Palissy’s Lost Grotto: From the Archive to the Virtual

Talk by Kelley O’Brien and Luis Rodríguez-Rincón

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

4:30pm

VCAM Screening Room

Join Assistant Professor of Spanish Luis Rodríguez-Rincón and Tuttle Creative Resident Kelley O’Brien, Assistant Professor in New Media and Design at UNC Greensboro, as they discuss their project: 

Bernard Palissy’s sixteenth-century ceramic grotto was an architectural marvel that combined novel ceramic and enameling techniques with a proto-scientific desire to recreate nature forms and textures. With only fragments remaining of his so-called “rustique” grotto, we are left today with just the words of Palissy to guide us through his ceramic rendering of a natural environment.

Our project, Generative Waters, seeks to translate Palissy’s writings on the grotto from French into English and then produce a digital immersive environment that retranslates Palissy’s text into textured surfaces, sounds, and images both digitally modeled and archival. Our aim is not to recreate Palissy’s grotto like his imitators of the nineteenth-century, but rather to create linguistic, conceptual, and visual frameworks for exploring connections between nature and art as a reciprocal conversation between the sixteenth century and the present.

Our talk will introduce our team (specifically Tuttle Fellow, Kelley O'Brien) and discuss the history of our collaboration as well as the current progress and goals of the grotto model.

Luis Rodríguez-Rincón is a comparative scholar of the Renaissance whose interests lie at the intersection of literary studies and the history of science in the early modern period. Currently Assistant Professor of Spanish at Haverford College, he has published work on the grotto as a literary topos as well as on the function of pagan myths as nature allegories in the poetry of early modern Europe.

Kelley O’Brien is an artist and researcher exploring the overlaps of natural and human-made ecosystems through immersive video, digitally mediated sculptures and soundscapes. As Assistant Professor of New Media and Design at the University of North Carolina Greensboro; she has exhibited internationally two immersive installations exploring the domination, curation, and pollution of “natural” environments by human actors.

Sponsored by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities’ Tuttle Creative Residencies Program and the Department of Spanish.