Southern California has a rich history of both art and science, and this conversation focuses specifically on the influence of physics on creative ideas and practice, from the exponential acceleration of discoveries about the nature of matter in the 1950s to the multiplicity of possible outcomes offered by quantum computing today.
Moderated by Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the panel will feature Alice Bucknell, artist and future resident at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), José-Carlos Mariátegui, writer, curator and founder of Alta Tecnología Andina and Sharrissa Iqbal, curator of the PST ART exhibition Particles and Waves.
The talk will take place in the VIP Hub inside The Beverly Hills Hotel at Polo Private Lounge.
Pastries with coffee and tea service will be available from 9:30am.
The talk will start at 10am followed by a Q&A.
Booking is essential as capacity is limited.
Sunday, September 15
9:30am – 11:00am (conversation begins at 10am)
Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, Singapore Art Museum, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, Flash Art, the Harvard Design Magazine, and Mousse. In 2024, they are a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, and artist-in-residence at EPFL’s Enter the Hyper-Scientific research residency program in Lausanne. Bucknell received an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.
Michael Govan is the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Since coming to LACMA in 2006, he has overseen the transformation of the 20-acre campus with buildings by Renzo Piano and monumental artworks by Chris Burden, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Barbara Kruger, and others. At LACMA, Govan has pursued his vision of contemporary artists and architects interacting with the museum’s historical collections, as evidenced by exhibition and gallery designs as well as programming in collaboration with artists and architects. Currently, the museum is in the process of building a new, state-of-the-art permanent collection building designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor.
Sharrissa Iqbal is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Palm Springs Art Museum. She specializes in American art with a focus on artistic abstraction in Southern California. She earned her PhD in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine in 2021 and her MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Iqbal earned a 2019 Huntington Library Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology for her doctoral research on the histories of Southern California abstract artwork and modern physics. She co-curated the exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 at the Palm Springs Art Museum (September 14, 2024 – February 23, 2025).
José-Carlos Mariátegui (PE/UK) is a writer, curator and scholar. Holds both Masters and Doctoral degrees in Information Systems and Innovation from the LSE (London). Dr. Mariátegui is the founder of Alta Tecnología Andina – ATA (Lima, Peru), an organization working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society in Latin America. He is a Lecturer at LUISS (Rome), a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, a Board Member of Future Everything (UK), and a Member of the Board of Trustees (Kuratorium) of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany). Has published in journals such as AI & Society, Third Text, The Information Society, Telos and Leonardo. His multidisciplinary research embraces history of cybernetics, media archaeology, digitization, video archives and the impact of technology in memory institutions. He co-edited a special issue for AI & Society on Cybernetics in Latin America (2022). Recent exhibitions include Quántica /Broken Symmetries (co-curated with Monica Bello, 2018-2021), Rosa Barba. Evoking a Space Beyond Cinema (2024), and ARTEONICA*: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today (co-curated with Gabriela Urtiaga and Rodrigo Alonso, 2024).
