Overlooked Allies?

As we attempt to link art and science to increase the power of each, ArtSciConverge encourages developing partnerships with other like-minded entities like museums, university programs, artist residencies, arts councils, and other cultural institutions.

But there may be potential allies we've been overlooking: religious organizations.

I was recently gob-smacked when a group of fundamentalist Christians disrupted a public meeting to promote a hands-off management strategy for addressing western wildfire, and to express their heartfelt belief that this was the best way to protect iconic wildlife. I didn't see that coming from a sector that, in my experience, has aggressively claimed stewardship over the Earth, and--often--an understanding that it was put here for us to use up before the Apocalypse. But it's good news for ArtSciConverge: we can work with that!

Throughout history, many religious traditions have addressed the challenge of human existence by withdrawing their practitioners from worldly life, or by adopting deeply cynical perspectives on the need to accelerate the arrival of an apocalyptic end. But, like art and science, religion can also be, and often is, used as a mechanism for understanding and shaping the world. Significant examples of religious engagement in the world's problems include:

• Engaged Buddhism. Founder Thích Nhất Hạnh interprets Buddhism is a way of linking authentic Buddhist practice—particularly mindfulness—with social action. The western efforts are centered in Loubes-Bernac, France and Berkeley, CA. This sect identifies an explicit social ethos present in the earliest recorded Buddhist teachings, and adopts the non-violent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Beside Hanh's efforts, the current Dalai Lama has expressed a need for Buddhists to be more involved in the socio-political realm, stating, "Buddhists have not acted vigorously to address social and political problems. In this, we have much to learn from the Christians." Engaged Buddhism is the model for the larger Engaged spirituality, which refers to religious or spiritual people who actively engage in the world in order to transform it in positive ways while finding nurture, inspiration and guidance in their spiritual beliefs and practices.
• Christianity has a long and checkered record of social engagement, a history that includes some of the most violent, oppressive and exploitative policies and episodes in recorded human history. Frankly, given current headlines, there is still too much of this and a long way to go to end it. But Christian organizations like the Sojourners work "to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world."
• Network of Spiritual Progressives. Founded as an interfaith organization in 2005 by Rabbi Michael Lerner in Berkeley, CA, the network seeks to influence American politics towards more humane, progressive values.

Other efforts may spring from the mystical traditions of major religions, or develop Earth and nature-based spirituality (deep ecology, radical environmentalism, hallucinogen-based spirituality, etc.); these New-Age movements have often been severely criticized for lack of intellectual rigor, which rather misses the point.

Artists have not failed to notice all this. One excellent ongoing project is Reverend Billy's Church of Stop Shopping, whose Fundamentalist theatricality is twisted in service of a deep message of economic revolution.

Powerful artists

Here are some artists currently doing remarkable work at the intersection of art, environment and science. Thanks to Josh Harrison for the suggestions:

David Haley

"Ecological artist, David Haley, believes our ability to survive Climate Change is the enactment of a complex evolutionary narrative. As the dance of creation and destruction, also, demands new opportunities and meanings for the other side of collapse, his inquiries into the nature of water, whole systems ecology, complexity, and integral critical futures thinking inform his arts practice, academic research, education and community developments."

Tim Collins & Reiko Goto

"Tim Collins is an artist, author and planner, working across art, science and philosophy for over twenty years. He has worked within a wide range of communities developing research, methods and practices that take best advantage of art and aesthetics in the public interest...Over the last decade, Collins and his partner Reiko Goto have been developing artwork, tools and technologies that attend to the silent, the invisible and the different temporal relationships that occur at the scale of forests and gardens."

Jonathan Baxter

"Jonathan Baxter is an ‘artist and …’ He works across disciplines – both art and non-art related – using psychoanalytic methodologies and performative practices to variously open up, challenge and propose what is."

 

 

Lucas Ihlein 

"Ihlein is an award-winning Australian artist whose work explores the relationship between socially engaged art, agriculture and environmental management."

=================

Recommendations for artists who are compatible with field station science

Take a look at these artist's websites to see if their work resonates with yours:

"...I promised to send along the list of artists I know of who would be a great fit for a residency at a field station (and/or they may have already done something like this in the past)

Carolina Aragon
Cathleen Faubert
Helen Glazer
Ryan Griffis
Sarah Kanouse
Brian Knep
Mikhail Mansion
Jane Marsching
Lize Mogel
Teri Rueb
Brooke Singer
Joseph Smolinski
Andi Sutton

These are some that are at the top of mind at the moment, but I could certainly come up with more if folks are interested.

Best wishes,

Catherine D'Ignazio

Assistant Professor, Emerson College
Senior Fellow, Emerson Engagement Lab
Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media
@kanarinka | www.kanarinka.com | 617-501-2441"

CODAworx

"Published 12 times a year through Flipboard, CODAmagazine showcases the best design + art projects from all over the world, highlighting exemplary collaborations between designers, artists, architects, suppliers, fabricators and other industry resources."

