Ten Sci-Fi Artists to Share with Your Students (Ep. 439)

Kyle Wood is back as a guest today as he and Tim talk about their favorite sci-fi artists to share with their students. Listen as they discuss the connections between art and science fiction, as well as explore various artists whose work intersects with themes of futurism, technology, and imagination. Hear what they have to say about Salvador Dali, Yayoi Kusama, Cai Guo-Qiang, and so many more artists–both historical and contemporary–who explore speculative themes, blurring the lines between reality, imagination, and science in their work.

Full episode transcript below.

Resources and Links

• • Read Kyle Wood’s articles, and listen to the Who Arted? podcast
  • Tony Oursler’s Alien Invasion
  • Check out the work of Rosemary Lee and Lynn Hershman
  • You know you want to see a Cowboy Shooting a Dinosaur
  • Vija Celmins, Umberto Boccioni, and Salvador Dali

Transcript

Tim:

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for our teachers. The show is produced by the Art of Education University, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

Welcome to the show, everyone. We are very excited to have this conversation tonight. One of the things the AOEU magazine is doing this month with our theme is sci-fi and AI. And we have an AI episode coming in next week. We may fit a little bit in, but we want to talk about sci-fi artists and artists from art history who have a ton of connections to science fiction. Some of them are strong connections. Some of them are a little tenuous here as we kind of dive into things. But I thought who better to come on the podcast and talk about artists and art history with me than regular podcast guests, host of the Who Arted? podcast, AOEU magazine writer, and all around incredible art teacher, Kyle Wood? And Kyle, how are you?

Kyle:
I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me on here again.

Tim:

Well, thanks for always saying yes when I invite you. We just keep doing more and more episodes, and I love talking to you. So I appreciate you continuing to come back. So, for new listeners, people who have not heard from you before, can you give us a little introduction and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kyle:
Well, I am now suffering a giant ego blow that all sorts of anonymous listeners don’t already know who I am. Ithought as a suburban elementary art teacher everyone would just automatically know my name, but . . .

Tim:

I know, it’s so rough, isn’t it?

Kyle:

Yeah, so I teach K-5 art. I’ve been doing this for a long time since 2007. I’m, you know, in the suburbs of Chicago, I am super excited.

I have been a magazine writer this year doing a couple articles for The Art of Ed.

It’s so cool to be a part of the organization that I have learned from so much over the years. And I am also really excited if I can give a shameless plug. It’s this month marks five years of doing my own podcasts.

Tim:

Oh, congratulations, that’s amazing.

Kyle:
Who Arted? Yeah, and for anyone who’s interested in nerding out in some art history, one of the big total history nerd thrills for me was I got to talk to the curator of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco about Mary Cassatt on my most recent episode.

Tim:
Yes. Absolutely.

Kyle:
It was such a thrill to learn from someone so knowledgeable, so I highly recommend anyone who wants to dabble in visual arts in an audio medium to check out my Mary Cassatt episode of Who Arted. It was it was a great one.

Tim:
I was going to say that’s a big get for you. That’s very exciting and very cool episode. Also, in the less cool episode category, there are a few with me in the archives, too. So after that month, Mary Cassatt, you can, you can listen to me talk about Keith Herring and, uh, I don’t know who who else have we talked about on your podcast.

I feel like it’s disappearing now.

Kyle:
We did Christo and Jean-Claude.

Tim:
Christo and Jean-Claude. Yup.

Kyle:
We talked about Yves Klein and coming up the, the toilet episode of Who Arted, just like rounding out a theme there with the Mauricio Catalan episode.

Tim:
Yes. Can we call it the duct tape banana episode? I’d feel better if we go that way. No, that that’s good. I highly recommend the Who Arted podcast if you’re an art history fan. It’s a fun one. But for our art history today, I want to talk about science fiction, connection between art and science fiction. And I guess to to start, before I ask you the first question, I want to just kind of define sci-fi for our purposes today. And I’m just thinking about, you know what, it is, how we approach it. And my best thought, my best professional type definition, would just be that art that’s based on future science or future possible technology that leads to some kind of change. People are hoping for for change with what’s coming in the future. That may have something to do with outer space or time travel or aliens or all of those things we kind of imagine, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from as we start this discussion. As I said at the beginning, some of these art and sci-fi connections will be strong. Some of them are a little tenuous, so we’ll we’ll kind of see where we go with this.

But Kyle, like what I would love your perspective, too. like What do you consider to be science fiction? And I guess part two of that question, are you a fan of science fiction?

Kyle:
Okay. So, I am always the type to seek out the broadest possible definition. And so when I look at it, I always take that sort of structuralist approach, like science fiction. We’re talking about something that’s fictive. It’s imaginary.

