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Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine

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Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine

Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine Our Mission is to support research and exhibitions that explore new relationships between the arts, and Joan F. ADMISSION IS FREE.

The Beall Center aspires to redefine the museum/gallery experience, both in content and form, formulating answers to the questions of how technology can be used effectively, not only to create new forms of art, but also to connect artist to artist, and artist with audience. Don Beall became Chairman of the Board of Rockwell Corporation in 1988. Don is an influential business leader, and he and his

wife Joan have been advocates, leaders and supporters of the arts in Southern California for many years. Upon his retirement, the Rockwell Corporation was in search of an opportunity to honor the Bealls' contributions to Rockwell and to Southern California. The School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine proposed the funding of a new facility, the Donald R. Beall Center for Art and Technology, an endeavor which addressed three principal aspects of his career and their enjoyment of life: business, engineering, and the arts. The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corporation in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan. Today major support is generously provided by the Beall Family Foundation. For more information on how you might support the Beall Center, please contact the Beall at (949)824-6206. Paid parking is available in the Mesa Structure (4000 Mesa Rd., Irvine, CA 92697) or the Student Center Structure (311 W Peltason Dr, Irvine, CA 92697)

04/24/2025

Jiayi Young’s “Whispers of the Unmade: Seeking Humanity in the Machine” explores the deprivation of love modern society faces despite living in a hyperconnected world via the internet. In 7th-century Japan, lovers exchanged tanka poems after a night of courtship. Young’s multimedia work features an inflatable tatami mat where tanka poems flow between human presence and their 7th-century companion across geography and time.

Jiayi Young with Ye Xiang, “Whispers of the Unmade: Seeking Humanity in the Machine”, 2025. TPU inflatable tatami mat, oncology mask, LED light, we**am, GenAI computation, computer monitor. (Credits: An earlier incarnation of the piece was featured during SLSA 2019 as part of a UCHRI-funded project developed in collaboration with Yogita Goyal, Coleman Dobson, Wenjie Cao, Ting-Yu Chang, and Ye Xiang) Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

04/17/2025

Yvette Granata and Alina Nazmeeva’s virtual reality experience, “Pre-Game” explores immersive and extended realities, machine environments, and feminist AI. “Pre-Game” is a mixed-reality installation set against the backdrop of American football culture. It deconstructs how digital bodies are produced in 3D animation and examines the digital body as a complex assemblage of data sets, skins, and motions.

Yvette Granata and Alina Nazmeeva, “Pre-Game”, 2024. Interactive XR, multimedia. Courtesy of the artist.

Photo by Yubo D**g.

04/10/2025

Catherine Griffiths’ “Irises” explores critical code and algorithmic aesthetics in the context of machine learning ethics. Her work explores the implications of autonomous decision-making systems that bear social and ethical consequences. The simulation reveals the internal structure of an AI algorithm as it processes data in real-time. The data points represent a real person being recognized by the algorithm, and their organization invites viewers to contemplate this disembodied authority.

Catherine Griffiths, “Irises”. Digital video (5:05) and interactive simulation. Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

04/03/2025

Nina Vroemen’s “Lessen in Time” is an installation featuring ten ceramic chemistry flasks leaking iodine, three acetate prints of nuclear waste, and a video. Her piece poses the question of whether or not a nuclear test is still a test if the effects are irreversible. Under the guise of military testing, over 2000 nuclear bombs have been detonated since 1945. Each ceramic flask represents 200 of those nuclear tests. The toxicity of such materials lessen in time, while others stand the test of time.

Nina Vroemen, “Lessen in Time”, 2023. Video (3:22), 3 acetate prints with lead sinkers, 10 low-fired ceramic chemistry flasks seeping iodine from the crazed glaze, paper scroll. Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

03/27/2025

“Krista-Leigh Davis’ video titled “No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom”, the sculptural costume “The Trauma Surrogates”, and the mixed media work “Choreographies for Capitalistic Ruins” uncover creative strategies that shift human and nonhuman relationships towards a more ecologically just world. “No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom” tells the story of a toxic abandoned mine and a quiet revolution for a damaged earth. “The Trauma Surrogates” is a wearable sculpture that appears in a section of the video. It displays the bioremediation abilities of certain fungi that can remove toxins and waste from contaminated land as well as render the emotional trauma of others inert. “Choreographies for Capitalistic Ruins” honors extremophiles, or microorganisms that thrive in environments inhospitable for humans. In this mixed media work, the extremophiles are reimagined as performers who use fancy footwork to clean up the land.

