Science, Art & Society 1

00:00:00 table discussion before lunch so if you're feeling a little hungry I promise we won't starve you we are going to talk for the first time in this conference specifically about the relationship between science are in society so we added this subject in because we've been talking a lot about specific examples in education in collaborative working groups etc but there's this larger issue which encompasses everything that we're talking about and that's the multi-directional relationship between science and art art in society and

00:00:31 science and society and my argument and I'm happy to hear otherwise is that all of those relationships are damaged or dysfunctional and so what can we do to solve that and to build upon the relationships that we envision to kind of go towards the future that we envision for ourselves so I will let Zack introduce the panelists all right

00:01:01 so participants if you could raise your hand as I call your name Eric Hall is a post doctoral researcher at Columbia University and a writer whose works have appeared in the Atlantic American fiction and other publications joining us again Ilana Quinn Ilana is an exhibit and program organizer at the cultural program at the National Academy of Sciences Ben Lilly Emily is a high-energy particle

00:01:33 physicist and co-founder and director of the story Collider as well as a contributing editor for Ted calm he has founded a space called caveat an intellectual events venue David Grinspoon David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist award-winning science communicator and prize-winning author as well as an advisor to NASA on space exploration strategy elizabeth Desmarais

00:02:04 elizabeth is a fine artist working in sculpture digital media and eco art to explore the interface between the belt and natural environments Stewart Fierstein Stewart is a Stewart is a professor and former chair of the biology department at Columbia University where he studies vertebrate olfaction as well as an author and an adviser for the public understanding of

00:02:34 science to the Alfred P sloan Foundation with that let's start the round table so something that occurs to me is that this conversation wouldn't have felt as necessary a few decades ago one of the reasons why is that historically of course artists and scientists have been very separate there was a very important book called the two cultures by CP snow

00:03:05 about exactly how separate they are but I feel that something kind of important began to happen in the 60s and 70s which is that the public profile of science began to grow and moved out of just being something academic and for instance there are now sense accounts on Twitter with millions of followers and that simply did not exist prior to science popularization the New York Times has a science section of its

00:03:38 website it didn't use to write so I think a lot of this is that science as a cultural institution if Martians you know came to our planet and there were sociologists and they asked what are some of the growing really important driving institutions to our culture they would very quickly hit upon science this collection of individuals and institutions and the ideas it's producing and notice that it's been growing in relevancy and I think at this

00:04:09 point it's grown to such a degree that it's kind of colliding with art and all these other things that suddenly people are realizing wealthy they not only have to deal with this they have to come to some sort of understanding whether it be of criticism whether be of support or or whatever but they have to do this and so I just want to remark that what I see a lot of here is basically this kind of new error of collision because quite simply science has gotten so big and so important that

00:04:41 art just has to deal with it all right so I just wanted to chime in on that so I'm a I do art and science collaboration I'm a sculptor but I'm a professor at Rutgers and I teach in the engineering department in the computer science department in addition to the art department and one of the interesting things I think about the sort of moment is that in so many different ways in genomic engineering in AI computer science scientists you know

00:05:12 once upon a time there was this idea of like the pure science says right you'd go and you'd study the natural world and now even the quote-unquote pure Sciences are making the things that they're studying so it's become sort of an applied practice and in many ways I see similar kinds of activities happening in the science department that you'd see over in the art department in other words researchers are making the things that they're studying and then they're looking at so do the emergent properties that are coming from

00:05:42 it so I think that that might also be sort of one of those other kinds of bridges that we're sort of seeing right now it's interesting I agree with everything you guys both just said that the historical perspective on that two cultures this division of course if you go back farther in history there was no such division science didn't exist as a separate professional endeavor more than say 150 years ago give or take certainly

00:06:16 more than four hundred years ago there's no such thing science was a branch of philosophy was natural philosophy so it was a part of the humanities so this professionalization the splintering of our professional communities out of the specialization of knowledge you know it's easy to get down on that in some senses it's also been very necessary wouldn't we would been able to learn and achieve a lot of what we have without that specialization but then we've lost a lot too and our ability to reconnect and I think in a

00:06:48 way the same thing is true of our art has become a very professionalized endeavor certainly Fine Arts and that leads to some problems too a word that hasn't come up I don't think explicitly this weekend yet but I think it has been implicit a lot in our discussions is elitism and I think both art and science have a problem have an elitism problem and it hinders our ability to do in both areas what we feel we want to do which is connect foster

00:07:20 wider connections and I think the good news is if the kinds of collaborations we've been hearing about and talking about can really help both art and science can be helped with their elitism problems by working with one another and I've experienced this somewhat in my collaborations I'm I primarily identify as a scientist although I have been involved in a lot of collaborations with artists and I'm also performing musicians so I get my my art kick that

00:07:52 way as well and I found that one of the many values of these kinds of collaborations is they get us and I mean us collectively artists and scientists out of our normal boxes and force us to to extend beyond our normal audiences and present our work beyond our normal spaces places work the eat-off presenting art in places that are not places where fine arts is normally presented is often one of the outcomes

00:08:23 of these collaborations and force scientists to expand our vocabulary in communicating with quote the general public or the non-professional non science public so I think we need each other to to fight our elitism problem and the good news is are sort of a natural breaking down of those barriers that comes when we do this this trans discipline every work of working beyond our normal professional boundaries oh yeah I'll

00:09:00 just take up not entirely rogen all 20 view to that but just a little off to the side I so I just came back from a two-day symposium with the Santa Fe Institute on the limits of understanding all I can tell you if I understand less now but one of the things that did come out of it even though it was largely a science oriented sort of symposium was the idea of a plurality of methods of

00:09:31 understanding and I think we don't want to smush everything together I do think there's a value to boundaries and borders good fences make good neighbors and things in the nature because there are a lot of ways to understand things there's paintings or a way the novels are away scientific experiments are away and and I don't think we want to dismiss any of those ways or try and push them all together or what we really want is is to develop a more pluralistic approach if anything we're not only and

00:10:02 I don't just mean diversity I mean pluralism is in my opinion more than simply diversity it's the ability to allow more than one thing to go forward even though those two things are as they say in commence or both they're at odds in some way or another and but they're both important ideas there's a great quote if you don't mind Niels Bohr said the opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth and that I think it's really hard to hold in your

00:10:34 head a little bit but a very important idea to hold in our head so I'm not entirely against some of them the boundaries that that we have with art and science now the failure to communicate or for the elitism or things like that I mean elitism isn't yet a second issue which we could talk about I'll just near this gonna give the floor to Ben but but I think you have to be a little this came up a little bit in the last panel the idea of expertise and so elitism grows unfortunately is a little bit of a weed or a lichen on on on expertise well we

00:11:06 don't want to lose expertise in the fight against elitism which I agree we could all do with a little more humility in this world I'm not just going to pick up on the expertise thread first which is one thing we've learned is okay so what I do now I opened an event space and our our notion is to provide a home for what we call intelligent nightlife and we want a place where people can come out and have extraordinary things happen in the context of drinking with friends but more than that when I pitched to producers what I want is a

00:11:37 space where you blending discussion of the academics with knowledge from the Performing Arts and there we it's what is key to us is recognizing the expertise that that exists in all of the domains that we're bringing in so for example we we bring in comedy groups and we ask them you know okay you're really great at comedy can you do something that fits our space can you do something that is the in line with our mission of you know exhibiting thought in new ways we're still searching for good ways of saying this but um but so we've had a

00:12:10 couple great successes with that just last night we hosted a group there called north coast they're a hip hop improv group and they improvised a musical in the style of Hamilton and it was brilliant these people came in they executed it was it was gorgeous a while ago we brought in another comedy group they are a big one what's known as a very supportive open mic trying to develop new comics and so we're like great we will bring them in we'll give them the mission of doing shows that

