Co-creators of the Crochet Coral Reef Christine and Margaret Wertheim in conversation with Donna Haraway, 5 PM.
Now one of the world's largest science + art endeavors, the Crochet Coral Reef project combines mathematics, marine biology and community-based art to create a vast handicraft response to global warming and its devastating effects on living reefs.
As UCSC emerita professor Donna Haraway writes,
The Crochet Coral Reef is an SF story of string figures, science fact, science fiction, stitched fantasies and speculative fabulation. This hyperbolic reef is material, figurative, collaborative, tentacular, worldly, dispersed within the tissues and across the surfaces of terra, playful, serious, mathematical, artistic, scientific, fabulous, feminist, exceeding gender, and multispecisist. Its story is brave—actually making—real and fabulated things together in order to open up still possible times for flourishing on a diverse earth.
Join Haraway and the co-creators of the Crochet Coral Reef project in lively conversation about these facts, fictions, and fantasies.
Christine Wertheim is a poet-performer-artist-critic-curator-crafter-teacher-and-collaborator. She is currently on the faculty at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Margaret Wertheim is a science communicator and curator who focuses on the relation between science and the wider cultural landscape. Together, they are the founders of the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles, an organization dedicated to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics, including the Crochet Coral Reef –– the biggest participatory art/science project in the world. The IFF has had solo shows at NYU Abu Dhabi, the Smithsonian, Science Museum Dublin, Hayward Gallery London, Museum Kunst der Westkust Fohr, Art Center Pasadena, Track 16 LA, New York University NY, New York Financial Center, and the Chicago Cultural Center.
Donna Haraway is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies and the author of numerous books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985) and Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988). Her most recent book is Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science, the J.D. Bernal Prize, for lifetime contributions to the field.
Crochet Coral Reef List of Events:
Thursday, October 20, 2016
7-8:30 PM
Seymour Marine Discovery Center, La Feliz Room
"Understanding Coral Reefs Through Woolly Sculptures"
Margaret Wertheim at the Ken Norris Memorial Lecture
Friday, October 21, 2016
1:30-4:30 PM
UCSC Stevenson Event Center
UC Santa Cruz Satellite Reef Crochet Workshop with Margaret Werthiem
Friday, October 21, 2016
5-7 PM
UCSC Stevenson Event Center
"Crocheting the Chthulucene"
Donna Haraway in Conversation with Christine and Margaret Wertheim
Sunday, October 23, 2016
12-3 PM
Seymour Marine Discovery Center, La Feliz Room
UC Santa Cruz Satellite Reef Crochet Workshop with Margaret Wertheim
Friday, November 18, 2016
5-8 PM
Museum of Art and History
705 Front Street, Santa Cruz
Radical Craft Night
Crochet with UC Santa Cruz Satellite Reefers
February, 2017
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
Porter College, UC Santa Cruz
Opening of the IFF's Crochet Coral Reef Traveling Exhibition
May 4, 2017
Seymour Marine Discovery Center
Opening of the locally-made, UC Santa Cruz Satellite Reef Exhibition
Stay tuned for more info!