May 12, 2018
The First Time, The Heart:
Dario Robleto and Adrian Matejka in Conversation Part 1
Dario Robleto and poet Adrian Matejka reflect on their collaborative project, The First Time, the Heart, exploring the early descriptive language and images from the 19th century scientists who created the prototype archives of the heart.
May 12, 2018
Dario Robleto: The Signal
The First Time, The Heart:
Dario Robleto and Adrian Matejka in Conversation Part 2
Dario Robleto and poet Adrian Matejka reflect on their collaborative project, The First Time, the Heart, exploring the early descriptive language and images from the 19th century scientists who created the prototype archives of the heart.
April 25, 2018
Dario Robleto And Patrick Feaster:
Unlocking Sounds of the Past
Interweaving historical research, poetic storytelling, and innovative approaches to image and sound processing, a multi-year collaboration between artist Dario Robleto and media historian Patrick Feaster has sought to discover unexpected sensory pathways to our shared past.
By challenging entrenched notions of what constitutes a playable “recording” of the past, Feaster and Robleto’s work allows for a type of empathy through time by unlocking latent data and meaning in media once presumed dead. Their work has discovered and made audible the first pulse and heartbeat recordings and the first dreams and emotions registered as blood flow to the brain, each originally traced in soot from flames in the nineteenth century. Currently, they are working on reanimating the first electrical signals recorded from the heart and brain in various states of emotional experience.
April 18, 2018
The Heart's Knowledge Will Never Decay:
Artist Dario Robleto in Conversation with Dr. Doris Taylor
In this presentation, Dario Robleto joins Dr. Doris Taylor of the Texas Heart Institute to explore the scientific, cultural and poetic implications of her laboratory’s groundbreaking creation of a “ghost heart”— a heart scrubbed clean of all cells so that it can be regenerated anew.
March 29, 2018
Ann Druyan in Conversation with Dario Robleto
Each year, at our Innovative Thinker lecture, SITE honors the achievements of a visionary educator who has innovated significantly in the field of museum and arts education. This Spring, SITE honors Ann Druyan, an American writer and producer specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and is currently working on Cosmos: Possible Worlds which will air in 2019 on Fox and National Geographic channels.
While it would seem that Ann Druyan’s work relates more to science education, her work with Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Cosmos documentary series is truly an achievement within the context of the arts. By presenting scientific concepts using aesthetics, the visual medium of video and the emotional insight that art allows, her work has allowed for inspired education in both the fields of art and science that reaches a broad and diverse audience.
Artist Dario Robleto interviewed Ann Druyan for this presentation and contextualized her work within the field of contemporary arts.
December 02, 2017
Dario Robleto on Interdisciplinary Practice
On December 1, 2017, Skidmore students Teague Costello ’19 and Emily Cooper ’19 interviewed artist Dario Robleto about his work. This interview was part of a series of interviews with artists conducted by Skidmore students in the Art History course The Artist Interview, led by Dayton Director Ian Berry.
December 01, 2017
Dario Robleto on Falsetto Can Be A Weapon
On December 1, 2017, Skidmore students Teague Costello ’19 and Emily Cooper ’19 interviewed artist Dario Robleto about his work Falsetto Can Be A Weapon, 2001, from the Tang Teaching Museum collection. This interview was part of a series of interviews with artists conducted by Skidmore students in the Art History course The Artist Interview, led by Dayton Director Ian Berry.
August 05, 2017
Art + Engineering Interview: Dario Robleto
Why Empathy Matters:
A Conversation with Dario Robleto and Emily Rapp Black
Visiting artist Dario Robleto discusses the relationship between art, science, and the university with the Block’s Associate Director of Engagement and Curator of Public Practice, Susy Bielak.
June 18, 2017
Short Clip on the Exhibition If You Remember, I'll Remember.
Northwestern’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art curator Janet Dees discusses Dario Robleto’s contribution to the exhibition, If You Remember, I’ll Remember.
May 01, 2017
The Sun Awaits Our Shadow:
Dario Robleto and the New Mexico School for the Arts Time Capsule
Organized by SITE Santa Fe, from 2016-2017 artist Dario Robleto worked with visual arts students at the New Mexico School for the Arts to create a time capsule.
February 04, 2017
Opening Day Conversation for the Exhibition If You Remember, I'll Remember
Organized by SITE Santa Fe, Dario Robleto speaks with a class From the New Mexico School for the Arts.
March 03, 2016
Dario Robleto Speaks with a Class From the New Mexico School for the Arts
Dario Robleto talks about his solo exhibition Dario Robleto: The Signal at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through May 25. Hosted by Santa Barbara appraiser Elizabeth Stewart, PhD.
