Science-Art Collaboration 2

00:00:00 okay everyone we are gonna start our afternoon sessions so please take your seats I feel bad ending all of your amazing conversations but I have to so we are now entering the more kind of in not it's not more interesting but we're entering the phase of our conference where we're going to go into Phase two we've been in phase one for the last three panels now we're in Phase two because we're repeating the subject matters that we've been talking about

00:00:31 but with unique participants for each roundtable and so the participants you'll be seeing in this panel the next one and then tomorrow morning we're all gonna be talking about the same stuff but from new points of view evolving the same dialogue together but but with new things added in so I wanted to just plant this for you guys because we had a very nice kind of segue from last panel to this one Eric from the last panel mentioned that one way we could think

00:01:01 about mending the relationship between science and society and art in society is to is to think instead about how science and art could work together become stronger partners and then that would have a trickle-down effect into society and I think that's a really nice idea but this speaks directly to science art collaboration and in the ways that we can improve collaboration get collaboration to be a more regular thing identify the problems that we're having with collaboration maybe it's about jargon like we were just talking about

00:01:32 so I want to kind of plant that as a way for you guys to start out this because I think it really ties together nicely Zak is going to come up and introduce all the panelists so please raise your hand when he says your name Daniel Kohn Daniel is co-founder of the VIS group and was a founding the founding artist in residence at the Broad Institute for genomic research he currently serves as an artist in residence at the Center for epigenomic research at Albert Einstein

00:02:05 College of Medicine and manages a variety of other projects Edgar - Ari Oh Edgar is a professor and director of Princeton's program in engineering physics and director of prisons Princeton's electric propulsion and plasma dynamics laboratory tiga brain tiga is an artist and an environmental engineer whose work intersects ecology

00:02:37 engineering and the politics of emerging technologies she's a fellow at data and society and is an assistant professor of digital media at NYU Karen Engram karen is a crate creative director designer artist and author as well as a synthetic biology leap fellow she is also a co-organizer of the empiricists league a science cabaret based in Brooklyn Alexi Gambas Alexi is

00:03:11 a filmmaker and biologist whose interdisciplinary work aims at transforming the way science is communicated to the public through film and visual arts his work has been featured in The New York Times Forbes Nature and Ted to name a few Patricia Olynyk Patricia works Patricia's work explores art Science and Technology related themes that often examine the dialect of natural and artificial and cognition and affect she

00:03:42 also co-directs the New York laser program in New York and is a former chair of the Leonardo education and art form let's begin the round table okay on how do we how do we improve upon science our collaborations I think each and every one of you engages in science our collaborations either in your own work with yourself because you've dual degrees or with other people

00:04:19 okay thanks Julia well I you know it's something that I think a lot about what are the kinds of structures and scaffolding that support you know dialog between artists science scientists and humanists and writers and anybody who wants to be part of that technology and

00:04:49 they're I guess a couple of observations that I would make over the years having done this in different kinds of forums so when I was introduced as the co-director of the New York laser program which we do out of Ellen levy studio Ellen may be as my co-director on that we very purposely actually don't record any of our sessions because we're trying to keep the conversations as a

00:05:20 kind of testing ground and we think that it will from our observation that people have been a little bit more hesitant to speak up which of course if you're not really speaking up and you're really digging deep and you really may be saying something that you don't want to have on record this can really inhibit actually recording can actually really inhibit a kind of more exploratory kind of set of conversations but something that I was struck by with even some of Elizabeth de Moraes comments I'm you

00:05:51 know I'm quite institutionalize it's just a person at this point I really need the research institution to do my work I need the the maker facilities I need it's a kind of context now within that context there are many different ways to structure it and I think the University of Michigan which was already mentioned here today once actually has some very interesting programs that give rise to

00:06:22 the kinds of situations that then grow the essential questions that we need to be asking ourselves around these collaborations a lot of those situations involve agnostic spaces and I'm a big fan of the agnostic space the idea behind the agnostic space is that it it's owned by nobody but it serves everyone so when technology or programs aren't growing as nodes off of existing programs but rather they're coming from

00:06:54 the provost level and they're not really owned by anybody but they serve everyone then I find that the different disciplines tend to come together a little bit easier because the questions grow out of essential issues that are pertinent to everybody sitting at the table so I guess I would start by saying that the structure that brings together art science and technology that the structure itself can fundamentally shape the kinds of conversations that emerge

00:07:27 Daniel I I kind of fell into art science or into this dialogue I was I'm a painter and fifteen years ago I met a geneticist or he wrote to me and whatever we started a discussion and I realized that a lot of questions I had about my readings and physics which I would give physics for the light person and physics and philosophy that probably

00:07:57 a lot of us have read and whether I could better understand some of those ideas that I found difficult to understand by engaging with this geneticist and maybe that genetics was sort of poised to be the physics of the 21st century in terms of its role in society but I also I think I rushed into that breach because I've always been very uncomfortable in the art world and I um excuse me for all the artists in the

00:08:29 room but I often get bored with talking to other artists because we end up talking about the materiality of our practices in ways that are you know our galleries and if we're lucky our pigments and if we're really lucky we might give each other critiques but rarely and I found that when I engage with scientists we had none of that in common and so the only things we could actually talk about were the meta structures that the things that are common to all of us which are the culture in which we are and the kinds of inquiries were interested in and so I've

00:09:00 often positioned myself sort of as an outsider to a lot of places and I think so one of the things that I mmm I could have spent a lot of time talking to you all last night as I was having a hard time sleeping but one of the things that really came up was the role of failure in trying to collaborate and the role of madness and I often found myself as a sole artist in an institution of which grew to 1500 people or the road

00:09:31 institute that I never knew if I was totally crazy or a visionary or an idiot you know like it was very hard to understand what my position was and so I think there there's something that would be interesting to talk about is the role of the ways in which in the different communities were part of we have methods for validation for the kinds of

00:10:01 knowledge that we produce and as we move between disciplines those kind of break down and so I'm sort of curious with other people in around the table but also in the room in terms of your experiences and your your ideas for solutions how do we start to build communal mechanisms for locating ourselves so whether they be ways of sort of creating a map of the art science activities that happen in different cities was something I've been

00:10:32 really interested in doing in New York but I feel like we we need to find mechanisms to you understand our relative positions like at one point I when I would I think two or three years after I was at the broad list I found this book that David Edwards had written about called art science in the post Google generation or something like that and it was the first time I read something I thought I was kind of crazy and on the fringe and I read something that gave me a context for understanding what I might

00:11:05 be involved in and the idea that I might have had this intuitive leap and I might take 10 years to realize it in anyway and to have so few stories was really really profoundly useful and I think that's a lot of us are wondering as we make these leaps like am I crazy or why am I doing this and there's actually an emergent moment where we're a lot of us are doing and I'm just curious to what are these what are the mechanisms we

00:11:35 have to understand that it's actually you know like I often see my ideas on other people's faces you know like like people are constantly using my ideas they're not my ideas you know they're they're the emergent ideas and so I'm curious how to you know that's my question sort of further from the space of collaboration how do we because it's actually very hard to I found I usually say I've spent 15 years failing at collaborating and I think to some degree it's really true but it there have been

