Art and Science Hybrids

In Praise of Hybridity: Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank J Malina

By Roger Malina

Posted at http://malina.diatrope.com/2013/05/20/in-praise-of-hybridity-celebrating-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-frank-j-malina/  on 20 May 2013, 7:16 pm
Sent to us by John Chalmers.
 

Colleagues

My father was a hybrid. He achieved success in the 1940s as a scientist in the nascent field of astronautics, helping develop the theory of space flight and leading the team that launched the first human made object into outer space (1). As a pioneering kinetic artist in the 1950s he helped start the art and technology movement that has led to large industries in entertainment and cultural media.

In the 1960s he socialized with other hybrid artist-scientists such as artist and mathematician Anthony Hill, artist and bio-rheologist L. Alcopley and mathematician-artist Claude Berge member of the Oulipo literary group (2). But they were few and far between. They were often lonely professionals and marginalized by their peers. My father debated the problem with his friends such as C.P.Snow, Jacob Bronowski, Roy Ascott and Buckminster Fuller.

This year a group of colleagues and I have been developing a report funded by the US National Science Foundation and supported by the US National Endowment for the Arts, the SEAD White Papers Study (3). The study seeks to enable new forms of collaboration between the sciences, engineering, the arts, design and humanities, identifying opportunities and obstacles. It has been an exhilarating task working with a growing, dynamic and energetic community of practice. Artists are involved in all fields of science and engineering, from the health sciences to the nano-sciences, from digital manufacturing to space technologies. And they are working on the hard problems of our time where it is impossible to decouple culture from science  or engineering; climate change, the aging of the brain, sustainable energy.

The hybrids have arrived! From mixed teams of artists and scientists, to hybrid individuals with dual career tracks they are working in universities, industry and the burgeoning making and hacking spaces. In studying the demographics we were surprised that 20% of them are hybrids in the sense that they have both a higher education degree in science or engineering and a second diploma in a field of arts, design or humanities. (We also noted that the community of practice is gender balanced with 50% women and 50% men). These hybrids often play a special role as ‘translators’ able to navigate between the different ways of knowing represented by the sciences and the arts. Nature magazine (4) recently took note of the phenomenon, asking whether there were new hybrid career tracks emerging. They noted the recent development of PhD programs dedicated to the training and cultivation of these hybrids.

Physiologist and artist Robert Root Bernstein has recently studied hundreds of successful scientists and engineers; out of all proportion with the general population of scientists and engineers, and the public, they are hybrids participating in deep avocations in the arts that they view as essential to their own scientific practice. (5)

There are very good reasons to have disciplines and to train scientists and engineers to drill deep with a single minded focus. Art is not Science (6).But there are also good reasons to have mobile professionals who can navigate in trans-disciplinary practices. The good news is that the Tree of Knowledge has been felled and we now live in an evolving system of Networked Knowledge, enabled and accelerated by the internet and on line collaboration technologies. As Anthony Hill and Claude Berge would have told you, this is a topological revolution. It is far easier to make connections in complex network structures that are continuously evolving, than in tree structures that rigidify as they age (7). Unfortunately our institutions are still locked into the topology of old tree structures rather than complex networks and hybridity is still often a high risk activity.

I think my father would be thrilled at the turn of events. My father once wrote “It was my feeling that one way in curbing the misuse of technology might be if we could, through the arts, emotionally prepare young people to see the aesthetic, positive side of things and also then respond by seeing the negative” (8), Chastened by the human crimes committed using advanced science and technology during the second world war, he was convinced that the arts and sciences had to be connected at their very source, the human imagination and passions that drive scientific, engineering and artistic discovery. This emerging hybrid community is carrying within it the ideals of a socially robust science (9) that foregrounds not only ethics and values as core values in science and engineering but also celebrates with joy and pleasure the well-being of human beings in all their, non-reductive, complexity.