Tim:
Right, right.

Kyle:
It’s not literally true. And it’s rooted in science that doesn’t exist today, but scientific principles as they are imagined by somebody in some future or parallel dimension or something like that.

So I take a very, very broad definition, even something that, you know, seems to be a little bit fantasy. If there are scientific elements, I’ll lump them in there and stuff, too.

Tim:
Yeah, I appreciate that because, actually, at least one of the artists I listed was just like, oh, she likes outer space. Let’s include her. So I think the broadest definition possible is appreciated for for our purposes here.

But . . . we have a list of artists.

I asked you to to come up with a list of a few artists. I have a list of a few. I thought this was going to be just a short list. But then I got making mine, you got making yours and all of a sudden we have like 10 or 12 artists that we need to talk about. So we’ll zoom through them pretty quickly. I thought we could kind of go back and forth. Kyle, are you okay if I talk about one of my artists first?

Kyle:
Oh, yeah absolutely. Especially if it means that I don’t have to pronounce the name.

Tim:
Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair. All right. Our first artist, one of my favorites, one of my favorite to show with students, a Chinese artist named Cai Guo Qiang, and he does all sorts of incredible drawings with gunpowder. And so he started out just like doing gunpowder on uh, you know, boards and trying to to create two-dimensional drawings just done with gunpowder, which is very cool, fire explosions, all the things that that we love, then he’s moved on to fireworks and huge explosions.

And he did the opening ceremony from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which is a while ago now. But remember these fireworks of just footprints flying through the sky and this is some incredible stuff. So he’s maybe most well-known for that. But the reason I wanted to include him in this list is he thinks, or he’s attempting to at least ah communicate with aliens through his explosions and through his artwork, which I absolutely love. It’s fascinating for you know all of our students to to think about, like, this dude thinks that he’s talking to aliens. And so I recommend looking him up on YouTube and seeing some of his artworks, and his explosions.

They’re incredible. They are colorful. They’re bright. They’re exciting. I love watching them. One of my favorites is called Sky Ladder; it is a set of fireworks attached to a huge weather balloon that explodes while working its way up into the sky. And it looks like this ladder is lighting up as it climbs way up into the atmosphere. It’s amazing to look at. So I’m very excited about him and his work. Great one to show to students and absolutely the first one I thought of. Are you familiar with his work, Kyle?

Kyle:
How i know that work is actually because i have seen something that you have written. Every time I’m stuck for ideas and I need to find some fun facts, I keep coming across an old article that was like 10 fun facts about artists and you know the communicating with the aliens and every time I see it I’m always just struck thinking like

Tim: 
Oh, God, yes, I remember that one.

Kyle:
Where does he think the aliens are watching this from?

Tim:
Right, that’s a great question.

Kyle:
Because, like, if you are so distant that we’re not picking you up on radars and in our space telescopes, how on earth are you detecting the message in fireworks and not noticing everything else that’s happening around the world?

Tim:
Yeah, yeah. That’s a great point.

Kyle:
It’s mind boggling to me. you know I find the work beautiful and interesting in a lot of ways. I like the idea of explosive artwork for a number of reasons, but mostly just the fact that it’s like it’s to be in the moment. you know And yes, it’s documented and stuff like that, but I like things that are experiential like that.

Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know how truly or how thoroughly he believes he’s talking to aliens, but it’s it’s a great conversation piece. Like it’s a great conversation starter about his work. So I do appreciate that. Who is your first artist?

Kyle:
So I put Lynn Hirschman first. She’s been doing work in like all media since, I want to say around the 1960s. She’s doing drawings, photographs, videos, installations, performances. I put her on the the list because um relatively recently, I think it was done with like chat GPT-3. So that tells you fairly recent.

Tim:
Yeah.

Kyle:

She did something where it was like it was an installation that had video with somebody acting as a cyborg and talking about AI and the history of AI and the script being written by AI, by chat GPT, and I just thought like that if that’s not gonna go into our sci-fi Listicle of an episode then I don’t know what is?

Tim:
No, that’s perfect. I love that. I’m not familiar with Lynn Hirschman, so I will have to check her out. But I was going to say, I appreciate you setting up me up for my next artist, a great segue, also about installations and videos and not necessarily cyborgs. But ah Tony Oursler is my next artist and he does all sorts of video projections, video installations. And I’ve talked about him before on the podcast, but he talks about some of the alien qualities of some of his earlier work where he’s recorded these people uh these voices but then he puts up different videos would be like a close-up of one eye next to a video of a close-up of another eye versus a close-up of a mouth and they’re all sort of put together into this weird almost human, but not quite, sort of collection of videos and you have this voice that’s almost human, but not quite, and so it’s like surrealism mixed with technology. Which I really appreciate and it’s got so many different qualities of audio and visuals and and science and technology.