00:12:05 really creative failures I've have a whole body of work that came out of it and I've really engaged with scientists in very interesting ways and in ways that which I think we're bi-directional but so I guess that's one thing I'd like to throw out and the other one is I know this is an art science space or conference but the thing that always comes up for me is that's just one access that we have chosen to explore

00:12:37 because we are either artists or scientists but what to me is really interesting is this intra whether you call it trans or intra or this space in between all of our disciplines which allow us to post questions come out of arc we know we've talked everybody has kind of talked about this space and is that what are the advantages of keeping that an art science collaborative space and what are the disadvantages or what might be gained by allowing anthropologists of science into the room or historians or economists or you know what how does the

00:13:09 discussion around the table change as you release those boundaries completely stop yeah I just want to kind of go on the city of space so I'm a geneticist actually just to go off what Daniel was say I'm a geneticist with parents that are both artists my dad's a painter and and my mom's a filmmaker and I did my PhD at Rockefeller and I was very interested basically that during my

00:13:41 training as a PhD you know as a scientist I found that the space and being in a laboratory really enabled me to think about artistic endeavors and it was actually that experience that brought me into the world of filmmaking so now you know it's it's hard to define and start to hear yourself being defined in a certain way as a I guess I'm a biologist retired at a young age and became a filmmaker but I was working on on on vision I was working on fruit

00:14:12 flies first in Michael young's lab that just received a Nobel Prize and then went on to to the stellar lab at Rockefeller and I found that actually the the work that I was doing was very amenable to two narratives into to kind of engaging with with artists and and I guess for me the being in that context is what led me to to actually make that leap although I would oftentimes not call it a leap because I feel that a lot of people when you're being interviewed or discussed your journey everybody

00:14:43 always says you know how did you transition from one field to the other but I never I don't think about it that way I think about it as kind of a natural progression from you know from being a geneticist to now being a filmmaker and still okay and thinking about those same ideas about how to you know how to visualize science how to create stories about science and things that pertain as much to the research world as as they do to the film world and I find that there's a lot of similarities between between

00:15:14 those worlds in terms of the importance of the institution in enabling the work most of what I did started as a PhD student I was able to start a film series that Rockefeller and bring scientists and you know polymers and many people to really engage in how they thought about science and in media and especially in in film and I had a particular interest in fiction actually and thinking about the portrayal of science and scientists and how to create films that were about accurate science

00:15:47 compelling science but also told stories and this is a little bit the mission of the sloan foundation that was mentioned over the last few days but it was that environment that led me to to create and to make my first films but then I left that institutional world and I created my own nonprofit organization which is a film festival that happens here in New York called imagined science and that just celebrated its tenth year that started at Rockefeller ten years ago and now what I find myself doing is with

00:16:17 this institution we go back to universities and the universities have become the venues in which we actually show the films and and my career as a filmmaker I find that I find that the academic institutions and the conferences that I used to attend as a graduate student are the places that receive me and you know where I used to have a poster you know in the middle of like a Hilton lobby I find myself going back there and and showing my film and

00:16:48 it's been a real thrill to be able to go back and kind of repurpose these spaces that are that are used for scientific talks and conferences and go back there with artistic projects which I think are happening and we can probably talk about that a little bit more over the next over the next hour so I guess that's my experience has been that I've the Institute I've almost left the academic world to go back to it and now I you know I teach at NYU and I and I find myself kind of interfacing with those worlds

00:17:18 but there was a step where in which I had to kind of push myself out of there but I will say that speaking about this overall art science collaborations and I remember yesterday there was talk about you know two artists enable scientists is the exchange mutual I would say that um it's important not to necessarily refer to it as a switch or as a leap but but I find that those two worlds are very similar in processes and and you know and every scientist has an artistic

00:17:50 kind of chord in them so so I think it's kind of trying to find that middle ground between those two worlds and it's not always necessarily about the collaborative process but it's also about what you know what you're trying to and in my case it's a lot about the narrative and the story that I want to say and then based on that I'll I'll engage with different types of artists and visual scientists and filmmakers and use these different artistic approaches to to answer a question as I would answer in in in a science lab surround

00:18:26 well my background is environmental engineering and I worked for a number of years in Australia in this field and you know spend a lot of time doing urban design developing storm water and water infrastructures in the context of cities and new housing developments and I got really frustrated with working in this industry and also like coming through an engineering education where there was not a lot of opportunities to ask questions about the narratives that are driving these fields politics who's

00:18:59 funding research why we framed technologies through this like solution ISM perspective and through stories as if like technology's going to solve these problems which are inherently political social economic and this is something that you know I think in the u.s. is you know amplified in an insane way right now by the Silicon Valley and I feel like not for me the reason why I now primarily work as an artist but also as an academic so I also teach a lot of

00:19:30 media arts and computational arts and way.you so what motivated me to leave the fields of engineering and like explore these technologies and these there's you know ways of engaging with the world but from an artistic context in the context of galleries and so forth is because I didn't find a space for that in in my work as an engineer and in engineering education I think this is something that is hugely problematic so I guess I'm going to speak to this more from a perspective of practices that are

00:20:03 sort of in-between engineering design art I mean we like use a lot of labels I don't know if it matters so much what you want to call it but I do think there's like you know I do think in terms of some of the really really thorny problems we're facing that it's so critical that we find ways to get a better language for you know the culture and political context in which technologies are developed and the agendas which they serve so my work

00:20:35 attempts to address this it's often like public experiments online or it often involves participation for example one of my recent works is sort of like a public demonstration of how fitness trackers fail and how you can spoof them and how you can although your own fitness data so that you can take advantage of insurance discounts and health discounts and all of these things that are available to you and so this project is about telling a story about

00:21:05 how these technologies representing like they they're come they have an agenda and how that they can fail right and that you know an everyday person can kind of try to reverse engineer and understand you know what does a step look like from the point of view of a tracker and their fall out what is this story about trackers being representative of health like it's such a narrow view of what health is right that serves the insurance industry that is promoting this so this you know exists as a website is

00:21:37 it we use the language of the Silicon Valley to kind of invite people into thinking critically about data thinking critically about what it means to quantify the body quantify health in this way what's left out right who is left out in this in these sorts of situations another work recently that I did just to give some sort of context what I'm saying takes the Siri is a smell based dating service right so we actually my

00:22:10 collaborator is here over sitting over there but we launched a service that allowed people to sign up we had a few hundred people sign up in New York City and asked each to wear a t-shirt for three days and send us back their shirts and then they only got 10 samples anonymous samples randomly from the group from which they then chose who they would like to meet based on the smell of the body odor and our website would then connects you via email if

00:22:40 there was a mutual match between the participants and yes people went on dates and yes relationships did come out of it but you know the project really did provoke an extrordinary conversation about the role of smell in attraction but also provoked this really extraordinary response from the press in terms of you know smell dating is the next big thing in dating you know we can extract value from body odor we can quantify it you know we can optimize

