Cristina Albu

When thinking of art, we may envision an artist creating a painting, a musician, perhaps even a dancer. Cristina Albu is proving art transcends those boundaries, studying ways in which art can be intertwined with science and technology. She is an established art historian and currently an associate professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she feels she has achieved her greatest accomplishment, training future artists, historians, and discerning visual thinkers. She believes art helps us see history through a different lens, discover new ways to engage with our present surroundings, and imagine alternative views of the future. This is what she aims to give to her students, by teaching them to use art to raise questions about our world because art in its essence is disruptive.

While her passion lies within the arts, she is fond of exploring its intersections with science. This may partially be attributed to her mother’s study of physics and her wondrous observations of nature . She did not have a traditional trajectory as an art historian which may in fact be her biggest asset, having enabled her to look outside the box and challenge traditional methods. When she began her journey as a historian of contemporary art in 2005, it was a growing field as more and more scholars were starting to chart the trajectories of present art rather than focus on preceding art tendencies. Albu investigates how contemporary artists are revealing and expanding the workings of the embodied mind.

She is currently writing a book that offers a genealogy of art practices based on electroencephalography (EEG). Be they performances, installations, or participatory works, these practices modulate brainwave oscillations and call attention to the entanglement of our minds in broader biological, cultural, and social webs. In the book, Albu examines how artists are inquiring into the synchronous relations that can be established between the brainwaves of multiple art participants concomitantly experiencing sounds and images modeled by their mental states. Significantly, she focuses primarily on women artists who have created such artworks. This is a sharp move, a chip at the disproportionate access that women in art receive, something she passionately explains still occurs in art today.It is a means of showing that women artists have often embraced risk, envisioning alternative uses of technology and posing research questions otherwise neglected by scientists.

As Albu explains, women artists still need to combat limited exposure and continue to go against gender biases while developing transdisciplinary collaborations. She also states that new media art projects have yet to acquire a more prominent presence in art museums, most of which are not fully prepared for the variability and unpredictability involved in the display of such works. She believes the humanities are increasingly marginalized and instrumententalized in universities indicating that a significant number of art history programs have been cut despite an increased need for looking at visual production through  critical lens. Even when areas of study in the humanities are preserved , their role is often defined primarily in terms of enhancing skills needed for training in other disciplines. Albu’s work calls for pushing past these limitations, expanding the idea of what art is and can do, proving that art is forever evolving by engaging with existing social, technological, and scientific challenges.