And I actually just read an interview ah with him where he thinks of his work as an alien invasion. And so as soon as I read that, I’m like, yep, he’s on our list for today, too. So I really like his stuff. Another great option if you’re thinking about, you know, video and technology. And, like I said, it’s just sort of surreal work that’s done through video. So I really like that one.

Kyle:
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting very sort of uncanny valley vibes, but it’s it’s interesting to me how across so many different media, there’s something about like eyes and mouths and like those features zoomed like hyper-focus and I mean, I guess in some ways it makes sense for visual artists to be focused on and the eyes, but I think as an audience too, there’s something really interesting that’s happening as we’re looking at work that in some ways feels like it’s looking back at us, you know, like the Mona Lisa effect and all of that.

I think it just opens up a really good space for conversations about psychology in art as well.

Tim:
Yes. Well, and just on that theme, I could talk about Tony Oursler for the rest of this episode and beyond, but I will try and make this quick. Just kind of on on that point, I’ve been to exhibits of his where you can become the voice looking in on other people. So you were in a separate room and whatever you say comes out of that video and you can talk to the people who are viewing the exhibition and you can comment on their clothes or their look or whatever, and it just it’s a fascinating interaction.

So that’s a good one. But anyway, like I said, I could talk about that forever. We’re going to move on, though. Who is your next artist?

Kyle:
Okay, so moving on to interaction and people we could talk about forever. um This next one, point of personal privilege is actually an old friend of mine, Rosemary Lee.

She and I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago years ago, but she was good at it. So she is like, Dr. Rosemary Lee, she has her PhD and she like goes around the world. She’s an art theorist and a visual artist working in all sorts of different media. Right now she’s based out of Portugal, but I don’t know, she might be doing a residency in Germany or something, but she does all sorts of stuff.

When we’re talking about AI and arts, you know, she literally wrote the book on AI in art, a book called Algorithm Image Art. But she’s also done some really interesting stuff that I think could spark great conversations with students. Like I’m thinking one thing that caught some students’ eyes, she surgically implanted speakers into carnivorous plants.

Tim:
I love it!

Kyle:
That was a few years back. She also has this piece, Molten Media. And the reason I think that’s perfect to talk about in this conversation is, you know, one of the things that’s happening at least in my mind today is I think like, Oh, all my home movies and stuff, all that data that I’m collecting, it’s all preserved. It’s digital. It’s in the cloud. It’s going to be there forever. But, like our physical hardware, it is somewhat disposable and changing. The code and the language that we’re using is changing so much that like we could almost be in a digital dark age where think about like I can’t read the stuff that I saved on those old LS 120 discs and you can’t get a DVD player anymore and you know like so many different things that are changing.

Tim:

Right. Right.

Kyle:
And so she was she was creating this piece, um like I said, molten media that just it it seemed like the wreckage of our old computer systems and stuff. And just invites you to think about, like, what if these relics will survive the long term and, you know, um how well preserved is it and will it still be accessible?

Tim:

Right.

Kyle:
And what do we need to do to, you know, keep going with all of this? I don’t know. I’m she’s one of those people that I’m always bragging about that I got to know and have a small.

Tim:

You knew her when, or still still know her, yeah.

Kyle:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m like excited about the prospect of one day being a footnote in her biography.

Tim:
Yeah, I love it. Thank you for bringing up the digital at Dark Age and giving me something else to have anxiety about. I really appreciate it.

Kyle:
But not us. This podcast will live forever.

Tim:
Absolutely, it will. All right, ah my next artist is Vija Celmins, and now she is one of the artists where I’m like, I don’t know if she actually fits, but she loves drawings about her space. So I I love her work so much. She does graphite drawings of like deserts and oceans and just these vast empty spaces. And of course, one of those vast empty These spaces are going to be our galaxy or you know, just outer space photos. And so just these huge graphite drawings that are all black, with the exception of all of of the stars or the constellations or whatever else she puts into there. And they’re just these huge, beautiful graphite pieces. If your kids appreciate realistic drawing.

She is a great artist to show. Like I said, I don’t know if the science-fiction connection is there, but the science connection is definitely there. We love outer space, and I just needed to give her a shout-out. So I really enjoy Vija Celmins.

Kyle:
Yeah, and mine is also a somewhat loose connection here. I’m looking at Kusama . . . her infinity room installations are just amazing.

I look at that, and it invites me to contemplate the vastness of space with that infinite reflection and and all of that.