00:23:12 dating in this way that really kind of revealed to me the narrative again that you know through which technologies is kind of deployed but for me that was really interesting so we did talk to a lot of scientists it wasn't really a collaboration the scientists were kind of like well we can't really get involved with that because we don't know what who knows what's gonna happen but they weren't it was fabulous because they did really encourage us to you know we were like should we instruct our participants not to smoke not to eat garlic whatever and they were like no you do like let people

00:23:43 do what they want right that's part of the data in your in your body owner so it was really a way of inviting a public to questions that are unresolved in that field right and so people could then see for themselves we've got lots of emails from you know straight men who are like I matched with all men what does that mean you're asking me like maybe you need to think about that right so there was lots of uncertainty and humor and obviously questions raised rather than

00:24:16 questions answered I think so it was a great thing for art to do it's raised questions yeah exactly and I think for me it's about prodding for asking questions of what's missing what assumptions are being made like science totally emerges from a from a social context from a culture and I think art can really like I think as artists we are trained to kind of look at the stories being told and why certain assumptions being a made and so I think

00:24:48 in all fields it's about realizing that science doesn't have this monopoly on the production of knowledge right and it can take many different forms in terms of collaboration I think the challenge is you know most of us are like in institutional departments where if I talk to a science my research isn't really legible to how their research is assessed and vice versa I find in the u.s. actually this is a little bit better because research metrics seem to be a little bit more flexible in Australia but it's I think it's a massive challenge because it means that

00:25:20 collaborations like we're talking about today aren't really legible to the mechanisms or the institutions that support them so I think we all need to be trying to reshape our institutions and and make a space and make a metric for actually supporting this work so see ya it's just kind of summing up in my mind we all pretty much agree that having an institution behind you well may be difficult to work with and their

00:25:52 silos are actually very helpful that's where the money is oftentimes the money also could come from a scientific organization doing science outreach stuff that's pretty much where it's at we all agree we kind of need a neutral space to collaborate whether that space is virtual or physical there needs to be something neutral about it really interesting your point about not having things recorded maybe a collaborative space needs to be a safe space in that way where people do feel as freedom yesterday we were talking about types of

00:26:23 collaborations a taxonomy of collaborations which is an interesting idea to think about kind of the potentials of it but I'm wondering from from you guys you know what are you and Marc Roz and spoke to this a little bit but but what are the things which make collaborations you know successful in the way that when we look forward to our futures what do we hope the future of collaboration looks like is it always going to look like it looks right now or how can we make it look better

00:26:54 we talked about the space of to collaborate it might be interesting to we can enhance opportunities to connect first heard from people who spoke so far some wonderful examples of interfaces between how things you know evolved I would like to answer the original question by starting with a give me an example the thought experiment okay imagine all humans can see color between only green and yellow that's it you

00:27:25 cannot see anything else most likely what your eyes will show you also white because you scepters in your eye will mix the colors and give you white and black and there's no color so you see white yellow green and black that's it and we evolved that way and that's what we can see and then one day I invite you to my lab and I give you a pair of goggles put them on and bang you see the dark spectrum everything in color red blue

00:27:56 violet everything around us as an artist it's Justin if you were an artist who put those goggles on it might completely open up your world what I would like to say is that there are actually many such goggles today all around the world some of which are weeks old which opened up which to a scientist and I'm speaking as a physicist I have no clue but what can they expire in artists the disconnect there's a latency when these Anana talk about technology

00:28:27 only I think a lot of you were talking mostly about technology which i think is wonderful interface between I'm also technologist I believe in technology but I'm talking about the ability of science to provide tools that open up your perception as an artist that most artists are not aware of because it's also disconnect between the two communities that Daniel touched on you know artists talk about galleries and leaders and scientists talk about journals and graduate students so there's a disconnect and so I think one

00:28:59 of the questions I'd like to propose is is to find ways for these interfaces to exist so people can see those goggles yeah can one one way which I don't see much of at all as someone who has to go to confidence all the time New York City for example is known for its galleries and wonderful theaters and so on but people forget that on a short week in New York City there are at least 12 scientific conferences being held you know here some of the tops scientific societies hold our conferences here I've

00:29:32 never seen an artist at my conference my physics conferences even in New York City why not bring people or have and the institution level first you will have the American Physical Society for example with NEA collaborate on some event that will bring the two together where first just wandering around a scientific conference as an artist and they're quite often specially Thaksin when I understand at all but there are sometimes technologies or imagine

00:30:04 microscope this is not example of seeing skill that before cannot be seen they are when an artist dr. michael microscope sees completely different world an abstracted world which can inspire him or her and that those tools can be seen that conferences there are what often not only actual tools but ideas of course there is a disconnect on terms of the convention you have to know mathematics you have to know physics to appreciate details but

00:30:34 sometimes that disconnect is actually advantageous because you see the aesthetic aspect of exposure so what I'm suggesting is that should be more institutionalized proactive bringing together of people because the latency between the time when an idea and science comes in and sometimes decades before the hardest picks up on it to accelerate this I think and also so I encourage a proactive attitude on on an individual level artists really skip

00:31:05 going go into these compasses and there's some dread involved but let me assure you it's not as much as a dread of some physicists I know going into gallery in Chelsea trying to make sense of what's going on on the walls so it's it's it's it takes going over the hill and once you do I think the whole world opens up it seems to me you essentially have done that experiment no but the broad institute as an artist you've done that experiment so what would you say was the was the outcome of having the

00:31:36 color more colors at it their visions so I think that were a little differently than that I I think I mean as artists we're trained to think about representation and I come from I'm French American I was born in India I'm sort of Jewish but not religious I grew up in France so for me there was always meaning was always context dependent and so and I think a lot of artists think

00:32:08 about the world in that way that they they are aware of this the tools they use in the reference representational systems that they use and so when I went to the broad I was curious about what are the tools that we use that we use today in science what does the space of science look like and I wasn't so much interested in painting cells or neurons or double helixes but I was interested in in you know for

00:32:38 example reading about physics you know strength theorists talk about maybe there are 10 dimensions but they're curled up in such a way that we can't understand I'll see them and I was like no way you know like I know that there are three dimensions I'm a good 3-dimensional thinker maybe four but this is crap you know and the first time I met so the the this colleague at the Broad who invited me he said well you can think of dimensionality in a different way you can think of information and so we

00:33:10 choose to chart space on three axes a point in space with three axes but if you want to chart its temperature you can add an axis and if you want to chart its fuzzyness you can have an axis in its color you can have an axis and all of a sudden it kind of blew my mind that this was a new tool it wasn't a I mean perhaps it's a sense of it was a set of goggles right it was a story that allowed me to look at the world very differently however I also brought my

00:33:43 you know I'm a highly trained visual thinker and I brought my tools and I was not so much interested in just learning from scientists although that had a huge part but I was also I had to count the hubris to think that I could also contribute to the discussion that helped them make better science that it would be a two-way street and so you know on the base level people talk a lot about the genome as a series of eight and four letters right and it's

