SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS 2015

Transcription

SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS 2015
THE BLOG
The contents of this chronicle of artists’ and scientists’ impressions and experiences were originally posted to
leonardo.info/blogs during the month-long Scientific Delirium Madness residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
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2015 SDM RESIDENTS
ALLISON COBB, Writer
LUCA FORCUCCI, Composer/Media Artist
DEBORAH FORSTER, Primatologist/Cognitive Scientist
EATHAN JANNEY, Composer/Scientist
CHRISTINE LEE, Interdisciplinary Artist/Designer
Frank Foreman, Yield to Whim, 1983
RACHEL MAYERI, Media Artist
GUILLERMO MUÑOZ, Physicist
KATE NICHOLS, Interdisciplinary Artist/Designer
KARL SCHAFFER, Mathematician/Choreographer
LAUREL SHASTRI, Choreographer
ELENI SIKELIANOS, Writer
TAMI SPECTOR, Physical Organic Chemist/Writer
CAROLINE WELLBERY, Medical Doctor/Writer
THE PARTNERS
Scientific Delirium Madness is a collaboration of Leonardo/The International Society for
the Arts, Sciences and Technology and
the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. This
project is supported in part by an award from
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Leonardo/The International Society for
the Arts, Sciences and Technology creates
opportunities for the powerful exchange of
ideas between practitioners in art, science
and technology. It has served as a critical
content provider in the field of Art/Science
through its publications program since
1968, currently in partnership with the MIT
Press. Through its community engagement
programs, Leonardo has a rich history of
collaborative activities and events with likeminded organizations and institutions around
the world.
Leonardo’s popular LASER (Leonardo Art
Science Evening Rendezvous) lecture/
networking gatherings spotlight art and science practitioners and thinkers. The series,
founded by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi
in January 2008, is an international program
of evening gatherings that bring artists and
scientists together for informal presentations
and conversation with an audience. LASERs
are now presented at over a dozen venues
internationally: University of San Francisco;
Stanford University; UC Berkeley; UCLA;
UC Davis; UC Santa Cruz; LevyArts, New
York; the National Academy of Sciences, DC;
University of Westminster, London; University
of Toronto; University of Puget Sound, WA;
Kansas State University; Hexagram/Montreal.
Recognized as one of the world’s most
prestigious artist residencies, the Djerassi
Resident Artists Program has accelerated
the creative process of more than 2200 residents since its founding in 1979. Perfectly
suited to grant creative thinkers freedom for
intense work, the facility sits on an isolated
583-acre ranch amidst native redwood and
oak forests, rolling grasslands, and broad
Pacific Ocean vistas. Residents connect with
and use the inspirational grounds for hiking,
installation and performance areas, and for
gathering artist materials. The program’s
mission is to nurture creativity and provide
space and uninterrupted time for arts and to
protect, preserve and restore—in perpetuity—the natural habitat upon which it sits.
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SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS #2 HAS LAUNCHED!
By Patricia Bentson
I’m having trouble fathoming that a whole year has gone by since the
launch and first edition of Scientific Delirium Madness (SDM#1),
the month-long artist/scientist residency hosted by the Djerassi
Resident Artists Program in partnership with Leonardo/ISAST.
Nevertheless, here we are! I am thrilled to report that SDM#2 is
indeed starting off with a bang—and the excitement will continue, if
the myriad all-over-the-map conversations among the participants
during dinner last night are an indication of the energy and ideas we
can expect to hear about over the coming weeks.
During the course of this year’s residency, artists and scientists
will explore the boundaries of art and science—and very possibly
transform their own work in the process. This year’s group of artists
and scientists arrive at the Djerassi ranch from a fascinating mix
of disciplines: Allison Cobb, Writer, Portland, OR; Luca Forcucci,
Composer/Media Artist, Italy; Deborah Forster, Primatologist/Cognitive Scientist, San Diego, CA; Eathan Janney, Composer/Scientist,
Brooklyn, NY; Christine Lee, Interdisciplinary Artist/Designer, Oakland, CA; Rachel Mayeri, Media Artist, Los Angeles, CA; Guillermo
Muñoz, Physicist, Valencia, Spain; Kate Nichols, Interdisciplinary
Artist/Designer, San Francisco, CA; Karl Schaffer, Mathematician/
Choreographer, Scotts Valley, CA; Laurel Shastri, Choreographer,
Scotts Valley, CA; Eleni Sikelianos, Writer, Boulder, CO; Tami
Spector, Physical Organic Chemist/Writer, San Francisco, CA; and
Caroline Wellbery, Medical Doctor/Writer, Bethesda, MD.
