Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences

I keep having to look these up, so I thought I'd make a post for everyone's future reference!

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Environmental science often refers to the Grand Challenges. These are the key issues facing humans in the 21st century, and there is some back and forth discussion about what they are, of course. But a report from the National Academy of Sciences in 2001--"Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences"--synthesized the results of a prestigious working group exploring this issue over several years, capturing the concept in 8 challenges:

1. BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES: The challenge is to understand how the Earth's major biogeochemical cycles are being perturbed by human activities; to be able to predict the impact of these perturbations on local, regional, and global scales; and to determine how these cycles may be restored to more natural states should such restoration be deemed desirable.
2. BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING: The challenge is to understand the regulation and functional consequences of biological diversity, and to develop approaches for sustaining this diversity and the ecosystem functioning that depends on it.
3. CLIMATE VARIABILITY: The challenge is to increase our ability to predict climate variability, from extreme events to decadal time scales; to understand how this variability may change in the future; and to assess its impact on natural and human systems.
4. HYDROLOGIC FORECASTING: The challenge is to predict changes in freshwater resources and the environment caused by floods, droughts, sedimentation, and contamination in a context of growing demand on water resources.
5. INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND THE ENVIRONMENT: The challenge is to understand the ecological and evolutionary aspects of infectious diseases; to develop an understanding of the interactions among pathogens, hosts/receptors, and the environment; and thus to make it possible to prevent changes in the infectivity and virulence of organisms that threaten plant, animal, and human health at the population level.
6. INSTITUTIONS AND RESOURCE USE: The challenge is to develop a systematic understanding of the role of institutions—markets, hierarchies, legal structures, regulatory arrangements, international conventions, and other formal and informal sets of rules—in shaping systems for natural resource use, extraction, waste disposal, and other environmentally important activities.
7. LAND-USE DYNAMICS: The challenge is to develop a systematic understanding of changes in land uses and land covers that are critical to biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem functioning and services, and human welfare.
8. REINVENTING THE USE OF MATERIALS: The challenge is to develop a quantitative understanding of the global budgets and cycles of key materials used by humanity and of how the life cycles of these materials may be modified. Among the materials of particular interest for this grand challenge are those with documented or potential environmental impacts, those whose long-term availability is in some question, and those with a high potential for recycling and reuse. Examples include copper, silver, and zinc (reusable metals); cadmium, mercury, and lead (hazardous metals); plastics and alloys (reusable substances); and CFCs, pesticides, and many organic solvents (environmentally hazardous substances).

You'll note that "Climate Change" is not listed, but it drives and aggravates all of the other challenges. There is much more to say about why these particular issues are so critical. You can read more about it in the report.

Long-awaited paper now out

The Integration of the Humanities and Artswith Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine inHigher Education: Branches from the Same Tree (read online, or order a hard copy).

The National Academy of Sciences commissioned this report on the value of STEMM integration in higher education. From a highlights document:

"This study examined an important trend in higher education: integration of the humanities and arts with sciences, engineering, and medicine at the undergraduate and graduate level—which proponents argue will better prepare students for work, life, and citizenship...This movement in higher education raises an important question: what impact do these curricular approaches have on students? 

To address this question, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formed a 22-member committee to examine 'the evidence behind the assertion that educational programs that mutually integrate learning experiences in the humanities and arts with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) lead to improved educational and career outcomes for undergraduate and graduate students.' The committee conducted an in-depth review and analysis of the state of knowledge on the impact of integrative approaches on students."

 The results are encouraging:

"Aggregate evidence indicates that some approaches that integrate the humanities and arts with STEMM are associated with positive learning outcomes. Among the outcomes reported are increased critical thinking abilities, higher-order thinking and deeper learning, content mastery, problem solving, teamwork and communication skills, improved visuospatial reasoning, and general engagement and enjoyment of learning. 