00:34:14 very powerful because you can reduce this highly complex framework or this highly complex reality to something for which we have lots of tools right we've spent thousands of years analyzing texts and doing a neurology so we can manipulate this Bible with a high level of sophistication and but as you do that you forget that they're not letters right and it's not that that they represent other things so that they exist in three-dimensional space with

00:34:45 electric potentials and etc etc etc and so you know I I listened to this ACTG thing and I went well so you're you're using you know the idea that genes is sort of like a verb right it's sort of a word and at the time people talked a lot about junk DNA right so there was these sequences of code that were like words that were genes and then there was all the and in between them that was

00:35:16 chunked because it wasn't doing anything that we could tell as a visual artist I know that the negative space of things is essential to the thickness of things right so you know the first thing you know I learned in art classes was to a person who draws this is our universe right and anywhere you touch the universe you change the whole thing and so as I draw a cup I know that it's operating and it's changing the whole thing if I draw the outline or and so I

00:35:47 was like I don't believe it that's junk you know and it's not my saying that that changed the fact that people realize that junk DNA isn't it junk but I was able to kind of critically Intuit that that there was information there because it was it's a representation of space and that's one of the things that artists bring to science basically it's just an example you gave up precisely a different kind of goggles with an example I mean the goggle does not have to be colors or sound or it

00:36:18 can be ideas and you already happen to have an obstructed abstraction a band for abstraction which is wonderful one could it be inspired by a mathematical ideas and as a we share those thought we we give each other goggles and part of the part of the richness I think of transdisciplinary work is that and there's reasons for this I think that we increase Des Moines to the points of view on setting problem sense and we enrich them and that that echoes in our

00:36:49 culture at the moment that we're thinking and for lots of different reasons high dimensionally we're thinking in terms of Paulette the phonies we're thinking in terms of these integrative social systems and we need non domain-specific ways of addressing them so what if the residency had not been in like a science context what if it was a neutral space with microscopes technologies and all of these things

00:37:21 were disconnected from art and science and again I go back to for example the Duderstadt Center which is part of the University of Michigan I quote that because I'm I had taught there for eight years and the Duderstadt Center is completely agnostic run by the Provost serves everyone and open 24/7 but taking pen together and they have and they have virtual reality caves they

00:37:52 have 360 degrees stereoscopic screens we have 500 independent workstations for the experimentation with digital technology and you will be in there at 3 o'clock in the morning and the person to your left is is from biology the person to your right is from naval architecture and marine engineering the person behind you is from School of Medicine person over there is from Arts and Sciences right how does this shift the way that

00:38:24 we think about that connective tissue between us I realized I'm putting out a thought experiment we imagine this would shift the conversation because I've done residency's in scientific context as well and they're wonderful and this isn't in any way a criticism of that but I'm wondering if imagining this other space would provide us with an opportunity to ask a different set of questions I was thinking about the idea of space because I curated a speaker

00:38:57 series in Brooklyn called the empiricists League and what what we do is we get scientists and researchers and journalists to get on stage the same stage that comedians and musicians and people of a different sort of skill sets get on stage and talk about their work you know in it for 15 minutes and I think you know I've also been in the position where I've gone to as an artist gone to a conference where I didn't understand the jargon but I immersed myself in it this is because I was

00:39:27 involved in this I'm involved in the synthetic biology community and I think that it it takes it's a lot of effort as an artist to be immersed into a field of science a field of science like that because you have to you have to take in what's been said and be patient with yourself and understand that you'll you'll the jargon will become more familiar in time and then you have conversations with people and you and you kind of compare your jargon your mutual jargon and see if you can find

00:39:59 overlap so it's it's interesting process as an artist to be so closely intertwined with with a scientist you know I experienced this when I was working on the synthetic biology curriculum with Natalie Cole Dell and the amazing team that I worked on it with just kind of being quiet and listening to ideas come up and take notes and then the next time you have the conversation with them you understand a little bit more and you can you can and you said something about about observation I think that translation is a part of that as well

00:40:31 as an artist like your you observe what's happening you observe a process you you question it you think about how it's depicted visually because it is like a symbol and then you translate it into a piece of work or Grapher diagram or yeah just something that somebody else can build off of so yeah I want I wanted to come back to this idea of tools because I think that you know we've been talking a lot about the emphasis of you know kind of repurposing tools and using these tools

00:41:02 in different settings and neutral settings that the way I often think about you know accessing and infiltrating these these spaces or conferences is is also thinking a little bit more in my case and you know I have kind of a distorted world where a lot of my films are about animals and the way I kind of infiltrate these conferences is by kind of this anthropomorphic kind of entrance into these world so I made a my first film was about fruit flies because

00:41:32 I spent 10 years but then they were kind of my friends I spent 10 most of the time looking at fruit flies and imagining that I was kind of like Africa yes good like human size fly so I'll spare you guys with those dreams they appear in some of my movies but but the way I was able to access there was two ways one was through kind of taking a subject matter I'm very interested in this idea of animals as subject matters

00:42:05 in which you can you know you can create a film that has a kind of emerge of scientific information as well as kind of like a fictional representation and you can access these conferences you know like the Drosophila conferences that that attract thousands and thousands of people all around the world and I find that you know there's a lot about the synthesis of the tools but the way the way I kind of get into these worlds is through these model organisms or through the actual participants in this case scientists which I invite

00:42:37 scientists to be involved in fictional films so Stuart I think who has spoken or will speak uh Stuart Fierstein plays a 1920s professor of my key plays Thomas Hunt Morgan in the 1920s lab at Columbia but I I and then I had Leslie bull who works on smell Playa scientists in the 20s but by involving these scientists and art projects where they're not only passive advisors but are actually actually involved in the making of this project even though

00:43:09 there's a bit of resistance initially I find that I can access you know it's the same way as when you make a film and you want to get you know this actor well I try to get these scientists that are kind of the experts in their field to put them in a in a in the kind of leave their comfort zone and put them in these settings where they may be talking about their work but they may also be in a fictionalised setting so thank you this idea of tools is very important but the tools are evolving an incredible speed and I feel that the tools will

00:43:40 eventually it's you know it's like when you go to film school and they teach you about the latest cameras but ultimately all this will change and evolve so I think it's important to think about how the tools will enable these kind of ideas or whether it's also like a mathematical equation or an animal or and I find that for me the oldest scientific jargon that you were mentioning I find that there's a lot of ways of making parallels between these you know these kind of very abstract ideas and and make these parallels

00:44:11 between the lives of scientists and and you know what does it mean to study the genes that dictate color in a in a butterfly wing and how does that relate to to a person so I often times transpose or translate these ideas or these equations into people's lives and kind of find these relationships between between micro and macro so I think just to like put this out on the floor I think that you know we think a lot about tools and we think a lot about DIY spaces that have PCR machines and you

00:44:44 know all these tools but I think ultimately it's you know over the last hundreds of years it's it is this idea that that kind of motivates these collaborations and so like that you inverted the normal model and you're in scientists into an artistic space I think like maybe also in response to your observations like I would like to see more of that like what would it mean to have a scientist in residence at a museum or an art or an engineer in residence in an art context and I think

