Einstein's Brain

Einstein's Brain is a series of performances and experimental lectures that interrogate science, myths and rationality through the tropes of the academic symposium format, asking questions about the presentation and communication of scientific information at a moment of rampant public doubt and skepticism about the position of science in society today. This event is curated by Greg Ruffing, in conjunction with The People's Museum of Revisionist Natural Itstory.

Presenters:
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar discusses presenting at scientific poster sessions, and getting to know scientists and loneliness via the poster format.

Karl Anderson explores the pomp, circumstance, and implicit power narrative that is inherent to the lecture. By examining the current information landscape and the recent surge of online lecture series, he questions the authority of the lecture and the lecturer, while also looking towards the complicity of the audience.

Using art, film and literature references combined with recent scientific findings of water throughout our solar system, Jacob Koestler discusses the prospects of terraforming while remembering human impact in the now post-industrial Midwest. To imagine another terrestrial body as our own home away from home is to first see our own reflection through a telescope or naked eye.

Greg Ruffing weaves together grilled cheese sandwiches, snowfall patterns, birdsongs, cassette tapes, photography, capitalism, and popular myth to ask us whether or not the sleep of reason really does produce monsters.

Kate Sopko pulls together a conversation with media activists, story-tellers, social scientists and artists about the meaning of "narrative justice". With Dan Lyles, Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press.

Image: courtesy Greg Ruffing, as part of his contribution to this event.