Notes

1. There is a large literature on Frank Malina’s career in astronautics from co founder and first Director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designer of the WAC Corporal rocket and co founder of the International Academy of Astronautics:  http://olats.org/pionniers/malina/malina.php
2. I have recently co written a history of the Leonardo Journal that Frank Malina founded to champion the work of artists involved in science and technology:  http://malina.diatrope.com/2013/05/19/a-history-of-the-leonardo-journal-on-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-its-founder-frank-j-malina/
3.   The SEAD network is coordinated by Carol Lafayette; the SEAD White Paper Study is co chaired by Roger Malina and Carol Strohecker working with an international community of 200 professionals. The work of the network and the draft report can be found at: http://malina.diatrope.com/2013/05/19/a-history-of-the-leonardo-journal-on-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-its-founder-frank-j-malina/
4. Interdisciplinarity: Artistic Merit, Virginia Gewin, Nature, 496, 537-539 (2013) doi:10.1038/nj7446-537a
5.    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.
6. See the writing of my colleague Physicist Jean-Marc Levy Leblond, La science n’est pas l’art, Jean Marc Levy-Leblond, Hermann Editeurs, Paris 2010 ISBN 978-2705669409 “. My rebuttal is at http://malina.diatrope.com/2011/04/17/is-art-science-hogwash-a-rebuttal-to-jean-marc-levy-leblond/
7. See the Leonardo Project on the Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks: http://ahcncompanion.info/
8. See http://malina.diatrope.com/2013/05/19/a-history-of-the-leonardo-journal-on-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-its-founder-frank-j-malina/
9. See the work of European Research Council President Helga Nowotny, for instance http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/tadn/tadn993/nowo99a.htm

The Evolving Creative Campus

 by John M. Eger reposted from the Huffington Post

Van Deerlin Endowed Chair of Communications and Public Policy and Director of the Creative Economy Initiative, San Diego State University

Many colleges and universities are looking to put more arts at the center of campus life and in the process, foster creativity.
The Creative Campus initiative, a program of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, is leading the way.
The idea began early in 2004 at a meeting convened by the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, Pfizer and the Altria Group. The idea simply was "to examine the factors that characterize effective partnerships in education and the arts: the projects, proposals, curricula, and creative forces that make such partnerships work."
Later, thanks to $3.5 million from the Doris Duke Charitable Trusts, the "Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program" was created "to seed innovative, interdisciplinary programs that brought together artists with a range of community and campus-based partners in order to stimulate arts-based inquiry and elevate the role of the arts in academic life. "
The grants now helping over 14 Universities establish projects that serve to nurture the entire campus including many "collaborative projects (which involve) intense partnerships that require shared language, trust, and a "restructuring" of knowledge and practice. While Creative Campus projects fell into both (cooperative and collaborative) categories, the truly collaborative projects proved most transformative for both participants and the larger campus."

After six years of study the Association seems pleased that the role of the arts has indeed stimulated academic life, but fully aware that:

"In spite of the incentives for campus-based arts presenters to work across disciplines and to become better integrated into the curricular and co-curricular life of campus, there are significant cultural and structural barriers that make such work difficult. Budgets, facilities, selection processes, and professional norms all work against innovative programming that places other goals (learning, engagement, conversation, community building) above more narrowly conceived notions of curatorial excellence. Furthermore, institutional structures and academic practices, from tenure to course review and scheduling and budgetary silos, also discourage faculty and other campus partners from embracing arts-based interdisciplinary inquiry."

One of the barriers, not surprisingly are the artists themselves. Alan S. Brown and Steven J. Tepper, PhD., who wrote the report and did most of the research, commented that "While a small cohort of artists and university arts programs explore the intersections of art and other disciplines, a large majority of the country's presenters and producers of performing arts programs - opera, classical music, jazz, dance, theatre and multi-disciplinary presenters - remain committed to finely tuned missions and business models that more or less exclude interdisciplinary work - much less work across artistic genres. "
Clearly, they argue, what is needed is a "new breed of artists who are vitally engaged in research and discovery, mindful and articulate about their creative process, open to critical reflection, and who can bridge disciplines and interact with people from different backgrounds."
Importantly, the University can do a lot of things to make the campus experience, as well as the courseware, come alive. Yale University, for example, (while not a recipient of the Creative Campus grant program) has started using their on campus Art Gallery to be a teaching mechanism for the whole university...including courses that help teachers how best to teach K-12 students. Already, last year they hosted over "48 courses from departments other than art history or art" according to The New York Times.
In addition to the art courses, according to the Yale University newspaper, 578 individual class sessions--from "women's, gender and sexuality studies...to a "Photography and Memory" course and an African American studies class on "Re-Visioning Subjectivities'--were held during the last year.
There is a message here for all universities desirous of seeing more interdisciplinary course development, and aspiring to be a creative campus. Ways to get faculty to work more collaboratively must be developed. Providing incentives for such collaborations to encourage art and science marriages is clearly essential. So too is leadership at the highest level to make such collaborations a critical part of the University mission.
The goal must be to forge an undergraduate curriculum that offers truly interdisciplinary courses, and curricula that make the college experience meaningful for life and work in the new global economy, an economy that highly values creativity and innovation.

