The Saraceno slides are amazing!
It is the inaugural presentation for MIT's center for arts science technology (cast) in 2012.
I would skip to minute 12 which is when Saraceno comes on.
Up to minute 2 it is just slides that the CAST management puts up to advertise future CAST events, installations, visiting artists.
Then from minute 2 to minute 12 the DIRECTOR of CAST talks about some abstract ideas and he places Saraceno work in the landscape of his (the director's) ideas about art, society, architecture, education, technology, so he INTRODUCES Saraceno to the audience. this is potentially interesting (the director of a new to-be-influential Center at a prestigious leading-edge institution tells you his philosophy of art society and everything) but it is not what you came for.
Then at minute 12 Tomas Saraceno comes and in a fumbling halting sensitive humorous way establishes rapport with the audience. he makes the persons in the audience aware of their surroundings (e.g. the light in the room, the interaction of them with the speaker) by unobtrusive offhand imaginings and remarks.
Because his art is about interaction within the environment and with the environment
Only about minute 14 (if I remember right) does he show the first slide!
It is not his greatest, it is very modest. It is a small installation where the wind takes a picture of itself. A windmill operates a camera.
This is a very subtle way to begin because it is is humble and gauche minor art and sets your expectations low.
Then he springs on you, around minute 16. Photographs taken at a salt lake in Bolivia. I will not comment.
Then around minute 18, an installation in Milan, that is about air
and I would say about air=geometry=gravity
and the interaction of people IN the installation WITH the geometry because interacting with the air.
John Wheeler (an early quantum relativist) said very simply matter tells geometry how to curve [and wave], geometry tells matter how to flow. Carlo Rovelli would have liked that Saraceno piece very much, if he ever saw it.
I like the Dandelion post partly because I never heard of Saraceno or saw any piece of his. What I am seeing is that a work by Saraceno can EMBODY PHILOSOPHY about us and the natural world.
So this is very good new information for me. thanks.
http://www.tomassaraceno.comhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROqL-8h_7DM#t=63Published on Nov 28, 2012
Tomas Saraceno is the inaugural Visiting Artist at MIT's new Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). An artist trained as an architect, Saraceno deploys theoretical frameworks and insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science. His residency at MIT focuses on advancing new work for the ongoing Cloud Cities series, in which Saraceno creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks, or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living.
It's possible the person who introduced Saraceno was not the director of CAST but was one of these two MIT faculty/administration: Nader Tehrani, or Anton Garcia-Abril. Still don't have it sorted out.