An important observation was that the kinds of outcomes associated with certain integrative approaches in higher education are the educational outcomes that many employers presently seek. Employer surveys consistently show that employers want well-rounded individuals with a holistic education who can take on complex problems and understand the needs, desires, and motivations of others. Importantly, these learning goals and competences are similarly valued by institutions of higher education. The committee considered multiple forms of evidence as it developed the following recommendations for institutions, faculty, administrators, scholars of higher education, and federal and private funders. The recommendations fall under four main areas:"

1. Support for Integrative Approaches
2. Evaluating Integrative Courses and Programs
3. Enhancing Inclusivity Through Integrative Courses and Programs
4. Removing the Barriers to Integrative Approaches 

The paper concludes that:

"Higher education should strive to offer all students—regardless of degree or area of concentration—an education that exposes them to diverse forms of human knowledge and inquiry and that impresses upon them the fact that all disciplines are 'branches of the same tree.' Such an education should empower students to understand the fundamental connections among the diverse branches of human inquiry—the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, mathematics, engineering, technology, and medicine."

Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world

This 2011 article by Ariane Koek is an excellent discussion of the potential and pitfalls of art/science collaboration.

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Olafur Eliasson's "Your Split Second House",
shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010,
took physics as its jumping-off point.

It is one of the fashionable arts movements of the moment. It is also one of the most troubled because the aesthetic is unsubtle and still evolving. With the seemingly giddy rise of the wonders of science in our culture, epitomised by the boyish Brit physicist Brian Cox's blockbuster TV series, “Wonders of the Universe” on the BBC, arts/science (sometimes called “sciart”) is gaining ascendancy in the 21st century as a movement of influence and power.

Almost every week, across the world, exhibitions are opening that are billed as arts/science to cash in on this emerging trend, which is also driven by new funding possibilities from science in the current arts cash crisis.

But we are in the middle of a crisis of another kind—a reduction in the wonder of creativity itself, and the question of who controls it and how. Creativity, and where it comes from, is one of the last great human frontiers, and one over which we have little control, cash crisis or no cash crisis.

But there is a battle to do just that, and reduce creativity to a systematic formula in our function-obsessed, input-output, application-driven world. Artists are being driven to become scientific, from the moment they fill in a funding application predicting their final production.

Let me explain. I work in arts/science myself. So, you could argue, who I am to talk? After all, I have created an artists’ residency programme at Cern, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and home to the large hadron collider. But it has at its heart the wonder of the creative process. It is not a residency which is process-driven or defined by an outcome; nor does it demand communication about or homage to the science.

I have deliberately set it up to be a laboratory of the imagination, where freeplay can happen. The science and the place are springboards of the imagination for the artists, not the destination, reason, mission or simulacra of production. When they apply, prospective artists may be asked to imagine a project they would like to carry out, but we fully expect that to change completely once they come to Cern—and who knows what will happen then? That’s part of the process.

This goes against the trends that can be seen in the arts/science aesthetic which has emerged from the 20th century, which contains, in my view, three very dangerous strands.

First, art as a communicator of science, where the artist represents the science to the outside world. This is, essentially, art as a publicity and communications tool, and can happen consciously or unconsciously when the artist becomes subsumed in the science. This is becoming critical in the current cash crisis, when artists are seeking new ways of funding their work and science promises new purse-strings.

Second, science as a means of production, where scientific methods, experimentation and technologies become the channel through which art is processed and made, subjugating the imagination to reductive processes.

Third, science as art – for example, when a snapshot of a cell is admired as beautiful or a chemists' laboratory is found in an art gallery. Both instantly become art, “daringly” crossing the threshold of the arts/science boundary, but in reality saying nothing more than that. It is an intervention that leads nowhere.

But there is a fourth, more invisible, strand, where the arts and science are in fluid interchange—just as they were in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, when he moved easily between the two. Here, the disciplines are honoured for their similarities as well as their essential differences.

Let me explain this fourth and more subtle strand in full. Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world. Both are driven by curiosity, discovery, the aspiration for knowledge of the world or oneself, and perhaps, as the conceptual artist Goshka Macuga said on her recent visit to Cern, a desire for world domination. She was half joking.

But they express themselves in different ways: the arts through the body and mind, often driven by the exploration of the ego, contradictions and the sheer messiness of life; science through equations, directed, collaborative research and experimentation that works in a progressive, linear fashion.

As Dr Michael Doser, the experimental physicist on Cern's cultural board for the arts, says: “What I find wonderful about working with artists is that they are just as fascinated by side routes and diversions as they are by the direction in which they are going. This is what makes artistic work really different from scientific work.”

These oscillations between sameness and differences form what I call the fourth aesthetic—the Leonardo way. Honour the differences and then amazing work, true arts/science work, happens. One example is Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, which took physics as its jumping-off point.

