Dean’s Seminar Series to Welcome Jen Bervin
The seminar will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, February 13
If you think that the engineering laboratory is not a source for poetry, then think again. Artist and poet Jen Bervin’s conceptually driven work blurs the boundaries of disparate disciplines, weaving together art, writing, science, and life. Her most recent work, Silk Poems, features a nano-printed poem that can live inside the body.
As a part of the Northwestern Engineering Dean’s Seminar Series, Bervin will visit campus next week to discuss the motivation, research, and process behind Silk Poems.
Presented in partnership with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the seminar will take place at 4 p.m. Monday, February 13 in the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center’s ITW classroom.
Created at Tufts University’s Silk Lab, Silk Poems is a poem written in nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor that can be placed under a person’s skin. After consulting with more than 30 international nanotechnology and biomedical labs, textile archives, medical libraries, and sericulture sites, Bervin fabricated a silk film with a poem written in a six-character chain that corresponds to human DNA.
A SETI Institute artist in residence, Bervin has received several awards and honors, including The Rauschenberg Residency and a Creative Capital Grant. Her work has been exhibited at the Des Moines Art Center, BRIC, Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University, MASS MoCA, MCA Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Walker Art Center. She has also published nine books in addition to the forthcoming Silk Poems, which will be published by Nightboat Books in fall 2017.