the pesky rings deposited by spilled coffee on a table after the liquid evaporates or the common splash of a drop of liquid onto a countertop. His work includes high-speed photography of splashing liquids and drop formation.

Jennifer Ding is a PhD candidate in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago studying visual processing in the retina. She is interested in how realities are constructed, from the biological signals underlying visual and cognitive processing to how information is disseminated in the political arena. Ding is the recipient of an Arts, Science + Culture Initiative Graduate Collaboration Grant.  She enjoys improvisational cooking, theater, and stand-up comedy. 

The Arts, Science + Culture Initiative explores the intersection between artistic production and scientific inquiry, amplifying the University’s belief in the transformative power of ideas. The Arts, Science + Culture Initiative embodies UChicago’s tradition of “integrated and borderless inquiry” by offering grants, programming, and other opportunities for students, faculty, and practitioners in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences to work, think, and experiment in proximity to one another within the University of Chicago, throughout the city, and beyond.

About FarBar:
Conceived as a way to maintain the ethos of our regular Sidebar series for the pandemic moment, FarBar is a vehicle for artistic and scholarly dialogue with practitioners from around the world. Throughout 2020-2021, our planned conversations with artists in Puerto Rico, Haiti, South Africa, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Chicago will revolve around translation, indigeneity, ecological and economic collapse, logics of extraction, crisis, and memory and the archive. Being online for the year will also enable the Gray Center to reach audiences well beyond our Chicago geography, so please invite your far-flung friends. 

Image: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gosila, 2018, 16mm film and HD video transferred to video and projected through a piece of lighthouse fresnel lens

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• FARBAR