 

Follow John M. Eger on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeger62

Art and Science Inspirations

This art and science quotes by the great and good are meant to give you some inspiration to pursue your dreams.......or to distract you from them!

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these
aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the
sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards
freedom.
- Albert Einstein
'Moral Decay', Out of My Later Years (1937, 1995), 9.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this
advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good
conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is
leading the 'higher life.'
- Aldous (Leonard) Huxley
Ends and Means (1937), 320. In Collected Essays (1959), 369

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one
another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its
goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
- Franz Grillparzer
Notebooks and Diaries (1838). In The Columbia World of Quotations (1996)

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee
them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are
predicted by science.
- Henry Thomas Buckle
'The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge,', a discourse
delivered at the Royal Institution (19 Mar 1858) reprinted from Fraser's
Magazine (Apr 1858) in The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry
Thomas Buckle (1872), Vol. 1, 4. Quoted in James Wood, Dictionary of
Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893),
426:46

and from Dolores Kaufman, DAG member:

Carl Sagan said "The creative process is a partnership of the 
unconscious and conscious mind"

 Steven Hawking said, "I follow my nose, one thing leads to 
another and I don't know what I'll find next."




and from Joe Nalven, DAG founder

Georges Braque said, "Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."


 

Bubbles in Space “Mad World” Mastermind Michael Andrews Collaborates with High Tech Hig-School Kids On New Video

Bubbles in Space on Nowness.com.

Psychedelic flashes of Hello Kitty and Albert Einstein blend into vignettes of summery nostalgia in Josh Hassin’s animated music video for Michael Andrews’ “Bubbles in Space.” Comprising 3,000 frames hand-drawn by more than 100 students from San Diego’s High Tech High International, the flipbook-style piece was based on a live-action film Hassin and retro-pop singer-songwriter Andrews shot with their children, but takes Andrews’ lyrical concept of new fatherhood to an unexpected place. “I have a little girl, Mike has a little boy, and we think they’re so cute,” says Hassin, who has created videos for the likes of indie rock bands Metric and Celebration. “The school kids drew them and put crucifixes on their foreheads and other crazy stuff. But this is what goes on in their brains. So we just let that roll—it’s honest and that’s what this is about.” A prolific film composer with credits including Donnie Darko, which featured his breakout cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” with Gary Jules, and Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, Andrews is currently working on the score for Mira Nair’s new film adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Ahead of his new album Spilling a Rainbow, the musician talked us through his pregnant musical journey, from being uncomfortably numb to stealing love songs.

When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists

Science and art are often considered opposites – so what happens when top practitioners in each field collaborate? The results, finds Stuart Jeffries can be seismic. This article comes from the guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 August 2011 21.30 BST

Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.

The artist and the geneticist

Just before 9/11, Marc Quinn did a portrait of Sir John Sulston, one of the genetic scientists who decoded the human genome. "At the moment this divisive attack happened, John's work and this portrait were suggesting that we are all connected – in fact that everything living is connected to everything else," Quinn says.

It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."

"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."

A decade after their collaboration, Quinn and Sulston are meeting in the artist's east London studio. Did the collaboration change each man's attitudes towards the other's discipline? "I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions," says Quinn.

"Science simply means finding out about stuff, but in that process science is the greatest driver of culture," says Sulston. "When you do something like decode the human genome, it changes your whole perspective. In terms of genetic manipulation we're not just looking for answers but modifying what's there."

That is very much the focus of Quinn's recent work. Last year, his White Cube show featured a sculpture called Catman, depicting Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat, and another of Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who, according to the blurb, "has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis". Quinn says: "They're about the fantasy of being someone else – you can be a man or a woman, anything. We've always had those fantasies and now science is making them possible."

Quinn says Sulston's portrait was important to his later work. He shows us his painting of a human iris in the studio. "I've made a lot of work since, to do with eyes and fingerprints, because we are controlled so much more by scans of abstract data about ourselves." As for Sulston, since he finished working on the human genome, he has become concerned with ethical questions to do with the application of his work to police DNA databases and civil liberties.

The collaboration came about when Quinn was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, to do Sulston's portrait. "John did all the work," says Quinn. The artist, at least, decided on the portrait's frame. "People can see themselves in the reflective surround, which highlights that we're all connected – one of the great messages of the Human Genome Project.

