How can light shape both matter and meaning? Artist Alan Bogana and scientist Prof. Marilyne Andersen explore this question from two distinct yet intertwined perspectives — Bogana as an artist working within scientific environments, and Andersen as a researcher who integrates artistic thinking to deepen and communicate her scientific inquiries.
In this conversation, the two will discuss their collaborative journeys between art, optics, and chronobiology, reflecting on their experiences at EPFL and the creation of the Lighten Up! exhibition — now on display at the MIT Museum. The evening will include visual excerpts from Bogana’s light-based sculptural research and an exchange on how light can inspire both experimental science and artistic imagination.
Speakers
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Bio
Alan Bogana
ArtistAlan Bogana is a Swiss artist based in Geneva, Switzerland.
His practice spans a wide range of media, including installations, sculptures, time-based works, virtual realities, websites, and holograms.
Central to Bogana’s research is the exploration of light — both as subject and medium — and its complex interactions with living and non-living entities. His works poetically examine how technology, ecology, and evolving worldviews shape perception. He is particularly drawn to how technoscience cultures construct reality by amplifying, distorting, or narrowing our senses. This has led him to investigate as intimate light pollution, the retrofuturism of holograms, the utopia of computer simulations, the polarizing iconography of laser light and, more recently, the speculative birth of vision in living organisms.
He completed a Fine Arts Diploma with honours at the Geneva University of Art and Design in 2009 and a specialization in artistic research methodologies at the Zürich University of Art and Design in 2013.
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Bio
Marilyne Andersen
Director General
GESDATrained as a physicist, Marilyne Andersen has been conducting pioneering work at the interface between science and engineering, design, society and culture. A leading expert in the field of daylight in relation to neuroscience and psychophysics, Full Professor and Head of the LIPID lab at EPFL, she has been Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) from 2013 and 2018 and carried the development of the EPFL Fribourg associate campus (Smart Living Lab). She initiated and led from 2022 until 2025 a Swiss-wide research consortium on the energy transition with a focus on the future of living and working, involving 10 academic institutions and 30 partners from the public and private sectors.
Before joining EPFL, she was a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Visiting Professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) in California and at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She was a member of the Board of the global Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction from 2015 to 2024 and an expert to the Innovation Council of InnoSuisse from 2018 to 2024. She has also been on the Boards of the ArtTech and Culture du Bâti Foundations, and leverages her research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a start-up she co-founded that offers specialised consulting services on daylight and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants.
In parallel, she has been actively engaged in bridging the gap between art and science, notably since 2021 as co-curator of the exhibition entitled Lighten Up! On Biology and Time and as author of the Circa Diem immersive installation and policy-oriented fiction Droit au Jour ; these works have been on display in diverse venues such as the Seoul Biennale, the EPFL Pavilions, the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (mudac) in Lausanne, and the MIT Museum.
Program
- 5:30pm – Doors Open
- 6:00pm – Opening remarks
- 6:05pm – Conversation with Alan Bogana and Marilyne Andersen
- 6:45pm – Audience Q&A
- 7:00pm – Reception
- 8:00pm – End of Event
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
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Boston
5:30PM