00:12:41 involve science or other thinkI thoughts and they said yeah yeah great we'll do that and the show had nothing to do with that whatsoever and there was somewhere along the line we to to look at at what they were doing and say oh this is what their expert in let's work with their own expertise instead of trying to put what we want to have happen on top of it whereas with north coast they have developed their own expertise and now our job is to pair them with historians and and people who are going to really make that that sort of thing shine but more broadly when

00:13:12 you're talking about elitism and this is a lesson we're learning and really trying to teach ourselves whether whether you can get outside of the box by going transdisciplinary it's not automatic and you have to do it very intentionally and so part of that comes from what other expertise you recognize right are if we're going out and we're working with comedy groups are we only going out and working with ones that already serve sort of an elitist audience and I've seen this happen I've

00:13:42 seen us do it or are we going out and looking for groups I have a group coming in that organizes intellectual it's called drunk Education he gets experts drunk and has them give talks about subjects but one of the first things he said is great [Applause] yeah it used to be called drunk TED talks because it's under my cease-and-desist but I was great by the way yeah you were but but one of the first things he said to me is that he

00:14:13 organized one of his most successful events ever that brought in the most people was an evening of discussion of carly rae jepsen and that's the kind of thing I feel like a lot of people in this crowd a lot of people in our crowd are gonna look at that and say oh you know is that really the the arena we want to be playing in and the answer is if you really are serious about breaking through this barrier and not just reaching the other elite crowds then yes you have to be willing not just to go beyond your own disciplinary boundary but outside your own comfort zone in the social arena as well and that that can

00:14:45 be the the big challenge for really getting out and really having this discussion with the kinds of audiences that aren't naturally invited in yep presenting in non-traditional spaces is really good for that and and probably what I was saying before is that is that these collaborations often force scientists to present science and non-traditional spaces because I mean I've given talks in art museums which is where I don't usually give talked because of these collaborations then vice versa I have artist friends come in and do things in science museums and planetariums and so just by the nature of reaching across those boundaries you

00:15:18 you you find yourself in front of non-traditional audiences for your discipline and that alone is I think very valuable the one who first brought up the idea of a neutral space and you already brought up CP snows two cultures I want to ask you Ilana and since you work at the National Academies but part of the cultural programs what's your experience they're bringing in a very well educated a generally lay audience into a science institution where you're

00:15:48 doing very art and science things for that well I guess my question is um do you do you feel like people come in with certain expectations that are met or aren't met do you feel like people have to dumb down their art or their science in order to read certain audience because of some of the questions were skirting around or like okay we talked a lot about science communication in the last couple of panels but can we communicate complicated science to a lay audience

00:16:19 can we connect science and society through communication or do we need to reframe the way we're thinking about it I think what people come into the space they really are expecting scientific accuracy obviously we really try not to dumb down anything that we that we do and one thing we're really focused on is presenting examples of intersections of

00:16:50 science and art that are really exciting and actually are solving some problems that we're facing today that we can get a really wide audience of people interested and we do we definitely try to invite all of our speakers to bring in hands-on objects that they can share with the audience we think a lot about accessibility we try to engage all the local universities we have a partnership with Gallaudet University School for the

00:17:21 Deaf and we have ASL interpreters at all of our events all of our events are free and open to the public so that breaks down some some barriers that might exist for some people would not be such a bad topic to talk about for a little bit here because we're all involved in somewhere in other words what we mean by scientific literacy or scientific accessibility or this dumbed down versus not that how you present complicated science to an audience and things like

00:17:52 that and whether refers to whether there's any value whatsoever in that value you know what well any sorry you said any value in in doing that and actually you know working really hard which many of us are doing so that so I think there is but I would also like to suggest that the Scientific Revolution if you think it was important which I do but if you think the red is on the restoration world one I think the signs of the Reformation were important I think the Scientific Revolution is probably important but what was it

00:18:24 important what was important for a new way of thinking it was important for a way of thinking that said you don't get knowledge from authority whether that authority is Aristotle with a good book or whatever it is that's not where knowledge comes from it's a whole new way of understanding knowledge and it seems to me that's what we're not communicating so effectively by doing physics for poets kinds of things or looking for those things we're not we're not communicating the fact that what science is based on if you'll pardon a kind of a half-assed plug here ignorance

00:18:54 fell your doubt and uncertainty I wrote about those things but especially notions of uncertainty I mean why uncertainty is so crucial to science not that it's a failing that it's crucial to good science that you can't have science with neurons for that matter in my opinion but I'm not an artist I won't say that oh but that's what needs to be communicated it seems to me not just here's a way to understand quantum physics simply and easily I think one of the the key things there is is the lens that you view the

00:19:26 rest of society right so I'm a huge fan of never using the phrase dumbed down I think that's a destructive way to look at what we're doing yes and but that the sort of lens that you use shapes how you're thinking about the activity so you're talking about how do we communicate ideas and the you know the the statement is oh then we do this physics for Cohen maybe that's not helping with uncertainty to me there's a sense in which that's mind blowing if you want to talk to people talk through issues of uncertainty you could do a whole lot worse than talk to a group of

00:19:57 poets and so if you're if you're not doing that in a physics and poet thing it means you're the lens to which you are viewing poets is as the stupid people who don't know the science and that that is a very disruptive way of do I'm agreeing with you but I think oh I think it's very unclear that Steve as always but but but the but it's really this is where we need to turn the mirror inward and asks ourselves how are we viewing society and if we view society as the unwashed masses that need to be educated that's how our work is going to come out

00:20:28 and and this is why I keep harping on about expertise and recognizing it out there with the other people that we're interacting with and going into these things not as not as Authority disseminating information you know it's ironic that most of our site coms guess exactly that but going into it as a partnership there are there are different ways to think about scientific literacy for sure I think it's a good question ask what do we even mean by that and you know before in the previous panel people were talking about not liking the acronym steam I've never

00:21:01 liked the acronym stem science technology engineering math not because I don't think it's you know a reasonable summation of some corner of knowledge that sort of fits together but it's so often used in this narrow unless cheerleading role we need STEM education because we need to prepare people for jobs and vocations and increase American competitiveness and these are not the reasons why I'm excited about teaching

00:21:34 science to people I mean I recognize those are important but it is a way of seeing the world there's a more profound a deeper sense of connection to the world than just here's a way to get a good job that's why we need to get people into STEM careers so I think of science literacy as spreading a way of interrogating the world seeing ourselves in relation to the world and when you think of it that way it's not just something that's like sort of a good idea or enrichment it's actually crucial

00:22:05 I think for a human survival right now we have learned some things about our relationship with the world in the way it's changing right now the role that we find ourselves in this world that that we need to deal with collectively as a species we can't deal with it collectively if only some of us are aware of this and it doesn't do any good to just have the scientists be aware of it and not really effective at communicating and we need obviously a larger collaboration to do that so to me

00:22:35 this is survival skills for Humanity you know we've learned some important things we have to figure out how to include more people in that knowledge and in our response to that knowledge and so I do see that as in a way science literacy but it's not like here's the facts we know and how do we get people to understand that I agree about dumbing down it's not dumbing down it's smartening up it's it's about if you cannot communicate what you think you know maybe you really don't know it all

00:23:05 that well or maybe it's not coherence so it's about improving our communication skills as much as it is about lowering some perceived level that we're communicating at and in that in a large sense that it's it's really really vital work and and the collaborations we're talking about I think are absolutely essential I just wanted to follow up Stuart I would love to have an art symposium sometime titled the limits of understanding I just I just following up on the comment about sort of like what

