Observations: A Conversation between João Alves and Anna Von Mertens

CELESTIAL SPHERES

Speakers: Anna Von Mertens, Artist; João Alves, University of Vienna

For this meeting of the Celestial Spheres seminar, artist Anna Von Mertens and astrophysicist João Alves will discuss their shared commitment to observation. Alves and Von Mertens met at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2018, where they felt an immediate kinship. Since then, through a continuing series of collaborative looking sessions and conversations about their respective practices of visual attention, they have directly catalyzed each other’s work. They have discovered that, at heart, they are both observational cosmologists, albeit working in very different mediums. In this session, they will discuss what they have learned from each other about observation, and what they have gained by looking together. 

About the speakers

Anna Von Mertens is a visual artist whose labor-intensive artworks use material intelligence as a lens for new perspectives on science and history. She is the author of the book Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (MIT Press 2024), which received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology grant. The book is an expansion of Von Mertens’s 2018-2019 exhibition at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She recently received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where she studied dark matter as a structuring force in our universe. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions including the Berkeley Art Museum; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery; and Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College.

João Alves is a Professor at the University of Vienna whose research explores the structure, evolution, and star-forming activity of the Milky Way. He focuses on the interstellar medium, molecular clouds, and the physical processes that govern how gas turns into stars. Alves led the team that discovered the Radcliffe Wave, a sinusoidal gas structure nearly 9000 light years long that links many of the molecular clouds near the Sun. His conversations with Von Mertens helped spark the insights that led to the discovery. Before joining the University of Vienna, Alves held positions at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich and served as Director of the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain. He is also the former Dean of the Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy at the University of Vienna and a Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.