00:45:15 Olin College came up once in a in the prior panel but there's a really wonderful professor there Sarah hendren who is launching this so they recently have got some funding to do engineering placements into art engine art organizations for their students so yeah I mean yeah that's that's a great methodology you don't do genetics anymore no I don't I mean I I dabble in science when I work on a film because I get to actually come back and shadow

00:45:45 scientists and work in those environments and and I and I will say that back to your point it is hard to access these worlds and being a geneticist has helped me yeah it's it's a question I asked myself often is whether if I have inverted kind of the the experience and my background in terms of studying film and I think that um yeah that's a question that I there's a fundamental question I think we

00:46:16 touching on which is to be interesting we all agree that that there's a fundamental relationship between science and and an art and aesthetics these were beauty perception beauty science deals with truth since Plato - Heidegger people talk about truth and beauty being the same or fundamentally related so let's be all agree on that the fact of you're here believe in it and we're talking about the fact that how science can these goggles and those equations

00:46:46 can inspire artists but now both of you open up lectern the table almost and as it begs asking fundamental question can art fundamentally enhance science fundamental science it's a it's not clear to me right away I mean of course as an artist as a scientist I as a who loves art ya know but I'm not sure I'm not totally sure how as a scientist and perception

00:47:17 of of course on a fundamental level there is a looking for simple ideas simple equations we humans perceive beauty and simplicity as a whole movement in physics trying to unify things down to a simple single equation possibly and there's a people question whether there is a such a thing or whether such a funneling down to a single equation is indeed a true a true fundamental thing to do or reflection of

00:47:48 our aesthetic tendencies but my question the question would like to put forward is a to what extent art can inspire science and I think that the first thing to think about before we you know even address that a question is we first have to kind of demystify this idea that science is objective in Sciences you know it's always about striving for accuracy and I think you know when I approach any type of collaboration I'd love to mix to kind of work in this

00:48:18 middle ground between what is real and what is unreal and so I think you know what's important is to understand that there's a lot of subjectivity there's a lot of interpretation and you know and creating narratives when you're publishing papers that that shouldn't necessarily pollute or misconstrue the facts I think you know it actually enhances it in many ways and I think that is how I think arts art can really help the scientist is to think about you know how do we use

00:48:50 these tools and repurpose them or how do we think about these questions in different ways you know I have the story where when I was working on this film about fruit flies I created a by thorax fly that has four wings and I had many labs in New York that were involved in trying to generate this fly I had to be in these 18-degree chambers and it's very hard to make because they can't get out of the pupae and then suddenly we were shooting we were maybe like in the first week of shooting and somebody told us at that they had this by thoughts fly so we

00:49:22 went over to the lab we brought it in a petri dish in a taxi was like escorted and then we brought it on set we had like these huge cameras and ready to shoot and and it lived maybe for for a minute more but when I made the film I I had all these scientists that asked me how I generated this flight so I felt that the film had actually contributed because there was actually no video of this poor wing fly only these images that were made by Ed Lewis and a long time ago but um but anyway this is a

00:49:52 case where the film actually gave people ideas about trying to generate this flight but I think um yeah just a side note there I think that you know inherently artists are there also to kind of show the science is that the the information that they have the facts that they have the they can be used in other ways danger in what you first are completely agree with your scientists are full of the biases there could be somewhere on the on the spectrum of aesthetically

00:50:23 minded or not but they are all I have our biases its projected our work nebula but we teach our graduate students to one the right of paper if they see something not to tell it because you know make it sound more beautiful or more aesthetic or more poetic the other way around of course they won't fail to some extent but there's a danger in trying to inject status in in the practice of science that scientists will recall it we are taught to recall a edit so it's a I'm

00:50:54 not saying is a bad thing the experiment can be what a wonderful can be you know although the way we learn is through a narrative the way the way I think it's TEDx I agree with you is is it's a tricky line but the way we ingest information is by telling stories inherently whether it's facts you know whether it's experiments that we did in a chronological fashion or we you know we did experiments over six years but then we stream light into this paper then so you're inviting the physicists do are to tell story artistically in the

00:51:24 Physical Review Letters or oh no not artistically you have to tell a story in order to present your data but also powers of observation are very different between artists I mean I was just a Roger Molina's watering hole a couple of weeks ago at UT Dallas and there was someone there patrice legal who was working with an artist and they set up these large fluid tanks and he's a works in fluid dynamics and they were I believe I could be forgive me if this isn't entirely accurate but as I understand that this pool was tipping back and forth and they

00:51:55 were photographing waves with a very high-speed camera and through the observation of first of all through the setup and through the observation of these waves they discovered that certain parts of the wave formation itself are still on the surface of the water this is scientific discovery this is completely new scientific discovery so I think there are depending on the setup and though though the the lens through

00:52:27 which you observe phenomena I think this is something that artists bring to the table that it can be quite different another example former colleague of mine when we were working with particle and theoretical physicists ended up using the math from physics to visualize a boat on and it was it was a different interpretation of the math but the math was correct and he brought this back to the physicists and the physicists said holy cow the math is right but we never thought that we it could turn into a

00:52:58 form that looked like this this went back and fundamentally changed the research that was occurring in that that physics lab so I think there are occasions where the kind of interpretive lens through which an artist will look at mathematics and the ways in which an artist will actually observe phenomena can actually bring something quite unique to the table question for all of you and this is something I've been

00:53:29 wondering about Oh a lot of science art collaborations maybe 98% of them are started by artists scientists usually agree in the end yeah that was great I enjoyed that and maybe it added to their work maybe it reveals something about their work maybe they just liked it because it was fun we need the dating service right my question is does anybody have a problem with the fact that that's true that if that this world is is pretty much artist

00:54:01 initiated it is that problematic or not I don't really know if I haven't really necessarily found that to be true just because like as an artist I guess one of the one of the biggest the biggest projects that I worked on was like I said the curriculum and I ended up working on that because the scientists asked me to because I had made like a like a an artifact I made a diagram that explained a process and she saw it and was like this makes sense to me I think that this would be great for the book and we can

00:54:33 apply this to how we teach it you know and so I didn't actually actively seek out the collaboration with her I just made something and said here look at it you know and was open to Corrections and criticisms but I wanted to talk about something really quickly about the the notion of story because even within like the world of art and the world of science story can be jargony because I mean I worked in the marketing and advertising world and and they would they would just harp on the idea of story story story story and and what

00:55:06 when I think of story from that perspective it's like a crafted narrative that leads you to a specific outcome which is you know to purchase that's what it is and so but but when you're talking about science in term I mean I'm sorry story in terms of science you're looking at data and you're seeing what patterns emerged from the data you know and maybe you have an idea of what story you'd like to tell but I mean at least this is experience that I had when I was working with you know another