Many of these remarkable artworks have scientific themes or inspiration, including many from one emphasis area: Technology + Art.

UNA, for example, is a collaboration between artist Wolfgang Buttress, and astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Bayliss:

Storytelling with Digital Mapping

Ouchhh Creative New Media Agency works at the interface where meaning emerges from data and digital technologies.

In addition to the expected advertising, their work includes performance art created from 3D image tracking and mapping, and inspired by scientific and mathematical topics like light physics, geometry, neuroscience, and particle physics.

Their website includes many compelling projects, including these:

Artists in space?

Liquid Gravity, 2013

There's not much that is more tech-y and science-y than a space program. In a way, a spacecraft is the ultimate field station, embedding humans in an undeveloped, hostile natural environment to enable research.

Artist Charles Lindsay has explored the concept of a field station using cast off research apparatus, including space program hardware. Lindsay also started and runs the artist residency program at SETI. NASA and JPL have remarkable art programs. Artist Trevor Paglen has launched photographs into space that will likely outlive human civilization, and the artist will soon launch Orbital Reflector, the first satellite whose sole purpose is to be a work of art.

But has an artist ever actually been sent to space in that capacity? Is physical space a cultural space? The European Space Agency funded the Arts Catalyst program to explore that question from 2005-2009.

Photographer Michael Najjar has been training since 2012 to be the first civilian artist in space. His supporters have funded a seat for him on Virgin Galactic's first flight, which has continually been pushed further out into the future.

Central to outer space is Najjar’s personal experience with space flight and the performative aspect of the exhibited images. As one of the pioneer astronauts of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Najjar has been undergoing an intensive, multistage cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia, since 2012, and is scheduled to board SpaceShipTwo in the near future. The artist uses the actual experience of training (zero-g flight, centrifuge training, stratosphere flight, and underwater space walks, to name a few) to create complex and never-before carried out photos that examine vital connections between humans and technology. Reality and simulation are so intertwined that they become indistinguishable, allowing for novel ways of seeing. Video artworks based on Najjar’s extreme training will be shown as part of the exhibition.

Art and Science Collaboration: The Key to a Sustainable Future

This AASHE.org webinar from Nov. 1, 2017 is an excellent justification for art/science collaboration. It includes presentations from Emily Bosanquet, Assistant Professor, Pacific Northwest College of Art; Elizabeth Demaray, Associate Professor of Fine Art, Head of Sculpture Concentration, Rutgers University; and Kim Landsbergen, Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Science, Antioch College.

These three academics and practitioners each have dynamic art/sci collaborations, and a lot of interesting things to say about them. The presentation was packed with excellent quotes about why this cross-disciplinary collaboration makes so much sense.

Emily Bosanquet is an interdisciplinary scientist whose "current research interest is in supporting cross disciplinary dialogue between artistic practices and scientific methodologies within a pedagogical framework in order to address social and ecological concerns."

Demaray discussed several of her hilarious and awe-inspiring projects, including PandoraBird, which offers music to wild birds, then generates Pandora radio stations based on their measured listening preferences. Demaray also discussed her FloraBorg project, which robot-izes potted plants and automates moving them to places that better meet their needs, as judged by species-specific programming, internal and environmental sensors, and weather database connections.

Kim Landsbergen is an ecologist. She discussed a project where invasive plants were used to create a journal on invasive plants. The project was received with far more enthusiasm than any scientific paper she has ever passed around.

The video recording, presentation slides, and a compiled document of resources shared during the webinar are available on the Campus Sustainability Hub at: https://hub.aashe.org/browse/video/18115/Art-and-Science-Collaboration-The-Key-to-a-Sustainable-Future

(If you do not have an AASHE login yet, please create a free account here: https://customer2597942ba.portal.membersuite.com/profile/CreateAccount_BasicInfo.aspx)

If you are associated with a university you can use their AASHE membership. Just create your account with your institutional email address.

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.

Beautiful abstractions of complex physics concepts

This work is so interesting: Tufte's ideas and observations at the link are stunning!

"Edward Tufte's wall-mounted sculptures, All Possible Photons,generate an enormous multiplicity of three-dimensional opticalexperiences of line, light, airspace, color, shadow, form.Made from stainless steel and air, the artworks grow outof Richard Feynman's famous diagrams describing Nature'ssubatomic behavior. Feynman diagrams depict the space-timepatterns of particles and waves of quantum electrodynamics.These mathematically derived and empirically verifiedvisualizations represent the space-time paths taken by allsubatomic particles in the universe.The resulting conceptual and cognitive art is both beautifuland true. Along with their art, the stainless steel elementsof All Possible Photons actually represent something: the preciseactivities of Nature at her highest resolution."

