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Taking Note: Stress, Music, and Epigenetics in Heart Disease Patients

Friday, April 5th, 2013

April 5, 2013

By Sunil Iyengar, NEA Director of Research & Analysis

Music Lover by flickr user stephaniezens

Last September, in opening remarks during a National Academy of Sciences workshop on the arts and aging, I posed some questions about research in this field. As reported in Aging and the Arts: Building the Science (2013), an account of the workshop, jointly sponsored by the NEA and the National Institutes of Health, I asked, “Are there theoretical models that explain how participation in the arts affects the health and well-being of older Americans?”

For researchers in the social sciences, assumptions of this type are often illustrated through a “theory of change” diagram or a logic model. But in biomedical research, there’s an additional layer of terminology to describe how we think different variables rub off each other to produce a result. We talk about plausible “pathways” or “mechanisms of action.” And every so often a study emerges that invokes this impressive argot to reflect on how art works.

A couple of months ago, the peer-reviewed journal Medical Science Monitor published an article titled “Recreational Music-Making Alters Gene Expression Pathways in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease.” The study, backed by Yamaha Corporation of America, shows how a specific music-making intervention brings about molecular changes that can lower the impact of stress in heart disease patients.

The arts intervention, Recreational Music-Making (RMM), is described as “a unique stress amelioration strategy encompassing group music-based activities for individuals without prior musical experience. RMM focuses on personal expression and group support, rather than mastery and performance.”

The study design itself was creative. Researchers took 34 subjects with a history of heart disease (19 men and 15 women, all white) and, well, stressed them out. Participants were all asked to assemble a 500- to 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, ranked by its manufacturer as “most difficult” because of its “repetitive images, dual-sided images offset by 90◦, extra pieces, and photo-to-mosaics within each piece,” the article helpfully notes.

The subjects had one hour. Cash was promised to the person who assembled the most pieces in that time. And, as if that weren’t enough, the subjects were reminded periodically of the time remaining.

After this so-called “stress” phase of the study, participants were assigned randomly to one of two forms of relaxation: either RMM or “quiet reading” of newspapers or magazines. RMM sessions consisted of “no more than seven participants at individual electronic keyboards and the facilitator physician sitting in close proximity.”

Peripheral blood was taken from the subjects at baseline and then again at the stress and relaxation phases of the study. The samples were analyzed for changes in gene expression pathways relevant to modulating responses to stress and relaxation. The result? RMM participants showed changes in expression for “12 pathways governing immune function and genetic information processing.” By contrast, the quiet readers showed a “significant change in expression” in only two pathways.

These findings impel the authors to write that “RMM may be more clinically useful for stress amelioration and may confer greater benefit to cardiovascular patients than traditional modes of relaxation.” Given the well-documented  role of psychosocial stress as a risk factor for heart disease, this research has potentially broad applications for clinical practice—although as with any study worth its salt, the authors note that “additional studies are required.”

The study team included Marina Vernalis, MD, medical director of the Integrative Cardiac Health Project at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The lead author is Barry Bittman, MD, chief innovation officer at the Meadville Medical Center in Pennsylvania and CEO of the Yamaha Music and Wellness Institute. Another key contributor was Darrell Ellsworth, PhD, senior director of the Integrative Cardiac Health Program at Windber Research Institute, also in Pennsylvania.

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Art (& Science) Talk with Pamela L. Jennings

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

February 7, 2013

By Whitney Dail

Pamela L. Jennings

Pamela L. Jennings. Photo courtesy of Ms. Jennings

Pamela L. Jennings is equal parts artist, engineer, and researcher. Her CV is extensive, covering everything from teaching positions in the arts to research projects in human-centered computing. As Director of the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Jennings works to create pathways between SAIC’s community and civic, academic, and industry partners. Prior to this, she led the National Science Foundation’s CreativeIT program that supported cross-disciplinary projects combining creativity, computer science, and information technology. As a veteran of the emerging art, science, and technology field, and a self-proclaimed “wizard behind the curtain,” she has big plans for its future.

The NEA caught up with Jennings over a 45-minute phone call to hear her perspective on what’s happening in the art-science community. We talked about media art in the early eighties to mid nineties, her time in Silicon Valley, and the rising STEM to STEAM movement. Here’s what she had to say.

NEA: Let’s start with your background. How did you develop an interest in media art and computing?

PAMELA JENNINGS: I’ve always been involved in various forms of art making/art creation, from visual arts to performing arts. My base visual art was photography, going back to junior high school. When I was a student at Oberlin College in the eighties, computers were not in abundance. We worked primarily on mainframes and word-processors, and quite frankly, I was critical about the impact of computers on society as I watched how anxious and impatient students got waiting for their dot-matrix printouts from the other side of the foreboding Plexiglas window. However, in 1990, I had the opportunity to do a residency at the Banff Centre in Canada. It was a combination of an internship and opportunity to work on my own creative explorations in video art, music composition, and sound synthesis. The main project I worked on was the completion of my thesis video, the silence that allows, for the New York University-International Center of Photography Master in Studio Art program. There was this incredible group of artists at that residency who were involved in what we call today the electronic arts, including Trimpin, Laura Kikauka, and Gordon Monahan. They were early pioneers who disassembled computers to build machines of their creative imaginaries, and I was wowed. This was the beginning of my pursuit of knowledge and involvement in the hybrid practice of the arts, engineering, and design. I also have to share that there were other artists at Banff during that residency who had tremendous influence on me, including feminist writer Tillie Olson, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, and bad-boy Canadian painter Attila Richard Lukacs.

At that time, I was making experimental video art and electronic sound compositions. So, in essence, I was working with computers and technology, but not deconstructing technology. After that experience at Banff I decided that I wanted to learn more about multimedia as an artistic medium. The early to mid-1990s was a great time to enter into this burgeoning field because there were many opportunities to learn and leverage my new computational skills both for my artistic practice and paid gigs into what came to be known as the dot-com era. During that time I lived in New York City and as the dot-com industry started to rise, almost every major media conglomerate was trying to figure out how to use interactivity as a new medium for pushing content. I had the opportunity to work at Time Warner Interactive, NBC Interactive, Voyager, and a couple of smaller start-up companies [that] were developing CD-Roms and corporate websites. As a matter of fact, I worked on the first NBC Olympics website for the 1996 Atlanta Games. We were an HTML web farm in Rockefeller Center putting up photos, articles, and links in “real time” that were sent to us from the crew in Atlanta.

I would say that I am 70 percent self-taught. However, I found myself going back to school to learn more about computer programming and electronics. I started a Master’s degree in the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program and finished an MFA in Computer Arts at the School of Visual Arts. In many ways, multimedia was the perfect format for me since I was already very engaged in image making through photography and video art, sound design and theater, and vocal arts. The rich medium of multimedia provided the tools for knitting these creative forms of expression together.