Tim:
Yes.

Kyle:

It honestly is the stuff of my nightmares to see infinite reflections and stare out into the void, but you know, good on her because a lot of people really love it. There’s always a line around the block when the infinity rooms are coming to your local museum.

Tim:

I honestly have never seen a Kusama Infinity Room in person. It’s something I would love to do, but never had the opportunity, so it’s on my bucket list for sure. Although I may go in and get freaked out like you, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

All right, my next artist is Ray Harryhausen. I don’t know if Ray Harryhausen is necessarily a fine artist by definition, but he does a ton of art-related things. Animation and special effects, he worked in Hollywood in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

He would do all sorts of stop motion things, building armatures, creatures that you could see in films. He did one called It Came From Beneath the Sea. He’s got another one called Earth versus the Flying Saucers. Just think of like kitschy, stop motion animation. If you’ve ever going to to see movie monsters, he probably had something to do with that. And you know, as I’m thinking about that, like are students going to be into like movie monsters from 50-60 years ago? ah Maybe. They’re kind of cool, but also kind of ridiculous. So I’m not sure how well he’ll he’ll go over. But one thing that I promise will go over well, he has a painting of a cowboy shooting a rifle at a dinosaur. It looks like this Old West painting that you’ve seen a million times with just a cowboy on his horse going into battle,  just that that sort of Western art tradition. And then you do a double take and you’re like, that is an Allosaurus.

And he’s literally shooting at a dinosaur. So that is a painting that I promise will will get some good reactions in your classroom. so Have you seen that one? Have you seen any art with cowboys fighting dinosaurs? It’s something unique to me, I think.

Kyle:
Okay so I have not seen that specific painting but I did immediately have a flashback to my BFA show where I walked into the gallery and the first painting I saw and really the only one I remember from the entire show was a painting of a dude fighting a like polar bear in space, like bare-knuckle boxing up in space.

Tim:
Wait, did you say in space, like in outer space?

Kyle:
And, and it was, it was one of those things where it’s just like, it’s such ah an absurd, it was well painted, but the thing about it that was so memorable was it just, it leaned into the absurdness of it. And I think, you know, you talked about will students appreciate, you know, these old, old monster movies and stuff like that. And I think the answer is yes.

I think you didn’t have to be raised in that to see the ridiculousness, the over-the-top campiness, and like, and I think the embrace of that is what makes it so endearing. You know what I’m saying?

Tim:
Yeah, absolutely.

Kyle:
I think just people earnestly going for it and going over the top and not being embarrassed to go big and be ridiculous. I love that and therefore everybody must, right?

Tim:
Oh, yeah why not? Why not?

I think no, there’s something to be said for for going for it. Once you get past that point ah of campiness, you might as well just embrace it and just go all out with it. And like you said, I think people appreciate that.

So that’s a good one. All right. Who’s who’s next for you?

Kyle:
Well, we’re, we’re sticking to a theme here. This is funny because we kind of randomly cut and paste, pasted our way into this list, but there are natural segues happening all over.

So I actually put in the OG, uh, practical effects guy, George Miliers.

But one of the things I so for those unfamiliar, his big film was a trip to the moon, which has been around. It’s a classic. It’s been referenced in all sorts of ways, like the Smashing Pumpkins video for Night Tonight was a take-off of that.

But the thing that I find really interesting, like he kind of stumbled into this stuff in the earliest days of, of film. Like we had the earliest days, like right after photography was kind of invented, you know, um, very shortly after that we had, you know, the horse in motion, arguably the first, the first moving picture, if you will, series of frames.

And then Milliers was doing kind of what Edison was doing, trying to film stuff on the street, just capture little bits of motion. And he broke his camera, broke the hand crank.

And by the time he got it fixed, he starts cranking it again. The scene has changed. And so then he has this epiphany of like, oh, that video I recorded, all of a sudden the bus full of workers turned into a hearse, which kind of dark imagery, but he saw that as a great special effect and that’s where he started to experiment with the stuff we saw where you know, you stop the camera, change things out, sort of precursor to stop motion, if if you will.

He also did double exposures and the split screen technique. And so I highly recommend anyone delving into video and animation, especially like stop motion, those old forms, show your students how it all began because it’s really accessible, special effects, you know,

Tim:
Okay, yeah. I like I have heard of him. I did not know that story though, so I appreciate the background there. So that’s that’s cool. I’m going to do a two-for-one deal here if, if you don’t mind, to kind of close out my list with Umberto Boccioni and Salvador Dali.