Once again, the artists and scientists have been invited to contribute
to this blog and share their experiences and insights about their time
together. Stay tuned!
I’d like to thank the leadership and staff at DRAP for the opportunity to join forces on SDM—especially, of course, Margot Knight,
Executive Director; Celia Olsen, Resident Program Manager; Terra
Fuller, Stewardship and Events Associate; Alice Marshall, Program
Assistant; Judy Freeland, Residency Coordinator; Tom Shean,
Facilities Manager; Dan Tosh, Chef; and all of the facilities staff, as
well as the DRAP Board of Trustees.
POSTED ON JULY 02, 2015
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WELCOME TO SDM 2.0
By Margot H Knight
I am grateful to be able to add to Patricia Bentson’s welcome to
Scientific Delirium Madness 2.0. If you don’t know me, I am the
Executive Director of Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
With each new group of residents that arrives fresh-faced on our
perch of the Santa Cruz Mountains, I feel a rush of excitement. The
rush is particularly sweet for the new crop on the hill—the scientists and artists who will live in harmony and intellectual discourse
for the next 30 days.
It is like Christmas for me—with 13 brainy intellectual packages to
unwrap.
I would like to thank Piero Scaruffi, Roger Malina, Jeanne Finley,
Patricia Bentson and Gordon Knox for their role in selecting this
year’s residents. As well as our colleagues at Leonardo, and Michael
Orlove and Pepper Smith at the National Endowment for the Arts,
for “getting” why this summer gathering for artists and scientists
matters. I echo Patricia’s thanks to the amazing staff at the Artists’
Ranch—you will be hearing from them on this blog as well.
One of the hallmarks of Djerassi’s residency program that is replicated for SDM 2.0 is an equal emphasis on individual work (I told
the group their job is “to be”) and opportunities for collegial interaction about ideas, practice and process. We urge the group to take
risks—physical, emotional and intellectual. From the decibel level at
dinner this past Wednesday, the group has launched headlong into
the experience.
Another exciting component is that, on July 19th, a glimpse of this
process will be shared with the public during our annual Open
House/Open Studios. Once a year, we throw open the gates to our
583 acres with its 5 1/2 miles of trails and limitless vistas. People can
also meet the limitless minds of our artist and scientist residents.
Tickets are still available at djerassi.org.
I hope that readers will follow along as residents and staff blog their
ideas and experiences.
Come, Watson, the game is afoot!
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THE ART OF DOING NOTHING
By Caroline Wellbery
The art of doing nothing
On arriving at Djerassi, I welcomed leaving productivity behind.
I’d worked hard to jettison my usual obligations: teaching medical
students, supervising residents, seeing patients and, hardest of all
to throw off, the editing tasks I normally do on a daily basis for our
academy’s medical journal. So I was much reassured that I needed,
while I was here for a delicious, unencumbered month, to do nothing.
Doing nothing is, for one thing, a disciplined act. Underneath these
virtual pages on which I type lurks my email account. I could at any
time let the messages suck me in and nibble at me like so many
piranhas. No doubt there is a student who wants to meet with me
about a project that can’t realistically be completed the way she
envisions it. Or an author will want me to call him for just “one minute” but which involves a conversation I know will go on for twenty.
Or a copyeditor has sent me the galleys for a paper with urgent queries that only my co-author can answer, though she is off trekking
in Nepal. It takes a certain amount of fortitude to resist the tide of
messages, all of which give me a false sense of my indispensability.
Doing nothing is, therefore, also a philosophical act. I have always
been fond of saying, “Everyone needs a project.” We need a project
in order to feel useful, even if it is only to the ants at our feet, to a
political prisoner on the other side of the globe, or just to ourselves.
As soon as we embark on a project, meaning accrues, which is why
the most humble of hunger artists can be as content as the CEO of a
multi-national corporation. So imagine how doing nothing challenges
our construction of meaning. Doing nothing gets us down to our bare
bones, or at least our underwear. For a moment we feel what it’s
like to just be. And that’s why when Margot Knight invited us to “just
be,” she spoke to that most profound opportunity offered us here at
Djerassi, to do nothing.