NEA: What led you to a career in research that has shared synergy across the arts and sciences?

JENNINGS: Long story short, I found myself with the requisite skills and ability and talents to be solicited for some interesting jobs in the more commercial sector. Although that wasn’t my main goal, the job opportunities were fresh and open to alternative perspectives and approaches. My goal was just to have great experiences working on cool projects. As I mentioned earlier, I returned to school and completed my MFA. When I graduated, I was recruited by IBM to work on a new cutting-edge (for that time period) corporate Internet project called alphaworks. From art school to IBM, this was an unusual path and to this day I don’t know how they were referred to me for the position.

The reason why I really liked the IBM project and decided to do it was because it was connecting IBM computer science research to the world beyond IBM. IBM has a world of research that is not intended to become part of a product. However, they wanted to leverage this giant research brain trust to make it available to outside developers to think about how to use it, license it, etc. IBM wasn’t necessarily thinking of open source, although some of the technologies went that way, particularly since this was all happening during the time period of the “birth of Java.” I liked the project because it connected me to IBM research, not because it was a dot-com initiative. We were moved to San Jose, California, to set up shop at the Almaden IBM Research Lab. While there, I spent substantial time working in one of the research labs that was then called the User System Ergonomics Research lab that focused on human-computer interaction interfaces of the future. Following my time at Almaden, I spent a couple of years at SRI International, another Silicon Valley think-tank where I worked at the Center for Technology in Learning, a cutting-edge research group that was developing technology and applications for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning in informal and formal settings. Today, we take PDAs or smartphones for granted. Back then, we were discovering and inventing new ways to integrate these tools into everyday life and learning.

My path is unusual. I was driven in those jobs by the opportunity to access, engage, and subvert ideas about how we develop and use computer technologies. Getting access to a lot of really interesting, cutting edge ideas—things that we might take for granted today, but at the time in those labs were truly groundbreaking—was my driver to flirting with corporate research think tanks.

I spent eight years at Carnegie Mellon University, following Silicon Valley, with a joint professorship in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) in the School of Computer Science and the School of Art in the College of Fine Arts. Prior to my position, there had been one other faculty member, Simon Penny, who had a joint professorship in art and robotics. I was the first to have an appointment between the School of Art and the HCII. After I left Carnegie Mellon, I spent a year at the Banff as director of the research program in Banff New Media Institute. While at Banff, I resurrected and restructured the Advanced Research Technology Lab, which had fallen to mothballs after a splendid nearly 10-year Banff New Media Institute run and about three-year research lab run. I hired an incredible international group of junior researchers from Austria, Colombia, Canada, and Hong Kong. We focused on software development, virtual and augmented reality projects, and rapid prototyping of complex systems.

After a year in Canada the opportunity to return to the States as a program director at the National Science Foundation was presented to me. Being a job that I simply couldn’t refuse, I moved to Arlington, Virginia, and took up the reigns as lead program director for the NSF CreativeIT program. Plus, Obama had just been elected, and this was no time to become an expatriate. To this day, I believe that the CreativeIT program was and is so far the only, federally funded program focused specifically on the integration of computer science, engineering, and creativity. We funded many wonderful projects. And perhaps someday, a published record will be made about the impact of that program. (more…)

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Art + Science = Opportunity

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

January 17, 2013

by Bill O’Brien, NEA Senior Adviser for Program Innovation

silhouette of 2 dancers in Jonah Boaker's "Replica"

Jonah Bokaer and Judith Sanchez Ruiz in Replica by Bokaer and Daniel Arsham. Photo by Michael Hart, used courtesy of Chez Bushwick, Inc.

In 2011, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco convened some 125 artists for a summit entitled Art as a Way of Knowing. The purpose of the convening was to engage artists, scientists, educators, and thinkers in an investigation on how the arts can be engaged as a form of inquiry. As the report from the conference demonstrates, this interest is often charged by a desire to investigate ways that new knowledge and new insights can be acquired via arts experiments and experiences.

As demonstrated previously on this blog, there is increasing interest among practitioners from the arts, sciences, and humanities in topics and themes that lie at the intersections of these fields. At times these efforts and collaborations are spurred on by a perfectly valid desire to utilize the capabilities or tools from one field to benefit the other. For example, a scientist may enlist the aid of an artist or illustrator to help communicate her work to a broader audience. Or a lighting designer may employ new digital technologies and software capabilities that will allow him to work more efficiently. At other times these activities are propelled forward by a desire to experiment with how new technologies can inspire new artistic practice, or a desire to expand our knowledge and understanding of things that are not exclusively artistic or scientific in nature, but are rather matters of shared concern.

In November, the NEA announced a new wave of grants to support arts projects across 13 artistic disciplines and fields. More than 800 grants were listed in the announcement, a number of which will support a wide range of projects that focus on art and science.

For example, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University is being recommended for support for residencies for up to eight artists in their “laboratory for atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional research at the intersections of arts, science, technology, and culture.”

Dallas Opera is receiving a grant to support performances of Tod Machover and Robert Pinsky’s hi-tech opera Death and the Powers. The production will be directed by Diane Paulus and will feature designs by Alex McDowell, including a host of innovative sound and visual technologies developed for the production at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. These include “operabots” and a new technique called Disembodied Performance, which employs gestural and physiological sensors and voice analysis to capture a singer’s offstage performance, which are then used to generate real-time, technologically enhanced representations of the performance on stage.

Underground Railway Puppets & Actors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is receiving a grant to support the development and production of a new play from author/physicist Alan Lightman, Mr g: A Novel about the Creation. The play is part of the ongoing Catalyst Collaborative@MIT initiative in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and will be developed through dialogue between scientists, artists, audiences, and community organizations.

And in a project that perhaps best exemplifies the “Art as a way of knowing” conversation at the Exploratorium, Chez Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York, is being funded to support new work by choreographer Jonah Bokaer and his visual artist/collaborator Daniel Arsham. The piece will attempt to create illusions in space through the use of movement, visual design, lighting, and other forms of media in a work that is rooted in the team’s ongoing research on Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR).

EMDR is an emerging integrative form of psychotherapy that has been developed in clinical settings to treat psychological disorders. It’s based on the theory that we process new experiences through our senses by linking or categorizing them with similar existing memories. Over time, these experiences and linkages create memory networks that inform our perceptions, attitudes, emotions, and sensations. In this new work, Bokaer and his creative collaborators will continue their ongoing experiments that use EMDR tests and principals as a creative element that creates illusions in space through the use of movement, visual design, lighting, and sound. This work builds on the team’s previous work, Replica which also incorporated EMDR experimentation and was the first choreographic work funded by the National Academy of Sciences.

