CCA News
Adrian Van Allen: Mapping Science
Posted on Thursday, October 8, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
CCA alumna Adrian Van Allen (MFA 2000) has been awarded the intensely competitive and prestigious Rome Prize. She was one of only two artists in 2010 to receive the award in the Design category. During her residency at the American Academy in Rome from January to June of next year, she will create a multilayered interactive map she calls Mapping Science: Rome (Scientiae Historia Romae).
The final product will enable visitors to explore the evolution of the sciences in the city of Rome, from the advances in the time of Pliny the Elder to the biotechnological creations of the 21st century. Portable to a website or a handheld device, it will offer interactive maps laced with 3D panoramas, podcasts, articles, and photo essays mining the history of particular urban locations. It will also feature downloadable papercraft models of scientific objects, for instance fold-out anatomies and a Galilean telescope.
"It's a large project with many interlocking narratives and a lot of technology," says Van Allen, "but the resources for bringing together all the diverse elements will be right in front of me in the city of Rome. And being able to focus completely on a project is such a rare pleasure."
The artist's nine years as a multimedia exhibit developer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco will be put to excellent use (as will the espresso machine she plans to install in her studio), since she is researching, photographing, designing, and coding the entire project by herself.
All of Van Allen's artwork engages the history of science, emerging technology, and taxonomy. She has worked in numerous media, from installation to interactive media art, video, drawing, photography, and what she calls "transgenic taxidermy."
"Through observation of the natural world, we as a species attempt to know, contain, and control the world. Humans have always had a strong desire to create meaning through naming and organization. The history of scientific classification is fraught with interesting contradictions, often centering around the struggle between individual subjectivity and rational ideals.
"I confess some nostalgia for the age when the universe was conceived as fully knowable—a place in which everything could be named, noted, and displayed within a lifetime. My art practice is a series of attempts at transcribing that lost history, collapsing the real and imagined scientific past into current research. The ways in which I 'get it wrong' are often the most interesting parts of a work."
After returning from Rome in fall 2010, Van Allen will be pursuing a PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley, focusing on the intersection of data visualization, synthetic biology, and 17th-century cabinets of curiosity.
In addition to her work at the Exploratorium, she has created multimedia exhibits and websites for NASA, the Smithsonian, and UC Berkeley's departments of archaeology, anthropology, and music. She was founding creative director of ReadyMade magazine and wrote the magazine's "Post Martha" column. She has created site-specific installations for Southern Exposure Gallery and Genetic Savings and Clone. She has received three Webbys, two Golden Muse awards, a Scientific American Science and Technology Award, and grants from the Film Arts Foundation, New Langton Arts, and Women's Studio Workshop. She has been a resident artist at the Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Foundation, and her work has been featured in the Rhizome.org ArtBase.
Read more at rome.mappingscience.net and www.adrianv.com.