00:55:37 collaborator who's a scientist now and she was like I'm looking for the story I'm like what do you mean we have the story it's how do you know artists and scientists think alike or not not alike you know and she's like no I mean like the story like the the my new show the details like the patterns and I'm like oh story yeah I mean still I think Julia's point is is still another two-way street that's mostly these things are initiated

00:56:07 by artists perhaps one way to get the balance off on 98% or so to maybe 90% is to encourage scientists I know in mind to Duke art my University has a competition every year scientists are encouraged to make a picture or as graphic and submit it and the art of science yes why it's called a lot of science okay and and I've contributed to it I lost but I know colleagues won and we take it seriously so it all becomes an artist for a week and we and so that

00:56:38 could be things like this done at you know what residences are wonderful places to to practice these Tyson I think for a long time maybe that was true it i I think we're we're in an emergent space which maybe we tired of using that word but things are changing very fast and and there are more and more institutions that are trying to understand what's happening in the street sort of sort of so to speak and

00:57:08 that are trying to support it I was really fortunate to be the past two years in a conference organized by the National Academies called NACA the National Academies cake futures initiative which is originally a science-based interdisciplinary conference and two years ago they started inviting artists and designers and I know Roger was there Roger Molina was there and I think more and more these things are happening all over the place

00:57:38 and and in all sorts of different forms and I I think one of the okay the focus is shifting a little bit to okay well now we know that this is possible and and maybe now we can start tackling problems and I kind of wanted to come back to what Stewart had said you know we've found ways that in to interrogate we all interrogate the world and we're starting to see our relationship with it we've found out some things about our

00:58:09 relationship to and effects on the world that are problematic I mean I'm having now but that are problematic and that we we're going to need to address and I think a lot of our motivations come from different kinds of sense of a sense of urgency about what we can or could do in our siloed activity spaces and what we might be able to do by pooling efforts and points of view and I think there's so for example in the case of Naqvi last year we came up with this idea this

00:58:41 question does the ocean have memory and it's a silly question right of course the ocean does have memory well wait a minute you know and so what sutured what's nice is that knack see also has grants that follow the conference so we applied for sea grants and we're able to bring together 20 20 researchers from across oceans our fee the humanities and the arts to play and pose this question and we're kind of iterating this now and

00:59:12 it turns out that there's a lot of fruitful ways to pose that question and just in the articulation of the words and then in the articulations of our disciplines and so that would set off a different series of narratives for each of the it sets out chamber and ultimately what we're talking about is shifting and I guess that was one of the things I wanted to talk about the floor before we leave it or before we just open it to questions was we're in a space where we're starting to wonder about carrying right and a few years ago there was a art

00:59:45 science conference at MIT and Bruno Latour was one of the speakers of the keynotes and he said you know the science is in about global warming the real question is why don't we care you know and I'm gonna be working from now on this was real speaking about why we don't care about Gaia and I was kind of lone away by you know there's I think to some degree without trying to save the world we're all wondering about that question what can I do right now and the

01:00:16 reason that we're reaching beyond our disciplines has something to do with that is that the solution obviously we're this we're the cause of the problem so if we don't start acting differently and starting to find ways to care for this planet that we live on we're toast you know absolutely and I mean I talk to a lot of ecologists because I a lot of my work involves you know environmental research and intervention and I think that's a field actually where there's a huge amount of interest and work happening inviting

01:00:48 artists and designers into research projects because of this because you know this the those fields have struggled to get engagement and you know public discussion happening around the findings and and these very urgent problems that we all face and I'm both excited and terrified when the discourse changes and all of a sudden the artists are going to come in and solve their problems right but yeah I think perhaps this is there's not so much of an agenda to do this in physics but definitely

01:01:18 like in environment and ecology there is biggest part of what that represents we're actually coming out of it we're not going into each just into another and it's not just about going into the lab or coming to the studio it's actually going into our common Street or whatever we want to call it a common world and saying well we need to collaborate on this and it's no longer about just doing art about science or science about art I can see how the environment is a perfect perfect environment for it but what would be

01:01:49 another another discipline that would that would have such fraternity for I mean I think because of the way that science is taught it's so hard to see outside of these dominant Western narratives that we all just live and breathe because that's the way we're taught from literally like kindergarten right so an example that I've been talking about a lot with some friends is recent in apparently in the field of ecology they think that the way that birds evolved to have wings wasn't

01:02:21 anything about them getting like developing modes of transport but it was about an interface for attracting mates right so that the birds would perform and the wings get larger and it's about doing get attracting your whatever you know your partner and so I think this like this idea of effective ecology the narratives of ecology we think about it in a very functional sense right so you know wings were developed because you know organisms want to get around better or that there's an advantage to doing that or you know when an organism is

01:02:52 moving around it's looking for food and we we have this super anthropomorphic perspective on the way that we understand all systems and so I think understanding that effect is something that isn't also exclusively human is obviously something that the arts is really well-versed in and can completely then change narratives of how we understand the natural world that aren't necessarily in like traditional you know scientific I think those narratives are really ursula Heiser at the sustainability Institute at UCLA as an

01:03:25 echo critic and she's a highly highly critical of the kinds of narratives that were spinning around ecology today and says that they're highly problematic and we have to think of entirely new narratives to actually budge people forward and to think about futures with these changed environments that were soon to encounter but back to that idea of the narratives a one word that hasn't come into this conversation yet and I'd like to throw it out there is the word empathy because I teach in medical humanities prime the director of the

01:03:56 Graduate School of Art at Washington University in st. Louis and I've gotten some terrific grants to put together art science fellows groups one of them from the scandal eros Center for Entrepreneurship because I managed to convince them that the bringing together of artists scientists and humanists was in and of itself an entrepreneurial venture and I got a nice big grant that culminated with a symposium at UCLA but the in teaching predominantly pre-med students and showing them again focusing

01:04:28 not on the aesthetic qualities of the work as much as I'm focusing on the kinds of discourses that the work attaches itself to using medical practice contemporary medical practices both subject and object how is it that artists then extend or expand upon conversations about the AIDS pandemic or about disease and healing or about redesigning the human it's it's really changing the ways in which people going

01:04:58 through medicine training for to become either researchers or to go into clinical practice are really thinking about their practice and we know that there is significant data that states that empathy is extremely important for positive clinical outcomes and yet the average student who goes through Medical School over time loses empathy so they come in with a very high level of empathy and by the time they graduate from medical school they have virtually none and I think increasingly more and more

01:05:30 universities are requiring of their medical students to take medical humanities courses this has been one of the richest experiences on co-teaching with a wonderful science historian Rebecca miss Barger cultural historian and I'm just wondering you know that the one word that I keep coming back to in this course that I think I'm passing on to the med students is empathy and I'm wondering if anybody has seen by throwing that world out you didn't indeed open up my eyes to an answer to the question I posed artists

01:06:02 are better equipped in general of course to be they are humanists and in the sense that much more so on the average than scientists so how many scientists can build can build a nuclear bomb now imagine how dangerous if scientists can who can build nuclear bomb and I never had a poem so there is this ethical dimension that the artist is on on the average better equipped to bring into into this window so I think that you touched on a very important point one thing that arts can offer in data

