The future is already here
KERNEL X design challenge
AGNES CHAVEZ IS EXCITED; the pandemic is subsiding, masks are off and a long-delayed trip to Portugal is at last, once again in sight. Chavez’s itchy feet long to travel.
“I’m inspired by travel,” she says over Zoom where we have met a few times over the course of COVID.
Chavez is the founder of STEMarts LAB which was started as a Research and Innovation platform for sci-art explorations applied to art and education. Agnes Chavez is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and social entrepreneur.
She is also the founder and developer of the Sube Teach language through an art, music and games program, now in its 20th year and serving over half a million children. She cofounded the Paseo Project with J. Matthew Thomas.
In 2009 she founded the STEMArts Lab which partners with new media artists and schools to research and develop 21st-century tools and learning opportunities as part of new media art festivals, school programs and community events. She has developed art-based curricula and STEAM programs for Scholastic, 516 Arts and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In her art, Chavez experiments with data visualization, sound and projection art to create participatory experiences that explore our relationship with nature and technology. She was invited to install a permanent piece at the CERN Institute in Switzerland just prior to the lockdowns.
Now the world is opening up and Chavez is hitting the ground running.
“It was easy for me to transition my curriculum to a completely digital model,” she explained, “as it’s always been a hybrid of sorts.”
What’s more, the kids were engaged, even kids who were tuning out the world they didn’t recognize any longer.
So Chavez took them further afield, connecting them with kids in other places, creating unprecedented collaborations with this new cutting-edge model that perfectly reflects the current zeitgeist.
STEMarts Lab has partnered with the KERNEL X – Light Art Festival in Monza, Italy, to connect students there with students in Taos, to participate in an audiovisual 3D mapping onto the architecture of Residenza Ponte dei Leoni in the city of Monza.
KERNEL X is the first Italian light festival of international interest to take place in Monza. Between June and November 2021, audiovisual 3D mapping shows and interactive, light and sound installations will transform and enhance the historical and cultural context of the city center through an emotional experience capable of involving the interest and participation of a transversal audience.
The light festival will also host audiovisual mapping projections developed with the involvement of emerging artists, students of Italian and international academies and elementary and middle school children. Marcello Arosio, Art Director of AreaOden and the KERNAL X festival says, “We’re very excited to connect students from Italy and New Mexico by giving them the opportunity to become the protagonists of a collaborative video mapping show, where they’ll share their own vision of the future through fantasy, color and the freest interpretation of architectural shapes.”
For this design challenge the teachers from Raiberti plexus of Monza and the teachers of Taos County schools,
including Christine Autumn (TMS) and Claireen Espinoza from Taos Day School at the Pueblo, are invited to engage their students in a simple and fun drawing activity onto a printed diagram of the building’s façade that captures their vision of a sustainable future. The student drawings from both cities will be submitted to the video mapping artists in Monza who will produce a creative reinterpretation of Residenza Ponte dei Leoni on July 2 - 11, from 9:30 p.m., on a rotating schedule.
To make this easy for teachers, STEMarts Lab has created an Activity Guide that provides links and resources on how to engage students in “Futures
Thinking” to inspire their drawings.
Agnes Chavez, STEMarts Lab Founder, says “Futures Thinking is a literacy skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do. Like reading and writing, it is a skill everyone can learn because the future must be imagined and all humans have the ability to imagine. Futures Thinking is a mindset and we are all Future Imaginers!”
As far as Chavez is concerned, the future is already here, and with a brand new baby granddaughter arriving as she turned 60, she sees it clearer than most.