Anyone interested in learning more about how the NEA can support art/science projects in the future are encouraged to join our art/science mailing list by emailing us at artandscience@arts.gov.

We would also encourage you to consider submitting an application at our upcoming Art Works deadline on March 7. You can view an archive of a webinar highlighting NEA’s funding opportunities and application process along with further information on how art/science projects can be supported across all agency disciplines here.

 

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Art (& Science) Talk with Kerry Tribe

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

December 4, 2012

by Whitney Dail

A still from the video installation "H.M." by Kerry Tribe

H.M. (2009) by Kerry Tribe. Double projection of a single 16mm film, 18:30 minutes loop Installation view, 1301PE, Los Angeles. Photo: Fredrik Nilson, courtesy of Kerry Tribe

This year, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Kerry Tribe was one of twenty-three artists to receive a visual arts grant from Creative Capital. Tribe will work with health professionals and aphasic patients over the next two years to develop The Language of Forgetting, a large-scale experimental film, video, and installation piece about aphasia, a communication disorder that occurs when the language center of the brain is injured. By working with patients and scientists, Tribe seeks to explain and mimic the disorder through a combination of sound and video. Her project is the result of an ongoing interest in, what she calls, “the phenomenology of memory.” We wanted to know more about her plans for The Language of Forgetting, so we spoke to Tribe through a brief email Q&A.

NEA: Can you tell me a little about The Language of Forgetting and how you conceived the project?

KERRY TRIBE: The Language of Forgetting investigates the neurological condition of aphasia through the language of moving image, sound, and installation. A few years ago, I made a film installation called H.M. that explored the true story of Patient H.M., a man with no long-term episodic memory; he would forget everything that happened to him within about 20 seconds. H.M. describes the condition of amnesia in a (relatively) traditional documentary style while simultaneously producing the experience of short-term memory loss for the viewer by looping the 16mm film through two projectors with a 20 second delay between the images. I see The Language of Forgetting as a continuation of the work I did for H.M., as a project that will both describe the condition of aphasia for the viewer and also “produce” some aspect of the aphasiac experience by playing with the dissociation of images and words.

NEA: What inspired your artistic interest in aphasia?

TRIBE: I’ve been consistently interested in neurological processes and in the ways that the formal aspects of film and video can mirror processes of cognition. If you’re not familiar with the term, aphasia is a cognitive impairment that affects the language centers of the brain. It has many forms, but generally manifests as an inability to remember words or name objects, or as profound difficulties in speaking, reading, or writing. Basically, it is a radical disorder of linguistic communication. As such, aphasia seems like a particularly apt subject for documentary film, in that it might problematize the medium’s basic assumptions: the existence of subjects who are capable of coherent self-expression, and of an audience able to receive and rationally interpret others’ experiences

NEA: How have aphasic patients and researchers responded to your project?

TRIBE: The project is in its early stages, but the scientists and researchers I have approached to date have been very receptive and are putting me in touch with patients. One of the things that I enjoy about my artistic practice is the opportunity to collaborate across disciplines.

NEA: Since The Language of Forgetting is a work-in-progress, what is the expected outcome and timeline?

TRIBE: Generally when I begin a project I have an idea of what it will turn out to be, but ultimately the process determines the outcome. What I can say at this point is that the project will have aspects that can be exhibited in museums and art galleries, and will also most likely result in an experimental film that may travel to festivals. My aim is to create a work that both in its production and reception will bring together disparate communities: patients, scientists, researchers, and audiences of contemporary art and film. I expect the work to be completed in early 2014.

NEA: In what ways can your creative inquiry be applied to existing research on the subject of aphasia?

TRIBE: It’s too early to tell with this project, but in previous collaborations with scientists I have found that for them, approaching their subjects from a radically different, often more philosophical and creative perspective tends to generate new and productive insights.

NEA: Are there any specific insights into the neurological condition that you hope to convey with The Language of Forgetting?

TRIBE: Primarily, I’m interested in developing formal strategies through this work that will allow viewers a more empathic, experiential understanding of what it might be like to live with these kinds of communicative disorders.

NEA: What do you see is the connection between art and science?

TRIBE: The connections between art and science are too vast to enumerate! I think that there is a tendency to place art and science at opposite poles, in that we generally think of art as being the realm of fantasy, and science the realm of reality. But I tend to think of art and science as fundamentally similar endeavors. Both artists and scientists are engaged in forms of cultural production that generate new knowledge and insights into the workings of the world.

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Art (& Science) Talk with Marguerite Perret

Monday, July 30th, 2012

July 30, 2012

by Whitney Dail

Visual artist Marguerite Perrette

Marguerite Perret working at the Grant Museum, University College London. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“At different times I am some combination of colleague, collaborator, educator, mentor, facilitator, archivist, witness, and activist. And all of those roles are part of my way of being an artist.” —Marguerite Perret

Marguerite Perret is an interdisciplinary artist and associate art professor at Washburn University who creates community-based installations for art and science institutions. Her work surveys ecology and health issues by means of artifacts, decorative arts, and exhibit design. For creative research, she’s traveled to the United Kingdom to study collections at medical and natural history museums. And for over a decade, Perret has partnered with scientists, healthcare professionals, and artists—including her husband, Bruce Scherting, director of exhibits at the University of Kansas’ Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. Last week, we interviewed Perret via e-mail to learn more about her curiosities for the natural world. She spoke to us about why she chose a career in the arts over sciences, and the importance of sharing knowledge between the disciplines.

NEA: What do you remember as your first engagement or experience with the arts?

MARGUERITE PERRET: Two stand out in my memory. As a young child, my cousins and I would visit my grandmother for weeks at a time during the summer. She lived on an ocean inlet in a small rural community in New England. The water’s edge was a briny, mucky place teeming with small marine animals, grasses, and seaweed. We would scoop out starfish, mussels, and small crabs and place them in buckets of seawater. Sitting on the dock, we made careful observational drawings of our subjects before releasing them back into the dark waters.

[Then] in fifth grade, our class had a student teacher who peppered our reading and math sessions with demonstrations on the importance of understanding anatomy when drawing animals. Her parents were graphic artists. Living just outside a large metropolitan area, I was aware that art existed in museums, but it was a revelation that artists lived in my community. Art and life were not so separate after all.

NEA: What’s your version of the artist’s life?

PERRET: There are many ways to be an artist. This is a really interesting time because the definition of art and what it means to be an artist is so broad. I thought I would follow a scientific career when I was younger, but at the last minute, I checked art instead of biology when filling out my college applications. Now I think I have the best of both worlds because as things worked out, I have been able to combine these interests.

