While a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, I researched the layered histories of science in the city, focused on mapping them into three conceptual and physical pathways (http://rome.mappingscience.net). My fascination with the origins of the museum led me outside the city to collections and archives in Bologna and Florence. ‘Zoologia’ is a visual cross-section through the research I collected.
This work represents different aspects of my practice: as an artist and an anthropologist I focus on the history of science and technology as my object of study. As I research, design, and build various projects, I don’t experience these aspects as separate – each is a way of understanding and organizing the world around us through a different lens. For me, these lenses almost always overlap.
The way knowledge is constructed and deployed in and between individuals, communities, and cultures is what interests me. It is what my work centers around, whether it be the reconstruction of Galileo’s first telescope in exact detail, observing interaqctions in a synthetic biology lab, or portraits of taxidermy in 18th century natural history museums. Through observation and classification of the natural world, we attempt to know, contain, and control the universe we inhabit. My projects are a series of attempts at transcribing that knowledge construction – I recreate my own scientific methods, collections, and displays that parallel scientific research, both historical and contemporary. I think of my art projects as collaborations with dead natural philosophers, and my anthropology work as the observation and analysis of living scientists. The ways in which these overlap and intersect provide new perspectives into the construction of art, science, and anthropology.