This installation of twirling water-sprays momentarily separated the drops of water under strobe lights. It is a piece about perception, and was inspired by thinking about how long it takes an astronaut to get out of a black hole. The answer is about a day. But to people who are not in the hole, the astronaut takes forever.

Or take the work of Mariko Mori, which is driven by engaging with opposites and the oscillations between the two: reality and fantasy, seriousness and humour, human and machine, technology and nature, science and religion. This is shown very clearly by Wave UFO, which is simultaneously an architectural piece, a scientific experiment in which the visitor’s brain waves become the work of art in a space-age pod, and a temple to meditation.

The piece is fuelled as much by science and technology as it is by Buddhism and an investigation of religion. Critically, Eliasson and Mori are not so enthralled by the wonders of science that their work loses its wonder and integrity.

For nine months, I tracked a very confident young Swiss artist and astrophysicist working together on a residency. For four months, they were equally enthralled by each other. But then there was a turning point. The artist said to me: “The science is so amazing that I have to prove that I understand it and that I too have a brain.”

From that moment, I knew he was lost. The work he did at the end of the residency was at best a communications piece trying to explain what quantum fields were. Now, a year later, he has rediscovered his playfulness by regaining his distance from the all-intoxicating wonder of particle physics, and is starting to create great work again.

I will leave you with two quotes, one from an artist and one from a scientist, in order to practise what I preach: mutual respect, equal exchange and difference.

Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”

Keith Tyson: “If you attempt to marry and equate art with science, then you fail. If you allow what is not similar about art and science, and their different methods and processes, to co-exist and thrive, then a real art/science collaboration and aesthetic will emerge. But at the end of the day, art and science are united by one logic and one impulse—both are attempts to understand what it is to be human and the world around us.”

That’s why I call Collide@Cern, the programme I have created, Cern’s latest great experiment, colliding elements even more elusive than the Higgs boson: namely, human creativity and the imagination. It was founded to honour the creative process, and to keep science and the arts in an equal balance of wonder—and apart, too. Let’s just have spaces for this to happen, and let the magic and the mystery—those chance operations the great John Cage talked about—occur.

The writer is a Clore Fellow and is head of international arts development and the arts programme at Cern. She created Cern's arts policy and its main strategy, the Collide@Cern Artists' Residency programme.

Kids and Art

Here are a couple of recent articles about how art helps kids adapt to and influence their environment:

• A new study, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, shows that music improves kid's brains.
• Kids in India Are Sparking Urban Planning Changes by Mapping Slums

Article from Conservation Biology, and book from Oxford Press

Here's an interesting 2007 article by Jacobson, McDuff and Monroe from the journal Conservation Biology, titled Promoting Conservation through the Arts: Outreach for Hearts and Minds:

Emotions play a central role in the decisions we make. For example, we often make poor investment choices because we are driven by our emotions rather than rational judgment (Tversky & Kahneman 1991). On the positive side, when emotional input is added to learning experiences, it makes them more memorable and exciting. The brain deems the information more important and enhances memory of the event. Presenting facts alone is less likely to result in long-term changes in feelings and behaviors (Sylwester 1994; Weiss 2000; Cable & Ernst 2003). 

The arts offer a way to make an emotional connection to people, and the visual and performing arts can help conservation practitioners reach new audiences. Art can provoke reactions that typical education and outreach methods do not. Art has the potential to inform audiences or participants in a new way about conservation topics, and it can stimulate new dialogues and actions...

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The essay was based in part on the planning, implementation, and evaluation guidelines for using the arts in conservation, published as a meaty and thought-provoking chapter in Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques, Susan K. Jacobson, Mallory D. McDuff, and Martha C. Monroe.

Communicating music

The idea of transcribing music is really interesting if you think about it. It is a translation of the products of one of our senses to another, like trying to translate the visual experience of, say, color into the tactile experience of touch.

But there's more than one way to interpret this task:

"It all started around 840 C.E. when a former monk named Aurelian of Réôme created one of the first examples of Western musical notation."

Read the entire article here.

The Art of Exoplanets

"...Hurt and Pyle, who render vibrant visualizations based on data from Spitzer and other missions, are hybrids of sorts, blending expertise in both science and art. From squiggles on charts and columns of numbers, they conjure red, blue and green worlds, with half-frozen oceans or bubbling lava...Visualizations based on data can also inform science, leading to genuine scientific insights...For Hurt, the real goal of scientific illustration is to excite the public, engage them in the science, and provide a snapshot of scientific knowledge."

