Tabula Rasa

Our 2024 commission is Tabula Rasa, a stop-motion animation by the cross-disciplinary artist Ezra Wube, which explores experiences of consciousness based on interviews with scientists at the Zuckerman Institute and with members of the local community.

Tabula Rasa, stop-motion animation, acrylic paint, foam board on wood panel, 5', 2024

Ezra Wube (born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in New York. His pieces encompass video, drawing, painting, and installations. His work explores experiences of mobility, the malleability of time and place, and the dialogical tensions between "here" and "there", a confluence of prior and current influences on social idealism, pluralism, and autonomy.

Members of the community contribute their own ideas and drawings, which were later incorporated into the final stop-motion animation.

Tabula Rasa was conceived as a collaborative art project. The artist invited residents from the community and students and staff from the Zuckerman Institute to answer the question, “What do memory and consciousness mean to you?” The recorded, written, and drawn responses were then painted and animated on top of scenes of neural activity. These still images were edited together along with participants' interviews, sound effects, and AI voice over. Participants at our Saturday Science program and members of the A. Philip Randolph Older Adult Center were among those who contributed to the project.
 

Ezra drew inspiration from numerous conversations with Zuckerman researchers.

Much of the inspiration for Tabula Rasa came from the artist’s interactions with scientists at the Zuckerman Institute, including Eunji Kong of the Losonczy Lab; Becka Stecky and Dianne-Lee Ferguson of the Marlin Lab; Pia O’Neill and Erica Rodriguez of the Salzman Lab; Pegah Kassraian Fard of the Siegelbaum Lab; Sharon Su and Andrew Po Fung Liu of the Behnia Lab; Nikolaus Kriegeskorte of the Kriegeskorte Visual Inference Lab; and Spyros Mylonas of the NSF AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence.

Ezra Wube’s work advances the mission of the Zuckerman Institute to help make science more accessible and interdisciplinary by breaking out from the expectations of traditional scientific programming. 

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Learn about our work with previous Artists in the Education Lab: Sleepyfoot? (2024) Damali Abrams (2023) Dister Rondon (2021) and Ivan Forde (2020).

To get involved, tell us your ideas, or find out more, email us at [email protected].