Now, you just mentioned Horse in Motion, which I think is Edward Muybridge, if I remember correctly. But, you know, showing the horse in motion frame by frame. And that makes a pretty natural transition, I think, to talking about Boccioni, because he did the sculpture called Unique Continuity of Forms in Space. And it’s that gold a sculpture of a figure in motion or multiple figures put together in motion combined and into one where the base is separated into two and it looks like someone taking a big step. They’re walking. I think a lot of people are familiar with that, but I think the idea of showing motion in sculpture whether it was something new. And Boccioni was always embracing the future trying to do those new things and so he’s embracing new technology, embracing the future, like all futurists were doing and he’s doing that through his art but he’s also writing and philosophizing. And you know that that Unique Continuity of Forms in Space, that sculpture, just the idea of multiple figures in motion combined into one, just a figure striding into the future is so representative of all of those future technologies that he was fascinated in that kind of form that basis for science fiction.

And so I think that that embrace of futurism, the idea of bringing humans and machines closer together and like loving all this new technology, how it’s going to change the world, I really think it is kind of the epitome of science fiction, some of the ideas behind it. So I wanted to include him. And then just real quickly, Dali, everybody knows Dali and his work.

But I just want to bring him up because he was fascinated by how art and science can intersect, how they do intersect. He had a lifelong interest in science and there’s a great quote that he loved to combine “the cold water of art with the warm water of science”, and I love that quote and it just kind of shows his thought processes and you can see that with a lot of his works, a lot of his paintings that are distorting time and space and like persistence of memory, the clocks melting, just dealing with future, dealing with time. And like I said, it’s maybe not the strongest connection with science fiction, but I feel like ah it’s worth mentioning.

Kyle, thoughts on either of those or do you have anybody else that you want to include or anything else that you want to add to the list?

Kyle:
No, I like I’m I’m out of lists, you beat me on that . . .

Tim:
Is that a contest?

Kyle:
I really like the inclusion of, I know you say like Dali is a tenuous connection, but, um, you know, the surrealists really were inspired by science, but they were not scientific. You know what I’m saying? And so in, in a very real way, they were I think science fiction just not on another world. They were trying to get at the subconscious and inspired by Freud and Jung and and persistence of memory if I recall correctly I think that was a bit inspired by Einstein and relativity because he was talking about like the camembert of you know time and stuff but I think that’s another interpretation of science fiction. And I think, just to end where we began, I think taking the broadest possible definition is always to our benefit.

I mean, when we look at and consider what art is, it encompasses so many different things.

Tim:
Absolutely.

Kyle:
And when we think of science fiction, anything creative and not literally true, but based on scientific principles and extrapolations of it, imaginative reinterpretations of these scientific ideas, I think is worth is worth making the connection to.

Because that’s how we spark ideas, especially for students. That’s how we show them how we make connections because it’s the unexpected connections like, you know, a man fighting a polar bear in space or a cowboy shooting a dinosaur that they stick in your head. Like that’s that’s how you get that image imprint imprinted that sticks with somebody years or in my case, decades later.

Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. I honestly could not say that any better. You were spectacular there. You should host a podcast. No, I really do appreciate you wrapping it up and putting some closing thoughts on there. So I will just leave it there because I feel like that was a great way to close the show. So Kyle, thank you for that explanation. Thank you for tying a bow on things. And thank you for for joining me with your list of artists today. Appreciate it.

Kyle:
Oh, thank you. I’m always happy to to ramble and geek out on some art history.

Tim:

That was a fun episode, and thank you to Kyle for coming on! I am not going to link to every single artist we mentioned in the show notes, but we will definitely make the cowboy hunting the allosaurus painting easy to find for you as well as anything else that seems important. So open up those show notes, find some links, and hopefully find some artists or art history stories that you can share with your students. Monster movies, fireworks, cyborgs, futurists, aliens, it’s all there for you.

Art Ed Radio is produced by the Art of Education University, with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. 

Also, if you know about any sci-fi artists that we missed, or ones that you think we should know about, I would love to hear them! Please email me at timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu and let me know!

You can also email me to submit any questions for the November mailbag, which I will be doing with Amanda Heyn that first week of November–we would love to hear from you–any questions you have about art teaching.

And one last thing–for Halloween, we are collecting art teacher horror stories. The last time we did this we had some incredible stories–exploding paint, inappropriate play-doh sculptures, some injuries, some vomit, and maybe the most fascinating teaching story I’ve ever heard, about a cooperating teacher actively sabotaging their student teacher’s lessons. And while I don’t think anyone has a story that rises to that level, I think we have all had something horrific happen to us in the art room at one time or another. So if you have a story–AND you can laugh about it now–we would love for you to share it! Email me or check out the art of ed community for a post that should be going up today. We want to hear your stories!