Art That Raises Awareness of Forest Ecology Issues

LaynaJoy Rivas and Eva Reiska’s “Sysimetsä”, a memorial

for those affected by the fires that destroyed Lake County, as

well as for a beloved art space by the name of

Ravens Landing back in 2015.

1. Trees (and/or forests) are iconic symbols in virtually every culture;
2. Western US forests are in crisis.

Combining or juxtaposing previously unrelated ideas is how humans create new knowledge, whether with art or science. So, how are artists combining these two ideas at Burning Man, one of the country's most controversial art events?

"Ursa Mator," by Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson: a gorgeous
sculpture covered in shimmering, edge-wise pennies takes 
on additional meaning as the Man burns in the background. 
Large wildfire destroys forest ecosystems, including 
iconic wildlife.

Black Rock City--the temporary Nevada city of 70,000 people (including an airport that is the busiest one in Nevada while it lasts!)--displayed numerous tree &/or forest issue themed artworks in 2017.

The most significant of these conceptual artworks was undoubtedly The Temple. Each year, a Temple is constructed as a locus of communal and personal release. People post photos, stories, keepsakes, mementos and messages relating to loved ones they have lost, or issues they are struggling with. The entire Temple is then burned to the ground on the last evening of the weeklong event in a solemn, silent ritual of cleansing and renewal that counters the rowdy, Saturnalian burning of the Man structure on the previous evening.

This year, the Temple architects chose to highlight western forest health problems by using lumber milled from dead salvage logs. This forest health theme is aligned nicely with the purpose and function of both the Temple, and the entire Burning Man ethos, which aims to alter attitudes of citizens in order to address systemic dysfunction in western culture.

More info about the Temple philosophy this year.

* * *

Burning Man is not the only group of artists working on forest issues, of course. Some artists are actively trying to change social policy.

Saving The West (STW) is a UC Santa Cruz-based, artist-led group working to create a new kind of timber industry that can use the small, torchy material that needs to come off of dry western forests in order to restore ecological function and resiliency. Without industry, there is no way to pay for the work that everyone, including loggers and environmentalists, now knows needs to be done. Meanwhile, our precious forests will continue to die off and/or burn. The current timber industry has retracted so far, and is still so focused on large trees--and lucrative salvage logging of the standing dead--that it is not useful at all in addressing this problem. Unfortunately, it's good business to let the forests continue to die.

STW recently received a grant from the US Forest Service to start a bi-state Wood Utilization Team working in California and Nevada in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Saving the West: A Whole Systems Proposal in Brief from Helen and Newton Harrison on Vimeo.

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?

Mechanisms of discovery

Discovery is the creation of new knowledge. Both art and science are ways of combining previously unrelated elements to create this new knowledge.

"In designing this project, I have been looking for the right proportions and contrasts that set associations in motion, that invite the sort of very human experience of engaging through curiosity and being rewarded with discoveries...I think it’s an important skill to be able to read things in multiple and often contradictory ways." -- Todd Gilens

But what are the mechanisms involved in this discovery process? The philosopher David Hume argued convincingly that the human mind does not invent: it combines previously unrelated elements to create something new:

"What never was seen, nor heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction...But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted." 

"If all we had to go on were impressions and ideas, we could not do much more than have perceptions and notice past experiences. Hume, however, develops a powerful account of the mind by identifying the ways in which ideas may be related to one another. We can mentally link ideas together in three ways:

1. Resemblance: A and B share similar features;
2. Contiguity: A and B occur together in space and/or time;
3. Cause and Effect: A brings B about.

...Hume argues that all human beliefs [and mental processes] result from applications of these simple associations. From our simple ideas and associations we build very complex systems of thought and belief. Yet, no matter how complex an idea or belief system, it is always possible in principle to analyze it into its simpler component parts: ideas and relations between them.

This theory of mind and method of analysis provided the tools that Hume used to arrive at remarkable conclusions about knowledge, understanding, metaphysics, the self, morality, justice, religious belief, and a host of other key philosophical topics." Much of Hume's work has been confirmed by later science. Read more here.

* * *

So, how does someone actually effect this productive recombination? Artists and inventors have a particular need for novelty; here are a few of the tools they have used to explore new hybrid ideas:

Surrealism is an art movement creating artworks that feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. The result was achieved by by combining conscious and unconscious awareness, with the goal of effecting social change.

