Idea Projects

Idea Projects, Ontario Science Centre’s partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, provides studio residencies to selected artists exploring science and technology through art. Idea Projects unites two forms of inquiry and reveals the potential for scientific and artistic collaborations to reimagine the global landscape. The resulting site-specific installations, made in 2019, all employ photography in ways that consider the medium’s utilitarian role in the sciences. Showcased in the CONTACT Core Exhibition Idea Projects, they challenge the presumption of scientific objectivity. Join the OSC as they celebrate Idea Projects artists, community volunteers, participants, and stakeholders with an afternoon of programming.

PANEL
Alien Agencies
3pm, Studio 1, Level 2
The Alien Agency Collective (Joel Ong, Gunes Isitan, Nicole Clouston, and Tosca Teran) maintains a bio-art practice, engaging with the microbial and mycelial life that helped to terraform the Earth, and which may be sent to other planets in order to make them hospitable for human life.

PANEL
What Do You Do With 100,000 Endangered Species?
4pm, Studio 2
Artist Dornith Doherty and David Galbraith of Royal Botanical Gardens discuss plant conservation today at the global level. What are the most pressing problems and what are the responses being tried?

Meet the Artists
5–7pm, Great Hall

PANEL
SYSTEM Sounds
6pm, Studio 2
Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida’s science-art outreach project converts the rhythms and harmonies of the cosmos into music and sound.

INTERACTIVE EVENT
Vault: Seed Exchange with Dornith Doherty
6pm, Great Hall, Level 2
Visitors are invited to help build a functional seed bank onsite by exchanging one viable living seed, sourced by the Vault volunteers, for one photograph of a seed by the artist.