"We kind of cover each other's blind spots a bit"

"...art is as much a historical record of our changing understanding of the universe as the textbooks we write." -- Robert Hurt, IPAC Center

Read article here.

The Trouble with Scientism: Why history and the humanities are also a form of knowledge

"While replicable fact is the domain of science, human perception and value are the domains of art and the humanities."

This New Republic article from 2012 is an excellent rebuttal to the "scientism," of those who argue that the arts and humanities are somehow less reliable and useful than science:

If Marx and Freud are favorite whipping boys for those worried about the [validity of the humanities], the compliment is readily returned...nineteenth-century physics and chemistry [were infested] with the proliferation of “ether theories.” No less a figure than Maxwell even characterized the ether as “the best confirmed entity in [science].

Rigorous mathematical studies of gene-cultural coevolution reveal that when natural selection combines with cultural transmission, the outcomes reached may differ from those that would have been produced by natural selection acting alone, and that the cultural processes involved can be sustained under natural selection...culture appears to be at some level autonomous and in some sense irreducible, and this is what scientism cannot grasp.

But there is still a deeper reason for the enduring importance of the humanities. Many scientists and commentators on science have been led to view the sciences as a value-free zone...Yet on a broader view, which explores the purposes and their origins, it becomes clear that judgments of the significance of particular questions profoundly affect the work done and the environments in which it is done. Behind the complex and often strikingly successful practices of contemporary science stands a history of selecting specific aspects of the world for investigation.

What we discover depends on the questions taken to be significant, and the selection of those questions, as well as the decision of which factors to set aside in seeking answers to them, presupposes judgments about what is valuable. Those are not only, or mainly, scientific judgments. In their turn, new discoveries modify the landscape in which further investigations will take place, and because what we learn affects how evidence is assessed, discovery shapes the evolution of our standards of evidence. Judgments of value thus pervade the environment in which scientific work is done. If they are made, as they should be, in light of the broadest and deepest reflections on human life and its possibilities, then good science depends on contributions from the humanities and the arts. Perhaps there is even a place for philosophy.

Healthy relationships between the sciences and the humanities should aspire to the condition of the best marriages—to a partnership in which different strengths and styles are acknowledged and appreciated, in which a fruitful division of labor constantly evolves, in which constructive criticism is given and received, in which neither party can ever make a plausible claim to absolute authority, and in which the ultimate goal is nothing less than the furtherance of the human good. 

 Read the complete article here.

On Sustainability and Art: artist Hannalie Coetzee

Fire-created artwork.

ART AFRICA looks at the practice of artist Hannelie Coetzee. "Hannelie Coetzee’s artwork draws attention to our warped relationship with nature through pragmatic, solution oriented interventions."

The article also includes highlights of a fascinating discussion between the artist's associates and collaborators.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

The more intuitive approach of artists can provide a window into the complex models, calculations and simulations of the scientific world… Natural world issues require more than just a technical fix. They require systems of thinking and creativity to imagine and illustrate the best possible solutions. -- Prof. Caroline Digby from the Wits Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry

Sustainability is not primarily a scientific problem; rather, it requires us as citizens, communities and societies to rethink the way in which we live our personal lives… This requires engaging the hearts, minds and imaginations of a wide set of people across many different spheres of society. Artists have a particularly important role to play in this regard – not only in creating a space that can help bridge and connect between different actors, but in contributing and opening our minds to completely new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. -- Dr. Reinette Biggs of the Stockholm Resilience Institute and the University of Stellenbosch

How can art and science integrate into a discipline or collaboration that aids transformative understanding?

Art is the expression of creative ideas that are likely informed by prior knowledge but not restricted by natural, economic or social rules. Science is a knowledge that we have built through methodical enquiry over many generations into how nature, economics and society work. When art is introduced into science, it gives permission to seek different ways of addressing the same problem. It enables one to leapfrog or do a U-turn. As stated in New Roles for Art Are Clarified (Carney 2010), Tim Collins declares that, “while replicable fact is the domain of science, human perception and value are the domains of art and the humanities. – Philipp Kirsch, University of Queensland

How do such partnerships reach wider audiences?

