The Once and Future Heart
For centuries, in both the arts and the sciences, the human heart has been a source of reverence and marvel: Western artistic traditions have explored the heart as the vessel of sacred identity and the visceral instrument of emotional life, while the sciences know it as an exquisitely complicated pump that has tested the limits of medicine and engineering. Although these approaches may seem incompatible, recent advances in both fields provide surprising opportunities for art and science to converge around new insights and questions.
Join us for a conversation between the artist Dario Robleto, whose exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute rethinks the deep history of cardiological recording, and Doris A. Taylor, a scientist whose work toward regenerative transplantation is reshaping the metaphorical—as well as the medical—prospects of the human heart.
Free and open to the public.
Event Video
SPEAKERS
Dario Robleto, Exhibiting Artist and Visiting Scholar, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Doris A. Taylor, Director of Regenerative Medicine Research and Director of the Center for Cell and Organ Biotechnology, Texas Heart Institute
MODERATOR
Jennifer L. Roberts, Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
On Friday, November 8, 2019, the Harvard Art Museums will host an Arts Study Center Seminar, "Dario Robleto: Witnessing Sound" at 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, at 11 a.m.
In this seminar, presented in conjunction with the exhibition Winslow Homer: Eyewitness, Robleto will explore the theme of “witnessing” as it relates to auditory and material forms of war testimony. He will present his research on a rare and little-known audio recording made during a battle in Lille, France, in 1918, toward the end of World War I. It is the first live audio recording ever made on a battlefield.