November 13, 2015
Scientists and Artists Team Up To Explore Our Brain On Art
National Science Foundation Science Now Episode 38
Researchers have been recording brain waves from hundreds of art gallery visitors, as they hope to discover how our brains combine sensory impressions with memories and emotions into judgments about works of art.
October 26, 2015
Your Brain on Art :
Collaboration Between Dario Robleto and the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering
In conjunction with the Blaffer Art Museum, the Cullen College of Engineering presented the first event in the Your Brain on Art series. The series is a groundbreaking collaboration between UH’s Noninvasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems Laboratory, the Blaffer Art Museum and Houston-based artists that seeks to understand what happens in the brain as people create and contemplate art.
At this event, artists Lily Cox-Richard, Jo Ann Fleischhauer, and Dario Robleto played a variation of Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative, chance-based game made famous by the Surrealists in the 1920s.
March 03, 2015
Insights Into the Interplay Between Science and Art: Dario Robleto at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute
Programming in conjunction with Dario Robleto’s Setlists for a Setting Sun, on view in the Contemporary Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This exhibition weaved together the histories of recorded light and sound in a body of poetic sculptures, prints, and cut-paper works. The show debuts three works inspired in part by the BMA’s proximity to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).
As a special collaboration between these two Baltmore institutions, Robleto presented a BMA Artist Talk as part of the STScI Public Lecture Series. He delved into the cross-pollination of art and science – including the ways in which imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2015, has influenced Robleto and the works featured in the exhibition. In counterpoint, STScI astronomer Frank Summers explored the scientific properties of light, space, and time that not only underscore the artistic depth, but also expose the mind-bending realities within Einstein’s theory of relativity.
January 15, 2015
Panel Discussion at Artpace Celebrating Hare & Hound Press
Panel discussion from the opening of Artpace’s 2015 Hudson (Show)Room exhibition Hare & Hound Press + Artpace: The Art of Collaboration, January 15, 2015.
December 14, 2014
The Modern Art Notes Podcast episode 161
On the second segment, Dario Robleto discusses two exhibitions of his work at the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Menil Collection. The BMA is showing Robleto’s Setlists for a Setting Sun, and the Menil is offering up The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed.
Curated by Kristen Hileman, Setlists for a Setting Sun is the exhibition of works Robleto made on a residency while at the Headlands Center for the Arts. It mashes up the histories of recorded light and sound. The exhibition was partly motivated by the BMA’s proximity to Johns Hopkins University, where the Hubble Space Telescope mission is headquartered. It was on view through March 29, 2015.
The Menil’s exhibition, The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed, features Robleto’s interest in the history of our knowledge of the human heartbeat. It was commissioned by the Menil and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the arts at the University of Houston. The exhibition was on view at the Menil through January 4, 2015.
December 02, 2014
Conversation with the Artist
Mimi Swartz, Dr. Bud Frazier, Dr. Billy Cohn and Dario Robleto
In her upcoming book, Mimi Swartz, an executive editor of Texas Monthly, traces the history of the artificial human heart. The first total artificial heart was implanted in 1969 at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, and much of this tale of ambition and innovation focuses on the work of surgeons living and working in the city today. Dario Robleto and Swartz have been in dialogue since the early stages of their respective projects and invite the public to join them in a layered conversation about the past, present, and future of this technology.
November 03, 2014
Dario Robleto:
The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed
Short profile on the exhibition The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed. The exhibit, held at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, revolved around the artists most recent area of enquiry: the largely unexplored history of the human heartbeat as sound. The exhibition draws on his extensive research into the earliest attempts to record the heartbeat as sound and image, the heartbeat and brainwave recordings on a probe currently headed toward the edge of the Solar System, and recent developments in the evolution of the artificial heart.
In addition, the show and museum served as laboratory to a collaboration between Robleto and Dr. Jose “Pepe” Contreras-Vidal, Director of the Laboratory for Non-Invasive Brain Machine Interfaces at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston. In the study, the brain response to viewing Robleto’s art was studied with mobile electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural basis of aesthetic experiences. In contrast to most studies of perceptual phenomena, participants were moving and thinking freely as they viewed the exhibit. The brain activity of over 400 subjects was recorded using dry-electrode and one reference gel-based EEG systems over a period of 3 months. This work provides evidence that EEG, deployed on freely behaving subjects, can detect selective signal flow in neural networks, identify significant differences between subject groups, and report with greater-than-chance accuracy the complexity of a subject’s visual percept of aesthetically pleasing art. In Robleto and Contreras-Vidal’s “museum as laboratory” approach, acquisition of neural activity “in action and context,” could lead to understanding of how the brain integrates sensory input and its ongoing internal state to produce the phenomenon which we term aesthetic experience.