I have been astounded by how much easier it is to interest people in the science when it is encompassed in an artwork. Before, I was only talking to the small community of people who were already thinking about these issues. People like the art – and they like the idea that the art has some scientifc substance behind it. Some, not all of them, want to know more details about our science questions and I am challenged to maintain their interest and expand it. – Sally Archibald, WITS

How can partnerships between artists and scientists contribute to resilient systems and change?

The data on climate change is indisputable, but how does one develop an emotional appreciation of the potential consequences? I think this must come through experience and art is a fantastic mechanism to develop emotional experiences and consider possibilities. – Caroline Lehmann, Biogeography, University of Edinburgh

How has an artist’s work influenced your work and vice versa?

Hannelie sometimes brings aspects that I think of as ‘outside’ the system, into the discussion. At its simplest, ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment and it is refreshing to have a different take on the shape and form of these interactions. – Sally Archibald

I started to write a conference paper about the potential to re-imagine mining overburden as a building material. To change the way that the industry framed everything as waste rock, waste dumps, waste piles etc. In researching this, I uncovered the genre of Land Art. These artists have given considerable thought to moving earth to make art. I strongly believe in the potential for artists to create not just new mine closure landscapes, but to also drive improved community relations when working side-by-side with the engineers and financial managers in mine planning and operations. – Phillip Kirsch

Read complete article here.

Field Notes of a Terranaut

Artist Alan MacDonald was inspired by the notebooks of DaVinci and Michelangelo to create his recent work, Field Notes of a Terranaut. MacDonald has some lucid ideas about the creative process:

"Our senses filter out vast amounts of information unessential for survival of the body-organism. Yet still, a trickle of information enters the mind experienced as intuition, a creative spark. Aha moments. Truly creative artists are in a sense mystics, 'receiving' non local information in order to co-create local objects that inspire and extend consciousness."

I would argue that this statement applies to truly creative scientists, as well: they notice things that the rest of us filter out. Perhaps we lack a term for the truly creative perception that distinguishes transformative art and science from the merely pedestrian?

These Nine Artists Will Help You Understand the Future of the Planet

Smithsonian curator Joanna Marsh highlights 9 contemporary artists whose practices are conscious-raising and problem-solving. Here are some quotes from the full article:

"Part of the reason that there is a lot of public inaction around climate change and environmental issues more broadly is because the science isn't communicated in an accessible way that triggers emotional responses and curiosity on the part of the public." -- Joanna Marsh

"I frankly believe we’re at a moment where we have some really big problems and we need as many minds that can come together from as many different perspectives as possible to address these issues because we’re not going to resolve them just within one field of study." -- Krista Caballero

"One of the challenges of our time is that people feel disconnected from – perhaps even insensitive to – the world’s great problems. We do not see ourselves as agents in a global society. Climate change, poverty, war, and illness are all challenges that vie for our attention. The overwhelming avalanche of information in society today, coupled with the PR efforts aimed directly at us, as individuals, have resulted in many of us accepting that something has to be done. Yet there is a huge gap between what we know and what we feel. How can we translate knowledge into action, and really change our behavior? Of course, it is necessary to present the facts and data supporting climate change science, but this is not where action begins. Only by embodying knowledge can we gain a sense of responsibility and commitment." -- Olafur Eliasson

Perception Is Not Static

It turns out that people with different personalities actually see different things. Artists and scientists, with their highly divergent training and experience, also see differently. Putting them to work on the same problems offers the potential for greater discovery, since we generally see what we expect to see, not what is really there.

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry

 "In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women, botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art, most famously in Beatrix Potter’s scientific drawings of mushrooms and Margaret Gatty’s stunning illustrated classification of seaweed. Across the Atlantic, this art-science adventure in botany found an improbable yet impassioned practitioner in one of humanity’s most beloved and influential poets: Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886). 

Long before she began writing poems, Dickinson undertook a rather different yet unexpectedly parallel art of contemplation and composition — the gathering, growing, classification, and pressing of flowers, which she saw as manifestations of the Muse not that dissimilar to poems."

• The Morgan Library's Emily Dickinson exhibition.
• The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Judith Farr, et al.
• Harvard's complete digitized Dickinson herbarium

Read entire article here.

Einstein was an Artist

Einstein was an Artist? Zat Rana wrote a recent article in Medium that makes some interesting points:

"Einstein inspired a paradigm shift in physics not as a scientist but as an artist...English distinguishes a scientist as someone who systematically learns about a part of the natural world and uses that knowledge to describe and predict it. An artist, on the other hand, is defined as someone who creatively produces."

