Programs and Events Past Events
2023 Past Programs
Artist Talk Back: The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto
July 9, 2023, Block Museum of Art
In this closing-day gallery talk led by artist Dario Robleto and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and exhibition curator, they reflected on the months of public conversations, inquiries, and new ideas generated by The Heart’s Knowledge.
The Future Heart in Poetry and Medicine
May 24, 2023, Block Museum of Art
Inspired by advances in biomedical engineering, this conversation between director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute Center for Cardiovascular Care Doris Taylor, artist Dario Robleto, and poet and editor of Poetry magazine Adrian Matejka explored how poets, artists, and doctors can benefit from cross-disciplinary inquiries.
Block Museum blog coverage and event video.
Resequencing “The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life, 1854-1913)” (2017)
May 18, 2023, Block Museum of Art
McCormick students Andy Wehmeyer (‘25) and Dylan Brown (PhD, Chemical Engineering) led a gallery talk about the scientific perspectives they brought to the museum when they assisted with curating Dario Robleto’s artwork in The Heart’s Knowledge.
Block Museum blog coverage: Engineering Students Bring Scientific Perspective to Sequencing Artist’s Prints.
The Opportunity of Uncertainty presentation at Northwestern Best Practices Forum
May 3, 2023, Online
McCormick’s Kyle Delaney and Block Director Lisa Corrin spoke together as part of the Northwestern Office of Organizational Strategy and Change’s 2023 Best Practices Forum, sharing learnings from successful initiatives across the University. Dario Robleto joined them to share what he learned from the many relationships he built across the University during his time as Artist-at-Large.
Block Museum blog coverage with shared slides from the presentation: The Opportunity of Uncertainty
Art at the Limits of Life and Empathy
April 12, 2023, The Hive, Ford Engineering Design Center
McCormick Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering Malcolm A. MacIver joined Dario Robleto in exploring how art and science both contemplate—and seek to overcome—the physical and temporal limits of human life. McCormick coverage with event video: The Common Ground Between Art and Science
Ann Druyan, The Golden Record, and the Memory of Our Hearts
March 8, 2023, Online
Dario Robleto dedicated The Heart’s Knowledge to Ann Druyan, who recorded her own heartbeat as a daring contribution to the Golden Record that was attached to the Voyager II spacecraft and sent to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. Robleto, Druyan, and Harvard University Professor of Humanities Jennifer Roberts discussed the legacy of the Voyager Golden Record in connecting the most intimate of human emotions with the vast imagination of what the furthest reaches of space might be like.
Block Museum video of the online event: Ann Druyan, The Golden Record, and the Memory of Our Hearts
Science, Art, and the Search for Meaning: Opening Conversation with Dario Robleto
February 4, 2023, McCormick Auditorium, First Floor of Norris Student Center
What are the tools that artists and scientists use to observe and measure the unknown? How might we use those tools collaboratively to construct new pathways of human understanding across time and distance? How might shared values of empathy, care, and curiosity guide such pursuits? In this introductory conversation about The Heart’s Knowledge, artist Dario Robleto posed these questions in a wide-ranging discussion with Harvard University Professor of Humanities Jennifer Roberts, astronomer and co-founder of JustSpace Alliance Lucianne Walkowicz, and Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts Michael Metzger.
McCormick coverage: Finding Emotion and Empathy in Science
Block blog coverage and video: Science, Art, and the Search for Meaning
The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto exhibition
January 27 – July 9, 2023, Block Museum of Art
For American artist Dario Robleto, artists and scientists share a common aspiration: to increase the sensitivity of their observations. Throughout the history of scientific invention, instruments like the cardiograph and the telescope have extended the reach of perception from the tiniest stirrings of the human body to the farthest reaches of space. In his prints, sculptures, and video and sound installations, Robleto contemplates the emotional significance of these technologies, bringing us closer to the latent traces of life buried in the scientific record.
The Heart’s Knowledge concentrates on the most recent decade of Robleto’s creative practice, a period of deepening engagement with histories of medicine, biomedical engineering, sound recording, and space exploration. The exhibition organizes the artist’s conceptually ambitious, elegantly wrought artworks as a series of multisensory encounters between art and science. Each work seeks to attune viewers to the material traces of life at scales ranging from the intimate to the universal, returning always to the question: Does empathy extend beyond the boundaries of time and space?
