Rethinking our plan(e)t
A new exhibition at TAU’s Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery combines stunning photos, nature, and tech
“Plan(e)t”, a new exhibition at the Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, has turned the gallery space into a colorful landscape of plants, animals, and large mysterious objects. Walking from room to room, you’ll find yourself surrounded by lush fruit trees and fearsome birds of prey, strolling through an arid desert and visiting a field of robotic plants.
A view of paradise
“Promised Land,” the work of David Burns and Austin Young, which stretches across the walls and first-floor windows of the gallery, offers visitors views to Israeli nature: birds, insects, some from the archives of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, and the rich and diverse vegetation of Israel’s fruit trees. The photos the exhibition is comprised of were taken across the country by the artists during a period of several months. Visitors are also offered maps, which they can take with them, with the locations of fruit trees across Tel Aviv’s urban landscape.
From the “Promised Land”: The gallery walls covered in all the colors of the rainbow. (Photo: Asaf Brenner)
Meet me in the living room
The “living room” created by the Onya Collective is a bright, living space intended for resting, reading and taking in the exhibition. This is a growing space, in all senses of the word, where workshops and discussions will take place, and will continue to change and expand as the exhibition continues.
A plant environment that’s also an urban environment
Robots in the field
Artist Liat Segal, known for her sophisticated use of technology, has created huge stems that respond to the changing light in the gallery space. Like plants in nature, their movement follows the light and adapts to how it changes. The stems of the robotic “plants” are coated with carbon fiber, a material that combines both organic and artificial properties.
“Tropism” – giant stalks that illustrate the movement of plants. (Photo by Asaf Brenner)
The weeping stones
The final part of the exhibition is the work of the French artist Stephan Teide, “The Weeping Stones”. The giant boulders hanging in the air undermine the laws of gravity, while shedding tears in an arid world, lacking any hint of vegetation. The work presents a “miracle”: the stones seem to produce water by themselves, and the constant dripping produces both a meditative and otherworldly experience.
The weeping stones (Photo: Asaf Brenner)
Like nature, the exhibition is expected to change and grow throughout the year, as its living components change, expand, wilt and renew themselves. The exhibition will be open until June 2020, and will include guided tours, lectures and other events open to the public.
From the “Promised Land”: The gallery walls covered in all the colors of the rainbow. (Photo: Asaf Brenner)
Meet me in the living room
The “living room” created by the Onya Collective is a bright, living space intended for resting, reading and taking in the exhibition. This is a growing space, in all senses of the word, where workshops and discussions will take place, and will continue to change and expand as the exhibition continues.
A plant environment that’s also an urban environment
Robots in the field
Artist Liat Segal, known for her sophisticated use of technology, has created huge stems that respond to the changing light in the gallery space. Like plants in nature, their movement follows the light and adapts to how it changes. The stems of the robotic “plants” are coated with carbon fiber, a material that combines both organic and artificial properties.
“Tropism” – giant stalks that illustrate the movement of plants. (Photo by Asaf Brenner)
The weeping stones
The final part of the exhibition is the work of the French artist Stephan Teide, “The Weeping Stones”. The giant boulders hanging in the air undermine the laws of gravity, while shedding tears in an arid world, lacking any hint of vegetation. The work presents a “miracle”: the stones seem to produce water by themselves, and the constant dripping produces both a meditative and otherworldly experience.
The weeping stones (Photo: Asaf Brenner)
Like nature, the exhibition is expected to change and grow throughout the year, as its living components change, expand, wilt and renew themselves. The exhibition will be open until June 2020, and will include guided tours, lectures and other events open to the public.
Lonnie G. Bunch III was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s inspiring National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which constitutes the most comprehensive and significant project toward the preservation of the full sweep of African American history and its impact on American and world history. With over 40,000 exhibits, the museum has been critically praised for its clear-sighted, unflinching portrayal of the African American experience. An influential curator and prolific author, Bunch serves today as the Smithsonian’s 14th Secretary – the first historian and first African-American to be appointed to this position.
Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a distinguished scholar of Performance studies and Jewish Studies at New York University, who led the development of the core exhibition of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, winner of the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award. The museum is a hub for Jewish historical preservation in Warsaw, tracing the 1000-year history of Polish Jews, in an effort to re-animate a vibrant and culturally rich vanished Jewish world, which she has spent a lifetime exploring – telling the story literally where it took place.
Prof. Debora Diniz is the Deputy Director of the Rights and Justice Unit for the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, where she oversees strategies to promote and protect gender equality, sex, and reproductive rights and health, and to eliminate violence against women and girls in Latin America and the Caribbean region. Her ongoing contributions span her work in sexual and reproductive health rights, social protection, and reframing the Zika virus in relation to social and racial inequalities.
Prof. Gita Sen is a pioneering feminist scholar, researcher, and advocate. For decades, she has worked expansively in the fields of population policies, reproductive and sexual health, women’s rights, poverty, labor markets and global governance, combining her academic career with policy advocacy and activism. Her innovative research on disadvantaged populations in low income rural settings, together with her mentorship of young scholars and advocates, has made a significant impact on the field.
Dr. Demis Hassabis is a pioneer of artificial intelligence and a widely-cited neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI research companies, which seeks to combine insights from neuroscience and machine learning with the latest developments in computer hardware, to construct a mechanism for general-purpose learning – ‘artificial general intelligence.’ To date, DeepMind has published nearly 1,000 papers – including multiple Nature and Science publications – and achieved groundbreaking results in challenging AI domains, from self-learning algorithms playing strategy games at a “superhuman” level (DQN and AlphaGo), to protein folding and medical applications.
Prof. Amnon Shashua is a machine learning and computer vision researcher at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work and insights formed the seeds of several startups he has co-founded over the years, including Mobileye (acquired by Intel Corp. in 2017), which develops AI to enable driving assistance systems and autonomous driving technology – to date, more than 55 million cars throughout the world are equipped with Mobileye systems; and OrCam, which harnesses computer vision and natural language processing to assist the visually and hearing impaired.
Was he serious about it at the time? “Absolutely not,” says Prof. Rechavi. “I didn’t think it through, and didn’t think people would be interested. It was just a tweet, I didn’t think about it for more than a few seconds.”
Nonetheless, within hours, Prof. Rechavi got responses from scientists all over the world.
(Colleen Murphy, molecular biologist from Princeton, and Piali Sengupta, a neurogeneticist from Brandeis)
(Ahna Skop, geneticist from UW-Madison)
(Javier Irazoqui, microbiologist from the University of Massachusetts)
Within days, Prof. Rechavi received hundreds of messages from people who wanted to participate. And so, two days after the original tweet, the idea became a reality:
“One of the great things about Twitter,” Prof. Rechavi says, “is that it feels like a big, global community of scientists who want to learn from each other and support each other. I want the conference to feel that way too. I want it to be friendly and welcoming, I want people to feel supported by the crowd. That kind of environment is great for collaboration.”
The “Woodstock of Science”
Woodstock.bio is different from other conferences. The event will have 75 speakers, with very short talks, and presentations containing only one slide. The order of speakers within each session will be decided randomly, to keep things fresh and spontaneous.
Each speaker will choose their own “Walk Up Song”, a short musical intro, like when a baseball hitter is walking up to the pitch. As soon as one person is done talking, a random generator will decide on the next song, from among the speakers listed for that session, so the order will be a surprise even to the speakers themselves. Prof. Rechavi hopes this will make the event feel more like a festival, and takes being compared to Woodstock as a compliment.
