IMAGE: Dario Robleto, The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed, 2019. Two-channel HD video, color, sound installation. Running time: 51:00, looped. Commissioned by The Contemporary Austin. Installation view, The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn, The Contemporary Austin, Austin, Texas, 2019. Artwork © Dario Robleto. Courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Colin Doyle.

Dario Robleto and Marina Peterson in Conversation

Advance tickets are sold out. A limited number of tickets may be available at the door, on a first come, first serve basis.

Artist Dario Robleto discusses his newly commissioned video, The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed, on view in the exhibition The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn, with anthropologist Marina Peterson. Their cross-disciplinary conversation will span sonic ethnography, audio archaeology, and the last beating heart in the cosmos.
 
Dario Robleto (born 1972 in San Antonio, Texas) is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, citizen scientist, writer, and teacher. He lives and works in Houston. Recent solo exhibitions include the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (2018); The Menil Collection, Houston (2014); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014). In 2004 he was included in the Whitney Biennial, New York. His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media including Radiolab, Krista Tippet’s On Being, and The New York Times. In 2008, a ten-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2007) and the United States Artists Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship (2009). He has been a research fellow and artist-in-residence at institutions such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (2011); SETI Institute (2016–2017); and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017). From 2016 to 2019 he co-organized the International Conference on Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation, and Creativity in Cancun, Mexico, and Valencia, Spain. He is currently serving as an artist-in-residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering and as artist-at-large at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. In 2016 he was appointed as the Texas State Artist Laureate.

Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work explores sound, sensation, and urban infrastructures above and below ground, with research primarily in Los Angeles and Appalachia. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles and co-editor of Global Downtowns (with Gary W. McDonogh), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader, and Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art (both with Gretchen Bakke). Her forthcoming book, Atmospheric Noise: Aerial Matters in Los Angeles (Duke UP), engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. Also a cellist, her improvisational practice experiments with sonic textures and materialities.