Krista-Leigh Davis,
“No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom”, 2023. Video (22:00).
”The Trauma Surrogates”, 2023. Wire, paper, cotton gauze, gelatin, tempura.
“Choreographies for Capitalistic Ruins”, 2023. Video; color, sound (3:00), sculpture; wooden mirror box. Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

03/20/2025

Rebecca Cummins’ “Shooting Stars”, 2007 is a series of digital prints that explore the sculptural and experimental possibilities of light and natural phenomena. Well-known Northwest glass artists donated their works which were then shot with a .22 rifle in Cummins’ basement. The glass works were photographed on impact using Harold Edgerton’s sound trigger with flash. Her work also includes a piece titled “A January day at the Arts Cafe, UC Irvine” from her “Cafe Gnomonics” series. In this series, the movement of shadows is traced at regular intervals throughout the day.

Rebecca Cummins,
(Left to right)
”Shooting Stars: Test Bottle #1”
”Shooting Stars: Sean Albert I”
”Shooting Stars: Sean Albert II”
”Shooting Stars: Dante Marioni”
”Shooting Stars: Benjamin Moore”
2007, digital prints. Credits to the artists, Mark Zirpel, Bob Edgerton, and Bob Patrick (Butch’s Gun Shop). Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

03/13/2025

Ava Aviva Avnisan’s “Specters of Home- Prologue”, 2024 is a video installation that explores settler colonialism. She utilizes her experience of being born a girl in a boy’s body and uses lidar imaging technology and generative AI animations to tell the story of a female time traveler’s return to her birthplace of Jerusalem. Through this piece, she uncovers the entanglements between personal and familial histories, the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, and the Palestinian Nakba.

Ava Aviva Avnisan, “Specters of Home- Prologue”, 2024. Single-channel video (9:40) with generative AI animations, archival footage, and 3D lidar scans. Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Yubo D**g.

01/17/2025

Our next exhibition opens next Saturday, January 25th. Join us for the opening reception from 2pm to 5pm!

Engaging the Margins presents the work of contemporary artists committed to experimenting in the marginal areas where artmaking, practice-based research, and scholarship intersect. Some of the selected artists stage their work in laboratory settings, some in studios, and some in wild or abandoned landscapes, but all interrogate the ways in which art is positioned in a culture that continues to marginalize artists working across disciplinary boundaries. The artists were among those featured in Jackson and LaFarge’s anthology Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art: Engaging the Margins (Brill, 2024), which will launch alongside the exhibition.

At 4pm, a performative lecture by Thomas DeFrantz with live sound design and electronic music by Quran Karriem—who is featured in Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art: Engaging the Margins—will take place at the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL). White Privilege engages white privilege as a discourse, casting the performative space as an opportunity to enlarge care and do better.
Images: “The Trauma Surrogates”, Segment 3 of No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom by Krista Davis, 2022. Still image from video.
Photo by Thomas DeFrantz; design by Philip Thompson.

01/03/2025

“Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty” is open for just two more days! Come visit the exhibition from 12-6pm today (January 3) or tomorrow (January 4).

Curator David Familian will be providing walkthroughs from 12-4pm today and tomorrow. Appointments are not necessary.

“Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty” explores the interconnected systems of our modern world. The exhibition includes five newly commissioned projects by resident artists of our Black Box Projects program. “Future Tense” is a part of Getty’s 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Learn more via the link in our bio or by visiting beallcenter.uci.edu/futuretense

Images by Will Tee Yang

12/05/2024

Future Tense will be extended through Saturday, January 4! Be sure to visit during our walkthroughs with curator David Familian on Saturday, December 14 and Saturday, January 4. Detailed holiday hours are below:

December 17–21: Open by Appointment (link in bio)
December 24–Jan 2: CLOSED
January 3-4: Open 12-6pm

Please email [email protected] with any questions, or visit the link in our bio to make a 1:1 walkthrough appointment.

