Science Café Fort Collins

Second Wednesday of every month
Fort Collins, Colorado

Beet Street Science Café connects the local scientific community with the general public to create a forum of critical thinking and discussion. They are informal and accessible – much more interactive than just a public lecture. The café takes place in a downtown restaurant making it a casual presentation over dinner and drinks. The goal is to engage and educate broad audiences about the incredible discoveries and research going on in our own community.

No cover charge for presentation.

Novelist E.M. Forster writes: “Only connect.” Those two words summarize Todd Siler’s philosophy of art, science and life, which are manifested in this exhibition, THE MIND AND ALL IT CREATES. In fact, over three decades ago, he coined the term and practice of “ArtScience” to describe the process of connection-making or integrative thinking, that is, how art integrates science (and vice versa) to better understand our world, as well as catalyze breakthroughs, discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Todd enjoys parallel playing with his passions for art history, fine arts, biology, nuclear and neural sciences, in exploring how nature connects things: creatively, deliberately and accidentally. His artworks interpret these connections and interrelates them in ways that aim to inspire wonder while challenging our imagination. They represent his unique creative inquiries into the potentially infinite meanings and possibilities of nature’s connectivity: from infinitesimally tiny strands of subatomic particles to clusters of stellar matter to human neural tissue to the multilayered concepts of cities, cultures and civilizations born from our collective brains.

Todd refers to himself as a “Cerebralist,” invoking the philosophy of the father of modern biological psychology, William James. Sir James respectfully regarded Cerebralists as individuals who combine the sensual and conceptual, the body and mind, the physical and spiritual. Siler describes his form of Cerebralism as “a visionary activity of the arts’ transforming all information, knowledge and experiences into new, purposeful, and useful things that enable us to realize human potential. For Todd Siler, A.R.T. encompasses All Representations of Thought, using any and all mediums, methods and tools to express and represent the human experience.

See Todd's Work

TODD SILER: ‘THE MIND AND ALL IT CREATES’ AND ‘MIND ICONS’
Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, 201 S. College Ave.
Through March 25

The Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art will present two exhibitions that explore how our understanding of the world and ourselves is informed by science and art. For the past 30 years, Siler has used art to search for the hidden meanings of nature’s connections: from the invisible strings of subatomic particles that connect massive clusters of stellar matter to the invisible strings of neurons and their cell-assemblies that connect us to our intellectual and creative endeavors. For more information please visit Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art.

Meet Todd Siler

Todd Siler graduated from Bowdoin College in 1975 (BA in Art History and Fine Arts) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 (Master of Science in Visual Studies). Siler was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1981-83 and 1991-92. He received his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art from MIT in 1986, the first visual artist to receive a doctorate from this Institute.
Siler has been exhibiting his works internationally in major museums and galleries for the past twelve years and is represented by the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City. His artworks are in numerous private and public connections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Pushkin Fine Arts Museum in Moscow, and the Belser Verlag Print Archives in Stuttgart and Zurich.
He has written many articles and books on his work. He has lectured in North and South America, the Middle East and Near East on the history of the arts’ interactions with science and technology, among other related topics. Todd Siler is the recipient of an IMB Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to Paris, France (1975-76, a Fulbright Scholarship to India (1985-86), and a Meitec Fellowship 1989-91 (awarded by the Meitec Intelligent Technology Corporation in Tokyo).