Which brings me to the third component of doing nothing, that is
to say, its role in gathering the forces of creativity. Doing nothing is
in reality a very busy activity. Otherwise, Goncharov, the Russian
author, would not have been able to create a whole novel out of
Oblomov’s idleness. (For those who have not read it, Oblomov cannot get himself up from his couch). Just as sleep mysteriously cleans
up the previous day’s neurochemical messes in our brain, doing
nothing makes room for the deepest form of creative repair. There
is, in the endless thread of emails, a heavy chain that continually
yanks us into obedience. We follow the lead, feeling at times abused,
but always at the mercy of some other need or want. We need to
create space for possibility. On my first morning here, I woke to see
the orange moon, above which hung Venus, a single point of light. I
watched the fog find different pillows of rest on the sea below. The
scent of laurel filled the air. Nothing—not the moon, not the fog, not
the laurel—expected anything from me.
I sat at my desk and began to write.
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SERENDIPITOUSCAPE
By Luca Forcucci
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SETTLING IN
By Tami Spector
Early morning, 5:30 a.m., cup of strong PG Tips in hand, I step outside Middlebrook D and snap a picture of the landscape, writ-large,
with my iPhone. The moon full, or almost full, up above the marine
layer covering the Pacific, pushing against the green-gold hills. But
enough of that—I start reading an interview between the nature
artist Alfio Bonanno and John Grande (JG) for my project on the natural and synthetic in chemistry, underlining and jotting marginalia
as I read: traces in the landscape, artifice, nostalgia, estrangement.
Then I read: (JG) “You shot a series of photos of every leaf from an
elm tree in the backyard of your home … it is a modest yet powerful
expression of nature’s versatility and omnipresence” (1), and shift
my purview, suddenly SEEING my local landscape: dirt, dandelions,
rocks stacked on rocks, tall yellowing grass, scat, little brown spider,
orange millipede, roly poly, hummingbirds, swallows, three bouncing
rabbits, a squirrel clicking. Two helpless beetles on their backs, legs
flailing, trying to right themselves. I turn them over.
Late morning, after more black tea, eating and struggling with a
paper jam in the Barn, I come back to my private plastic chair to
read. The weather is shifting, cooling. Later, when all my intellectual
abilities are drained, a hike, but for now a puffed up, calisthenic
lizard keeps me company with notions of nature (2).
Late afternoon, hiked with Allison, Deborah and Eleni to Stations of
Light. I was afraid of the dark. Saw two snakes.
Night, a bat in Studio A.
1) Alfio Bonanno and John K. Grande, “In Nature’s Eyes,” in Art and
Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists, State
University of New York Press, 2004, 57.
2) Joachim Schummer, “The Notion of Nature in Chemistry,” Studies
in the History and Philosophy of Science, 34, 2003, 705–736.
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NATURE. THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING.
By Guillermo Muñoz
“First artist was Mother Nature,” Tom
Shean, in Looking for Stones Adventure.
Abstract:
Here I write about my travel to San Francisco. Where starts? it is not
possible to say only one place. I traveled from Valencia to Barcelona,
where I visited an interesting exhibition of the 25 years of the RCR
architecture Spanish studio. Their connection to nature surprised
me, is it just a coincidence or a prelude of the entire nature that I’m
enjoying now. After Barcelona I took a flight to Istanbul, crossing
Italy and Greece. This is my first time in USA, but it seems that I
landed on an island of nature. As a physicist I could say: yes, nature,
the beginning of everything. When starts my travel? some years
before, I’m quite sure. In August 2009 I was in Bilbao (Spain) enjoying “The Matter of Time,” Richard Serra’s exhibition in Guggenheim.
His ideas developing a syntax of space through gravity, matter and
mathematics led me to try to think on syntax for nanospace. Hard
work!! I always left it. It is surprising to me that Richard Serra’s
father moved from Mallorca (Spain) to San Francisco. I’m following him, and I hadn’t realized!! This land was a place for Spanish
explorers, searching for the new and the adventures. Now we have
the gift of time, maybe it’s time to do it, or to simply explore the
connection between art and science with my colleagues.
Middlebrook Studio C. Frente a mí, una inmensa instantánea de
suaves colinas vestidas de verdes y amarillos. Al fondo, un mar que
se tapa. Este paisaje es el primer espacio que contemplo de EEUU.
