I am an interdisciplinary artist, media theorist and “ArtSci” curator based in Toronto. I am the co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences .
My work balances theoretical and applied research at the intersection of science, technology and creative resistance. I am interested in exploring how scientific and technological mechanisms translate, encode and transform the natural and human world, and how these processes may be re-purposed by relocating them into different venues or by reproducing them using different media. In order to emphasize how different contexts produce often opposite meanings, my work is mobile or itinerant, involving various form of interaction with local communities. While trained in digital media, I work with a combination of digital and analog technologies and found objects, in order to challenge the misplaced fascination for technological devices and their tendency to simplify human interactions. Although my work engages in a critique of technological spectacle, it also supports the complementarity of human and machine interaction as a way to reveal the multifaceted aspects of complex phenomena.
My recent SSHRC-funded research creation project “Emergent: Coping with Complex Phenomena,” draws on feminist technoscience and on collaborative encounters across the sciences and the arts to investigate emerging life forms exceeding the categories defined by traditional methods of classification.
My research-creation projects are collaborative and itinerant by nature. FACTT TO (in collaboration with Marta De Menezes), Edited (with Dalila Honorato) and The Cabinet Project is a distributed exhibition featuring 11 arts installations at the intersection of Arts and Science, mounted by 13 artists in abandoned or underutilized cabinets across the University of Toronto (St. George Campus). Transitions in Progress: Making Space for Place focuses on issues of mobility and migration, investigating the ability of tracking devices and big data collection to map the hidden dynamics of the city of Toronto (memories, silenced voices, uncelebrated histories, affect); and to expose its ecological and naturecultur(al) complexity (the relation between its urban, linguistic, natural, and technological composition). The Sandbox Project challenges concepts of sustainability in face-to-face and online collaborations in network and social media configurations.
You can contact me at rbuiani @ gmail.com
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