Project Overview
Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific Edge is a research project culminating in a major exhibition and catalogue presented as part of the 2024 Pacific Standard Time program in Los Angeles. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty with arts organizations throughout Southern California. These collaborative programs focus the cultural community on a variety of topics and themes connected to the region. For the 2024 PST iteration, the theme is Art x Science x LA.
Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific Edge examines scientific, visual, and philosophical implications of vibrational energies through a decolonial framework. We have assembled a culturally and geographically diverse group of researchers to investigate how vibration, sound, and kinetic energy have impacted broader cultural dialogues of the Pacific Rim, or Oceania, which is an expansive site of cultural, military, electromagnetic, and seismological activity. The project de-centers predominantly Anglocentric historical narratives in favour of broader international dialogues which reflect upon the divergent and vibrant communities of the Pacific Rim.
The project seeks to understand how energy fields operate on the senses, how they are represented in art and science, and how developments in each field have influenced one another. Works will range from installation to performance documentation and ephemera, to paintings, drawings, static and kinetic sculptures, and experimental scientific devices.
Research Team
The research team includes Lawrence English, Ph.D. (Australia) and Robert Crouch, Executive and Artistic Director of Fulcrum Arts, who will be co-curating the project. They are joined by Rana Adhikari, Ph.D., Caltech Professor of Physics; Patrick McCray, Ph.D., Professor of History, UC Santa Barbara; Nina Tonga, Curator of Contemporary Art at Museum of New Zealand, and Ph.D. Candidate (New Zealand); Enrique Rivera Gallardo, Executive Director, Santiago Media Biennial (Chile); Fiona Shen, Director of the Escalette Collection at Chapman University; and Marcus Herse, Director of the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University.
Additionally, a series of advisors will be collaborating on the project during its initial phase. The advisors are Annea Lockwood (American Artist), Perrin Meyer (Meyer Sound Laboratories), Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology), Joel Ferree (LACMA Art + Technology Lab), and Kyle Slabb (Australian Indigenous Artist).
About Fulcrum Arts
Fulcrum Arts champions creative and critical thinkers at the intersection of art and science to provoke positive social change and contribute to a more vibrant and inclusive community. We advance collaboration at the intersection of art and science to impact positive social change on a civic scale through exhibitions, institutional partnerships, interdisciplinary symposia, festivals, residencies, and outreach education.
Our programming forges deep and lasting connections with artists and the region’s top scientific, research, technological, design, and cultural assets.
Fulcrum Arts is dedicated to building cultural equity into the very structure and fabric of the organization at all levels ensuring that underrepresented populations and voices are included and heard. We support creative practices that incorporate broader, non-western, and Indigenous traditions that resonate within the nexus of art, science, and social change to expand, define, and further human achievement.
About PST and The Getty
Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented series of collaborations among institutions across Southern California. In each, organizations simultaneously present research-based exhibitions and programs that explore and illuminate a significant theme in the region’s cultural history.
In Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, more than 60 cultural institutions joined forces between October 2011 and March 2012 and rewrote the history of the birth and impact of the L.A. art scene. In Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, presented from September 2017 through January 2018, more than 70 institutions collaborated on a paradigm-shifting examination of Latin American and Latinx art, seen together as a hemispheric continuum.
Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty.
The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts that includes the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Getty programs serve a varied audience from two locations: the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades. The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, the Foundation strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect. Additional information is available at www.getty.edu/foundation.
https://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/pst/art_science_la.html