Nunca antes había estado en el país. Del aeropuerto fui directo a
los bosques de Redwood. No sabría decir si estoy aquí, allá, o en
medio de todo. De mi viaje trepidante, atravesando el mediterráneo
entre España, Italia y Grecia, para, en Estambul coger el avión que
me llevaría a San Francisco, de repente me encuentro en un paraje
donde los habitantes son conejos, ardillas, serpientes y algún que
otro ciervo que se deja ver. Me siento privilegiado de estar aquí, y
compartir con mis compañeros de residencia este hospedaje en la
naturaleza. Con esta estampa, en medio de bosques infinitos, de
colinas suavizadas por la niebla, es imposible permanecer ajeno a
lo natural.
continued
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Me asombra el poder de las casualidades, tanto que a veces
dudo de que lo sean. En Barcelona, antes de despedirme de Pilar,
pasamos un día visitando exposiciones, paseando y aprovechando
las buenas temperaturas del verano. Nos detuvimos en la exposición
que conmemora los 25 años del colectivo de arquitectos RCR. En
ella, dicen:
“Si no acostumbrais a contemplar el cielo, las estrellas …
Si no os permitis quedar embelasados. Si no acostumbrais a tocar
la tierra, los árboles … ni beber el agua que brota de las fuentes
naturales. Si no acostumbrais escuchar los sonidos del aire …
… ni el olor del viento. Si no percibis la belleza que
hay a cada paso
en la naturaleza y no deseáis conocer su misterio ni quererla.
¡Difícilmente podréis comprender muchos de nuestros
sentimientos, pensamientos y actitudes, y percibir la fuerza
y la energía que nos da la naturaleza¡”
Ahora no puedo estar más de acuerdo con ellos. Pero el espacio y el
tiempo, como sabemos, forman un misterio mucho más intrincado
de lo que nos podemos imaginar. El comienzo de mi viaje, si lo
tengo que situar en algún lugar y en algún tiempo específico, tendría
que remover mi memoria hasta un agosto del año 2009, en Bilbao
(España). En mi primer viaje a esta espléndida ciudad de nuevas
formas, y, por tanto, interesantes pensamientos, me quedé fascinado con la obra de Richard Serra “La materia del tiempo”, presentada como exposición permanente en el Guggenheim. El trabajo
de Serra para moldear el tiempo y el espacio cuando recorremos
sus esculturas de acero, de elaborar una sintaxis específica entre
gravedad, materia y matemáticas, inmediatamente me hizo pensar
en proyectar una sintaxis específica para los espacios nanoscópicos,
aquellos espacios que define la materia cuando está estructurada
en dicha escala nano (10-9 m). Un tema muy sugerente, pero tan
complicado que nunca he dedicado un tiempo lo suficientemente
largo como para abordarlo con detenimiento.
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En mi descontextualización particular en el seno de la naturaleza,
recuerdo que esta tierra de colinas y vinos, de árboles largos y
nieblas matutinas, fue un día tierra de exploradores españoles.
Diego de Becerra y Fortún Jiménez, de la expedición de Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, enviado por Hernán Cortés, le pusieron el nombre de
Califia a los espacios que contemplo, ahora mismo a través de una
mosquitera y una ventana de cristal. Es la exploración, y por ende,
la aventura, aliada indisoluble de la investigación, sea cual sea su
forma y su propósito.
Las coincidencias vuelven a sacudirme. Leo que el padre de Richard
Serra se marchó de Mallorca (España) a California, instalándose en
San Francisco. Sin quererlo, le estoy siguiendo. No hay duda, es el
momento y el lugar para abordar el tema, consiga o no sacar algo en
claro.
Sea pues, aquí estoy, inmerso en lo natural. Podría decir, como buen
físico: en la naturaleza, el principio de todo. Con el regalo del tiempo
que Margot y todo el equipo de la fundación Djerassi nos ofrecen,
dispuesto a dejarme llevar para tratar este tema, o cualquier otro
que surja en las colaboraciones entre científicos y artistas.
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QUANTUM DOTS MUSIC
By Eathan Janney
On Saturday I went on a morning run with fellow Djerassi resident
and physicist Guillermo Muñoz. As a result of a conversation about
our respective fields of interest we decided to make a collaborative
piece using music to explore the topic of quantum dots. I suggested
that I would improvise some music which might sound like quantum
dots and then ask him how to adapt it to better fit his own understanding. The idea was that the process of collaborative composition
could be a tool for learning about this topic from him. Visit the
Floating Piano Blog to watch a video of this interaction and see the
outcome of this experiment.