"Because it's true, isn't it, that our DNA is 90% the same as bananas'?" asks Quinn. "Well, no, actually it's more like 50%," clarifies Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in

2002. "Our DNA is about 90% the same as other mammals." Our material connection with everything else, not just our world but in the universe, clearly appeals to Quinn: no wonder that his Iris painting from 2009 is subtitled We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars.

In Quinn's most famous work, Self (1991), he made a sculpture from a cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own deep-frozen blood. It is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding us of the fragility of existence. Every five years since 1991, he has replaced what he calls a "frozen moment" on life support, with a new transfusion of his own blood. He calls it an ongoing project, while the portrait of Sulston is suspended in time for ever; once the Nobel laureate dies, there is something of him preserved in this picture, a code from which, perhaps, he could be cloned.

Go to the following link to read three more case studies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/21/collaborations-between-artists-and-scientists

The poet and the speech scientist

The photographer and the physiologist

The theatre director and the neuroscientist

SybioticA and the Visceral Project

Lisa Carrie Goldberg used to write the newsletter for SymbioticA form the University of Western Australia and has sent us her selection of links of interest that they gathered. We first read about their Visceral Project in Science Magazine. The exhibition explored and provoked questions about scientific truths, what constitutes living and the ethical and artistic implications of life manipulation. Check out these links which are on a variety of subjects.

http://www.artscatalyst.org/

http://seedmagazine.com/

http://www.visualarts.net.au/

http://www.leonardo.info/

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/

http://eyebeam.org/

http://www.aec.at/festival_about_en.php

http://www.exitart.org/about/mission.html

http://www.sciencegallery.com/

http://axiomart.org/

http://rhizome.org/artbase/featured/

http://isthisbioart.com/welcome/diy-links/

http://www.lelaboratoire.org/

Check out Lisa's own sites on her Somnolence Drawing project

http://structuringsomnolence.tumblr.com/
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/lisa
http://www.subtletechnologies.com/lisa

We are also including links sent to us by Naimeh Tahna:

Bay Area Science Fair: http://wonderfest.org/home_body/

and another cool one Your DNA Song

Healing Art Sites

We are grateful to Naimeh Tahna for giving us these links to healing arts sites.

http://www.thesah.org This site offers a lot of other links to research, projects, etc.

http://www.arttherapy.org/upload/file/RMveteransPTSD.pdf

http://www.arttherapyblog.com/c/ptsd/


This was a major area of interest in our last DNA of Creativity meeting with lots of people interested in healing arts subjects.

SymbiticA at Dublin Ireland

SymbioticA and Science Gallery, Dublin begin a new experiment in January 2011 when science and art collide in Visceral: The Living Art Experiment.

VISCERAL will confront audiences with the delicate processes of modern biology to explore our changing understandings and perceptions of life in the light of rapid developments in the life sciences and their applied technologies. A range of award-winning work from 17 different artists will challenge visitors to consider the tension between art and science and the cultural, economic and ethical implications of biosciences today.

The exhibition will explore and provoke questions about scientific truths, what constitutes living and the ethical and artistic implications of life manipulation. The exhibition also marks ten years of intensive and challenging work carried out at SymbioticA.

Curated by SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts and SymbioticA’s leading researcher Dr Ionat Zurr, Viseral will bring together more than a decade of work developed through SymbioticA’s art-science residency program at The University of Western Australia.

More info at http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/exhibitions/visceral

Works in the exhibition will include ‘Midas’ by Paul Thomas, which examines the space where skin and gold meet; ‘Silent Barrage’ by Neurotica, an architectural scale arrangement of pole robots that stimulate neuronal activity of cells and provoke epilepsy in a culture dish in response to audience movements; ‘The Vision Splendid’ by Alicia King, an installation of cultured tissue within an artist-designed bioreactor and The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s ‘Semi-Living Worry Dolls’ offer absolution through whispering your troubles to bioengineered worry dolls. The exhibition will also include the unique ‘Lab Out of Context’, where artists and scientists will create new work and research in view of Science Gallery audiences.

World Science Festival Live Webcase

Michele Mitchell sent me a link to an article that led me to the World Science Festival this weekend in NYC. Good news is that there are some free webcasts for those able to join in from SD.Check out this site or use the schedule below http://worldsciencefestival.com/live_schedule. These webcast are for sold out event, so save the air fare!

The events at this fair should give us some inspiration for our meeting on June 21 at 6:30 and I urge you to check them out before you attend. Yes, you will get another reminder and a full agenda before the meeting.