• Inventor Thomas Edison also famously accessed the power of his unconscious mind by power-napping at his desk with a handful of ball bearings. When he drifted off to sleep his hand would relax, dropping the heavy metal balls to the floor. The noise woke him to record his unconscious answer to whatever question his conscious mind had been pondering.
• Artist Salvador Dali used the same technique with a spoon and metal plate. Dali was intrigued with the images which "occur at the boundary between sleeping and waking that occur when people are falling asleep, or when they are starting to wake up. These images tend to be extremely vivid, colorful and bizarre".
• Though it slightly predated the Surrealists, Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious, mirrored and inspired their goals. Despite significant errors, Freudian analysis led to a revolution in psychology, ultimately transforming it from essentially voodoo into a more scientific discipline.

Humor uses startling juxtaposition of apparently unrelated elements to convey new concepts, and to build new coping mechanisms and emotional connection to the ideas and the people expressing them:

"Humor also bestows social, psychological, and physical benefits. It attracts attention and admiration, softens criticism, delineates social boundaries, and alleviates conflict between people with different worldviews (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Keltner, Capps, Kring, Young, & Heerey, 2001; Martin, 2007). Humor even helps people cope with anxiety, embarrassment, grief, and physical pain." (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Keltner & Bonanno, 1997; Martin, 2007)

"...comedy goes far beyond the business of making us laugh: it has long been a powerful tool for social change and a means of undermining authority. What we find funny can also be cruel, establishing symbolic boundaries that divide people, setting those with power against those without and vice-versa." -- Artdaily.com

"Stand-up comedy is among the most popular forms of entertainment in America today. It is also one of the few places in mainstream society where people speak candidly about the topics of race and racism. This is no coincidence." -- Colleen Frances Manwell

Perhaps because of its transformative power, humor itself has often been seen as subversive: in Confucian China, in the medieval Islamic world (where comedy was dissociated from Greek drama and re-associated with Arabic poetic forms), and in more modern culture, where jokes can unite, or at the expense of national, religious or social identities can work to enforce tribalism, misogyny and racism.

However, for its transformative capacity humor is often seen as the enemy of fanaticism. In fact, "the topic of whether Christ ever laughed was hotly debated by theologians over many centuries. So, if Christ never laughed, and priests should be models of Christ, then humor and laughter were counter to true religion" (which is conservative and rejects re-interpretation).

The roots of humor include:

• Being reflective of, or imitative of reality 
• Surprise/misdirection
• Contradiction/paradox
• Ambiguity

The comedian Rowan Atkinson goes so far as to state that a person or object can become funny in one of only three ways: by being in an unusual place, by behaving in an unusual way, or by being the wrong size (Laughing Matters, 1992).

Atkinson also notes the strangely close relationship between comedy, fear, surrealism, and magic, as well as the surprising recurrence of classic themes in all of these. The physical comedian, like the ground-breaking artist, "breaks all the rules of decorum and convention".

Magic upends expectation, exploiting object behavior that obviously must be following the laws of physics, yet appears to break them. Artist and inventor John Edmark says,

"Clearly the works are sculptures of sorts, but in a sense that's just a coincidence; they're just the medium that I'm using to ask and answer questions that I'm interested in...I think my work is most successful when it evokes a sense of wonder, when it sort of seems to be magical."

Explanation of the strobe effect seen in Edmark's dynamic sculptures:



Source: Removable Thumb Magic Trick by ViralHog on Rumble

EDWARD TUFTE  ALL POSSIBLE PHOTONS
THE CONCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE ART OF FEYNMAN DIAGRAMS

Interlochen Arts Academy land art

Brief Summary of the Project:
This new collaborative project that uses “land” as a genre to bring visiting artists, scientists, and land use planners together with high school art and ecology students.

After conducting a Forestry Management Plan, Interlochen Center for the Arts identified about 70 acres of pine plantation on our campus that need to be selectively harvested and re-forested with native hardwood trees. Ten acres of this land have been identified as a study site for ecology and visual art students to document changes in biodiversity, soil and carbon capture as a result of the timbering process. We have the opportunity to create a permanent land art installation commemorating and responding to the process.

Two classes that run simultaneously in Math/Science and Visual Arts allow students to collaborate on the project. The design of a public trail system that runs through the land-art installation provides accessible recreation to our students and the community and raises awareness about the importance of protection, regeneration, conservation and the role art has in making the process meaningful.

The impact of this collaborative project reaches beyond our students and the land on our campus to the people in our community and will hopefully be a model of how to use art to invite the public into environmentally important projects nationwide.