00:23:39 what we need now instead of this this moment you know this Anthropocene moment so many people don't really understand that science is the creation of factual knowledge you know like that that's even that sort of basic you know beyond sort of you're on a factual uncertainty okay but but yeah but but it's it's a little problematic at this particular point in time when we're really I I see I feel like as a society we really need to start helping people understand what our

00:24:09 certain ecological moment is and you know following up on that it's also interesting to me to see the way that humanity can so you know the quote unquote humanities can support that there's this really great organization called the Ace the association of environmental science studies and they're really dedicated to connecting like the hard sciences to the social sciences to the humanities and I wondered into I was presenting there but I went I wandered into like the wrong symposium and I sat

00:24:40 down for a while and I realized this is an American University and I realized that the symposium was on a geo-engineering and it was an American university so it was a whole bunch of policy people there governmental policy people they were talking about geoengineering and the other thing that astounded me was that at the front of the room there was a theology talking a theologian talking about the way that different cultures viewed

00:25:10 playing God right Oh God but you know it was this idea that you know like like if you know I mean that these kinds of considerations about like what sort of what we're able to technologically do really need to be supported by you know the sum total of you know human cultural production in terms of what we the understandings that different cultures

00:25:42 have come to in terms of you know the role of us humans in the world and it could equally apply to genomic engineering I mean there's all kinds of different things that those sorts of exactly only good points I think what's the most difficult problem in at least for scientists now I mean we should get back to the art part of this as well too but it's a commonly quoted statistic that forty eight percent or something of Americans don't believe in evolution and this has taken as some terrible critique of our object scientific literacy and

00:26:12 there were a bunch of stupid people emotionally and things like that there's a statistic behind that that's almost never mentioned and that is that ninety percent of those 48 people 48 percent understand evolution at least at the level of a high school decent high school education which is about as well as many biologists understand that frankly and I'm gonna buy all this at the bar so I can tell you that firsthand the point is these are people who understand evolution they're literate about evolution they're not illiterate they have made a kind of a Pascal's wager and

00:26:43 I think it's important for us to understand what kind of a wager that is what the cost is of not believing in evolution the costs are considerable for many people community church deeper held beliefs morality ethics lots and lots of things and what do you get for believing in evolution anybody tell me and you're what you got what you get for believing in evolution unless you're a biologist doing a certain kind of experiment so that's not to defend intelligent design or any of the rest of that but it is - I

00:27:15 think suggest that this is the deeper problem that it's not just a literacy problem it's it's a question of why it's better why it makes more sense to think scientifically than some other way why this makes a different kind of a world and why it will solve our problems in the other way will not solve our problems for example and things of that nature well so so far you know a lot of this conversation has been about this notion of science communication I mean effectively right and one of the reasons

00:27:48 for that is because of this you know growing popularity and as people were talking about last night that's clearly one way in which art and science and kind of intersect but it's by no means the only way right I I think that as the this you know the cultural volume of science continues to grow and but up against art a lot of interesting things happen that aren't just how do we commute us communicate a scientific idea to the public in some you know appeasing

00:28:19 way right I mean that's it that's a really important question right and as we say where the answer for teenage like these questions become ever more important but at the same time there's just this cultural phenomenon that's happening and you know I'm a neuroscientist who's also a writer and something about neuroscience kind of fundamentally inspires me because as was mentioned earlier scientific fields provides kind of metaphors for thinking they provide a

00:28:50 certain frame and type of language and I actually think something very very interesting is happening here at the outskirts kind of in some of what we just saw for example those statues that used quantum superposition or two kind of as a dominating metaphor and what that sort of work reminds me of and that work purpose isn't to necessarily communicate anything right I mean in fact the whole point of art and possibly

00:29:20 as concept the defining property of art is that it's not normative it's some form of intellectual play you know who knows exactly why do we do it but for some reason we think that this is really really important and in previous historical periods one of the things that happened was that the art reflected the important and rich ideas that were out there in the culture and one example of this is art based around religion I mean if you go to any museum there's so much in that art that you

00:29:52 don't understand that I don't understand because we're not nearly as well-versed in like deep doctrines of say Christianity to really get what's going on in that painting and what it means and that meaningful who paid for it but for example people you know if you look at frescoes or like anything else there's all these deep deep paintings and that's because artists play around with deep meanings that are out there and it used to be the case that possibly you know name the most semiotic reloaded

00:30:24 symbol of the last 500 years you know in in Western culture and you probably name the cross right what would you name today because another alternative competing symbol for something that's just as loaded with concepts and history and knowledge is the double helix of DNA and so I think that what's happening is that science and especially as science becomes part of the larger culture people have developed quite literally the concepts symbols signs and language

00:30:55 of science and something very interesting happening is that artists are beginning to play around with that just like they used to play around the fact that everyone knew the Bible backwards and forwards are all the big stories and then they would make heart based around that and so it provides this rich vocabulary so I think that's not maybe that is in a sense elitist it's not science communication but it's certainly something that I see happening as this science bubble expands and then it kind of frauds up against the art bubble in the social sphere it's also helping us

00:31:27 to process things that are happening in our world new ideas new realities new concepts we're coming across you know you mentioned Christiana you mentioned DNA now we've got you mentioned the Anthropocene and and and we're trying to come to grips with ourselves as a planet altering force and figure out if we can survive with that knowledge and actually thrive as a as a part of the earth system that we are whether we like it or not and I see I do see artists now responding to that challenge is very disturbing this notion of the

00:31:57 Anthropocene and it's also kind of essential and so another iconic image is is you know the image of the the earth rise from the moon you know it's gotten into our consciousness now and that's you know I think almost up there with DNA and the cross and and you know this notion that we're grappling with our planetary nature is something that you know I think is obviously there's a lot of science that we need to understand and learn and communicate but it but it's necessary but not sufficient and I

00:32:28 think the artistic response to that reality as a way to help us process our situation and somehow gain the global maturity to deal with it is really essential and and one thing that I see happening that I think is very exciting in that in that vein is the tools of connectivity which are very fraught these days and are leading to the all these kinds of fragmentation that we're all freaked out about on the news are also being used to facilitate global

00:32:58 collaborations in really cool ways there's that what is that that playing for change project where people are doing these musical collaborations all around the globe and you know there are things like that where there are these sort of glimmers of some kind of global aesthetic response to our inherently global problems in global reality and that is completely a new kind of artistic response that you know wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago because we didn't have the tools to collaborate across boundaries and in that way so I

00:33:30 think art simply as a response like you say to emerging ideas and emerging realities that help us to process the things that maybe may be problems that are originating with science but but goes so far beyond that domain I want to jump in here but I'm gonna kind of direct it towards you so and well I'm directing it towards the artists in the writers in the room or on the panel and we've talked a lot about science literacy we've not talked about art literacy please talk about that how do

00:34:02 we I mean yeah science literacy people make a choice to not believe in evolution okay that's tricky you know how do we deal with that but but most scientists outside this room don't know a darn thing about art they don't care because it doesn't affect them on a day-to-day basis or at least they don't think it does and yet on the walls of their office are paintings that some you know administrator put there and and if it weren't there then they would say huh there's nothing on that wall you know so how do we how do we get not only

00:34:33 scientists to care more about art as somes something that's not like functional something that's you know Conte and not functional but but important and and Elizabeth makes really interesting art that emerges with technology and kind of forces you to confront it in a lot of ways whether you want to or not it might be a robot plant that travels around and bumps into you so so yeah hearing from the writers and the artists and the table about art literacy I'd

00:35:04 love to hear more about that Wow art literacy that's so interesting um and here I was going to talk to I was going to talk to you about the loss of religion and our taking the place of that well you know one of the things that I think is really interesting and this isn't hasn't really been part of this conversation and I'm sure I missed the conversation last night but I'm sure that a lot of this was about you know how art science collaboration broadens