World Science Festival Live Webcast Schedule

Can’t make it to New York for the Festival? Watch the 2011 World Science Festival live from your commuter. We’re excited to provide free, high-quality streams of the select events below, with live on-site commentary from the editors of Scientific American and other award-winning journalists. Tune in. Join the conversation. Expand your mind.

Thursday

The Dark Side of the Universe
7:45PM — 9:30 PM
For all we understand about the universe, 96% of what’s out there still has us in the dark. More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Philip Yam, accompanied by WSF’s Greg Boustead and Michael J Kennelly

Friday

The Illusion of Certainty: Risk, Probability, and Chance*
4:45 PM — 6:30 PM | Watch Live »
Risk, probability, chance, coincidence—they play a significant role in how we make decisions about health, education, relationships, and money. But where does this data come from and what does it really mean?(*Instant Rebroadcast from Thursday) More
Live webcast commentary: Boing Boing’s science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker , accompanied by WSF’s Maki Naro and Michael J Kennelly

The Mind after Midnight: Where Do You Go When You Go to Sleep?
7:45 PM — 9:30 PM | Watch Live »
We spend a third of our lives asleep. Every organism on Earth—from rats to dolphins to fruit flies to microorganisms—relies on sleep for its survival, yet science is still wrestling with a fundamental question: Why does sleep exist? More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Robin Lloyd, accompanied by WSF’s Greg Boustead and Maki Naro

Saturday

Cool Jobs
1:45 PM — 3:30 PM | Watch Live »
Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. More
Live webcast commentary: Scientific American’s Anna Kuchment, accompanied by WSF’s Maki Naro

Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?
7:45 PM — 9:30 PM | Watch Live »
As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? More
Live webcast commentary: To be announced

Sunday

2011 WSF Street Fair
10:00 AM — 6:00 PM | Watch Live »
Live scenes from the Street Fair at Washington Square Park in New York City on Sunday, June 5, 2011.

Special thanks to Livestream for hosting these broadcasts.
Visit our channel, where you can find embeddable widgets of these streams and much more

From New Museum to Nerd Museum: Assessing the Arty Inventions Hatched at AOL's 7 on 7 Conference

By Karen Archey
Published: May 16, 2011

Compelling and ambitious was Emily Roysdon and Kellan Elliot-McCrea's bringitforward.info, a site prompted by, among other things, a shared interest in considering Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's recent disappearance. The site creates a platform through which one may bring various moments of political history or forgotten ideas from the past "forward" in hope of rekindling discussion of them. Roysdon and Elliot-McCrea did an excellent job of creating a clear, utilizable structure, though maintaining dialogue about such slippery concepts may be tough in the long run (among ideas people have so far decided they would like to see brought "forward" are "Goddess Worship," "Zeppelins," and "The Holistic Organics Movement.")

Next up were young internet darlings Ricardo Cabello (mr. doob) and moot (Chrisotpher Poole). Inspired by the ideas of metalayering, Youtube annotation comments, as well as mr. doob's multiuser sketchpad and the collaborative, anarchic online game lunchtimers.com, the duo created the fantastically-titled behin.de, a site that allows annotations on webpages.

Camille Utterback and Erica Saduncame together around the Japanese concept "sabi" — roughly translated to English as the beauty and authority that an object gains with age — and how this idea might be applied to the mercurial realm of consumer technology. Sadun set to work writing code for an iPad2 photo application that captures images by the prompt of a violent shake, and another that burns images into the iPad picture plane based on the length of time that a user just lets the device be. The results are odd Cubist style abstract photo-mosaics with a Zen undercurrent. While it remains dubious how well the duo engaged the notion of "sabi" (it seems as if the idea of creating a patina on software remains paradoxical), Utterback and Sadun did succeed amazingly in producing an iPad2 app that may well have commercial viability — and the results looked pretty cool to boot.

Last up was team Rashaad Newsome and Jeri Ellsworth, a collaboration seemingly lacking a "a-ha" moment, which likely could have used additional time. Ellsworth simply created a monstrous-looking instrument-thing that distorts and "yodelizes" sound imput. The two then put this to work in relationship to Newsome's "Shade Compositions" video, which turns the body language and tics of African American women into a kind of symphony.