"When it comes to categories like science and art, we have a tendency to presume [incorrectly] mutual exclusivity."

"There are many smart and knowledgeable scientists. Rarely, however, are they capable of producing work that shifts our entire understanding of the world. That requires an entirely new way of looking at things... At its core, creativity is just a new and useful way of combining old ideas. It isn’t imagined out of thin air, and it isn’t completely abstract. It’s a fresh way of making sense of the existing components of reality that have yet to merge."

Rana goes on to identify several key ways of nurturing creativity:

1. Be willing to produce subpar work
2. Compromise today for tomorrow
3. Don’t wait for inspiration to get moving
4. Seek relationships between existing ideas
5. Produce a large volume of work

Read the full article here.

Work by the Root-Bernsteins establishes that practicing art as an adult is 15-25x more likely in Nobel Prize-winning scientists than in their non-winning peers. Einstein was an accomplished violinist.

Einstein famously claimed to have conceptualized the notions behind the work that became Special Relativity while imagining what the world would look like if you could ride along on a beam of light.

This video by Eugene Khutoryansky does the best job I have ever seen of visualizing and explaining that conceit:

Patterns of narrative

More and more, it seems clear that human thought naturally organizes itself along patterns of narrative.

Story is how we process and understand our world, then encode that information to pass along to others. There is an argument that information passed down through aboriginal Australian songs may encode verifiable geological events from 8,000 years ago. Their visual art tradition appears to do something similar. And--at its best--what is the Judeo-Christian bible if not distilled wisdom about how to be a human from about 10,000 years ago to 100 a.d.?

Business theory accepts this idea. The "knowledge transfer cycle" states that:

"Knowledge can be stored in databases, documentation, process tables, decision trees, wikis and quick reference guides. But one of the most powerful ways to store knowledge is through stories. Much knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, exists in the minds of the experts and can be made accessible through mentoring or through connections using social media tools."

In the 1960's, Philosopher Roland Barthes worked to understand in narrative, "a principle of classification and a basis of description," pointing out that "there is a deep gulf between the most complex product of chance, and the most simple conscious construction..." He looked for the rules governing narrative construction in narrative itself: all narrative.

More recently, story narrative has been getting attention from science.

"...mathematicians at the University of Vermont have now looked at more than 1,000 texts to see if they could automatically extract their emotional arcs. And their results show something interesting, not just about narratives, but also about using this approach to study literature."

Using digitized texts from Project Gutenberg, the study found 6 consistent patterns of story. And--startlingly--these patterns hold not just in fiction but in non-fiction as well. We impose these patterns on all communication.

So what does that mean to FSMLs? Only that if we are not creating our own narrative, someone else will do it for us (and we may not be happy with the results). Understanding narrative may be a scientific process, but creating it is not: it is an artistic one.

How two Santa Cruz artists changed the course of environmental history

KQED recently produced this profile of Helen and Newton Harrison, the parents of the eco-art movement. The piece includes a radio broadcast, and a more detailed web article with photos.

"Widely known as the parents of the eco-art movement, the Harrisons have become world-renowned for using art to tackle environmental problems on a massive, global scale."

The Harrisons partnered with UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station and the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art for a project looking at native vegetation manipulations to mitigate snowpack conversion to rain. This is part of a larger, worldwide, climate-themed effort they call "Force Majeure" that seeks to find answers to thorny environmental issues.

More info about the Harrison Project at Sagehen.

The gap between thinking and doing

There's an interesting article in Wired UK this month about art/science convergence, though it isn't presented as such.

Artist Olafur Eliasson is a hybrid. A artist who was first a trained draftsman and architect, whose interest in bodies and spaces came out of his experience as a teenaged break dancer.


In his parent's homeland of Iceland, "he learned the power of defamiliarisation - the feeling you have when seeing things presented in a surprising way that makes you feel you're seeing them for the first time."

As an artist, Eliasson is interested in, "How do I take a feeling I carry within myself and give it shape? What's the gap between thinking and doing, idea and action?" Everyone at his highly collaborative 90-person studio is pushing for "non-quantifiable success criteria".

"Something you can neither see nor feel is hard to think about and easy to ignore; religion is helped by its icons and ritual, whereas environmentalists must rely on over-familiar, depressing footage of melting ice caps and denuded rainforest."