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ECOUTES IMAGINAIRES (IMAGINARY LISTENING)
By Luca Forcucci
Art and science are inextricably connected. Changing
views of the manner in which nature operates bring about
corresponding changes in art . . .
If I imagine myself then as a composer in a situation
where anything can be done, I imagine making a music
a little different from the concerts of ambient sounds we
nowadays hear wherever we are when we listen. I imagine this music as technically like my experience: wireless.
I imagine all distinctions between art and life removed.
Art would then have to do with the opening of ourselves
to the world in which we live—
—From a typed letter from John Cage to Billy Kluver
Ecoutes Imaginaires (Imaginary Listening) is the idea of a possible
imaginary aural perception emerging from the past while exploring
a landscape, and while (sound) walking. Walking is conceived as an
art form from which the aural landscape is revealed. Focusing on
natural landscapes, reading urban contexts and urban organisations,
surrounding architecture through the ear shall provide an alternative
and contrasting experience to sight, leading to a combination of
several possible realities:
• The one that existed, but not there anymore;
• The one that remains;
• The one imagined;
• The one which combines existed and imagined realities
within one’s own imagination.
Realities, in which memories, cognitions, perceptions are coined and
ready to emerge. Realities appearing as multiple layers and folds in
which the imaginary sound is ready to be listened.
continued
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What is imaginary listening? This will most probably stay in the
imagination of the (careful) listener and will be constructed in his
mind; it will be mostly revealed by memory, cognition, perception,
consciousness and/or experience. Bill Viola noted that in the past,
hearing voices was related to obedience:
The ancient Greeks heard voices. The Homeric epics are
full of instances of people guided in their thoughts and
actions by an internal voice to which they respond automatically. This suggests a people, as Julian Jaynes has
pointed out, not fully exercising what we would consider
free will or rational judgement. As with most of us, there
is a conversation going on their heads, but it is not with
themselves.
(Viola in Lander and Lexier 2013: 39)
Auditory hallucination might be considered or perhaps schizophonic
would be an appropriate term. How to promote a way to perceive
places that have existed, through imaginary voices and sounds?
Foucault told us that:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every
civilization, real places—places that do exist and that
are formed in the very founding of society—which are
something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted
utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that
can be found in the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are
outside of all places, even though it may be possible to
indicate their location in reality.
(Foucault in Soja 1996: 157)
Realities
The one that existed
The one that remains
The one imagined
The one merging the one that existed and the one imagined
within one’s own imagination.
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Bibliography
Lander, D., and Lexier, M., 1990. Sound by Artists. Ontario: Charivari
Press.
Soja, E.W., 1996. THIRDSPACE, Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
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NOT ART
By Allison Cobb
I’m interested in the idea of trash—how we humans deal (or
refuse to deal) with waste. At Djerassi there are many gorgeous
and interesting art installations that are numbered and mapped for
viewing. I want to focus on what is discarded here. This is the start
of what may be a series called “not art.”
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WRITING THE DIAGNOSIS
What is writing the story of one’s life if not a diagnostic exercise? We
look at patterns, discard what’s irrelevant, and go through the old
charts looking for early hints of trouble we’d once overlooked. The
best diagnosticians see the whole picture, and within that picture
discern connections that others have missed.
My mother, of Westfalian peasant stock, was in many ways sturdy,
stoic and tough. But when I was 5 years old, she had pneumonia,
requiring her to spend 6 weeks convalescing in a German hospital.
She had other pneumonias later on, readily treated with antibiotics.
It seemed she was often ill. Later she was diagnosed with pernicious
anemia, an autoimmune disease that prevented her from absorbing
Vitamin B12, a crucial building block for the production of red blood
cells.
Luckily, this kind of anemia is easily treated. She received B12
injections every month or so and she was fine. But the pneumonias
continued. Indeed, they seemed to take an increasingly serious turn.
It took several more years to see beyond the individual episodes to
make a diagnosis. At the local community hospital the chest x-ray
showed the usual pattern: pneumonia, the telltale wedge-shaped
infiltrate in the right lower lung. The doctor assigned to her case, a
pulmonologist, scratched his head: “How many times has she had
that?”
“Oh, lots. Dozens of times.”
And that’s how he made the diagnosis of a particular immune
deficiency that made my mother’s body susceptible to bacterial
infections. He called it adult-onset agammaglobulinemia. And for
this condition too, there was a treatment. At great expense to the
taxpayers, my mother received monthly intravenous gammaglobulin
infusions that prolonged her life by many years.