Overview of the exhibition, with extensive photographs of the installation from McCormick Magazine (spring 2023): The Heart's Knowledge: At the Intersection of Art and Engineering
2022 Past Programs
Dean’s Seminar: Artist-at-Large Dario Robleto
November 3, 2022
McCormick Artist-at-Large Dario Robleto gave a preview of The Heart’s Knowledge exhibition by discussing his primary inspiration in the work of Ann Druyan, who worked on the interdisciplinary team that created the Voyager Golden Record. Robleto traces a line between his artwork and Druyan’s radical experiment in embedding a recording of human emotion—her own heartbeat—in the Golden Record, setting up crucial questions about how the limits and possibilities of empathy beyond what is currently knowable.
McCormick coverage: Dario Robleto, Ann Druyan, and the Essence of Humanity
2021 Past Programs
Dario Robleto: The Art of Scientific Storytelling
April 8, 2021
McCormick Artist-at-Large Dario Robleto shared his artistic practices in creative research, interdisciplinary narrative storytelling, and sculpture as a means of exploring crucial questions about how scientists and artists know the world. His animating question in his work joins together art and engineering to ask: how can art’s sensitivity to the personal and emotional dimensions of human experience better illuminate the same experiences at the heart of all scientific investigation?
2019 Past Programs
Exploring Ethics: Across Art, Humanities, and Science
July 23, 2019
For many artists, researchers, and scientists investigating life—whether working with human remains, studying organ donation, or re-engineering the genetic code—ethical considerations inevitably appear. Questions of consent and personal autonomy, control and access, social responsibility and human rights proliferate across areas of research that work with living subjects. How do professionals in these fields identify, draw inspiration from, and respond to ethical questions within their work? In this program bridging disciplinary divides, artist Dario Robleto; synthetic biologists Josh Leonard, Julius Lucks, and Danielle Tullman-Ercek; and medical anthropologist Megan Crowley-Matoka share specific dilemmas they’ve encountered in their own work—and discuss commonalities and differences that could lead to new ways of addressing contemporary ethical concerns.
Block blog coverage and video: Artist-at-Large Dario Robleto discusses ethics with experts across fields
2018 Past Programs
Dario Robleto and Patrick Feaster: Unlocking Sounds of the Past
April 25, 2018
Interweaving historical research, poetic storytelling, and innovative approaches to image and sound processing, a multi-year collaboration between artist Dario Robleto and media historian Patrick Feaster sought to discover unexpected sensory pathways to our shared past. They shared their ongoing work in reanimating the first electrical signals recorded from the heart and brain in various states of emotional experience, to be mediated in a variety of sound and other media formats.
Block blog coverage and video: Dario Robleto and Patrick Feaster on Hearing the Hearts of History
Opening Conversation: Behind the Scenes of Roman Egyptian Mummy Portraiture
January 17, 2018
A behind-the-scenes look at the exhibition Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt with archaeologists, art historians, scientists and scholars of the ancient world. Learn more from their insights into the Roman past including their discovery of what lies beneath the wrappings of a mummy featured in the exhibition. With exhibition curators Essi Rönkkö (Curator of Collections, Block Museum of Art), Taco Terpstra (Associate Professor of Classics), and Marc Walton (Senior Scientist in the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts and Research Professor of Materials Science and Engineering) in conversation with Emily Teeter, Egyptologist, Oriental Institute.
2017 Past Programs
Pedro Reyes: Disarm
May 17, 2017
Pedro Reyes’s works integrate elements of theater, psychology and activism and take on a variety of forms, from penetrable sculptures to puppet productions. Reyes discussed his work as MIT’s inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist, including the project Disarm (2012), where 6,700 destroyed weapons were transformed into musical instruments.
Dario Robleto: The Pulse Armed with a Pen: An Unknown History of the Human Heartbeat
May 10, 2017
In a performative lecture that is part storytelling, part original research, and part rare-sound archive, artist Dario Robleto expanded on his research into the human heartbeat. February 13, 2017 Jen Bervin: Silk Poems Interdisciplinary artist Jen Bervin presented her project Silk Poems, a poem written in nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor. Consulting nanotechnology and biomedical labs, she fabricated a silk film with the poem written in a six-character chain that corresponds to human DNA.
2016 Past Programs
Hasan Elihi: How Do Our Lives Translate to Data?
October 31, 2016
Media artist Hasan Elihi discussed his ongoing work in Tracking Transience, to show how his life has been affected by ongoing digital surveillance. Hasan’s artistic practice of detailing minutia, photographs, and tracking data from his everyday life is meant to make visible these technologies that are often invisible or taken for granted—until one’s life is upended by them.