E-SCAPES: Artistic Explorations of Nature and Science opening reception on February 7 was the inauguration of 2012 activities at Istanbul’s Kasa Galleri in Istanbul. The exhibition, an intersection of art, science, and technology, features hybrid media artwork by InterArts faculty member Paul Catanese. The exhibition catalog is a collaboration with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, was curated by Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul), Vince Dziekan, and Ozden Sahin.

Detail from Catanese’s Visible from Space

Catenese’s featured work, Visible from Space, is a fanciful supposition to create drawings on the Earth so large they would be visible from the moon. Inspired by L’Arbre du Tenere (a lone and ancient acacia tree that lived in the hostile landscape of Saharan desert in Niger), Catenese’s work finds inspiration at intersections of dissimilar environments, and references nature’s ability to reflect and camouflage itself. The L’Arbre du Tenere, a route marker of the desert, an odd single blip on the map, occupies less than a pixel’s resolution worth of expanse when viewed from a distance.

Catanese frames his line of inquiry in the exhibition’s catalog:
“The desert is a site of remote testing where paraconsistent logics are first considered feasible. Mistakenly construed as the opposite of the ocean, the desert teems with depth—it is also its own mirror.”

The exhibition continues until March 1, 2012.