My version of being an artist centers on intellectual curiosity, engagement, and service. The work that excites me tends to be issue-based, engages the community, and has an educational component. It definitely falls outside the art-market model. Which is not to say I don’t appreciate sales when they happen, but most of my projects are funded through partnerships with various types of cultural and community-based organizations. In recent years, colleges and universities have started to offer degrees in Art and Social Engagement and Environmental Art. But when I first started working this way, it was not as common, and I wasn’t always sure where the line was. Then I just stopped worrying about these distinctions.

Collaboration is essential to my process. The kind of installations I do sometimes require extensive interaction with various skilled makers, scholars, scientists, writers, and community advocates. I also often partner with other artists. Brainstorming ideas and problem-solving with people you enjoy working with can be thrilling. There are some parallels between this approach and how a research team functions where there is a lead investigator or two, but many people contribute to the project in highly significant ways. My most consistent collaborator is my husband Bruce Scherting. Bruce is the director of exhibitions at a university-based natural history museum and has worked as an exhibition designer for major institutions. It is truly life and art without separation. Working together is a pleasure and our ideas are stronger for it, but it can get a little prickly around the house if we are not seeing eye-to-eye on how an installation should progress.

NEA: How do you see the intersection of art and science?

PERRET: In recent history, art and science have often been presented in an oppositional, binary relationship. In response, physicist C.P. Snow presented his famous “two cultures” lecture over sixty years ago. He called for a bridging of the disciplines in a manner that would benefit both, while yet maintaining a separation between what he felt were deeply divided traditions. A more contemporary approach is to consider how the histories and methodologies of art and science intersect. Both are forms of inquiry centered around experimentation and exploration, learning, and sharing. There is an interesting correlation in the ways [Bruce and I] work—between the studio and the laboratory. Some artists work in studio-laboratories. Collaboration between the sciences and the arts has the potential to create new kinds of knowledge.

NEA: What do you like most about collaborating and creating art from science?

PERRET: It is very exciting to sit down with a scientist, collection manager, or medical researcher and see the world through their eyes. A chance to share knowledge—the promise of cross-fertilization, discussions about visualization, and interpretation—is the attraction on both sides. We always find out something new or surprising that challenges our own expectations or preconceptions.

Sometimes [Bruce and I] are invited to work with a collection or institution, and sometimes we have an idea that requires a specific kind of image or knowledge. When we approach a scientist or researcher for a project, the response is almost always extremely enthusiastic. There is so much mutual interest and respect. Invariably, we end up working behind the scenes with access to objects and research data that most people never see.

I was thinking about this while working in the spirit collections (things pickled in jars) at the Natural History Museum in London. We were there for an ongoing project that documents rare and recently extinct species that exist only or primarily in museum collections. The curator was present to answer any of our questions, but then left us alone in the collections. And what a collection! I documented several ‘type’ specimens from the Challenger expedition of 1872-76. The Challenger was the first global oceanographic expedition. A ‘type’ specimen is the first collected example of a species that is described and named, and it serves as the baseline for identifying other members of that species. It is such an honor to be trusted with something that is so absolutely irreplaceable.

NEA: How do current issues in science and medicine inform your artistic practice?

PERRET: Some artists work in laboratories with bioengineers; others are artist-inventors and technologists. I am primarily interested in the cultural and social dimensions of scientific and medical discoveries. I want to know what are the intellectual and public impacts of how knowledge and innovation are administered and mediated. Who has access to the benefits? What are the risks? As social media, computer science, and biotechnology interact with and sometimes merge with the body, there are some really interesting questions about what it means to be human and how that might change in the future.

There have been some interesting recent developments in our understanding about how cancer cells create microenvironments in the tissues around tumors and insights into the molecular processes that cause Alzheimer’s disease. References to new developments like these are layered into the work as it develops. I have a tendency to work toward a visual and conceptual complexity that can be appreciated at multiple levels. Visually, [my work] is very densely packed with scientific patterns and images, sculptural elements, projections, and sometimes performance—all relating to a specific issue, but each stratified component provides a different twist, another perspective.

NEA: To date, what’s been your most transformative arts experience?

PERRET: The first time someone expressed how deeply an installation that I had worked on moved them shook me up a bit. I am so in my head when I am working, and even though I often deal with difficult subject matter, there is some distance afforded through the process. But things changed when I started working [to include] historical and contemporary personal narratives in my work. I didn’t understand the power that [these] could have. I think it was the realization that art can resonate in the psyche as profoundly as any other experience. And with that comes responsibility. (more…)

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Art (& Science) Talk with Michael Hearst of One Ring Zero

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

July 23, 2012

by Whitney Dail

Michael Hearst

Michael Hearst. Photo by Chris Smith/Photography, courtesy of Michael Hearst/One Ring Zero (Michael Hearst & Joshua Camp).

“On a fundamental level, music is science… But for me, they really just happen to be two big interests of mine.” — Michael Hearst

Michael Hearst has a taste for the unusual. For the past fifteen years, he has collected rare instruments that most people have never heard of—like Hohner’s claviola or LEMUR’s robotic musical instruments—and made use of one-of-a-kind sounds for his band One Ring Zero. The group is particularly known for its concept albums based on themes ranging anywhere from cuisine to the solar system. Aside from music, Hearst is also passionate about science. One Ring Zero’s album Planets (2010) was a major hit among science enthusiasts and NASA Goddard scientists. But his solo work is just as dynamic. In addition to operating a recording studio and record label, Hearst’s repertoire includes full-length albums, film soundtracks, and a number of short stories published in literary journals including McSweeney’s. His latest album Songs for Unusual Creatures celebrates lesser-known animals that fascinate, for instance, the Bilby, Glass Frog, and Jesus Christ Lizard. The project even caught the attention of Chronicle Books which in October will release Hearst’s Unusual Creatures in book format. We caught up with Hearst via e-mail to hear more about his art-science connection and find out what he’s up to.

NEA: What’s your version of the artist’s life?

MICHAEL HEARST: At any given point, I’m typically working on five to 10 projects at the same time: an album for One Ring Zero, an album under my own name, a film soundtrack, a short story collection, a children’s book, a watercolor series, a composition for a string quartet, and, oh yeah, I’ll take on a mastering job for a record company while I’m at it. Basically, I wake up each morning and decide which project takes precedence (often dictated by deadlines), and almost immediately get to work. But even then, I’ll often start on one project, work on it for a few hours, and then switch to another. I work from my apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and some days I find that I don’t even step outside until three or four p.m. Thankfully, I’ve developed a close relationship with my neighborhood (or, at least the four-block radius around my apartment). I can easily walk over to Colson Patisserie and say “hi” to Yonatan, the owner and grab a coffee; or go next door to Barbès (where I also perform quite often) and say “hi” to owners Olivier and Vincent before returning to my apartment to do more recording or writing or whatever it is I happen to be working on that day. It’s funny, I think some of the baristas (and probably many other random people who live near me) think that I have no job, that I’m just wandering around the neighborhood all day being a slacker, when the fact is I’m juggling multiple projects back home, and I just need to step out every few hours to get some fresh air and clear my head. Walking around the neighborhood is my equivalent of taking a smoke break (without actually smoking).