01:06:33 science is this humanist view of the world that sometimes scientists can get locked in a locked out of I'm really connected between art and medicine because there's a lot of literature being published about that right now and I think it's we were talking about you know where the ripe territories for the stuff that's definitely one place so we want to open it up to the audience for questions now you know the drill and yeah we have we have about 20 minutes

01:07:04 for questions I have to make that point that I have done art that is actually science research and I discovered working with liquid formations that the physics of liquid formation correlate to biological information processes and a

01:07:34 prime example of my findings is that I discovered information process of the vertebrae I mean I can I don't know maybe I can put it out on the desk afterwards what do you think yes yes baby have a question is Panama let me just finish and it was so what shown and was also shown in ps1 one of those little emission invertebrates is

01:08:05 in a collection of the National Gallery in Austria another example of my findings is that I dripped green paste into red gesso and this mouse formation came out a science research verse you cried another paint splash okay and let

01:08:38 me say one more thing anyway spray can markings organisms I put them out there and they'll be out there when you want to talk okay but also my my website other dimension website deals with outer dimension reality reality and that is also research under the facts of other dimensions can I say something

01:09:16 I just want to mention because we're talking a lot about our practices and we have this initiative at imagine science which some of the people in the audience and participated were we're very interested in unplug unpublished data and very interested in data that kind of sits on computers especially video obviously because we and we try to just I was just kind of inspired by by these presentations these these images that we encourage scientists to actually give us

01:09:47 their data and presented in kind of cinematic setting and I think that has been an amazing way of getting scientists to feel that their research is being interpreted in a different way and having them actually be there and also talk about the data and we try not to over narrate or over kind of explain what the data is we just show it as if it was kind of like an experimental film from the from the 20s or something you know like where they used to show like the Percy Smith and the acrobatic fly or

01:10:17 the mites on cheese or these types of things and and we have this other competition back because I wanted to talk as film I feel it's also the relationship every art practice is has a different way of thinking about it but we get a lot of Sciences that are very enthusiastic about participating in film and when we do this collaboration at imagine science cuts symbiosis where we get scientists and filmmakers to collaborate usually the scientists are you know I mean I don't want to generalize but they tend to be the most enthusiastic they tend to open the labs

01:10:48 and and be very open to these kind of collaboration so I've found that if you have the right setting and the right organizations these kind of closeted scientist that feel that maybe some of their work is not meant to be used in other ways they just it opens it up and then we we almost get them to be so excited that they want to still continue working and you know under this year he was part of that symbiosis competition on them and we have this event called a lab meeting where midway through their the making of these films they talk

01:11:19 about the the process of it so I find that scientists actually they reject in the art community this kind of sense of of kind of new wave and an excitement where sometimes artists and again I'm generalizing and they have a little bit more of a blase or kind of in scientists they just they get really excited and I always prefer to show my films to scientists and film festivals is a very like a very specific environment where there's just a lot of pretentious whereas with scientists who's just get

01:11:49 like these inherent excitement about your point about taking data and information out of a context and put it in other context can be really enriching and artistic in in conferences or you can go if even if you are specialist you go to a session where you could be completely gibberish right and especially life scientist goes into a physical sciences or vice versa and that happened to be many times and I see I sit in the back of the room and I look at the view graphs when the view graphs become the because that is disconnected from their

01:12:21 context right completely visual right and there can be gorgeous I mean that can be absolutely beautiful to look at and I think this is a great exercise to take real data plots actually my office is decorated with what plots which are genders to most most everybody else but they are I assume there are beautiful to some extent but I think what you're doing is a wonderful thing was to take things out of context and let the visual part speak and I'm really happy to be

01:13:00 here I've been working in scientific concepts not solely but it interests me and recently I was at a event at National Academy of Sciences Alana's here but it wasn't her event and it was about gene editing and my next project is for an exhibition at NIH about transposons and how they're expressed in tulips and I found out that the tulip genome hasn't been sequenced so I asked this woman who works on rare diseases

01:13:31 you know I said you know why hasn't the to of genome been sequenced nobody can explain to me why except that it's very expensive and she said well you know it would be really big and we'd have to understand it and I said no I don't have to understand it and so my question is how with all of these issues there's not all scientists obviously but too many of them this idea that I would say I don't have to understand it it's very foreign to them and after the event there was you know time to socialize and people

01:14:02 came up to me and thanked me for putting it out there like that so it's very much like I just want the visualization to use it for collage I don't have to understand how you got to that point so I think that's a really important issue for the scientists to understand that we don't artists don't have to understand it what they don't always understand any of it

01:14:35 [Music] I'm dr. Shirlee Muller I am a physician I wanted to add some balance to the empathy issue I think this was someone from the north of Chicago and he showed yes that medical students that when they start they have a lot of empathy and at the end of their training they don't and then he went into the positives and negatives of this and although it is

01:15:06 true that having some empathy is a good thing I think for a physician to have way too much empathy is a bad thing I mean that is part of the beauty of becoming a doctor is to become objective about the patient for example I could never treat my family it would be a disaster but I can pre people I don't know so like everything you know how the whole world goes like this you know at one time one thing is good and that it

01:15:37 isn't then it's good again I think with the empathy issue that's kind of the same thing balance is the most important thing not that you didn't say that but it's important to realize it right I mean having co-teaching with people from radiology for you know about 15 years or so and I was astounded to learn from the people that I knew at the universities that I had taught at that there was even only half a day of ethics training that

01:16:09 wasn't it's a mess so there's you know we get a lot of students coming back and sitting in on our classes saying oh my god I wish we'd have had this course when we were going through med school so you're right it's it's a maleeh understand the importance of being able to make an objective decision in the delivery of a medical assistance of any kind but there you know certainly for the students who are sort of taking the course in coming back a few years later it seems to really be helping them

01:16:41 so we'll see how it all balances out in ten years yeah thank you for your comments we're going to slice into somebody that's where anesthesiology comes into place right yeah hi first of all thank you to everybody who's been on these roundtables today and everyone who's asked questions I've really enjoyed the day so far my name is Kate Santa Mon I'm the co artistic director of a new york-based Dance Company and for the past few years we've been digging into this intersection of

01:17:12 science and art we ended up creating an evening length work that happy to report premiered in New York went very well and Edgar you mentioned about bringing art to like for example an ApS conference and we did we just did exactly that last month take the whole company to the New England chapter University over at Rhode Island to the APS conference it was amazing what did you guys do we performed our entire work for the conference and so we went to their conference most of them came to see the performance and we all spoke after so

01:17:44 which kind of leads to my question which Daniel I think you were starting to touch on we've done a few other examples of that but it just directly correlated to what she said so that was one performance through which we performed the dance and engaged with to us a new audience and what we're coming to a lot is you know I think what you do is amazing I think what you do is amazing and that's great that we both know it's really important that what we're talking about and doing and you know it's it's important but it's almost like what what