00:35:36 the audience for science and I think also for art the thing that I'm really interested in in terms of what art can do is you know there's these wonderful Sol LeWitt wrote this great document 25 sentences on conceptual art and in sentence 2 & 3 he says rational ideas beget rational experience sentence number three says but your rational ideas lead to new experience and I

00:36:07 really think that that's one of the things that that's one of the kind of spaces that art sort of inhabits it sort of allows us to be in a poetic or a metaphoric or an irrational space that can lead to new experiences and I just I don't know I find myself as an artist working with scientists often in collaboration with scientists on asking really irrational questions and I think that that can really lead to all kinds of wonderful different sorts of

00:36:39 directions both in art making and in scientific endeavor so I just kind of want to throw that out which is that innovation especially when you're looking at different disciplines sort of bumping up into each other you know those kinds of irrational sorts of those sort of a you know irrational kinds of questions or ideas are such a wonderful result of that that I just kind of want to make sure that that art sort of has a place at the table in terms of innovation from that perspective in

00:37:12 terms of art literacy you know how do you get people to look at art more I you know that I don't I don't know I mean maybe you know I I feel like I'm sitting here talking about the importance of everyone learning science maybe you scientists have some thoughts about you know the importance of people looking at art certainly I think that I think that there's really no no sense in which scientists have a huge literacy

00:37:45 concerning what's going on right now in our world I think most of its completely opaque to them some of that is simply because I'll be quite frank and say that a lot of the concerns of art are very insular and I get to say this as a complete outsider to the community and someone who has no you know serious background as an artist so this is just my personal opinion but I think for about 30 years the subject of art has

00:38:15 been art and that's a relatively boring um a great way to go about it and one of the things one of the reasons why I'm so interested in what's going on here is that science seems to provide and I don't mean it in some sort of in some sort of worshiping way and I'm not actually even I don't even mean it in terms of a communication right I mean it in terms of a there seems to be a new set of public symbols metaphors and so

00:38:48 on that have come into existence that art has not spent much time playing around with yet and art is really great at that art is great at criticism art is great at representing things in new ways and all those are things that science needs so I think you know if you want to get scientists interested in art one of the easiest ways is start doing art about science and don't just do it in a way that's just wow this is so amazing do it in a way like okay what you know

00:39:21 let me to do my interpretation of what this means right or something along those lines or you know a lot of the pieces that we saw of there are really I think feeling wonderful examples of that but so I think part of it is is on the responsibility of artists to kind of publicly engage with some of these things and I wish there was more support open in the artistic community for things that are maybe a little bit more new and

00:39:51 a little bit more out there even though of course given what I said previously I think that this is a very old conservative notion and then the best sense as in you know art has been about nature art has been about human institutions and religion art has been about politics and art has been about art and you know art about science is I think very much in line with some of the things that have produced some of the best art ever in the history of humankind what one problem and I think

00:40:24 this gets to your question of you know why we focus so much on communicating about science rather than communicating about art and this was alluded to in the panel yesterday is that a lot of the support for these kinds of collaborations comes from certainly that I'm familiar with comes from the world of science and this notion of broader impacts or EPO education and public outreach where this art is kind of treated as an add-on to a science project and it doesn't come for free you have to satisfy the funding agency why

00:40:57 you're doing this and a lot of it on some level or another is that I'm gonna this artist that's gonna help me communicate the science to a broader audience and there's nothing wrong with that I'm in favor of that but it does tend to cast things as that's the purpose of the art is to teach about science and then what about your asking about well what about just teaching about art one remedy for that or one alternate model that I've seen being very successful is artists and residents programs NASA for a long time had this artist-in-residence program I don't think they still do Association they

00:41:28 can't say our residents anymore and it still existed for a long time it was it was I think very successful they had this not too long ago they had this 50 years of the NASA arts program traveling exhibit that was wonderful in they had people like Robert Rosenberg and Andy Warhol and you know a bunch of the different kinds of folk artists doing really cool stuff and I don't know if it's true but the rumor is the last one they had was Laurie Anderson and the art that she did was so hostile to NASA that they were like you know what we're

00:42:01 not gonna do this anymore I don't want to spread rumors but I I heard that but but for whatever reason I think it's a shame if you know I think that where you're encouraging an artist to be for a year or whatever in that environment and respond and and there's the legacy of that is that some incredibly deep work where artists just responded to what NASA and what scientists were doing and the other benefit of that is that then you had these you know when you go to NASA Ames Research Center a place of

00:42:31 science you see the ocean Berg paintings of of the Apollo project hanging on the walls there you know so it's also so artists scientists get their hit of art from the fact that these the legacy the residue is still hanging in these places and I think that kind of project is is a little bit more open than the sort of broader impacts mentality at really getting artists to respond to science and increasing what you might call art literacy I'm not even sure what that is

00:43:02 among scientists and among the general public I'm just gonna ask what I look absolutely what we mean by art literacy I'm always suspicious of it because it sounds like somebody's gonna explain a joke to me and now it's not gonna be funny and there's somebody work to me it's not going to be really inspired answer for that but I would start by saying you guys please build upon this what's the difference between a print and a painting some people don't know

00:43:33 that and I would argue that's decent information to know about I think this is where it's worth looking at the discussions that have been having in the science literacy world you know would what David brought up that and Stuart that it's worth interrogating very closely what do you want people to know and why do you want them to know it and if you if you sort of look at the science literacy discourse for a long time it was about people need to know these facts and they need to know things and you just start adding up the sheer number of things that experts in every

00:44:03 field feel like everybody should know and very quickly it's more than you can anybody can learn in any and so you have to start asking yourself this question of like what when we say people should know stuff why what's the what's the purpose of that and what what are we expecting to get out of it and taking very seriously the notion that the vast majority of people are not going to know the vast majority of things and that's that's a math problem that is not a society problem and so you know I don't I haven't been part of these discussions but I suspect that's the place to start attacking this art

00:44:35 literacy question so I'll take as one answer so my answer of what bit of art literacy do I want scientists to know the one that I've chosen to attack that I want the people who work with us to understand is I want them to understand the process and the training that goes into it and I want them understand it in a visceral sense and so like i I've been going around giving talks where I ask this question why don't more people go to science lectures as an evening activity and as part of this talk I add up the number of hours of stage time

00:45:07 that a stand-up comedian accumulates before they're good enough to be invited to be the first guest for a show for a real headliner you know and it's it's literally months standing on the stage doing this work over ten years of time and okay so that's the thing I want to get across but but the broader point is you there's you have to pick and choose and you can't want people to know everything so I'm in a certain field where knowing bit with the difference between DNA and RNA doesn't matter to me

00:45:38 I don't have to know the difference between DNA and RNA so if I'm not I'm not in a field that print or painting matters to me what should I know about it and I think this is why process and method questions are often much more interesting than specific fact type questions because those tend to be more broad and universal yes I would say that the the place where it's most applicable and this is something we've been talking a lot about where things are applicable in science art collaboration what are the things that you want your scientist

00:46:08 collaborator to know about you and vice-versa at a conference about a year and a half ago with some of the people in this room we started to talk about is it possible and then it got out of control is it possible to create a list of terms that every single human should know right and it gets just so we can all get along better but it but it's unmanageable so how do we deal with the jargon issue is part of an issue between art and science but especially between art and society

00:46:39 science and society and also speaking to speaking to your point about the art that's getting made I think that there's a lot of things there's a lot of trends that are happening in art right now that you don't necessarily see in the art market that you don't necessarily see in galleries and that you don't necessarily see in museums there are these warm you know I was just at I always get the acronym I was just at the National socio-environmental synthesis Center it's a big mouthful but it's one of the the NSF synthesis postdocs and postdocs supported