The final verdict? While it's apparent that a few of the 2011 "Seven on Seven" teams didn't necessarily hit a magic moment in their day-long collaborations (and who could blame them?), others most certainly did, notably Bell-Smith and Baio, as well as Roysdon and Elliot-McCrea. Although "Seven on Seven" will never certainly predict sure-fire successful collaborations, there's much beauty in watching the experimentation and alternate success or failure of its participating duos. And in the end, there's a lot to be said for a technology-oriented initiative in which some shooting blindly and failing is not only supported, but built into its core.

This article comes from Art Info

Sent to us by Tom Sergott

Art/Science Initiative at University of Chicago

“ This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ”

—Albert Einstein

Check out their video on their joint speaker series March, 2011

Creating Distinctive Collaborations

The cross fertilization between the arts and science is emerging as a dynamic new intellectual endeavor. How can each of these respective disciplines enrich and influence the other’s culture of inquiry, working methods and forms of creative investigation? The Arts|Science Initiative seeks to actively pursue these ideas, explore the crosscurrents where new disciplinary exchange is taking place, and advance a distinctive collaborative research agenda.

A University-wide endeavor, the Arts|Science Initiative was formed in partnership with the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts and Provost’s Office, with the support of the Divisions of the Biological and Physical Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories.

Scholarship—Practice—Innovation

To break new ground and probe big questions, both artists and scientists know they must travel across disciplines and venture into unknown territories. This pioneering spirit of collaborative research and teaching environments which transcend academic borders is integral to the University and its mission. The Arts|Science Initiative will contribute to this groundbreaking culture, and support the ongoing development of transformative ideas, novel constellations of academic research, and creative innovation.

Opportunities for Exploration & Research

The Arts|Science Initiative will launch with sponsoring the Arts|Science Graduate Student Collaboration Grant. This is a pilot program to support teams of two or more graduate students, with at least one in the arts and one in the sciences, who work together to investigate a subject from the perspectives offered by their disciplines. Other programs in the planning stage aim to spark conversations among faculty and students that critically engage science and the arts in a broad spectrum of areas including astronomy and astrophysics, biology, chemistry, computer and information science, creative writing, literature, mathematics, media studies, medical imaging, music, physics, theater, as well as visual arts.

To learn more, http://arts.uchicago.edu/arts_science/

contact Julie Marie Lemon.

Batelco - INFINITY

I really enjoyed this amazing call for imagination which is beautifully illustrated with amazing digital graphic tricks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=qvl7kG82EfI&vq=medium

Patricia

Links And Catagories

Reference: Historical Types of Collaborations

Type I: Artists who collaborate with Scientists or Technologists on common projects resulting in both the production of art works as well as scientific discoveries.
Type 1a: Scientists or Technologists working with Artists to develop technological inventions
Type 1b: Artists working with Scientists or Technologists to appropriate science for the arts.
Type II: Scientists who apply their scientific research to understanding creative activity in the arts in collaboration with Artists and not just using the artists as “subjects”.
Type III : Scientists/Technologists or Artists with dual careers both as working scientists/or Technologists and exhibiting artists.
Type IV: Artists and Scientists or Technologists who engage the arts and humanities to improve the ways that the sciences are communicated to the public.

Below are some links classified by category.

Category I: Artists who collaborate with Scientists or Technologists on common projects resulting in both the production of art works as well as scientific discoveries.

Kinetica Art Fair
Art and Science Collaborations
Synapse Art and Science Collaborations


Category 1a: Scientists or Technologists working with Artists to develop technological inventions

Category 1b: Artists working with Scientists to appropriate science for the arts.

Category II: Scientists who apply their scientific research to understanding creative activity in the arts in collaboration with Artists and not just using the artists as “subjects”.


Category III : Scientists/Technologists or Artists with dual careers both as working scientists/or Technologists and exhibiting artists.

Edward Kac
Edward Kac Genesis

Category IV: Artists and Scientists who engage the arts and humanities to improve the ways that the sciences are communicated to the public.

Glass Sculptures of Viruses
Jonathan Keats
BioEASI
Yonder Biology - DNA art
Asci art show

Science:

Biological Images from the Wyss Institute
and Wyss Design Contest
Creativity brain courses - Herrman International



Art:

Yves Klein: artist or geoengineer ahead of his time?



Editorials and News:

Professor John Eger is gathering STEAM
Professor John Eger on infusing arts
Art and Science at the Salk Institute
The Crossroads Nation


On Creativity:
John Cleese on creativity
Creativity interview - with Oliver Sacks, Chuck Close, Richard Serra
Edward De Bono on - The Direct And Explicit Teaching Of Thinking As A Skill