NEA: What do you remember as your first engagement or experience with the arts?

HEARST: As a child, my father played (and sang) Kingston Trio and Roy Orbison songs for me on guitar and piano. My mother also played piano, and has always painted (art, not walls). Growing up in Tidewater, Virginia, my mother was a docent at the Chrysler Museum. I would take the tour with her at least once a week. I knew all the paintings inside out. My favorites were by Paul Klee and Marc Chagall. The Chrysler Museum has always held a special place for me. When I was in high school and driving, my friend Terry and I would actually write fake sick letters and skip school so that we could go to the Chrysler Museum and look at art. Nerds!

NEA: What decision has had the most impact on your work as an artist?

HEARST: Without a doubt, it was the actual act of deciding that I wanted to devote my life to art, a decision I made just after high school. If it had been up to me, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all, but my parents were very insistent. In fact, not going wasn’t really an option. I pleaded with my parents to let me at least skip the first semester so that I could try being a “normal person” and work a 9-5 job for a few months. They relented and let me stay behind for a semester, working a job at a screen-printing company in Virginia Beach while most of my other friends went off to college. During those months I had to make some big decisions. I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up! Any regular careers that were remotely of interest to me were simply ones that I’d be doing for the sake of making money, and not something I was truly passionate about. It’s totally cliché, but my parents always told me to do what I was passionate about, and [that] success would come. And with that I said, well then, I guess I’ll go to college for art! I think they were simply relieved that I was finally going to college. And for them, it was really about me having a college experience. I decided to go to Virginia Commonwealth University for music composition (visual art was a close runner-up). With this decision, I decided, okay, I’m going to make the most of it. I would put everything into it, no matter how bumpy the road. I would make it my career. Ultimately, I am extremely grateful that my parents pushed me to go to college and allowed me to study what I wanted. It’s always interesting to think where you might be if different decisions were made.

NEA: Your band One Ring Zero released Planets in 2010 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite. What role does astronomy play in your adult life?

HEARST: I’ve always been fascinated by science. Along with math and art, science was actually a subject that I did particularly well in in school. (I was terrible at English and history.) Astronomy has always been inspiring for me, and even more so now with all the new information we are constantly learning, and all the amazing pictures coming back from places like Hubble and various probes. Really incredibly stuff. If anything, I think I’ve actually become more interested in astronomy with age. Thankfully, my bandmate and co-founder of One Ring Zero Joshua Camp also loves astronomy.

NEA: Did you or the band conduct any investigations into the solar system prior to composing the album?

HEARST: While working on Planets (three years of production), we spent a lot of time relearning the solar system, and learning new things … like the discovery of thousands of previously unknown exoplanets, and, of course, the demotion of Pluto. I found myself watching NASA TV almost obsessively. The Astronomy Picture of the Day on NASA’s website is a lot of fun, too. And while Joshua and I were both incredibly inspired by Holst’s orchestral suite, we wanted ours to be something entirely new. The end result is as much an homage to Holst’s The Planets as it is us saying, “It’s been 100 years since he wrote his orchestral suite, and now it’s time for a revisit to our solar system.” Ultimately, his compositions were based on astrology. He even starts with Earth and works his way out. Ours is much more inspired by astronomy. We start with an introduction piece, and then head out from Mercury. Our album is only about half instrumental; the other half has lyrics incorporating information about the planets.

NEA: Tell us about your latest album Unusual Creatures. What stimulated your curiosity of the animal kingdom and how did you choose which ones to feature?

HEARST: I’ve always been animal-obsessed. And it’s no coincidence that I listened to Camille Saint-Saen’s Carnival Of The Animals non-stop when I was younger. In fact, I would say, along with Holst’s The Planets, Saint-Saen’s Carnival Of The Animals was one of the main reasons I decided to go to music school. (That, and seeing a video of Leonard Bernstein performing “Rhapsody in Blue” and [conducting] the New York Philharmonic with his eyebrows.) I think the idea of doing an animal-related music project has always been in the back of my mind. I also have a big interest in unusual musical instruments, and often incorporate them into my work. It seemed like a perfect fit to do a project similar to Carnival of the Animals, but inspired by unusual animals, and using unusual instruments. The “Glass Frog” song is performed by Cecilia Brauer on the Ben Franklin-invented glass armonica. The “Jesus Christ Lizard” is performed by Margaret Leng Tan on toy pianos. The “Blobfish” is performed on a tubax and contrabassoon. The “Honeybadger” on daxophone (dax comes from German word “dachs,” which means badger), etc.

In the process of working on the album, I also landed a book deal to write an Unusual Creatures book. It was a lot of fun to research and learn even more about the animals while simultaneously working on the album. It also helped me to formulate which animals were most interesting to me, and would lend themselves to a musical composition. In a few cases, the guest performer would suggest an animal that interested them. Kronos Quartet wanted to do a song for the Weddell Seal, and play along with samples of the animal’s incredible underwater sounds. Wade Schuman wanted to play on a song for the solenodon (a venomous, burrowing mammal found in Cuba and Hispaniola).

NEA: What do you see as the connection between art and science?

HEARST: On a fundamental level, music is science—the way musical instruments and acoustics work: harmonics, wave-lengths, etc. But for me, they really just happen to be two big interests of mine. In the past, I’ve also made connection between art and literature with One Ring Zero’s As Smart As We Are. And art and food with The Recipe Project. Ultimately, I find that just about any subject can inspire art. And, in fact, I prefer to bounce around from subject to subject. But certainly science has been a big inspiration for me for at least the last couple albums. It feels exciting and fresh, and often magical, and so much of science is about continuing to learn beyond what we already know. There’s a whole world of unknown scientific information out there, and that unknown is inspiration in itself.

NEA: What other topics or fields do you draw your inspiration from?

HEARST: Aside from animals, planets, literature, food, dance, and unusual instruments, I’ve also been working on lots of film scores. I’ve always dabbled in film, but over the past couple years, I’ve scored three feature-length films, and I’ve found it to be quite a lot of fun. Ultimately, I think I just like to have parameters. Whether it’s a subject I pick, or a scene from a movie, or a section of dance, those parameters create an environment that forces me to focus on something larger than just the music itself. Writing music for the sake of writing music is still great, but I find it to be even more inspiring if I have something specific to write for. Plus, the subjects I choose for my albums become a sort of self-inflicted college course, and I’ve always loved diving headfirst into new subjects.