00:47:11 synthesis centers down at University of Maryland and you know I found myself telling people you know there's this amazing new area of you know community art or artists go into communities and work within communities to make stuff you know there's this wonderful area of you know relational aesthetics or people are going into place and working with the things in the places in order for some of these postdocs who are working in applied practice so they're modeling

00:47:42 and they're they're using you know statistics of all kinds of good stuff but they're also trying to figure out sort of applied practices that are applicable to their research and so sometimes I also find that people who need this information are not necessarily interested in this information until they figure out that it's specifically applicable to them or their process but lots of lots of amazing things are happening that maybe we're not seeing in terms of what's called you know quote unquote art in a

00:48:13 gallery or in a museum yeah yeah so you don't necessarily see and yet and yet these are you know these are how many artists today is you know are practicing some of the kinds of art that we're trying to showcase at the National Academy of Sciences and you know submissions and also in the days or series one example that I love to talk about is the work of Matthew line who is a paper engineer and has an expertise in

00:48:47 origami and kirigami and he decided he wanted to try to work with some scientists at the University of Michigan and he was moving there and he emailed something like 30 scientists and out of that a collaboration began or he's working with solar panel engineer to apply the kirigami and origami techniques to make the solar panel track the Sun throughout the day and it's about a hundred fifty percent more

00:49:17 efficient than our regular solar panel this is the type of thing that you wouldn't see in a gallery you know but it could be a very meaningful collaboration a scientist would be interested in another one was this video game called Foldit that anyone can play that's about the way proteins fold and people outside of the scientific community started to play this game and were able to actually solve some problems I think related to the HIV protein that scientists had been

00:49:50 puzzled by for close to 40 years you know so these are some some of the kinds of impacts that were trying to show to maybe make scientists care a little bit more about the arts well I think you know as a scientist it both in my own experience in observing the experience of other scientists whenever we genuinely collaborate with artists whenever I have I always learned something new about the science it's not just about like oh I'm gonna find a new

00:50:20 way to tell my story and I think this is common when I first encountered the art of Monica and Tyler a yellow both of who have have spoken here I was really blown away because that's a planetary scientists and astrobiologist I think a lot about you know trying to understand compared with planetology planetary surfaces and comparative biology life on other planets and then when I saw artwork where she's responding deeply to

00:50:52 not just trying to depict what it looks like on other planetary surfaces in a photorealistic way which is what a lot of space art is but actually trying to understand the processes and the overtime how the landscape is built up and then using different materials to somehow duplicate or synthesize that in building up these 3d you know canvases when I started understanding her process and looking at and thinking about it it really made me realize new things about the way planetary surfaces work and the

00:51:23 way I was seeing them it so it made me not just I think better at communicating but better understanding through seeing things to hurl and same-same with Tyler's sculpture he does these these 3d amazing if you haven't seen his work check it out look online but like he'll do these giant metal sculptures of some really tiny biological thing that in real life is like this big you know a blade of grass or a some insect piece but they don't make it you know twenty feet high and it looks like some alien thing and I'm like how what is that and

00:51:54 it's like well it's an actual duplication of this thing on just on a completely different scale and it made me think about scale in a whole new way and when you think about life on other planets which is what I do for a living in part you've really got to think about scale because the physics is such with a planet with different gravity and different atmospheric pressure and all this that some of the same shapes and the same forms are going to manifest to solve the same bio physical problems as they are solved here on earth but it will be a different

00:52:25 scale in response to different physical domains so simply seeing his artwork not only moved me in the way that I think art just for its own sake does but it made me think wow you know that could actually exist if you had a planet that was like that and that this initial impression that has led to a long and fruitful collaboration that I've had with them that I think both the art and science has benefited so it's it goes so much more beyond just like a tool to communicate what we know and what we think the masses need to know oh

00:52:58 I was gonna change the discussion completely maybe not so so what I want to know in terms of my own personal artistic literacy from artists are the kinds of things that I think are actually common to science I don't believe in the scientific method I don't believe there's any such thing as a Crocker that we dreamt up so there's no thing where you put stuff in and you turn a crank and outcome gadgets and cures and things like that right the

00:53:28 way scientists work is with intuition inspiration curiosity they make choices they rehearse they do all kinds of things that I think you would say any artist does as well I don't know how they do it I want to know how they treat these same sorts of ideas these same sorts of processes because I think that's where there's a real connection to be made in a way that that's that's where not only for its usefulness but because I think it's again a kind of a pluralistic approach to these things

00:53:59 that that would that would provide value in both directions I assume artists would like to know the same thing about scientists science is a little bit of an art well it's a great deal really you know no matter what we may pretend so we've been talking for example mostly about I think when we say art we some another in our head get painting and sculpture but it does include things like theater and writing and and performance in general dance and so forth and I you know I think idea of the

00:54:29 uncertainty of a performance the uncertainty and a live performance is extremely important the experimentalism of a live performance especially is extremely poor otherwise I think graphic artists experiment to the notion of rehearsal as a kind of to me very has a great deal in common with what we do in the lab for weeks and weeks before we publish a paper on opening night you know Sciences is in a way good because it's useful to us but the arts are really

00:55:01 what most of us are engaged in there's a lot more engagement in art than there is in other words everybody this room is I'm sure engaged in one way or another with art but not everybody in this room is interested in science so art is a much bigger part of our life well it might be a bigger part but it's easy to take take for granted like Eric was saying you know we've been doing art forever we don't really know why maybe

00:55:32 some of the neuro aesthetics fans in the room can can shed light on that but certainly everyone in this room is extremely engaged with entertainment but it's not always art I absolutely but just very very briefly before we move on to the next topic it was to say that one of the things that I think is important is not just saying that okay you have this relationship between scientists and

00:56:04 the public and then you do that through science communication and then you have the relationship between artists and the public and you do that through science communication but I think it's very very important to put the scientists and artists in communication together because regardless of whether or not we immediately go out and like talk about the findings I do think that this creates like a trickle-down kind of effect or the moment you have intellectual fields put in contact with one another there will be at some you

00:56:34 know future point there will be communication about it there will be ideas about it so you know it's I think it's just as important to ask how can we get a very good artist and a very good scientist working together and how can we get scientists to understand what artists are doing an artist to understand what scientists are doing without immediately then going to this next step of what's going to be this outcome of that how will you know a very good scientist and a very good artist oh I'm sure the artist could could tell

00:57:08 you that okay it's not super undefinable but so I just I just I have to tell you guys when I saw that I was on a panel called art and science and society I thought oh no because we're gonna be we're gonna be asked to answer you know we're gonna be asked to you know cure all of these societal ills this is gonna be really rough and then I noticed that there were two panels I noticed that there was one before the other one and I thought ha the first one has these wonderful opportunities to bring up all these problems so I'm just curious like

00:57:41 what are you guys I mean you know in terms of society what do you guys think that we can answer what what should we be answering right now in terms of art and science collaboration and you know society at large what what could be what could we or should we be doing well people I mean we have some real problems in our society and we artists and science collaborating cannot solve them all but I think we can actually play an important role people are alienated from these sources

00:58:11 of creativity in these these sources of knowledge and and we also are at a time of somewhat of crisis in our world right now and so if we can you know any form of communication where you're getting people to think about the the bigger picture of our our existence and how we relate to the planet in the universe is we're contributing to to the solution we're helping to save the world I think and you know I'll just give you an

00:58:42 example of something I've been involved in I have this this group called the house band of the universe and it's a it's a band a musical group but one of one of the band members is a visual projectionists and we only play in planetariums and the the part of the context part of the content is well we use a software called Univ you where you can drive through the entire universe

