Art and biology may seem like an unlikely combination, but blending these two disciplines is at the heart of my creative work. I combine digital and stop-motion animation, live and electronic music, video, and performance to explore the emerging field of Evo Devo (Evolutionary and Developmental Biology). I call myself an Evo Devo Artist.
My work uses digital media to explore a variety of Evo Devo stories, to visualize biological processes in novel ways, and to underscore the emotional dimensions of scientific research. My art-science performance The Colony investigates the evolution of social life in both ants and people. In my short animated film Beetle Bluffs, I bring natural history museum specimens to life in order to illuminate the evolution of beetle mimicry. My art-science performance Theory of Flight delves into the genetic mechanisms of feather development, evolutionary theories of flight, and processes of regenerative limbs and transgenics. In Theory of Flight and my multimedia work Bird Brain, I use pasta, buttons, yarn, and bits of lace to visualize biological processes: a foreign microscopic world beyond human perception becomes approachable when animated with familiar objects.
My work is also invested in examining the human emotion and subjectivity behind scientific research. While grounded in scientific research, my work ventures into the realms of speculative fiction and fantasy. In Theory of Flight, an emotional, Icarus-like passion for flight drives a scientist’s ambitious and increasingly reckless experiments. Scientists in Bird Brain begin to mimic their subjects of investigation as they exhibit flocking behavior. In Beetle Bluffs, archival lantern slides and photographic portraits show the aging of scientist and curator P.J. Darlington alongside the stories of the beetles he studies. The Colony uses the ant colony as a lens for understanding the ever-present challenge of human connection and the paradox of acute loneliness in a world more connected than ever.
But biology is not just the thematic content of my work. I also use biological processes as a model for my own creative process. For example, I created the electronic music textures in several of my compositions — including the music for The Colony, Beetle Bluffs, Theory of Flight, Winged One, Bird Brain, and Where do you come from little seedling? — using algorithms based on biological development that I developed in the Matlab technical computing environment.
I believe that the combination of art and biology can spark curiosity in diverse audiences, allowing them to think and see in new ways. To that end, I seek to present my work at a wide range of venues. My Evo Devo Art has been featured at black box theaters, planetariums, galleries, digital arts conferences, concert halls, biology conferences, film festivals, classrooms from elementary schools to universities, scholarly publications, and natural history museums.
Short Biography
Anna Lindemann calls herself an Evo Devo Artist. As both an artist and educator, she is devoted to integrating art and science. Her work as a filmmaker, composer, animator, storyteller, and performer explores the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo Devo). She graduated from Yale with a BS in Biology and received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Anna is currently Associate Professor in the Digital Media & Design department at the University of Connecticut where she has pioneered courses integrating art and science.
Long Biography
Anna Lindemann's work integrates multi-disciplinary art and biology. She combines digital and stop-motion animation, live and electronic music, video, and performance to explore the emerging field of Evo Devo (Evolutionary Developmental Biology).
While Anna has always taken inspiration from nature — her first piano compositions written when she was eight to twelve were pieces about insects and forest animals — her interest in biology became fully developed as a student at Yale, where she graduated magna cum laude with honors with a BS in Biology. While at Yale, she worked for two and a half years in an Evo Devo lab. She received the Edgar J. Boell Prize for her thesis research on genes involved in the patterning of wing eyespots during butterfly development, and was a first co-author on a paper on butterfly wing patterning published in PLoS One. She became enthralled by the stories that the field is uncovering, by the awe-inspiring and baffling processes that make single cells grow into flies or butterflies or birds or humans. Anna wanted to share these stories with a wider audience, and she felt that animation, music, and performance would allow her to do just that. Wanting to forge a path as an Evo Devo Artist, Anna pursued an MFA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she was awarded the DeWitt Wallace Fellowship, the Ellis and Karin Chingos Graduate Fellowship, and the Rensselaer Graduate Fellowship. The unique program in integrated electronic arts at RPI, and the opportunity to work closely with faculty involved in BioArt, supported her development as an artist exploring biological systems using a range of digital media.
Anna’s work as an Evo Devo Artist includes the art-science performances The Colony and Theory of Flight and the animated short Beetle Bluffs. These and other works have been featured internationally at such venues as the Imagine Science Film Festival, New York, NY; International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Vancouver, Canada and Barcelona, Spain; KLI Institute for Theoretical Biology, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS); The State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia; ATLAS Center for Media, Art and Performance, University of Colorado, Boulder; EvoMUSART, Parma, Italy; SCINEMA International Film Festival, venues across Australia; Guerilla Underground virtual performance series by Guerilla Opera; the Joint Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the Entomological Society of Canada, and the Entomological Society of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Istanbul Fringe Festival hybrid festival; the Entertaining Science Series at Cornelia Street Café, New York, NY; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; USS Constitution Museum, Boston, MA; MATA Festival, New York, NY; Ho Tung Planetarium and Visualization Lab, Colgate University; Franke Program in the Science and Humanities, Yale University; the Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO; Bio:Fiction Science, Art & Film Festival, Vienna, Austria; Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, New York; and the Cantor Film Center, New York, NY. Anna’s work as an Evo Devo Artist has been featured in David Rothenberg’s book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (2011). Anna’s own writing has appeared in Leonardo, the leading art-science journal, as well as in SciArt Magazine, Women in Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science. She received the 2018 University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts’ Outstanding Research and Creative Practice Award and was awarded a 2019 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
Anna is committed to illuminating the intersections of art and science for students and audiences from young to old. Since 2017, Anna has pioneered classes integrating animation and science at the University of Connecticut (UConn), where she has facilitated art and animation students collaborating with more than 60 science and engineering faculty, staff, and students in the development of an interactive natural history exhibit and in the creation of animations for biology education, scientific research publications, and arts venues. Anna is currently co-PI on a four-year National Science Foundation grant designed to engage young people in environmental action through mentoring, geospatial technology, and digital media storytelling. From 2017-2020, Anna co-directed UConn’s AntU initiative, dedicated to developing interdisciplinary projects inspired by army ants and their guests. In 2020, Anna served as the Ellie Warburg Class of 1945 Visiting Artist at the Foote School in New Haven where she led workshops for 5th and 6th graders in which they created stop motion animations on a science theme. From 2012 to 2014 Anna worked with high school students in Boston to think creatively across the arts and sciences through a program called the ArtScience Prize. Anna has given talks about the integration of biology and art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Colgate University, Boston Architectural College, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Utah, University of Tennessee Knoxville, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Union College, Syracuse University, Cornell University, Parsons, and as part of the BioArt Talks @CBIS series at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Anna taught digital art as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University during the 2011-2012 academic year. She is currently Associate Professor in the Digital Media & Design Department at University of Connecticut.
Contact Anna
Email Anna to ask questions or for more information.
Anna is always eager to talk about Evo Devo Art!