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:

Discovery before science

Science was invented by Al-Haytham in the 10th-century, and expanded by other Muslim scholars and Renaissance philosophers through the 14th-century. Since then, science has proven to be perhaps the most productive intellectual tool in human history.

6 simple machines are used to control mechanical
advantage. Complex machines (like a drill press) use
more than one simple machine. All were invented or
discovered before the invention of science.

Yet prior to the 10th-century, people managed to discover and invent all manner of useful things, including many technologies we typically think of as abstract, technical or scientific. These inventions include alphabets, writing, literature, philosophy, mathematics, calculating aids, and controlled chemical reactions like fermentation, metallurgy, gunpowder, and cement (whose lost formula--incidentally--far surpasses the quality we can produce today).

Pre-scientific people invented complex architecture, including massive stonework, and the arch, vault and dome; they developed agriculture and animal husbandry, including selective breeding, the seed that became the field of genetics; they invented cities, plumbing, long-distance water delivery, and sophisticated forms of government, paper money, and banking. Pre-scientific people discovered mechanical advantage, and harnessed the energy of moving water and wind to power mills and sailing vessels.

Clearly, science's incredible later success is clouding our perception of its true nature: science is not the foundational source of human creativity, discovery, invention, and problem solving. In fact, science is just a criterion of truth--a powerful way to test assumptions and hunches, and bend them to useful application. No scientist comes up with their research focus via the scientific method: you come to science with a question that needs answering.

One problem with our current tendency to off-load all of our problem-solving onto science is that very few of us are actually scientists. 1999 Bureau of Labor statistics show that only 3.5% of the total US population worked as a scientist or engineer. Those numbers are likely not much different today. So, in turning exclusively to science for answers, we are ignoring the discovery potential of 96.5% of our human population.

Science's necessary objectivity is also off-putting. People are emotional creatures, yet emotion can have no part of scientific results...or it isn't science. We are now seeing the dangerous results of alienating the bulk of our population: science has become politicized and unpopular, eroding funding and support.

So, where else can we look for creativity, invention and human investment?

The Arts are a tool of discovery, and there is a long tradition of art detecting patterns that inform later science. In the 19th-century, a largely self-taught schoolmaster turned his attention from the Humanities to mathematics. George Boole was a big fan of Aristotle, and had the insight that he could use math to extend and formalize the rules of Aristotelian Logic. In doing so, he invented an obscure new branch of mathematics.

Even other mathematicians never imagined that Boolean Algebra would ever have any practical application to science or engineering. However, decades later in the 1930's, a young mathematics student named Claude Shannon enrolled in a philosophy course at the University of Michigan. There, Shannon realized that Aristotelian Logic, in the form of Boolean Algebra, could be used to describe digital circuits. This insight formed the basis of what has come to be known as "the most important Master's thesis of the century". Shannon's work went on to create the field of Information Theory, which profoundly influenced such diverse intellectual disciplines as biology, ecology, physics, electrical engineering, linguistics, philosophy and more. Information Theory utterly transformed society, resulting in the modern telecommunications and computer industries.

So, the foundation underlying the structure of the modern world came from the Humanities. Maybe that alone is reason enough to re-engage arts with science at FSMLs?

Here is an example of an artist using a visualization technique for the beauty and provocativeness of it...

Ground Cloud from Dennis Hlynsky on Vimeo.

...and a scientist using the same technique to make a fundamental discovery:

Hummingbird research at Sagehen from F. Felix on Vimeo.

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

Documentary about a scientist using art to make discoveries.

Painting the Way to the Moon is a feature documentary about Princeton mathematician and artist Ed Belbruno and how he found a new way of space travel using chaos theory.

The documentary,

"is Ed's first hand account of his time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and of how he used chaos theory and painting to find a way for satellites to travel (for example, from the earth to the moon) using very little fuel. Also known as 'ballistic capture', this would allow satellites to 'surf the gravitational field' to get from one point to the next.

But Ed's theory was rejected, and he had to give up trying to convince his peers that his work was worthwhile. Just then, Ed was given the chance of a lifetime when a JPL engineer knocked on Ed's door to ask if his theory could be used to rescue a Japanese satellite, which had malfunctioned on its way to the moon. What happened next changed space travel and put Ed's life on a new trajectory.

Painting the Way to the Moon shows how art and science share a common process."

Ed says, "(Van Gogh) did paintings so fast, that they have an element of reality that we don't see, because we're thinking." So that's what Belbruno did, too.


This is not the only time that Belbruno used his paintings to lead the way to new discoveries about the deep nature of the universe. Here's an article that talks about his discovery of "alternate time" through his artwork.

From Math to Shakespeare with Man Ray

A new exhibit at The Phillips Collection highlights Man Ray's photographs of mathematical models, displaying the objects alongside the photographs, and the later paintings they inspired.

The artist revisited these cold, abstract objects decades later, providing the works with names from Shakespeare, exploiting familiarity to trigger greater viewer emotional connection and introspection.

“The mathematical models would then become specific personalities featured in Shakespeare plays that would be familiar to his audience and invite curiosity...”

Exhibition curator Wendy A. Grossman asks in her catalog essay, 'Squaring the Circle : The Math of Art', if the Surrealists used modern math in pursuit of unreality...

"Is this confluence merely coincidental, or do Surrealism and modern mathematics share something of the same spirit? Or is there something Surreal about mathematics that drew these artists to this realm?"

The full article has some interesting ideas about the collision of art and science, and is worth a read.

Data Carpentry

Data Carpentry is a new project funded by NSF BIO Centers and DataOne. It is designed to teach researchers basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data.

Workshops are designed for learners with little to no prior knowledge of programming, shell scripting, or command line tools.

iDigBio recently hosted a Data Carpentry workshop, and their website has good documentation.

It occurs to me that this workshop offers an interesting opportunity to train both scientists and artists, while providing the possibility of interaction.

Looking at the rapidly expanding pool of data as a resource, or a medium, offers interesting potential art/science collisions. For example, Artist-Scientists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg lead Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They created a compelling art project from wind data that you have probably seen, as well as many internet data visualizations , including Many Eyes, an on-line data visualization tool, Wikipedia, chat history and e-mail visualizations.

More thoughts about data visualization here.

Mathematical Impressionist art.

Recent analysis shows that in paintings produced during psychotic episodes, Vincent Van Gogh was able to capture mathematically correct depictions of turbulence, one of the most difficult natural phenomena to describe scientifically.

This representation predates scientific recognition of the phenomenon. More here.