01:18:15 do we do some what do we do next sir and you were talking about kind of bringing this to a more world discussion and I don't know it I'd be curious to hear you speak a little bit more about like what do we do next or what can we do because there is a sense that it's important that we're talking and figuring stuff out and having these conversations but some it's good to hear a new perspective of life like why it feels so it's important I think I could listen to all of you say all of these things that are exactly and

01:18:45 I think in the last discussion art can sometimes embody something that we can't say and it can be ugly and beautiful and confusing and intelligent all at the same time so for me quantum mechanics just sparked something in me very specific and I sucked on a lot of doors along the way because I am in no way a scientist so it can say anything nothing and everything I don't want to get too far into my personal experience but I feel that it's important and I feel that I learned something after every

01:19:16 conversation or every performance but I didn't know before and that's what I hear happens after people are watching what we're doing so I don't know what maybe I'm just seeking more words to quantify that as we continue to grow our work last year at the space in-between conference Allan levy who's sitting over there talked about attention and how her work was shifting to attention and to look at attention and there's some really great examples and questions that she asked but for me that was really

01:19:47 transformative and I think we're starting to pay attention you know like we we are feeling a need to pay attention and it's very hard to pit in we could go into discussion about evolutionary behaviors and stuff like that but if you're in the environment that you're in always the same if you're you're you pay attention differently and as you start to reach out and to be in a place where you don't quite know the

01:20:17 rules or something will come up and you have never seen it before oh my god you know you pay attention and so I think there's something in this space that we're exploring which is allowing us to pay attention and we we know that it's urgent that we do it so I think we all have different things that we're starting to pay attention to you know places that we turn to for that sense of a surprise in my practice in mice just before I started working with

01:20:48 scientists I always move my paintings around in the studio because every time they're on a new wall in the new light I see them differently and I can repaint them or I can find find clues to how to continue them and I think there's something I mean I really think there's something happening across our culture's where and whatever I have a whole you know theoretical framework around it I will worry with it but I think there's some very profound changes that happened at the end of the 19th century that put us into new sets of causalities and where it's unfolding and at the same

01:21:21 time we're faced partly because we can see it because of those changes that happened we're faced with these sort of mounting deadlines and so I think those two things together are making us notice stop and notice and I think there's a real reason for it and you know that's what I think that's why we're all in this room in some way because we stopped and we're noticing we're wondering how did it move from here you mentioned that I just wanna add one thing to what you said you mentioned that art has been described in this

01:21:51 conference as a sudden that can express things are beautiful ugly and confusing and then you mentioned that you're the curious about quantum mechanics as someone who teaches quantum mechanics can tell you pick the right field because it's really it can be very beautiful it can be the questions can get very ugly and it's very confusing and the more the more you dig into it the more confusing it is so as an artist you couldn't have picked a better branch of it

01:22:22 hello hi my name is Leona I'm a laser accelerator student at Lawrence Berkeley labs and I've been thinking about a lot of these questions a lot actually and I think if you asked I'm Stein if his work with his violin was crucial he would say yes and for me I have been I have a favorite author it's Jules Verne and I don't research and exactly that field but didn't his work inspires me I've thought about this question of whether

01:22:54 art is actually necessary for scientists to be scientific not just whether art can inspire science and I don't have an answer to that I'd like to think yes but I'd also know a lot of scientists who don't know anything about art and seem to be pretty good scientists so anyway you could address that would be great I just wanted to mention two conferences

01:23:27 that I don't know how many of you know about that do bring science and art together and they have art galleries and presentations by artists and they have workshops at each of these one is called bridges which is an art and mathematics conference and they have you know a day for families and children and play and so we're talking about what can happen at these conferences they're a good example and the other one is that started out as a society for literature

01:23:59 and science and has become Society for literature science and the arts and so the kind of work you're talking about has been going on at these conferences for very long time and I recommend recommend them to anybody who wants to see how to keep going with this kind of thing thank you yeah those are both really really great conferences I'm sure some of you in the room have been there at the risk of sounding like I'm just plugging an organization but it's a good

01:24:29 one for anybody who's interested in arts integration in general as the Alliance for the Arts and the research institutions because they're looking at not only how art sort of permeates and integrates across campus but how the other you know and again it's the more difficult part of the conversation how are other you know disciplines coming to the Arts but there's one kind of branch or node of the research task force the national research task force is called the third tier aggregator that's looking to establish a research platform and

01:25:01 also a kind of committee of 100 people who will be qualified to assess transdisciplinary work and if we can get more people able to navigate the tenure system who are doing this kind of work it will fundamentally change the kinds of spaces that open up minoo on university campuses the more sort of joint appointments you get the more that we can assess this kind of work that's happening in this space between and this is one group run by kevin hamilton and

01:25:33 ER at champaign-urbana and also Dara Burnett Carnegie Mellon University they've been working very hard to sort of establish this and it could again it could it could fundamentally change the way that research universities where that have art programs are functioning and science of course is deeply embedded in in in all of these conversations so yeah well actually since we have is that you've touched on a very important point of creating academic positions in such a

01:26:04 field it does really feel I think if I hear you right you are exactly doing your faculty going through that process is this something that you think is difficult are you facing difficulties or facing resistance from traditional academic attitude towards merging to in in practicing as an academic we're not necessarily are you in your institution may in general well lucky at the moment

01:26:35 in that the engineering school at Nye is very unusual because it used to be Brooklyn poly tech and so we have an SDS department we have a digital media department within the engineering school which is like almost unheard of anywhere else but it means that like within the school itself there is this interdisciplinarity which I did not experience in the other institutions I've been in I mean I think in the context of art design there's a lot of opportunities for for people who are

01:27:06 doing more interdisciplinary work particularly people who are engaging with you know computation Media Arts as technology is sort of and computation is seeping into all aspects of our lives I think there's an ax sort of an awareness and and an agenda for including that more centrally within an institutional context but I also think and this relates to the steam panel that was earlier that the way that engineering and science are taught excludes a huge

01:27:39 amount of the population I mean if we look at who's in this room like we're not exactly a hugely diverse bunch in here right why is that and like coming through an engineering degree we're literally at the start of every subject the professor would be like oh well 60% of people failed last year so you better work really hard you know what it's like well that's why we face these diversity issues in the Silicon Valley and in lots of sort of institutions where we work we have the privilege of working and so I think for me one thing so I teach computer science

01:28:10 but through an art pedagogy so prompts assignments the work we do is open-end it's about personal expression it's not about you know working through problem sets as a traditional computer science course with heads up there unfortunately but all I was gonna say is that that means that a different community of people feel invited and feel able to participate yes and that's a really important part of that you could I just make one more which you

01:28:40 have to constantly okay the invitation to why don't we show up at more scientific conferences to twelve scientific conferences the artists that I know cannot afford the registration put aside a registration or a free registration for an invite an art student that would help the trip absolutely okay everyone um thank you conversations to be continued and absolutely thank you

01:29:11 round tables I'm okay is Jamie McRae in the room are you somewhere where are you okay we aren't having an artistic interlude so if you want to do that fun thing of turning around in your chair and facing the projector we're gonna watch some science bees dance right now [Music]