"Fundamental to Eliasson's work is the belief, rooted in phenomenology and gestalt psychology, that in changing an individuals' perception of their surroundings, art actually changes the world. The studio is based on a shared conviction on art and creativity as means of change, and 'because we are looking at things from an artistic angle, we consider things relevant that other people would not.'"

Eliasson is interested in somatic knowledge. "How do we change the world and push it away from being so obsessive with measurable success results?" he asks.

It seems to me that this somatic response is the thing that underlies science, and makes us care enough to do that work in the first place.

But, as with Eliasson, inchoate interest in phenomena can just as easily manifest itself as art. Or both simultaneously: FSML as exploratory art studio in service of basic scientific discovery.

ARTnews article on the Art/Sci movement

80SW/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City, 2007, part of
Tomás Saraceno’s series of inflatable sculptures
meant to simulate a floating city.

The March 2013 issue of ARTnews holds a fascinating article on art-science convergence that identifies a lot of the innovative players, including artist Brandon Ballengee, who participated in the recent ArtSciConverge meeting in Reno, NV.

In museums, schools, and research facilities, scientists and artists are swapping methods to illuminate natural phenomena and solve global problems.

Art/Science Residencies

Here's a great article on residencies that facilitate interdisciplinary work between art and science. Below are some interesting quotes from the article:

"We perceive a world where artists and scientists collaborate directly with each other to create innovative interdisciplinary work and projects that have a positive impact on society, technology and culture."

"The residency environment is also particularly well-suited for collaboration and synergy between often disparate-seeming disciplines...In this spirit, many multidisciplinary organizations are forming creative residencies as a way of addressing ecological and scientific issues."

"Art and imagery are inherent in the creative process in science and integral to the communication of its discoveries. For theoretical physics, images can be powerful expressions of elegant mathematical equations that are otherwise inaccessible to many."

"Artists often investigate ideas differently than scientists, and communicating this way of seeing can move the science forward."

"The artists were also surprised to find that some of the most innovative art was already being created at [CERN] by the engineers and lab technicians, who were crafting machines that combined state-of-the-art technology and some of the world's finest craftsmanship. The resulting dialogue explored the question of whether sculptural objects that were created without the intention of being art--but rather as scientific tools--were in fact art."

"While science dominates restoration thought, it seems increasingly clear that science is necessary, but not sufficient...and neither is art. I think this project can help establish a clear role for artists and humanists, not as solitary visionaries, but as participants; not as some mystical or magical process, but as an important, critical perspective; not as arbitrator, but as co-worker, one among many disciplines equally necessary to the recovery and revitalization of this whole place."

Read more at greenmuseum.org, a nonprofit online resource to support and advance the environmental art movement

Great article on science that was inspired by art!

This article (and references) from 2011 is so good, I'm pasting the whole thing in, just in case it vanishes from the original source at Science Blogs!

Also see this post.

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Most people are at a loss to be able to identify any useful connections between arts and sciences. This ignorance is appalling. Arts provide innovations through analogies, models, skills, structures, techniques, methods, and knowledge. Arts don’t just prettify science or make technology more aesthetic; they often make both possible.

That cell phone or PDA you’re carrying? It uses a form of encryption called frequency hopping to ensure your messages can’t easily be intercepted. Frequency hopping was invented by the composer George Antheil in collaboration with the actress Hedy Lamarr. Yeah, really.

The electronic screen that displays your messages (not to mention the ones on your computer and your TV), they employ a combination of red, green, and blue dots from which all the different colors can be generated. That innovation was the collaboration of a series of painter-scientists (e.g., American physicist Ogden Rood and German Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald) and post-impressionist artists such as Seurat – you know, the guy who painted his pictures out of dots of color, just like the ones in your electronic devices…

The first programmable device was invented by J. M. Jacquard to control the looms that made his tapestries and exactly the same technique was used to program the first computers. He also made the first digital image – out of black and white threads. In fact, the computer chips that run virtually all our devices today are made using a combination of three classic artistic inventions: etching, silk screen printing, and photolithography. 