12/04/2024

Last month, we were thrilled to invite Lucy HG Solomon of Cesar & Lois to host a workshop in the Beall Center gallery. Visitors of all ages had a blast exploring photosynthesis, learning about mycelial communication, and making art with local plant specimens. Many thanks to the fantastic STEAM ambassadors of CSUSM for facilitating such an invigorating afternoon!

Be sure to experience Cesar & Lois’s living sculpture, Being hyphaenated, before the close of our current show! The gallery is open Tues-Sat, 12-6pm. Check the website linked in our bio for updated hours.

-—About the Artwork-—

Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) is an artwork-as-ecosystem that performs complex interactions between the planet’s living beings. “Hyphae” references the mycelial filaments that fungi use to communicate. The sculpture has pods that host microorganisms which are connected to each other through respiration and are mediated by sensing technology. A vessel of water generates humidity in response to the CO2 produced by fungi and by viewers, triggering changes in bioelectric signaling within each pod. Embedded lights pulse in response to these changes, while an artificial intelligence studies bioelectric signals from each organism, looking for emergent behavioral patterns.

Artwork Information: Cesar & Lois, Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado), 2024. Mycelial networks, living organisms, wood growth rings, glass vessels, soil, water, bio-sensors, custom electronics, lights, iron supports, and visualized AI on monitor. 50 x 53 x 49 inches

Photos courtesy of Cesar & Lois.

Being hyphaenated (Ser hifanizado) was made possible with support from the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology, The Beall Family Foundation, and Getty. Institutional backing includes additional support from California State University San Marcos, UNICAMP, and FAPESP (2023/10966-1). The Treseder Lab at UC Irvine supported the project materially and through research contributions.

11/26/2024

Come see Laura Splan’s newly commissioned installation, Baroque Bodies (Sway), on view now as a feature of our current exhibition, “Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty.” Future Tense was produced in partnership with the 2024 Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Baroque Bodies (Sway) is an interactive installation exploring the impact of the environment on gene expression. Nurturing embodied sensations of micro and macro scales, the work features a projected 3D model of a nucleosome, a cluster of DNA and proteins that holds genetic information. Landscapes reflected on surfaces were Al-generated using text excerpts from
epigenetics research. Visitors’ movements influence views of the nucleosome. Multiple visitors’ movements share equal yet unpredictable “sway” over the view, just as environmental effects on gene expression compound in unpredictable ways. Movement also triggers sounds created with sonified data from simulations of chromatin (the material substance of the genetic chromosome).

Artwork Information: Laura Splan, Baroque Bodies (Sway), 2024. Interactive audio-visual installation including data-driven sound and 3D models with Al-generated imagery, 16 x 20 x 25 feet.

Photos by Will Tee Yang.

Baroque Bodies (Sway) was made possible with support from the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology, The Beall Family Foundation, Getty, Simons Foundation, EY Metaverse Lab, NEW INC, Onassis ONX, and Wave Farm MAAF. Collaborators include EY Metaverse Lab (Danielle McPhatter, Steven Dalton, Joseph Bradascio, Domhnaill Hernon), Hannah Lui Park (Principal Investigator, UC Irvine Park Lab) and Adam Lamson (Theoretical Biophysicist, Flatiron Institute).

11/25/2024

Here are the Beall Center’s Thanksgiving holiday hours !

Tuesday, November 26 12-6pm

Wednesday, November 27 12-6pm

Thursday, November 28 CLOSED
Friday, November 29 CLOSED
Saturday, November 20 CLOSED

11/19/2024

“Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty,” will be on view through December 14, 2024. Come visit us today!

Future Tense was produced in partnership with the 2024 Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

Photos by Will Tee Yang

Learn more at: beallcenter.uci.edu/futuretense, or visit the link in our bio.

Address

712 Arts Plaza, UC Irvine Campus
Irvine, CA
92697

Opening Hours

Tuesday	12pm - 6pm
Wednesday	12pm - 6pm
Thursday	12pm - 6pm
Friday	12pm - 6pm
Saturday	12pm - 6pm

Telephone

+19498246206

Website

http://beallcenter.uci.edu/

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