00:59:14 through any data set it's very powerful from the Cosmic Microwave Background right up to the latest information from New Horizons at Pluto and solar system and seamlessly drive through it this has been used a lot in educational programs which is great but when we get the band in there and we do the spoken word component about the history of the universe we tend to get a different kind of crowd in there and I think it's very successful people are thrilled and they I think they learn some science but

00:59:45 that's not really the goal it's like they should go away knowing some facts in fact we've evaluated it in that way because it helps helped us to get some funding but they also clearly people are inspired but also the musicians the artists have an outlet and they get to be in an environment where they don't normally play and then saw a sonic environment too because the sphere is a very weird and challenging sonic environment as well I mean a hemisphere a dome and I think it's it's a case

01:00:16 where the hall has been very much greater than the sum of the parts and people leave there feeling inspired and they've learned something and they've been exposed to some art and and there's a sort of ecstatic thrill of like well I I was going to this thing I didn't know what it was going to be it wasn't a science lecture it wasn't a normal concert I now I'm leaving and I still don't know what it was but I feel great and I feel maybe even a little bit more committed to trying to spread the word

01:00:46 that we live on a planet and we have to deal with it as a planetary species so I don't know I just think that when you actually do these things that magic can happen that is is very useful we are new oh I hate to cut you off we are gonna open it up for questions now from the audience if you have a question please line up at the microphone behind me and emphasis on on the question part we love love your comments but you can comment

01:01:17 all you want over lunch too we want to get in some good questions where we take a break great hi I'm Patricia Olynyk I'm the director of the Graduate School of Art at Washington University in st. Louis and I co-host the the Leonardo laser events with Ellen levy here in New York every six weeks and and I'm also part of this group called the Alliance for the Arts and the research institutions so for those of you who have sort of seen me at some of

01:01:48 these meetings you know that what I'm really passionate about is kind of articulating a position for the intrinsic value of the arts there's so much talk particularly in academic circles about arts service to other disciplines and although I understand why you know the kind of quantification and the data that goes with that is very important especially if you're writing a grant I do think that the other side of that has to be balanced out in the art

01:02:18 that we as artists have to do a much better job of articulating what it is that we do so getting back to I'm sorry at your name Eric's comments about you know art being sort of focused very inwardly on itself and the example of this sort of the painting on the wall I think this is a common kind of misconception especially within academic circles is that the function of art is to beautify walls right nobody ever

01:02:48 really talks about what art does right it's the more as it gets relegated strictly to the to the realm of the aesthetic and there's not enough focus in my opinion on what it is that art does not what does it look like but what it actually does and I think if we can focus more on that I think that this will really help to expand the conversations so I'll be speaking at 2:15 a little bit about my role in a Medical Humanities program as well but I'm wondering if any of you want to

01:03:18 comment on the institutions that you work at and how focusing on what art I hope that wasn't me what art does rather than what are you know what it what the athletic properties are but what it does especially when it comes into contact with other disciplines I would love to hear other comments on that dimension this to you while we were talking in terms of like the importance of art as an artist I always feel like I can't

01:03:50 function I'm a advisor at the art and artificial intelligence laboratory at Rutgers which is a platform for the artistic use of computer vision and machine learning and I can't make my art unless I have collaborators in other fields that allow me to function so I can't even make art unless I have all of this other wonderful support so I always kind of feel like I'm sort of in this weird situation where I am really appreciative of all of these other wonderful disciplines that allow me to

01:04:21 even function but in terms of what art does I was just kind of when we were talking about this my undergraduate background is cognitive psychology and neuroscience but I realized that when you make a piece of art you can communicate things that are very difficult to communicate otherwise you can make a statement that is contradictory you can make a you can make something that is simultaneously beautiful and ugly at the same moment and you know conceptually that I just when I figure that out I do is so

01:04:52 extraordinary that you can communicate things and in ways that you can't do in other kinds of disciplines so that's just one of the things that I wanted to sort of offer up as a sort of this funny little thing that might be a little different I don't know if anybody else wants to take Patricia's don't you think there is some connection between art and emotion you have to be a biologist to

01:05:25 feel that you know your leaders now there was the Marty show at the moment couple years ago there was what hurmati show yeah and I heard from a number of people that no matter how you felt when you got there by the time you left the show you felt calm peaceful so I'm just wondering that what what that role of art is an important role in our lives and I just

01:05:57 wondered from your perspective what I mean I don't have an answer that but I but I feel it's a little bit of that you know telling the person the meaning of the joke problem I mean in a way we should be happy that that's the way it works so I don't know that we need to understand the underlying or a science of why it is that I don't think that will add to art one but I mean I think is one of the big problems right now with the neuro - everything in the world that neuroscience is about to explain law ethics humanity arts writing all this other stuff and I'm not interested

01:06:28 in those explanations for the most part I mean I there may be okay but I don't think any one thing at all or an ounce of anything to any of those areas in my opinion in terms of evolution and in terms of the presence of art in in in the history of mankind there is a particular role that that plays well I mean I think you know there are a lot of people that make the case and I think it's generally maybe even well accepted now that that graphics preceded language

01:06:59 necessarily that you first painted ear on the cave before you have a word for deer which is a significant abstraction from just representing the deer but representing the deer is the beginning of an abstraction and then it's you we could never have developed the language that's allowing us to have this talk today without it so yes you could say that it perceives it I want to just very briefly say that you know it there's a bit of a linguistic thing going on here if we say that the aesthetics of art is just how something looks on a wall you

01:07:32 know saying that that art doesn't have to have a function doesn't mean that it's non-causal it doesn't mean that it's epiphenomenon right it means that there doesn't have to be an express outcome for this thing that you're generating and it doesn't have to have a particular use in the world and many argue that is the fundamental definitional aspect of art of course it ends up causing experiences causing change in the world causing all these ramifications right but it is definitely true that at least if you look at the history of art we there was a period

01:08:03 where both representation of just other things kind of have really went out the window for a period of time and one other thing that's happening with science and art is that because science is literally the stuff out there in the world definitionally or talk about me about that but we think of things that way they provide this new way to do representational art that I think is really unique and and novel you know so I think we're at the dawn in a lot of

01:08:34 ways of understanding what the actual impacts of art are on learning on behavior emotion on lots of things but I want to put out a little bit of a model here to ask you to react to it so if we take as a point of departure Eric's point at the beginning of this panel about the the the explosion of science the impact of that let's take that a step further and say that we we live in a world which is heavily and increasingly defined by the products of science and that shapes our experience

01:09:06 our life our culture many many things about how we how we live in how we behave okay so in that environment there are maybe here all kind of borrow from Rogers fuzzy taxonomy a little bit there may be three ways that we might think about that how art fits into all of that the first is that art can kind of help us understand it better and so that embraces but it's not limited to science communication because it also then touches on understanding what the implications of that are and what that

01:09:37 might mean to us as humans so then there's the second level so this world that we're living in where Sciences is in its products are driving our society is requiring behaviors of us which we don't necessarily have high levels of skill and development for and in some cases may be at odds with our evolutionary heritage so art and as we begin to understand more about how art actually impacts us we'll learn more about this art can help us with that in

01:10:10 lots of different ways and so there's that second level then of course there's the third level which goes beyond that which is so if the products of science are driving us in directions which are beneficial but also troublesome in many ways can co-creation between art and science be way of addressing them so I think of that as a little bit of a framework and I kind of want to throw that out there and see what you think about that hey I'll take that a little bit and tie it to the answer the preview of a couple previous questions of what