Project Description: Due to the generosity of WilsonArt, funds are available to both study the pine plantation before, during and after timbering, and to involve students, faculty and visiting artists in a land art installation in the subject area. Our proposed plan has the following elements:

1. The subject area will be timbered in late 2017 / early 2018.
2. In the school year 2017 - 18, Johnny Hunt, visual arts instructor, will offer a landscape art course, based in the Visual Arts Division, open to students of all majors. Mary Ellen Newport, Director of Math and Science / Ecology instructor, will teach an ecology class that is offered at the same time as the art course. Ecologists and artists will study ecology and landscape art separately, and then have the occasion to work together in the studio and in the field on art and science.
3. A visiting artist will be brought in to work with instructors to plan, design, create, and ultimately install the land art project in a 10 acre area of the timbered pine off Riley Road. Elements of the plan will consider some or all of these themes:


• Regeneration
• Invitation / initiation / blessing of new forest
• The replacement of the plantation with the natural
• The way that forests and art are shaped by the passage of time
• The creation of a special place, a grove, a sanctuary, a nursery; a space that may or may not be able to acknowledge native American sensibilities
• The changing nature of a forest in the process of secondary succession
• The role of (bio)diversity in creating stability


4. Guest artists, native artists, scientists and land use planners will be brought in to deepen the experience between ecology and art. Plans for trails / paths, observation decks, planting regimes will be developed. The expectation is that some of the timbered wood from this plot could be used in building structures such as shelters for students doing data collection, bird observation decks over Bridge Lake.
5. Here is what we have put together as a description for the artist(s) we have involved: Interlochen Arts Academy seeks collaboration with a visual artist to guide science and arts students in the creation of land art for a 10 acre pine plantation forest that will be transformed (over the years) into a native forest. There are scientific objectives to the project (document changes in soil, biodiversity and carbon storage) as well. Ideally the artist would be available to consult with students for 2 week period in the early fall 2017 (in residence), a time in late fall 2017 (by remote, if necessary) for two weeks in January 2018 (IAA's Inter*Mester program), and for a time TBD in the spring semester 2018.

Images of the land and the areas we are focusing on for this project. The zoomed in area near the lake is where the art would be installed. The pine plantation between Riley Road and Bridge Lake is the location of the project. The project location contains scrubby Scotch pine to the north and west, an irregularly shaped patch of red pine more centrally located, and a wetlands area with a path leading SW to Bridge Lake. The irregular patch is the location of the project.

Melinda Zacher Ronayne
Director of Visual Arts
Interlochen Center for the Arts

E: melinda.ronayne@interlochen.org
P: 231.276.7844
W: interlochen.org

Interlochen Arts Camp | Arts Academy | College of Creative Arts | Presents | Public Radio

ArtScience Labs

"Le Laboratoire Cambridge is an interdisciplinary culture lab that invites visitors to explore the experiments and wonders of innovative artists, designers, chefs, and more discovering at the frontiers of science. 

Founded in Paris in 2007 by inventor, material scientist, and Harvard Professor David Edwards, Le Laboratoire now lives in Cambridge as the flagship of ArtScience Labs, a global organization dedicated to radical idea development."

* * *

Le Laboratoire is part of a larger effort at art/sci convergence for cultural change called, Artscience Labs.

"Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs."

"Many of the questions that we face today — questions of innovation, of change — are not really questions we can deal with in a classical science lab."

"Labs are places of experience. We enter to explore. Each minute in a functioning lab is like a page of a smart novel that loses meaning without reference to what came before and is about to follow. 

Art, like science, is such an experience, and, yet, we encounter art and science in our museums more frequently as outcome, as product – dug up, carved down, highly edited – that follows a mysterious process of creative thought and engagement... 

At The Laboratory, we look for novel ideas of art and design that cannot be properly formulated without a sustained encounter with a pioneering edge of science. We then help broker encounters between artists and scientists that permit concrete idea formulation. Once ideas are formulated, we invest in development of the experimental projects that result. In this way, artscience, the process of creative thought that synthesizes esthetic and analytical methods, becomes a catalyst for innovation and the basis for partnership."

ArtScience Labs includes an educational program called the ArtScience Prize, a global "catalyst for student learning through passionate pursuit of innovative art and design ideas at the cutting edge of science...the ArtScience Prize [is] an interdisciplinary education program that supports young people as they explore and develop groundbreaking ideas around an annual scientific theme, seek[ing] to prepare the next generation of innovators."

2013-14 Boston ArtScience Prize from ArtScience Prize on Vimeo.


The winners of all the ArtScience Prize programs are invited to the annual ArtScience Labs Annual Innovation Workshop, which is like a Silicon Valley development incubator.

2015 ArtScience Innovation Workshop from ArtScience Prize on Vimeo.

More videos from ArtScience Labs on Vimeo and Youtube 1 | 2.
Books on ArtScience by David Edwards:

• Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
• The Lab

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.

Book Recommendations

This post is a running list of recent book recommendations from ArtSciConverge participants that explore the art/sci interface in the natural world. There is also a good list of related books on the "SciArt in America" blog.

I created a list on Amazon with additional titles that may be interesting.

---

Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment, Bill Gilbert and Annica Cox.

