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Topic/Description

Join us for a screening and discussion of the evo devo art science performance The Colony, a show about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. Informed by scientific research on ant colonies, The Colony ventures into speculative fiction and includes projected animations and imagery alongside live spoken and musical performance. Funny, poignant, enlightening, and just the right amount of strange, The Colony aims to kindle a sense of awe and understanding of our diverse biological world, while using the ant colony as a lens for understanding the ever-present challenge of human connection.

The screening will be accompanied by behind-the-scenes insights and discussion with The Colony composer, co-writer, animator, and performer Anna Lindemann and soprano and performer Lucy Fitz Gibbon. They will be joined by KLI fellow and myrmecologist Alice Laciny. 

Synopsis

The Colony is a new art-science performance about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. Informed by scientific research on ant colonies, The Colony ventures into speculative fiction and includes projected animations and imagery alongside live spoken and musical performance. For more about the performance visit www.thecolony.show.

Anna Lindemann’s Biographical note:

As both an artist and educator, Anna Lindemann is devoted to integrating art and science. Her work combines animation, music, video, and performance to explore the emerging field of Evo Devo (Evolutionary Developmental Biology). She graduated magna cum laude with honors from Yale with a BS in Biology and received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she was awarded the DeWitt Wallace Fellowship, the Ellis and Karin Chingos Graduate Fellowship, and the Rensselaer Graduate Fellowship. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Digital Media and Design Department at the University of Connecticut.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon’s Biographical Note 

Noted for her “dazzling, virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe), soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon is a dynamic musician who believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the multiplicity and diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. A graduate of Yale University, Ms. Fitz Gibbon has spent summers at the Tanglewood Music Center and Marlboro Music Festival. She is currently Director of the Vocal Program at Cornell University and on the faculties of Bard College-Conservatory’s Undergraduate and Graduate Vocal Arts Programs. For more information, see www.lucyfitzgibbon.com.

Alice Laciny’s Biographical Note  

Alice Laciny is a former PhD student at the Department of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna and completed her thesis in the course of the WWTF project “Voluntary self-sacrifice in exploding ants: a mechanism to defend coevolved microbiomes?” at the Vienna Natural History Museum. Her scientific interests include myrmecology, parasitology, Evo Devo, and caste-characterization of social insects. Her postdoctoral work at the KLI focuses on the influence of parasites on the morphology of ant hosts, and the overlapping aspects of ecology, evolution and ontogenetic development within host-parasite relationships.