I am a physicist, engineer and multimedia artist, currently a staff researcher at the University of Chicago (James Franck Institute’s Jaeger Lab). I am interested in how patterns and behaviors self-organize in nature, and I use this knowledge in robotics and art. In my scientific research, through soft material mechanics and dynamical systems, I develop new self-organizing and adaptable robots with behaviours at the cross of materials, swarming and modular systems. In my art work, I explore processes that highlights a connection in the emergence of natural and creative forms through live performance and installation. In Shapes of Emergence, I develop audio-visual immersive narratives, with real-time projections of visual physics experiments, where I use a robotic 5-axis camera stage that I have designed and build for the control of camera movement in live.

I earned a PhD in physics from Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and did post-doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University. I was awarded a CAMIT grant from the council for the art at MIT in 2018 and was an artist in residence at MANA Contemporary’s High Concept Labs in Chicago from Feb. 2019 to Dec. 2020. In 2021, I was invited for a residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). There I taught my class “The physics of Shapes, from Nature to the Hand”, an hybrid lectures and studio class, and was curating SAIC’s Conversation on Art and Science around the intersection of patterns physics, design and art.

CV 

You can contact me by email at saintyves@uchicago.edu