Arts Programming for the Anthropocene argues for a role for the arts as an engaged, professional practice in contemporary culture, charting the evolution of arts over the previous half century from a primarily solitary practice involved with its own internal dialogue to one actively seeking a larger discourse. The chapters investigate the origin and evolution of five academic field programs on three continents, mapping developments in field pedagogy in the arts over the past twenty years. 

Drawing upon the collective experience of artists and academicians in the United States, Australia, and Greece operating in a wide range of social and environmental contexts, it makes the case for the necessity of an update to ensure the real world relevance and applicability of tertiary arts education. Based on thirty years of experimentation in arts pedagogy, including the creation of the Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program and Art and Ecology discipline at the University of New Mexico, this book is written for arts practitioners, aspiring artists, art educators, and those interested in how the arts can contribute to strengthening cultural resiliency in the face of rapid environmental change.

---

"...in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie’s jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science. Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself. In chapters on wormholes, black holes, interstellar travel, and much more, Thorne’s scientific insights―many of them triggered during the actual scripting and shooting of Interstellar―describe the physical laws that govern our universe and the truly astounding phenomena that those laws make possible."

---

SILENT SPRING IS MORE THAN A SCIENTIFIC LANDMARK: IT’S LITERATURE
On the under-rated poetry of Rachel Carson's masterpiece.

"Carson accomplished the feat of raising a public outcry against DDT not just with her research on its deleterious effects, but with the descriptive imagery, strong rhetoric, and poetic language that lift Silent Spring into the realm of other great works of American literature."

Rachel Carson’s Radical Perspective On The Natural World

"Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962, created a widespread shift in how the general population perceived the effects of human impact on the natural environment. Her writing combined scientific studies and research, with anecdotes from American house wives about dead birds and squirrels, to create a scathing argument against the negative impacts of chemical pesticide use, specifically DDT, in the post-war period. Silent Spring became a bestseller and went on to bolster the environmental conservation movement prompting significant U.S. government policy changes banning the use of DDT.

Silent Spring was not Carson’s first book. Her three previous titles dealt with the wonders of the sea. The NY Times reports: 'Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense of wonder” about nature. In her best-selling sea books — The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and Under the Sea-Wind — she used simple and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.'"

---

"In this exquisitely researched work of fiction, Sylvia Torti explores sex and science, memory and forgetting, and how, in laboratory research on living organisms, we often destroy what we love.”--Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, finalist for The National Book Award.

More info. Available on Amazon.

---

The term “PARANOMIA” has multiple meanings, one of them being that which exists alongside the normative. In his inquiry into the entangled aspects of science and contemporary art, Christoph Keller outlines how knowledge is derived in the respective fields.

Available at Spector Books.

---

The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years, Counterforce is on the Horizon

This book offers a 21st-century manifesto from the pioneers of the eco-art movement. Since the 1970s Helen and Newton Harrison have been creating art inspired by the earth. They established a worldwide network among biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners, politicians, and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues about ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development. This definitive survey traces an influential joint career that has lasted nearly half a century.
 
More here.

---

Vladimir Nabokov's career in science, included "a stint as the lepidoptery curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology in the 1940s...his scientific work has mostly been treated as a curious fact rather than something of a significance on par with his writing. Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art, edited by Stephen H. Blackwell and Kurt Johnson and released earlier this year by Yale University Press, is one of the first works to thoroughly investigate his butterfly studies and scientific illustrations."

That Nabokov showed such insight despite working with such apparently limited tools at his disposal argues that he was more than just a competent taxonomist. His work in the Neotropical Polyommatus Blues stands out as a bold and brilliant scientific advance.

---

"Using the arts for conservation can help attract new audiences, increase understanding, introduce new perspectives, and create a dialogue among diverse people. The arts — painting, photography, literature, theatre, and music — offer an emotional connection to nature. This chapter provides examples of using the arts to inspire people to take action. Planning art activities requires reaching out to artists and the art community, audiences with whom scientists and educators may seldom interact. Conservation problems require creative solutions. It makes sense to access more ways of knowing the world in order to take care of it." -- Oxford Press

---

"Herman convincingly argues that closely analyzing works of art is an empowering exercise that translates to seeing the 'hidden' clues in many real-life scenarios...

Yet despite her expert clientele, Herman amply demonstrates that tapping into an inner Sherlock Holmes isn't only a skill for investigators and that heightened observation is critical to communicating effectively, empathizing with others, and making informed decisions." -- Amazon.com

---

"This anthology―which includes work by some of the nation's most accomplished writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Freeman House, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, and Scott Russell Sanders―grows out of the work of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program and showcases the insights of the program's thoughtful and important encounters among writers, scientists, and place.

