The VICARTE Research group is a group of scientists and artists housed at the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Portugal. An uncommon blend of serious scientists, chemists, biologists, physicists, conservation scientists and more. Together with a number of prominent art practitioners and educators, we engage in highly diverse activities, research in science, generally focused on the materials, glass and ceramics, and all aspects of conservation and restoration. The artists among us regularly access the science, but also contribute to it, asking and helping to try to answer both common and uncommon questions. The daily contact, cooperation and questioning between us, artists and scientists, creates a unique terrain, wherein practical and theoretical questions, like: what are the most common and fruitful methodologies for scientists exploring a thing or a question, and what are those of artists? Are those methodologies compatible with each other, similar, mutually exclusive? What does combining those respective methodologies when exploring some questions result in? What are the cognitive and non-cognitive processes required for those methodologies? What degree of certainty results from the practice of Science or alternatively, from the practice of Art, and to which areas of human experience do those certainties apply and are relevant?
In order to try to highlight these and some of the many other things we engage in at Vicarte, we are organizing a series of online talks/interviews: Like Science Like Art: the VICARTE Talks.
VICARTE Talks #2
Natali Rodrigues meets Jane Cook & Robert Wiley | 26th of May, 16h00 (GMT+1)
Following the success of the first session VICARTE Talks: Like Science Like Art, we are now organizing the second to be held on May 26th at 16:00 (GMT+1). In this second talk, Natali Rodrigues, until very recently, president of the International Glass Art Society, will be speaking with Jane Cook and Robert Wiley about their lives, their work, and their relationships to Art and Science.
Join us in this conversation!
VICARTE Talks #1
Natali Rodrigues meets Michael Rogers & Richard Meitner | 17th of March, 16h00 (GMT)
Now available on YouTube. Click here to watch.
In that first of the Vicarte talks, Natali Rodrigues, (until very recently, president of the International Glass Art Society), will be speaking with Michael Rogers and Richard Meitner about their lives, their work, and their relationships to Vicarte, and to its Master’s degree program in the Art and Science of Glass and Ceramics.
Natali Rodrigues is an Associate Professor in the Glass Program at the Alberta University of the Arts in Canada, and Vice President of the Glass Art Society. Her research investigates the experience of liminal space and transformative experience, which finds voice through two distinct making practices: drawing and glass. Her working methodology moves between a meditative making practice and one that is profoundly physical. Her work is an attempt to create a system of cartography of liminal space, where what is marked is not in reference to the physical but rather the transformative.
Michael Rogers is an experienced artist and Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, (2002-2018), and before taught also at Aichi University of Education in Japan (1991-2002). He explores performance art, site specificity, and installation works, and is currently curating an exhibition at The Latvian National Museum in Riga, and the “Current Realities” exhibition at the Levant Gallery, Shanghai China.
Richard Meitner is an international artist and educator whose artworks are in the permanent collections of more than 60 museums worldwide. In 2016 he was awarded a PhD from the University of Lisbon for his thesis, developing arguments that many aspects of current international educational practice in Art are based on quite faulty assumptions. In addition to artmaking, he is an active integrated member of the Vicarte Research Unit at UNL, Lisbon, Portugal.
VICARTE 