Data from NASA and NSA satellites is enhanced using artistic techniques such as chiaroscuro (a Renaissance invention) and false coloring (the Fauvists) to increase the contrast so it’s easier to perceive the important information. Artists figured out how to hide information, too. Camouflage was invented by the American painter Abbot Thayer, who was unable to convince Teddy Roosevelt to use it in the Spanish American war. By WWI, however, painters such as the Vorticists in England and the Cubists in France were co-opted by their governments to design prints to protect troops, equipment, and planes.

In medicine, the stitches that permit a surgeon to correct an aneurysm or carry out a heart transplant were invented by American Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, who took his knowledge of lace-making into the operating room. That pace maker you use: it’s a simple modification of a musical metronome. If you have a neurological deficit, your neurologist may employ dance notation to analyze your problem. The stent that was implanted in your aorta to keep it open, that was designed using the principles of origami.

Oh, and that bridge you drove over on the way to work: good chance its design was invented by an artist. Princeton engineering professor David Billington and Smithsonian historian Brooke Hindle have shown that most of the innovations in bridge design have originated with artistically trained engineers such as John Roebling and Robert Maillart. 

In fact, there’s a long tradition of artists-turned-inventors in the US. You probably didn’t know that Samuel Morse (telegraph) and Robert Fulton (steam ship) were among the most prominent American artists before they turned to inventing (visit the Smithsonian American Art Galleries some time). You are probably also ignorant of the fact that Alexander Graham Bell was a pianist whose invention of the telephone began with a simple musical game. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes don’t just provide us with unusual architectures, they also inform our understanding of cell and virus structure that permits new biomedical insights. Geodesic domes led to the invention of a new kind of chemical nanoparticle called “Buckminsterfullerene,” which is the basis of new medicines. Kenneth Snelson’s tensegrity sculptures (stroll past his “Needle Tower” outside the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden on the Mall) aren’t just fascinating, they’ve also created a whole new form of engineering. Biologists have even found that it’s principles explain the shapes of cells. Google it!

In fact, I’ve just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences
are actively engaged in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be an artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art with their scientific creativity.

Moreover, those folks who produce the new patentable inventions and found the new companies to produce them – they, too, are artistically trained: they are far more likely to have continuous participation in drawing, painting, dancing, woodworking, metal working, and mechanics than their less innovative peers. Ninety percent of them, in interviews, expressed the opinion that the arts should be part of every scientists and technologists education. Eighty percent of them could point to specific ways in which their arts training directly enhanced their innovative ability.

In sum, successful innovators in sciences and technology are artistic people. Stimulate the arts and you stimulate innovation.

Bob Root-Bernstein, Ph. D.
MacArthur Fellow
Professor of Physiology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
rootbern@msu.edu

Root Bernstein, R. S., Bernstein, M. and Garnier, H. W. “Correlations between Avocations,
Scientific Style, and Professional Impact of Thirty Eight Scientists of the Eiduson Study,” Creativity Research Journal 8: 115 137, 1995.

Root-Bernstein, R. S. “Art Advances Science,” Nature 407: 134, 2000.

Root Bernstein, R. S. “Music, creativity, and scientific thinking,” Leonardo 34, no. 1, 63-68, 2001.

Root-Bernstein, R. S. “Sensual chemistry. Aesthetics as a motivation for research.” Hyle: The Journal of the Philosophy of Chemistry 9, 35-53, 2003.

Root-Bernstein, R. S. and Root-Bernstein, M. M. “Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists: The
Link between Polymathy and Creativity” in Sternberg, Robert, Grigorenko, Elana L., and Singer, Jerome, L., editors, Creativity: From Potential to Realization (Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association, 2004), pp. 127-151.

Root-Bernstein, M. M. and Root-Bernstein, R. S. “Body Thinking Beyond Dance: A Tools for
Thinking Approach,” In Overby, Lynette, and Lepczyk, Billie, eds. Dance: Current Selected Research, vol.5, pp. 173-202, 2005.

Root-Bernstein RS, Lindsay Allen^, Leighanna Beach^, Ragini Bhadula^, Justin Fast^, Chelsea Hosey^, Benjamin Kremkow^, Jacqueline Lapp^, Kaitlin Lonc^, Kendell Pawelec^, Abigail Podufaly^, Caitlin Russ^, Laurie Tennant^, Erric Vrtis^ and Stacey Weinlander^. “Arts Foster Success: Comparison of Nobel Prizewinners, Royal Society, National Academy, and Sigma Xi Members.” J Psychol Sci Tech 2008; 1(2):51-63.