image: The SETI Institute's Artist in Residence (AIR) program named recipients for mid-career and emerging artist recipients of the 2024 Cosmic Consciousness residency.
Credit: SETI Institute
September 23, 2024, Mountain View, CA – The SETI Institute's AIR program announced the recipients of its Cosmic Consciousness residency for mid-career and emerging artists:
- Open (Mid-Career) category: The recipients are the artist team of Bart Kuipers, Julie Michele Morin, and daniela brill estrada, with their project Exoplanet Poetry. The artists plan to create a book of poems using an AI trained on chemical data from imagined extraterrestrial sources. The book will be presented as a multi-sensory chemical experience, making it accessible to humans and non-human beings.
- Emerging artist category: The recipient is Jeremy Colangelo. He proposed a collection of stories tentatively named Stories for the Tree Beasts. His project will explore how assuming extraterrestrial intelligence is similar to human intelligence overlooks the idea that different types of beings think differently.
"As crushingly hard as it was to choose the winners from all the outstanding submissions, these two choices will blow readers away with the work they produce," said Gregory Betts, literary arts residency lead for SETI AIR. X'They are operating at an extremely high level of quality."
In May 2024, the Cosmic Consciousness residency invited writers to submit proposals that explored the questions, "What is the nature of consciousness?" and "What is the nature and evolution of intelligence?" Writers from around the world submitted their ideas. The SETI Institute announced its shortlist on September 23, 2024.
About the Artists
Bart Kuipers is a writer from the Netherlands who lives in Berlin. He combines his background in computer science with creative writing and has published poetry, short stories and articles in the US and the Netherlands. He has also written for children's television in the Netherlands and Germany.
Julie-Michèle Morin is working on a PhD in robotics and theatre at the University of Montreal (Canada) and the University of Antwerp (Belgium). This artist-researcher focuses on how performance arts interact with science and technology, using a technofeminist perspective.
Daniela Brill Estrada is an artist from Bogotá who lives in Vienna. She is interested in complexity sciences, the origin of life and aesthetics. She has collaborated with institutions including CERN, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Jeremy Colangelo is a Canadian author and scholar focusing on literature, disability, and consciousness. His work includes a book on literature and pain, a novel about embodiment and the environment and an essay on time travel narratives.
The SETI Institute welcomes these outstanding artists to its AIR program.
About the SETI Institute
Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe and to share that knowledge with the world. Our research encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies, including NASA and NSF.
Contact information
Rebecca McDonald
Director of Communications
SETI Institute
rmcdonald@seti.org