These vivid essays, poems, and field notes convey a landscape of moss-draped trees, patchwork clear-cuts, stream-swept gravel bars, and hillsides scoured by fire, and also bring forward the ambiguities and paradoxes of conflicting human values and their implications for the ecosystem.

Forest Under Story offers an illuminating and multifaceted way of understanding the ecology and significance of old-growth forests, and points the way toward a new kind of collaboration between the sciences and the humanities to better know and learn from special places." -- Amazon.com

---

"Why do we covet beauty? Why does art, which seems to serve little practical purpose, feel fundamental to our lives?

Such questions have long fascinated philosophers and artists. Now neuroscientists are weighing in as well. The Aesthetic Brain explores the field of neuroaesthetics, the science of how our brain experiences and responds to art, music and objects of beauty. Chatterjee, a neuroscientist, argues that an instinct for beauty has helped our species endure. Art is a product of our quest for beauty and knowledge." -- Scientific American

---

Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder

"Shimamura has written the ideal introduction to what science can say about artworks, from prehistoric carvings to the latest video projections. It's readable, smart and informed. Better yet, it's a scientist's take that doesn't neglect the humanities: Shimamura cares about which neurons fire, but also about what Plato thought."

 -- Blake Gopnik, art critic, Newsweek and The Daily Beast

---

12-7-15: "An audacious collaboration between an award-winning novelist and a leading environmental philosopher, Love in the Anthropocene taps into one of the hottest topics of the day, literally and figuratively—our corrupted environment—to deliver five related stories (“Flyfishing,” “Carbon,” “Holiday,” “Shanghai,” and “Zoo”) that investigate a future bereft of natural environments, introduced with a discussion on the Anthropocene—the Age of Humanity—and concluding with an essay on love.

The “love” these writer/philosophers investigate and celebrate is as much a constant as is human despoliation of the planet; it is what defines us, and it is what may save us. Science fiction, literary fiction, philosophical meditation, manifesto? All the above. This unique work is destined to become an essential companion—a primer, really—to life in the 21st century."

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.

Art as Cultural Diplomacy

This expired Call For Papers by Cassandra Sciortino, University of California - Santa Barbara is a fascinating example of seeking problem solution through art.

This idea is a strong theme in FSML art programs that seek to enhance fundamental discovery and push scientific knowledge through to social policy and action.

The CFP was for a panel of the recent Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (The Fourth Edition) conference in Kraków, Poland. Presented topics included some information that is philosophically interesting and highly pertinent to ambitious FSML art programs, including:

• The Artist-in-Residence as Cultural Mediator: "...As well as being sources for inspiration, this global web of residencies can have a wide-ranging ethical and mediating effect through contact between visiting artists and their host cultures." Download paper.
• David Loewenstein: Art Intervention as Social Practice: "...It is a basic tenet of Loewenstein’s approach that for a community art project to have integral value, the needs it addresses must emerge from, and be articulated by, the members of the community themselves."
• Non-Aligned Modernism: Yugoslavian Modernist Art and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: "...the 1956 MoMa exhibition of Abstract Expressionism...legitimized modernist ethos as an accepted political, social, and cultural form during Yugoslavia’s transition from a hard-line Soviet-style state, to a more open, humanist-socialist one."
• More here.

=======================

CFP: Art as Cultural Diplomacy (Krakow, 24-26 Apr 2015)

Krakow, April 24 - 26, 2015
Deadline: Mar 23, 2015

Call for Papers for the Panel: Art as Cultural Diplomacy: (Re)Constructing Notions of Eastern and Western Europe

(As part of the Fourth Euroacademia International Conference ‘Re-Inventing Eastern Europe’, to be held in Krakow, Poland in 24th - 26th of April 2015, including a visit to Auschwitz – Birkenau on 26th of April 2015)

Deadline: 23rd of March 2015

Art as Cultural Diplomacy: (Re)Constructing Notions of Eastern and Western Europe Panel Proposed by: Cassandra Sciortino, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panel Description

The panel “Art as cultural diplomacy” seeks papers that explore the function of art (in its broadest definition) as an instrument of cultural diplomacy by the state and, especially, by nongovernmental actors. The main theme of the session is the question of art and diplomacy in Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Papers are welcome which explore issues related to the role of art, diplomacy and the politicization of the European Union and its candidate countries, as are those which consider how the arts have pursued or resisted East-West dichotomies and other narratives of alterity in Europe and worldwide. The panel seeks to combine a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how art—its various practices, history, and theory—are an important area of inquiry in the expanding field of cultural diplomacy.