01:10:42 what the function a function of art in society is which is I think one of the things that gets missed a lot in the sort of the traditional sicom art mode particularly the ones funded by science agencies is that one of the best things art can do for science is to critique and to critique and to ask very hard questions and I agree with your premise that in Eric's that one of the defining features of now is that our experience

01:11:13 is mediated by science and technology and I would go a step further and say it is absolutely essential that are engaged with that in a way that really wrestles with important questions and if you want to you know you can point at very specific things where you know you've got Elon Musk building a program to send us to Mars and this whole discussion happens very often in in a science and technology environment where you're not ringing in people looking at the social aspects of that and the ethics of it and so I feel

01:11:44 like there's two functions art can do that in that environment one is the direct critique you know make a parody of Elon Musk or whatever I come from the comedy world that's what I would do but um there's other ways to do it obviously and then but the other thing to do is to try and chip away at this barrier because one of the reasons we don't critique science and engineering is that it is viewed as this this thing that is walled off and that there is no access to and that's where the value of the access oriented part of this science communication are it said our stuff comes in is is making it possible for

01:12:16 those critiques to happen by by convincing people that it isn't this high priesthood that that can only comment on these things again as a member of the next panel on science and art in society I'm gonna feed forward to what we would feedback later if we had time she there's anyway so that thank you for the provocation so what do you

01:12:47 think of this I'm putting together how to deal with the jargon issue than knowing too many things lists of everything someone should know issue together with preaching to the choir issue which is no matter how wonderful it is we still do and the alienation from science and art these are all kind of related to me so coming at it this way ethanol has done way before even writing

01:13:18 was invented that make things work for us Ecology's and so forth NASA and other agencies have had some projects with this in the past where for example they work with people in other regions and the Arctic regions to figure out different ways of seeing snow and ice so they could then better map and model using the data from satellites great how was that done and this is the answer to all those previous questions the public they basically hung out in the community for months weeks whatever to get through lots of things like

01:13:48 what's the problem here what's how what's life and then finally getting to even metaphysical maybe abyss logical question and then finally getting to the sea and the ice and all that the actual ice colors they were working with people who are not scientists and not artists but they came out with some really good stuff and that's kind of the answer what I'm thinking here the the best context for art and science coming together is the public one and that brings me to the

01:14:20 other thing I left out art is free from rationality which is the beautiful thing about the public the public is free from as we see so much today very free from rationality and they can say contradictory things and it becomes a news story and it becomes a president and that's just the way you live and that's normal that totally has always been that way so you know work with it right so anyway I'm thinking the public sphere those synthesis Center kind of

01:14:51 things so how would that work if that if we were to with every at every scale find some public that wants something done with their community and they know their community and whatever the hell that is that they would like and then artisans artists and scientists get together around that and then kind of work with these people and whatever the result is who cares you don't know that in advance it's gonna be messy and stupid and then something's gonna come out of it everyone's gonna be happy if they listen to the public and because you know the brilliant scientist artists time to talk

01:15:22 to each other oh wow all that so I think you the key word or a key word it's a great point you make a great question a key word is listen and we can do those those community projects in different non places where we don't normally maybe do science projects and work with communities but we have to get away from a mindset that I think is pretty endemic

01:15:52 in the scientific community and shed some of our arrogance and and shed some of our sense that we're bringing the word from on high to work really successfully the community like that we requires a lot of humility and requires a kind of RAD listening where you're willing to not be efficient and that's a little hard where you're getting paid to do something you're gonna spend some time being purposely a little bit aimless and just listening I'll give you an example of something I think was very successful I

01:16:23 was part of something a few for a few summers I wish it was still ongoing called that the NASA and the Navajo Nation a summer space camp with middle school students and we collaborated we had a few NASA scientists I was one of them and a few Navajo elders and a medicine man and about 20 middle schoolers and we spent a couple weeks traveling around the Navajo Nation together going to different landscapes

01:16:54 learning the cultural stories of the land teaching our perspective on the scientific stories of the land listening a lot everybody learning a lot and then in the end the middle school kids synthesized all of this with art projects in which they combined the stories of the scientific and the and the cultural stories and they were really really powerful like one one group of and the kids collaborated to do the Seuss of one group of middle school

01:17:25 it's made a you know the Navajo cradle boards when when a child is born it's a small symbolic thing so they made the cradle board but it was also the story of the universe with you know the Big Bang and all this stuff and and another another group of these middle school kids they synthesized there's this volcanic site we went to which we told him about the salt flows and this and that but they're their traditional story is that the the basalt flows are the Giants blood because there were these this battle of giants so they did this diorama that had the Giants battling in their blood spilling out and then it was also basalt flow and it was just it was

01:17:58 tremendous we all learned so much but it wouldn't have worked if we had gone in there were the attitude of like these are the points we're going to teach and this is our time scale and at the end you will be able to be quizzed on this knowledge and you'll be able you know you have to listen and you have to be open to the fact that you're going to learn as much as anybody else I ran a little round table a couple years ago about art and science at Emory University and the one of the people at

01:18:29 the table was a surgeon and said you know well I'm an artist as well because I do watercolors and the artist at the table got really infuriated and said you know that's like me saying I've dissected a few frogs so I'm a surgeon and so you know without getting into the you know realm of elitism I do want to point out that the elephant in the room is that art and science are not on a level playing field and you know an example of that is that we teach science K through 12 and into universities and it's required in most of those grades and you know we stopped teaching art in

01:19:01 what may be fourth grade depending on the you know whatever the school district is and you know if you look at funding amounts you know the National Endowment for the Arts National Science Foundation you can add zeroes you know to NSF and to dark bug grants and so that's my comment so my question sort of reflection is sort of picking up with this topic of listening I'm starting up an art and science residency program in the Appalachian skald art science in the field as if Center you can go there as

01:19:31 if that Center our residency program starts this March that's my little plug and it's you know it's in a sort of cosmopolitan part of the Appalachian that's very near to Penland school of craft we're right over the mountains from where Black Mountain College used to be Matthews line was actually at Penland this summer there are a lot of makers in the area that come from other places but nevertheless you know that 48% of people who don't believe in evolution a lot of those people are my neighbors and so this it presents a problem I don't want to exist in a vacuum I don't want to be this jewel of

01:20:02 wonderfulness in the middle of you know quote-unquote nowhere I want to actually have relationships with the community and so one of the things I'm thinking about approaching this is well there are three things this is a area that's sort of tribal I thought you know I'm from the south I can just breeze right in and I'll blend in after a couple of years but actually people have been in that community for like eight to ten generations they all know each other they're like thirty last names that are in the county and there's like this real

01:20:32 sense of you know not from here and so there's this tribalism and I've thought like finding an ally within the community who's from there who can sort of like help to you know approach people and help tell our story and present our work is a really important thing and then the other two things are that people are more the older generations than younger generations really tied to the land tied to place and that's a lot of what this art Science Center is about is like art science plus nature you know

01:21:03 being in this southern Appalachian switch is incredibly biologically diverse and interesting geology so that pride of place is another way to tap in and the third one is that you know there's a sense of Independence and like as much as people from that region are they value essaouira tea from the church they do not value authority from the federal government and this kind of goes back to their Scottish roots and you know a lot of history but that sense of DIY that you know makers have and that

01:21:34 scientists have been trying to use that and so I guess my question is like looking for wisdom about dealing with difficult almost sometimes hostile audiences to science and like what are some approaches for tackling that challenge I know I deserve there is a growing literature on this that is run

01:22:04 by people who describe themselves as studying the science of science communication Dan kahan at Yale I am utterly blanking on everyone else's name but he has a blog rate list these people and it's there's no there's no magic bullet of course you know it's lots and lots and lots of hard work but they they have identified things and it like David's point or no sorry I'm Stuart's point about people actually do understand how evolution works and so learning thing like you know if your approach is to

