June 9, 6-7pm EST
Research in Bevil Conway’s lab aims to understand the normal brain processes by which physical signals that impinge on the sensory apparatus (eyes, ears) are transformed into perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Work in the lab has been especially invested in developing color as a model system. The advantage of color is that its physical basis (wavelength) is well characterized, yet these chromatic signals support not only low-level visual abilities such as color matching but also high-level cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, social cognition, and emotion. This variety of phenomena provides a rich opportunity for investigating the full scope of perceptual and cognitive computations that make human vision such an important source of information about the world.

May 26, 6-7pm EST
Ani Patel’s work focuses on music cognition: the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and responding to music. Two areas of special interest are the relationship between music and language (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press) and the processing of musical rhythm. A wide variety of methods are used in this research, including brain imaging, behavioral experiments, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies with nonhuman animals. Music reaches into our deepest self, or so Plato declared some 2,300 years ago. We’ve been wondering about music’s effect on us ever since. In the last decade in particular, a growing number of scientists have taken up the quest to chart music’s course in the body, starting at the top—the brain.

April 28, 10-11am EST
Heather Dewey Hagborg (October 1, 2013, Genomics, Heather Dewey Hagborg and Bang Wong) participated in a program early on in the history of Catalyst. She is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places. She says that since 2001, “I’ve been working at the intersection of art and science, with an emphasis on conceptions of the natural and the artificial. Drawing from diverse fields including biology, computation, sculpture, and critical design, I view art as an open field in which any discipline can become subject and material. I utilize art as practice-based research with which to probe the deep and often hidden structures of media/technology/science that dominate the contemporary moment and frame our cultural imagination.”

Dana Clancy, March 3, 6-7pm — Video Unavailable
Dana Clancy is an artist and Director and Associate Professor of Art at Boston University School of Visual Arts. Clancy has had solo exhibitions at Alpha Gallery, Danforth Museum of Art, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Babson College, Laconia Gallery, Harvard University Medical School, Boston University and other venues. About working with museums as a source for her work and her teaching she says “I teach my BU seminars in museums in front of works of art, because I want students to experience the power of complex material art objects.” A visit to the Tate Modern in London over a decade ago started her on this series of work. She says “It’s all about looking at looking. The museum is a public space that encourages social debate and private reflection, and I am interested in the way museums frame that public/private space and viewing experience. I embed my own reflection in much of my work to indicate my subjective presence and experience.” Since 2007 Clancy has painted and drawn from contemporary museum buildings and renovations from MoMA to Maxxi in Rome, and worked from modernist icons such as the Guggenheim Museum and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. During this pandemic time of social upheaval Clancy’s work has shifted toward painting from conversations with artists over Zoom onto pages of each week’s New York Times, continuing to make work about public and private reflections about the role of the arts in this current moment.

Our virtual spring programs were made possible by a grant from The City of Cambridge's Community Benefits Stabilization Fund. Please consider helping us fund future programs with a donation.