Some examples of topics include:

• How can art serve as a neutral platform for exchange to promote dialogue and understanding between foreign states?
• How can art, including organized festivals (i.e. film, art, music.), cultivate transnational identities that undermine dichotomies of East and West, and other narratives of alterity in Europe and beyond it?
• The implications for art as an instrument of diplomacy in a postmodern age where geopolitics and power are increasingly mobilized by image based structures of persuasion
• How has/can art facilitate cohesion between European Union member states and candidate states that effectively responds to the EU’s efforts to create “unity in diversity.”
• The politics of mapping Europe: mental and cartographic
• Community based art as a social practice to engage issues of European identity
• The difference between art as cultural diplomacy and propaganda
• The digital revolution and the emergence of social media as platforms for art to communicate across social, cultural, and national boundaries?
• Diplomacy in the history of art in Europe and Eastern Europe
• Artists as diplomats
• Art history as diplomacy—exhibitions, post-colonial criticism, global art history, and other revisions to the conventional boundaries of Europe and its history of art
• The international activity of cultural institutes

Please apply on-line or submit abstracts of less than 300 words together with the details of affiliation until 23rd of March 2015 to application@euroacademia.eu

For full details of the conference, please see before applying the conference website: http://euroacademia.eu/conference/re-inventing-eastern-europe-the-fourth-edition/

Reference:
CFP: Art as Cultural Diplomacy (Krakow, 24-26 Apr 2015). In: H-ArtHist, Mar 4, 2015 (accessed Sep 25, 2015).

Thanks to ArtHist for the original post. 

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.

Recommendation from an Eco-art legend

http://www.centerforforcemajeure.org/

For those of you who don't know me my name is Newton Harrison.

I consider myself an artist first but also an academic and an educator. I come out of a number of traditions and the Bauhausian attitude toward problem solving is a background sound in much of our work. The artist educators I identify with and know or knew, are people like Alan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, and Hans Haacke who are or were my contemporaries in my early thirties. I found myself comfortable in many of the sciences. Moreover, I have helped form art departments, chaired them, was the first policy panel chairman for the NEA and have done a body of administrative work. I took early retirement from UC San Diego after reaching the top of the professorial ranks in order to do art full time. The career of Helen Harrison, my lifetime collaborator, has the same general outline as my own. I bring up this history to make clear that I have direct and extensive experience in the three principle domains that comprise this discussion. If I am correct, they are about the melding of art, science, administration and support structures of various kinds.

I would like to suggest that missing from this discourse is what one one might call content. I would also like to suggest that there is a common meeting point between formations in art and formations in science. One might better say, a common beginning point. It is about seeing, in the sense of envisioning that evokes a question of originality about something not previously spoken. Let me begin with Cezanne the father of modern art, the question he asked was: why was the art making in the academies of his time dominated by straight lines that created various perspectives visually when in nature the same kind of seeing happened but in the absence of straight lines? A key question that he spent a good part of his life answering. The answers turned out to be how non-linear perspectives, 6 or 7 in number, actually worked. This was demonstrated most powerfully in his Mount St. Victoire works. From these discoveries emerged a body of art movements, such as expressionism, impressionism, even fauvism among others, changing the nature of the field and significantly expanding the conceptual domain and visual domains that people though of as art. His discoveries, and their proof exhibited in his paintings were endlessly useful field.

Let me now offer a parallel example, perhaps of even greater importance in the sciences. In 1969 I was doing an artificial borealis for Expo 70 and then the Art& Technology exhibition in LACMA. The work was based in plasma physics which I had to learn something about. Richard Feynman the physicist was my guide. The work was done, successfully, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. One time walking in the woods with Feynman, he explained the problem he had that forced him to make so many equations, always with something missing, finally discovering that what was missing was something. Also a lovely question that he asked which was something like this: is it true that the faster something moves, the more impossible it is to find its location in a trajectory of movement? I think he discovered you could come close by "averaging a sum of its histories" (a good physicist might express this more clearly). These discoveries seem to offer new insight into indeterminacy and wave particle physics.

The point I am making here is that powerful content emerges from asking, then setting out to answer, a question that turns out to be of great consequence. This is true of both the arts and the sciences. The outcomes in physical terms between the arts and sciences are sometimes parallel and sometimes very different but the original question, the original search and high excitement in original discovery, are common. It is my opinion that a concerted effort needs to be made to locate artists who are comfortable in the sciences and who are asking questions and seeking answers that are of great importance. For instance a dominate question in our own work, looks something like this: if flood and drought, the outcome from global warming, reduces dramatically the ability of the peninsula of Europe to feed its own people, is a mediating force on the horizon, can it be enacted, and can civil breakdown be countered? We think yes.

The artists that I have mentioned previously in the response to Janet Brown's blog, do in fact ask and seek answers to questions of importance and are useful models. Therefore I suggest that our rather complex group take on itself the extremely exciting task of locating and supporting, that relatively small group of artists globally, that go about doing what I have been talking about.

More later.

Newton

Mining time-lapse videos from random internet photos