October 21, 2014
Conversation with the Artist: Patrick Feaster and Dario Robleto
Prior to Thomas Edison’s groundbreaking invention of sound recording and playback technology in 1877, the ephemerality of sound meant that it only existed in the moment of its creation. To “record” sound before this time meant it appeared as oral or written descriptions or musical scores. In 2008, Patrick Feaster, a researcher and educator specializing in the history and culture of early sound media, and his colleagues revolutionized the field of historical sound recording by suggesting that attempts to record sound waves as visual tracings almost two decades before Edison’s breakthrough could be “played back” today as sound.
In this discussion with Dario Robleto, Feaster speaks about his work and their recent collaboration on “playing back” the earliest 19th-century attempts to visually record the human pulse and heartbeat
September 23, 2014
Conversation with the Artist:
Ann Druyan & Dario Robleto
In 1977, Ann Druyan, executive producer and writer for the Emmy-nominated series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, became the creative director of the Golden Record. As part of the team of seven headed by her soon-to-be-husband, astronomer Carl Sagan, she helped create a portrait of Earth from natural sounds, images, musical selections, spoken greetings, and even recordings of her own heartbeat and brainwaves that was placed aboard the unmanned space probes Voyager 1 and 2 and launched on a billion-year journey into space.
Thirty-seven years later, Voyager 1 is just now exiting our solar bubble and entering interstellar space. In this program, Druyan joins Dario Robleto in a discussion of the creation of the Golden Record and the relationship between science, art, emotion, and the human desire for long-term preservation.
March 28, 2014
On Being with Krista Tippet:
Dario Robleto: Sculptor of Memory
Live interview at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts with Krista Tippet of On Being. First aired March 27, 2014 on NPR.
Sculptural artist Dario Robleto is famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials — from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills meaning at once social, poetic, and scientific. He reveals how objects can become meditations on love, war, and healing.
March 28, 2014
On Being with Krista Tippet:
Dario Robleto: Sculptor of Memory (Unedited version)
Live (unedited) interview at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts with Krista Tippet of On Being. First aired March 27, 2014 on NPR.
Sculptural artist Dario Robleto is famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials — from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills meaning at once social, poetic, and scientific. He reveals how objects can become meditations on love, war, and healing.
March 13, 2013
Why the Civil War Still Matters to American Artists: Dario Robleto
Artists Terry Adkins, William Dunlap, Sally Mann, and Dario Robleto come together to discuss how they address aspects of the American Civil War in their recent bodies of work, and why.
Moderated by Senior Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey.
July 23, 2012
Interview for the New Orleans Museum of Art Exhibition, The Prelives of the Blues
Short documentary by Laura Sumich, produced for NOLAVie.com for the University of New Orleans.
May 19, 2011
Dario Robleto:
An Intimate Conversation About Art and War
Dario Robleto discusses his work with a group of war veterans at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver for the exhibition An Instinct Toward Life.
The program, which included veterans from four different wars, was co-organized with Nathan E. Matlock of The Regis University Center for the Study of War Experience.
May 07, 2011
Dario Robleto:
Lecture for the exhibition The Record: Contemporary ART and VINYL
Lecture (audio only) by artist Dario Robleto at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston. The lecture was in conjunction with the 2010 exhibition The Record: Contemporary ART and VINYL, which originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
April 18, 2011
ICA Teens Interview Dario Robleto
Teen Council members interview artist Dario Robleto in the galleries of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston. The interview was in conjunction with the 2010 exhibition The Record: Contemporary ART and VINYL.
November 12, 2009
The Old Weird America With Robin Held and Greil Marcus
Dario Robleto talks about his solo exhibition Dario Robleto: The Signal at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through May 25. Hosted by Santa Barbara appraiser Elizabeth Stewart, PhD.
August 07, 2008
Video Interview For the 2008 Exhibition Human/Nature:
Artists Respond to a Changing Planet
How do we mourn nature? Dario Robleto’s artwork for the 2008 exhibition Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego centers around a series of sculptures that focus on the inevitable loss of the glaciers, the mourning we collectively experience as we witness the changing of the earth at our own hands, and the ways in which loss can inspire new ways of thinking. The sculptures dialogue with one another to tell a larger story and relate to the artist’s past work exploring the cultural histories of mourning and faith.
During his visits to Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Dario Robleto interviewed many scientists, among them a leading glaciologist who is monitoring the park’s glaciers and participated in a glacier measuring expedition.
June 25, 2004
Radiolab - Space
Radiolab season 2 episode 5- Space [Dr. Peter Diamandis, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Philip Glass, Brian Greene, Dario Robleto and Neil deGrasse Tyson]
Episode ponders our place in the universe with stories of romance and cynicism in outer space. Artist Dario Robleto’s attempt to finish the lost Space Shuttles’ work is explored.
