Pi Day 2015

Featuring Laurie Anderson, Roy Wooten, Cano Ozgener, Mark Hanf, Joseph Hazelwood and Mark Rowan

9:26am to 2pm

Tickets: $20

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.” –Albert Einstein

Pi Day is a return to origins for OZ Arts, whose founding grew out of an epiphany that Cano Ozgener had, about the healing power of the arts, while he was ill with cancer. In art-making, Ozgener found spiritual and mental nourishment to balance his physical frailty, and a way to channel his lifelong fascination with math and numbers, especially pi. Ozgener also finds synesthesia compelling; the ability of some to sense that specific numbers have associated specific colors. Influenced by Sol LeWitt, who often used numbers, letters and geometric figures in his art, the works in Ozgener’s Pi Synesthesia series display varying shapes, and collections of shape, coded by the specific color that Ozgener has chosen for that numeral in the constant (3.1415…): yellow for 3, red for 1, brown for 4, red for 1, light blue for 5, and so on.

“The entire team is excited about celebrating Pi Day at OZ Arts,” said Tim Ozgener, CEO. “I am particularly proud to have my father’s Pi Synesthesia work and his views shared with our guests on this once-in-a-lifetime date. My dad’s genius has been expressed through business, math, and love—and now through art. We are fortunate to be able to share it with Nashville on 3.14.15.”

The day’s program begins at 10am. Following opening remarks, North Carolina-based, mathematics-inspired arts educator Mark Hanf will deliver a brief multimedia introduction to pi. Then, around 10:15am, OZ Arts will present a panel discussion in which a variety of luminaries will talk about the intersection of art and science in their work. Participants will include Hanf; Laurie Anderson, one of America’s most consistently daring creative pioneers and NASA’s first and only ever artist-in-residence; Roy Wooten, five-time Grammy-winning percussionist and composer; Cano Ozgener, visual artist and the founder of OZ Arts Nashville; and Mark Rowan, President of Griffin Technology, the industry-leading consumer electronics company headquartered in Nashville. Prior to Griffin, Rowan developed mixing consoles used on independent films, TV shows, and Hollywood blockbusters including Spiderman and Pearl Harbor.