Co-founder, Rubedo (London)

Rubedo are an art practice and a think tank founded in London in 2005 by Dr Vesna Petresin Robert and Laurent Paul Robert who have collaborated since 1994.

Vesna trained in architectural engineering and fine art and earned her Ph.D. in 2002 for a dissertation on temporal aspects of composition in architecture, art and music.

She has worked as an artist, theorist, performer and designer.  Having produced international competitions that led to artists taking over military barracks across countries of Eastern Europe, she continued using broadcasting as a medium of radical theory, directing online actions and short TV programmes.  She also worked with Hypersurface Inc, an office for speculative architecture founded at Columbia GSAPP exploring digital design and manufacturing methods (The Moebius House, Hypersurface Interfacing, Hypersurface Architecture: The Age of Electronic Baroque), as well as with contemporary British artists Mark Wallinger and Jane & Louise Wilson.

An academic since 1997, Vesna developed multi-disciplinary courses and has lectured in architecture, visual theory, film and design, most recently at the University of the Arts London and at the University College London.  A research fellow to Cecil Balmond, the Deputy Chairman of Arup since 2003, she produced innovation strategies and co-curated the acclaimed exhibition The Frontiers of Architecture at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, bridging aesthetics, engineering, acoustics and number theory.

Vesna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Her publications include Power Movement Multiplicity Transformation, Perception of Order and Ambiguity in Leonardo's Design Concepts, Solutions for a Sustainable City, Radicalising the Habitat, award-nominated Dimension of Time in Architectural Composition, and Colour in Visual Culture.  With Laurent-Paul Robert, she published Distructuring Utopias, The Double Moebius Strip, Trans_Form: Form Generation Using Particle Physics and Cybercity - an Urban Matrix of the Information Society.  With Cecil Balmond, she wrote Inform - a manifesto on emergent aesthetics, and is currently writing on Quantum Space and Sound.

About Rubedo

Research and Development
Combining experience in art, architecture, visual theory, music film, games, education, psychology, engineering and IT development, Rubedo also operate as a think-tank providing creative solutions.

Their research and development in adaptive environments, parametric modeling, digital manufacturing, acoustics and bionic design has contributed to patents and projects including Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, Ebbsfleet Landmark, Oscar-winning Hollywood films, AV midi devices and the world's first non-commercial satellite.

Artist Statement

The work of Rubedo crosses disciplinary boundaries, emerging as a single experience integrating sound, form, movement and narrative.

Using cutomised media - cross-modal networks, allows expressing the cross-modal synaesthetic nature of our senses.

The work takes arts outside the 'white cube' experience and explores sound in relation to space, time and user interaction.  It is supported by the technique of multimedia mapping, referred to as harmonography.

Rather than putting together a sum of specialist views, Rubedo aim at connecting senses, concepts and media.  Bridging a variety of disciplines allows us to resolve problems and express ideas at any scale.

Just as Renaissance thinkers were also artists and scientists bringing attention to universally shared humanistic values, so today, in the time after the digital revolution, the role of the artist may also be an innovator, philosopher, engineer, humanitarian and social reformer.

Rubedo have recently featured at Tate Modern, Vienna Secession (Vienna Art Week), Royal Academy of Arts (with Brian Eno and Tom Phillips RA), Royal Festival Hall (with Scanner), Casa da Musica, Venice Biennale, Beijing Biennale of Arcitecture, Cannes International Film Festival and the World Architecture Festival.