NEA: To date, what’s been your most transformative arts experience?

HEARST: Hard to say if one thing in particular has been transformative. It’s so many things combined. I guess, in many ways, it was my coming to understand what it was that I was doing with my career, collectively. The big picture. For a long time I felt like I kept bouncing from one random project to another: an album for a modern dance company, an album with lyrics by various authors, an album about the planets, and album set to recipes, and album of ice cream truck songs, and an album about unusual animals. What do all these things have in common? Well, one thing’s for sure, they all come from me. It was David Harrington from Kronos Quartet who really helped me understand the importance of just that. At some point I was kvetching to him about how I’d put all this work into my current album, and it wasn’t getting any attention. His comment was, “Just keep doing what you are doing, and ultimately you’ll have this incredible catalog.” So simple, and yet so important. Kronos has certainly done just that. You keep moving forward, you keep building your catalog, and that catalog becomes you. Some projects hit, and some miss, but it’s the big picture that counts.

NEA: You’ve performed at a variety of arts and culture institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jewish Museum, and American Museum of Natural History. How did these environments affect your performance?

HEARST: I personally love performing at museums and cultural centers. People are actually there for the art, and they listen, and are appreciative. You don’t always get that from clubs and festivals. Especially when you create arty music that isn’t particularly mainstream. There’s also another blunt answer to the question: money. The museums have funding. There’s a lot to be said for that. Those places do such a better job of fund-raising than I could ever do on my own. And it’s fortuitous that I’ve been invited to perform at these organizations from time to time. Ultimately, we are all very lucky that museums and cultural centers exist.

NEA: What do you think is the artist’s role in or responsibility to the community?

HEARST: That’s tough. I’m [not] entirely sure the artist should have any particular responsibility to the community, or, at least no more than any other person. The minute an artist feels like he has a responsibility, I think you are likely to lose something. That said, I personally love the idea of being able to occasionally incorporate an educational angle to some of my work, but I don’t think of it as a responsibility. I can always turn 180 degrees and do something else. I also love the idea of sometimes creating music that kids will like, but again, it’s not a responsibility. I think the only responsibility an artist should really have is a responsibility to his or herself to create something that actually feels inspired.

NEA: Conversely, what is the community’s responsibility to the artist?

HEARST: Well, I guess if the artist has no responsibilities to the community, then the community shouldn’t have any responsibilities to the artist. Of course, a community can be very dull without art. It’s up to the community to decide if they want to support art. And then they have to decide which art is worth supporting. And then the artist has to decide if he/she wants to create art that is of interest to the community. It’s an endless loop. It all becomes a bit of a guessing game. Can the artist create something that feels inspired and have value to the community? Will the community find the art valuable enough to support?

NEA: At the NEA, we believe that “Art Works.” What does that phrase mean to you?

HEARST: Art is inspiring for both the creator and the audience. It enables people to think, learn, and look beyond their horizons. The world would be a stagnant place without it—like a swamp, with festering green algae and mosquitoes. Wait, I should paint that, or write a song about it. ”Art works!”

 

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Art (and Science) Talk with Greg Mort

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

June 20, 2012

Text by Paulette Beete with all images courtesy of Greg Mort

Stewardship III by Greg Mort

“I think, ultimately, science and art ask the same question. They both seek a kind of beauty.” —Greg Mort

For painter Greg Mort, his art is grounded in the stars. His watercolors and oils reflect not just a deep fascination with the natural world, but also with the world that starts above the level of the clouds. As Mort reveals in the following interview, his long-term association with NASA’s art program happened after a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum left him “mesmerized by the notion that NASA would commission artists to,,,be an eyewitness to space.” Mort’s work has been collected by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Farnsworth Museum of Art, and the University of Padova in Italy, among other institutions. And, of course, his work also hangs at the Air and Space Museum as well as in several observatories across the U.S. The following interview is taken from a series of conversations with Mort over e-mail and via telephone.

NEA: What’s your version of the artist’s life?

GREG MORT: Art has always been something that I’ve kind of lived with; it’s a portion, it’s a part of, it’s an ongoing part of who I am. I think part of it was our household [when I was growing up] was where you had free reign to do whatever you want, and it was something my parents always encouraged, not really thinking I would be an artist. I think that’s the foundation for how I think about myself as an artist, as an adult, and even with my children—I encourage them to follow their passion.

Every day, even when I’m not working on a painting, I’m always in the process of creating something. All of my interests have an influence on the way I do things as an artist, and, as you know, one of my passions is science, so I’ve been able to weave that into how I think about my painting. It is something I never had a problem moving forward with. Sometimes you’ll hear about writers or artists having writer’s block or something, I’ve never had that problem; my problem is I have so many ideas that there’s not enough time to do all the different things I want to do, whether it’s just my painting, or some other creative endeavor. When I began being an artist professionally, it took some time for me to accept the title of an artist, because it was so much a part of who I already was, to put a label on it was hard for me to hold on to.

NEA: When did you start considering yourself a professional artist?

MORT: In the late seventies and early eighties, when I started to sell my work. It came about in sort of a strange way. I actually was building a sailboat, and I needed extra money to complete some parts of the boat. I had seen in my bank that they had artwork on the walls, so I asked the manager one time if I could display some of my paintings. Someone came into the bank and purchased all of the paintings, and that kind of made me think “Hey, this is interesting!” So that was the birth of the notion that I could actually do it as a livelihood because [previously] that never really occurred to me, that was something that was just beyond the realm of possibility of a realistic endeavor.

NEA: What do you remember as your earliest engagement with or experience of the arts?

MORT: My dad loved to work with his hands. His ability to draw in a stylized manner struck me as magical. He would hand carve pine airplanes complete with propellers that spun for my brother and me. I recall vividly him explaining the “twist” of the prop and how it drove the aircraft. Model making has remained an important part of my life and has clearly influenced my thought process in painting. Creating/building miniature elements to study and stage paintings is as fulfilling as the painting process itself. These models range from architectural elements to islands at sea. In some ways I view my paintings as two-dimensional models.

What I’m trying to express is that the notion of creativity was as natural as breathing in our family. It’s hard to imagine a day without a project underway, however small or large. One’s imagination was celebrated, as was the “process.” My earliest teachers who identified me as the class artist and challenged me to create appropriate images for a holiday or lesson offered further encouragement.

NEA: To date what’s been your most significant or transformative arts experience?

