Into The Wind

Georgie Friedman and Kerry Emanuel 

Monday, September 29, 2014, 6:00 - 7:00 pm 

MIT Broad Institute, Yellowstone Room, 75 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

There exists a dual perception of storms as they are both beautiful and terrible at the same time and evoke in us a sense of the sublime. Georgie Friedman and Kerry Emanuel both navigate this territory and shared their respective concerns and ideas about how storms affect us culturally, historically, and conversely, the effects of human behavior on the storms. Their interests as both artist and scientist respectively lead them to similar concerns—the power of nature and the fragility of life on the planet. There was also many questions, among them such as: can art elevate our awareness? Can science demystify phenomena as we seek to better understand what we do not understand?

 Georgie Friedman has lived, worked and exhibited throughout the United States. Her speaking engagements and exhibitions include museums, universities, galleries, film screenings and public art installations. She earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and her BA from UC, Santa Cruz. In recent years, she was named a "Rising star" by The Boston Globe and "One of the most exciting new-media artists in the region," by The Boston Phoenix. Her current exhibition, Into The Wind is on view at the Foster Gallery in Dedham, MA. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects include large-scale video installations, single and multi-channel videos and several photographic series. She investigates a wide range of phenomena including mild to severe atmospheric and oceanic conditions, along with deconstructing perceived geographic boundaries. Friedman utilizes photography, video, sound, installation, engineering and the physics of light, to create new experiences for viewers.

 Kerry Emanuel is the Cecil & Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. He has specialized in atmospheric convection and the mechanisms acting to intensify hurricanes. He was named one of the Time 100 influential people of 2006. In 2007, he was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He hypothesized in 1994 about a super powerful type of hurricane, which could be formed if average sea surface temperature increased another 15C - more than it's ever been. He works on various aspects of moist convection in the atmosphere, and on tropical cyclones. He is interested in fundamental properties of moist convection, including the scaling of convective velocities and the nature of the diurnal cycle of convection over land. Emanuel's group has developed a promising technique for inferring tropical cyclone activity from coarse-grain output of climate models or re-analyses.

Image:  Georgie Friedman, Hovering Hurricane: Sandy 2012, video installation on a suspended kinetic sculpture, four polycarbonate sections, height 36 inches, 10 foot full rotation footprint, 11 min video with audio (continuous loop), 2014