01:22:36 teach them evolution you're going to fail and so they've learned a number of things like this to be honest it feels like they're about 2% of the way we need to be but that's it's growing just for that question I'm Patricia Miranda I'm a artist and an educator and curator I've done a lot of work with my own my own work with art and science and I teach in a BFA and MFA program and also develop K through 12 programming

01:23:07 steam based programming in New York City in the tri-state area especially but I wanted to just push back a little bit on some of the art conversation which I thank you for Patricia starting that push back the I felt a little bit like the conversation about art in this panel has been kind of like a poor stepchild or the poor relation a little bit and I would just want to echo what Patricia is saying about art having a value of its own I think you've mitigated some of those since since she got up and said that but I also think this idea of artistic literature I want to literacy I

01:23:38 want to push back on that too with all due respect I don't think it's the artists fault I don't think that artists are making art about art and that that's an isolated think I think thing I think that the aesthetic and the formal are always unfolded by the social throughout history in every instance of art making so those frescoes that you may that we may not understand is not necessarily only because we may not understand all of the Christian symbolism but also because it's unfolded by the social of the time and so there's an entire culture built into those paintings which were didactic and they had certain

01:24:08 functions that it's invisible to us and we'll never know because we can't enter a medieval mind try to a renaissance mind and I would also say that I could take any of you to Chelsea tomorrow and give you an involved tomorrow not tomorrow it's Sunday but I could take you through Chelsea and show you artists that are deeply deeply engaged with the issues of the day and that maybe it's not getting out into the mainstream culture in that direct way but it filters down even to like dough hoses painting work appearing in like a Drake video or something like that so I think

01:24:39 that their artists are in conversation with each other they're in their conversation with art history and they're in a with all of culture so you can just think of the Kara walk I started not the Kara Walker well yes you can think of Kara Walker as an artist she's done that but the Danish shots Emmett Till painting controversy if you know about that or this Sam Durant scaffolding at the Walker Art Museum these are two things that create an enormous enormous discourse that bled out maybe it is this kind of core community that's having the depth of the conversation but it does

01:25:10 filter out and I've had these conversations with my students over and over again so framing it as the aesthetic in the formal are always unfolded by the social is one of the sort of pedagogy's that I've developed and I developed a pedagogy of critique based on you know critique is something that in the art world we do all the time but to help artists and professional artists I work with a lot in developing a critical language to be able to communicate what they're doing in their work without it dissecting trying to do the thing where you're like what does this mean well who cares right it's not

01:25:40 about it's not about why it's never about why it's about what what is happening what is the art doing because even a painting on the wall is a verb right it's in action it's in dialogue and it's in discourse and I think that people don't understand that about art not because artists are not doing it but because we don't teach art in the schools in such a way that that dial that discourse like someone just said before that science is taught K through 12 and art is not so it's it's a constant constant conversation that we're having and I I think in the pedagogy that I work in it is about

01:26:12 developing a critical language that communicates those things without dissecting them into sort of you know if you dissect the frog you understand the frog right we don't you can dissect the frog and understand many things but you still don't understand the frog so the same thing is true of art so I just wanted to push back [Music] yeah let me let me briefly comment on that so so you know I completely agree I was speaking specifically to science

01:26:42 literacy among us are artistic literacy among scientists so you know it is certainly true i mean i'm that's a cultural thing right it's not embedded in the in the culture of education in a way that a scientist would come up so I working worked in Europe this past last semester and it is a much more it's not perfect of course but much more embedded in the culture that people are learning about art the same way they're learning about wine or food you know what I mean it's it's considered this kind of larger conversation that you're all a part of

01:27:13 as a citizen and so I yeah hey hello so I wanted to push on for a second the society part of this panel and unfortunate and specifically unfortunately politics so as was just said artists are very engaged and apply in political issues these days and more

01:27:45 than ever but I'm curious my question for the panel is is what is the responsibility the unique responsibilities of scientists politically in my opinion very quickly is there's sort of too often a sort of view from nowhere neutrality that's mixed with a little bit of elitism and I I worry sometimes that the best we can do is like make signs for the climate March and and get out in kind of a way

01:28:17 that could be construed as a lead ism when you're hot when you're just sort of presenting the facts and hoping for the best is there and then one other example I want to mention was last year during the campaign in the heat of the campaign neil degrasse tyson made this unfortunate idea i think called why don't we all just live in a world called ration alia and then i think some of the new atheist people made t-shirts and it was this whole thing like really okay so the anyway that's my question for you guys what would I I

01:28:48 thought that was bad and I think it speaks to a certain kind of elitism that was talked about earlier what should scientists be doing politically or what should they not be doing yeah it's a fair question and it's it's a difficult one of course in something of I in a lot of my colleagues have been involved in discussions of that for a long time and and you're right we were sort of trained brought up with this idea that science is value neutral which of course is it's not and it gets gets us off the hook in a way

01:29:19 that we're really not but there you know the opposite extreme of that is an interesting question should scientists be activists and there's danger there too you don't want to enslave your when you're actually practicing science you don't want to enslave you don't want to have an outcome that you're seeking to try to make a point we I can give you examples of science that is aired and that way because if I only had this result it would help strengthen this political thing that I think is important that's dangerous too so

01:29:49 there's no simple answer to this but it's obviously not we just pretend were from on high disengaged one thing that I will say is that there is a genuine power and I think radical radicalism to telling the truth about the world the way we really see it in other words when you see the Earth from space you don't see national borders you know that macroeconomics as it is described by

01:30:20 economists is wrong fundamentally because it doesn't include ecology and notions of natural or you know limits and so forth you understand that the world is a place of deep cycling of elements and an energy than we are embedded in those cycles and so there is a radicalness to just simply teaching things about the world that we've learned that we need to integrate to be successful as a species and if that's a political act then then I'm guilty of it

01:30:53 very quickly about this okay very quickly I actually don't agree with you largely about this I'm some of it's okay but I think the job of science and society now is to be optimistic I'm that may sound like a crazy thing to say today but I think we completely blew the climate change thing I think it's the scientists fault that's as screwed up as it is because we took this thing we have made it a kind of a finger-wagging problematic issue for everybody you got to get on board with this or there's something wrong

01:31:24 with you my opinion is we should have said you know what we have these amazing new technologies from space and geology and elsewhere we have learned that the planet is warming up this is potentially dangerous guess what we're great at this we can solve this we got to the moon we can solve this too we just need to work on this and and then it's a kind of a you know there's a sense of optimism maybe it's foolish optimism or whatever but to me this is the way you garner or social activity was no I actually agree with you completely perhaps you misunderstood me that I do think that

01:31:55 there is also kind of an optimism that comes from that global long-term view that you can see that we've actually confronted problems like this before and anytime all right all right yes going to be continued for sure questions for lunch I have a really provocative

01:32:27 question if we're not really being honest with ourselves is it not the role of art in science art collaborations to glorify and help us worship science science has kind of taken the role of the church in our society and we we erect these huge buildings with magnificent architecture that we get architects in and we commissioned sculptures and statues like the ones we saw that sit in serene and around our scientific spaces and they become these behemoths that the society can worship

01:32:59 against and art enables that worship in the same way as it did with the church when you say it does that but it also does the opposite there's the critique and bringing it down to size the part that I wanted to include is that the common vocabulary here would be art history and the fact that technology made art change over the years and so you start with charcoal in caves and then you go into egg tempera you go from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Rome -

01:33:29 that's a Western focused view for sure but in that that's the vocabulary that we could use this commonality to cross over because the technology would be used to basically progress all of this we are gonna be back here at 2:15 sharp the next roundtable people please come ten minutes early to set up your mics go grab lunch continue these discussions see you in a bit