MORT: This might sound simplistic but at the age of 17 I took my paint box out-of-doors and my vision of the world was changed forever. Until that time I had limited myself to copying from magazines, cereal boxes, books. These endeavors were excellent training exercises, but limited the true transposition that takes place when the interpretation is exclusively your own. In a very profound sense it was the first time I saw the world through my own mind’s eye. For me this was the awakening.

NEA: What artistic decision has most impacted your career?

MORT: [The decision] to never be afraid to fail. This philosophy is paramount. The fear of not succeeding is one of the most destructive obstacles to the creative spirit. The freedom and ability to flow with one’s creative energy, without question, allows endless doors to open. This is a mistake frequently made by those who ride the artistic train. You must be a passenger on the train, not the engineer. You must trust the journey via the rails before you without fear.

NEA: I know that you have a huge passion for science. What do you see as the relationship between the arts and the sciences?

MORT: I think there’s an amazing parallel between science and art, and if you look at art history, you can see any number of people, like Leonardo da Vinci, who was a scientist and an artist, and for me, both are almost one and the same. There’s this shared experience. There’s a scrutiny that science requires; there’s a scrutiny that art requires, and both have a passion for the notion of the question, and also the idea of knowing. I think that part of what each shares is looking for the underlying harmonies in nature. “What makes a tree a tree?” I think both science and art can ask that question in similar ways, although in science it might come out as an equation, or some other description. I think, ultimately, science and art ask the same question. They both seek a kind of beauty. [Science is] like getting to the heart of matter—what is matter made of—and I think art is kind of the same thing. We try to get at the essence of things. A large part of my artistic journey as a painter seems to find its roots in scientific inquiry. Combining my two great passions—art and astronomy—into a fulfilling blend of vocation and avocation has offered amazing inspiration. (more…)

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Report from Transcending Borders: The Intersections of Arts, Science, Technology, & Society on a Global Stage

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

June 6, 2012

By Whitney Dail

Amanda Crowley, Liz Lerman, and Dr. Andrew Baden participate in a panel discussion at June 4 Transcending Borders event

Amanda McDonald Crowley (far left)  moderates the panel discussion Transcending Origins: An Artist/Scientist Cross-Discplinary Case Study with Dr. Andrew Baden and Liz Lerman as they share the experience of collaborating on The Matter of Origins, a multimedia performance exploring the beginnings of the universe. Photo courtesy of the Embassy of Austria.

In a 2002 TED Talk, astronaut Mae Jemison proclaimed that the arts and sciences are “avatars of human creativity.” Artists and scientists share a mutual search for new ideas and possibilities to build an understanding of the world; but they are increasingly doing so apart from the boundaries of their disciplines. The NEA partnered for the first time with the Salzburg Global Seminar on June 4 to present Transcending Borders: The Intersections of Arts, Science, Technology, and Society on a Global Stage, a seminar in the EU Rendez-Vous series hosted by the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC. The two-hour discussion was broken down into three panels featuring an artist-scientist team, three policy makers, and two curators of art, science, and technology institutions. The objective of Transcending Borders was to examine how the impact of creativity and cross-disciplinary collaboration is shaping today’s society and the future. Themes of the event included: long-term support; finding a balance between collaborations; contextualization and translation of projects at this intersection; industry partnerships; and the role of policy makers in funding experimental research.

The evening began with introductions from Ambassador of Austria to the United States Hans Peter Manz, NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman, and Salzburg Global Seminar President and CEO Stephen Salyer. As an independent branch within the Embassy, the Austrian Cultural Forum Washington presents Austrian and European related events that emphasize innovative artistic and scientific achievements. Ambassador Manz opened by expressing interest in the event’s outcome, as the topic is “truly philosophical,” and asking what the next frontiers in creative inquiry might be. With this sentiment, Landesman remarked, “The NEA is at our best when we operate as a responsive funder—one that stays in close touch with the arts community across the country and watches for the opportunities, challenges, and patterns that emerge.” Next, Salyer talked briefly about the work of the Salzburg Global Seminar, which brings together thought-leaders from around the globe to seek common ground via a fellowship program. Salyer then welcomed moderator Amanda McDonald Crowley, an independent cultural worker and former executive director of Eyebeam, and the first round of panelists to the stage for Transcending Origins: An Artist/Scientist Cross-Disciplinary Case Study.

The first panel highlighted the partnership of choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Liz Lerman and Dr. Andrew Baden, a physicist and department chair of Physics at University of Maryland, College Park. Lerman and Baden began collaborating together for an interdisciplinary performance piece, The Matter of Origins, exploring physics and beginnings. Baden explained the connection between art and science by saying, “We both are trying to get to the truth.” He added, “There’s a difference between what’s true and what you can prove. And you have to keep trying, but ultimately you need what both scientists and artists have, which is creativity.” Baden and Lerman agreed that both disciplines will play an important role in the future of our understanding of what it means to be human. Lerman continued by showing video clips, one from her visit to the Geneva-based particle laboratory CERN and another demonstrating a dance of a particle trying to break through a wall. At the end, she pointed out an interesting area in the borderland between art and science—education—which has enormous potential to embody the nature of knowledge.

On the policy level, NEA Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa initiated the next panel by sharing three examples of recently funded art and science projects from the NEA. “The NEA’s arts discipline directors routinely see projects that traverse the art/science bridge,” said Shigekawa. An example is the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, which received an NEA grant of $35,000 to foster interdisciplinary creative practice through their artist-in-residence program. Shigekawa indicated that the NEA is interested in encouraging grant applications from more collaborative art-and-science projects across all NEA disciplines. Crowley also added in between speakers that these kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations are an important part of the knowledge-making process. (more…)

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Moving ArtScience into the Mainstream

Friday, May 4th, 2012

May 4, 2012

by Whitney Dail

Shilpa Gupta's Singing Cloud, a sculpture made out of microphones.

Shilpa Gupta’s Singing Cloud —the result of her collaboration with Harvard psychologist and neuroscientist Mahzarin Banaji—is an example of an ArtScience project that was exhibited at Le Laboratoire (in winter 2009).

Programs with ArtScience themes—exploring universal ideas, discoveries, innovations, and current topics—can promote greater understanding of humanity and cultural legacy, a topic that is increasingly important in today’s society. This is why ArtScience needs to reach wider audiences. This challenge requires proactive strategies to build acceptance and expand support in other institutions. Building audiences requires researching local communities, identifying the needs, and creating programming accordingly. Cultural institutions can act as cultural laboratories and hubs offering experiences to audiences that inspire hands-on and informal learning as well as active participation.

During the 1960s, artists began working collaboratively across disciplines and exploring overlaps at a time of unprecedented scientific and technological breakthrough. Creative practices fusing art, science, and technology have emerged with scientist-artists and artist-researchers, along with a handful of arts organizations nurturing emerging fields. Yet despite a growing number of creators, practitioners, and collaborators working within what is called “ArtScience,” traditional institutions in the cultural sector frequently dismiss or overlook the movement. Perceived disciplinary boundaries play a major role in preventing larger institutions from supporting projects at this intersection, as current missions do not allow for the inclusion of hybrid work and programming focuses on exhibition rather than research or creation.

At present, major concerns for ArtScience are centered on the shortcomings of institutional support systems and funding structures. Institutionalization exists in variations: academic settings, alternative art spaces, museums, research centers, and for-profit/nonprofit social enterprises as well as informal communities such as project spaces and DIY/maker spaces. Another concern is that few financial resources are available for work crossing disciplinary divides because funding structures are discipline-specific. Members of the ArtScience community are looking for financial support from the arts as well as science funders to provide access to high-tech equipment. But most grants are limited to organizations and academic institutions. ArtScience requires innovative funding approaches to accommodate for new forms of research, collaboration, and experimentation. For institutions and grant structures to change, organizations must understand the benefits behind supporting ArtScience as well as its multiplicity. (more…)

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New Art/Science Affinities

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

by Andrea Grover, Lead Author, New Art/Science Affinities, Curator, Intimate Science, Curator of Programs, Parrish Art Museum

Bo0k cover of New Art/Science Affinities

For four months in the fall of 2010, I worked at a cozy desk in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a curatorial research fellow, hosted jointly by the Miller Gallery and the STUDIO. On a daily basis, students, faculty, and visiting artists would stop by my front-row seat at this frenetic concourse of technoscience dispatches.

The initial focus of my research was artists working in scientific or technological environments during the last five decades. The mid 1960s marked an explosion of interest in cross-disciplinary projects—the paring of artists with engineers, or the placement of artists in scientific or industrial environments—as exemplified by Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, Art & Technology (http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=1842) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Artist Placement Group, all initiated in the mid 1960s.

As I met with more visiting artists, faculty, and students at CMU, I began to uncover a new narrative—a tactile shift in discourse and practice between that moment and this one. While artists two generations ago were dependent on access to technicians, labs, computer time, or manufacturers to realize works of scientific or technological complexity, those I was presently meeting had far greater agency to conduct this kind of work themselves. Even ambitious endeavors such as independent biological experiments, materials research, and micromanufacturing can be conducted by today’s working artist—and not at a naive or removed distance.

Take for instance, the hallmark group Experiments in Art and Technology, founded in 1967 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer to “match make” artists with engineers with whom they could realize projects of an ambitious technological nature. Projects that took these pioneers collectively months to accomplish—creating responsive environments or radio-controlled robotic devices—might now be done by an autonomous artist in a matter of days with a microprocessor and access to open source communities like openFrameworks. Likewise, the present-day proliferation of home-based and shared laboratories such as Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, and hacker spaces like NYC Resistor  make it possible to bring once industrial or scientific endeavors into the domestic realm.

Contemporary artists working in scientific domains are heirs to the throne of the 1960s interdisciplinary milestones, and have much in common with the prevailing spirit of the 1960s avant-garde: the desire to incorporate everyday materials and include untrained and non-professionals in the creative process, and the refusal to participate in mainstream culture of mass production and consumption. It follows logic then that the practice has mostly moved outside rarified institutions and industries (the relationships were too complex and tied to capitalism and product-oriented economics), and into the hands of individuals and collectives (facilitated by networked communication which gave agency to maker culture, the open source movement, peer-to-peer sharing, crowdsourcing, etc.). From there, the types of activities exploded and yielded a variety of subtypes of Artists/Scientists/Technologists.

And unlike the rare polymath of the Renaissance, contemporary artists who operate across disciplines employ the expertise of the network: the network, not the individual, is encyclopedic. The Internet has provided unprecedented access to shared knowledge assets, materials, fabrication processes, microfunding, and audiences. Networked communication and open source culture have contributed to this shift from artists aiding science to doing science, and will ultimately impact the way scientific knowledge is acquired, utilized, and disseminated.

When I proposed my thesis to STUDIO Director Golan Levin he suggested I form a network of my own to test this out and told me about a newly developed technique for collaborative authoring called a “book sprint.” After reading up on the first book sprint, Collaborative Futures, which took place at transmediale in 2010, and speaking with one of the participants, Michael Mandiberg, I began whittling down a list of people I’d like to spend a week writing with—my dream team.

I ultimately had the good fortune to form a week-long hive mind with writers Claire Evans (musician, artist, and science blogger), Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art blogger on hybrid and technological art), and Pablo Garcia (architect and art history buff), and architecture-trained designers Luke Bulman and Jessica Young of Thumb. Each person brought a different strength to the table: Claire was a fast and competent writer who could digest and popularize scientific information; Régine had encyclopedic knowledge of more artists working in this domain than anyone on Earth; and Pablo could contextualize it all within a long view of art history. It was dumb luck that Luke and Jessica had seen a mention of the forthcoming “sprint” and offered up their services to design the book during the sprint (in essence, to “design sprint”). This final item was essential as it turns out to completing the book. Thumb’s ability to immediately synthesize our ideas into visual form fueled our writing and helped us organize a wildly divergent mass of materials.

All the while, Miller Gallery Director Astria Suparak, and STUDIO staff Marge Myers, Jonathan Minard, and Amisha Gadani, along with some dozen work-study students, provided us near around-the-clock feedback and companionship on our “research outings.”

We started the week with a graph and taxonomy that I presented, breaking down the various methodologies as I saw them at work in today’s art/science/technology projects. Each of these areas (more or less) became the subject of a chapter in the book. We used the simplest solution possible for collaborative writing: Google Docs, and for images we went directly to the artists or Wikimedia Commons and stored them using Dropbox. At the close of each day Jessica and Luke showed us “design rushes” of the content taking shape.

We tackled Maker Culture, Hacking, Artistic Research, Citizen Science, and Computational Art, wrote about more than 60 artists, and created a gigantic timeline that includes everything from the establishment of Radio Shack to Creative Commons and Kickstarter. We did this in seven days, with little sleep and lots of instant feedback from faculty and students at CMU, as well as artists who generously skyped into the conversation at a moment’s notice. The product of the sprint, New Art/Science Affinities is now out in the world and available as a free download or you can purchase a hard copy.

Our collective writing experiment mirrored the tactics used by many artists working across disciplines today, largely fueled by the Internet and access to once rarified information. We observed that artists are no longer operating on the periphery of research but conducting research themselves. And when artists become scientists, the lines of inquiry pursued become quite expansive.

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