The doctor recognized not just the typical pattern of pneumococcal
infections, but the pattern of their reoccurrence. Her pneumonias
had merely been symptoms of a very different disease. And so it
is that when we look at our lives, we wonder whether the recurrent
features of our behaviors and interactions aren’t part of a larger pattern for which we must seek a deeper origin. There is, in every story,
such a unity, manifesting as the conflict that drives the hero’s quest.
I don’t want to force my analogy. Recognizing the patterns of one’s
own biography is a different task than making sense of the patterns of illness. While they are both interpretive acts, they connect
to different goals. In the case of our personal stories, we seek to
organize and communicate what we have learned. In the case of
illness, we seek a cure. But there is overlap. My mother’s illness
makes an instructive story. Her two autoimmune conditions didn’t
just happen at random. I have no doubt that her pernicious anemia
was connected through a primary process to her B-cell deficiency.
This represents an organizational approach that might lead to new
knowledge. Then there is the interaction between predisposition and
environmental conditioning, which is so essential to understanding
the autobiographical self. I can’t help speculate whether, beyond
looking for genetic causation, the harsh conditions of my mother’s
early life—poverty, hunger, emotional deprivation and rape—didn’t
render her susceptible to the body’s self-destructive tendencies.
Finally, illness defined an important arc of her life’s narrative. Just
as the psychological damage she suffered early on might have made
her vulnerable to the expression of her disease, so her disease also
accounts for the way her life ended. The scarring of my mother’s
lungs from so many bouts of pneumonia took their toll on her heart.
She developed a common arrhythmia, called atrial fibrillation, a
condition that, though manageable, increases the risk of stroke.
Eventually, my mother did have a stroke, while the strain on her
heart caused her actual death.
My mother’s illnesses were all connected. Certain of these connections were crucial to saving her life—as well as accounting for
its end. Others are of medical curiosity or mere speculations. But
together, they tell a story that spans her time here on earth. When
we look to solve a diagnostic puzzle, our inquiry takes us further and
further into the mysteries of an organism, just as another diagnostic
lens reveals the mysteries of our life’s choices and circumstances.
Herein the stories of illness and the stories experience converge.
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IS INTERDISCIPLINARY BETTER?
By Eathan Janney
Last night a conversation emerged among a group of Djerassi
residents about our feelings on cross-disciplinary interactions—
especially between the arts and sciences. Each of us was chosen to
be here due to our interdisciplinary background so it is not a surprise
that we advocate interaction. Furthermore, there was general dissatisfaction with the current level of interaction we see in the fields in
which we participate.
I thought I had read somewhere that higher-impact journal articles
show a trend of citing outside their discipline. I brought this up in
our conversation. If this were true it would be a strong argument that
academic institutions ought to promote cross-disciplinary interactions on their campuses. As it is, most agree that this type of work
is shunned, avoided or simply off the radar to researchers that are
hyper-focused within their fields.
After a bit of searching I did not find documented evidence for a
trend of extra-disciplinary citation in high-impact articles. Nevertheless, it is clear that the highest-impact journals in the sciences
(Nature, Science, PNAS, etc.) publish articles from many scientific
disciplines (Ackerson & Chapman, 2003). It is important to note that
the articles themselves are not necessarily the result of cross-disciplinary research.
I did find some literature on the analysis of trends in interdisciplinary citations (Cronin & Sugimoto, 2014; Noyons, Moed, Glänzel, &
Schmochl, 2004; Van Leeuwen & Tijssen, 2000). For the purpose of
analysis, Arts/Humanities can be lumped into one group while sciences are divided into multiple categories. Thus, science can appear
interdisciplinary (if a physics paper cites chemistry literature this is
considered cross-disciplinary) while arts can appear less so (if an
sociologist cites an anthropologist this is not considered cross-disciplinary). Thus, results can be misleading.
I would like to see similar analyses performed using arts/humanities
and science as the only two categories. My sense is there is little
cross talk, but I would be curious to see where there is. Also, given
the success of multi-disciplinary science journals perhaps it would
be fruitful to add a multidisciplinary arts/science journal where
fields are treated distinctly but research is included in the same
publication. This would be slightly different from an extant publication like Leonardo, wherein articles bridge the disciplines. Though
it is still unclear whether or not interdisciplinary work is of higher
impact, the success of multidisciplinary science journals indicates
that there is certainly an advantage to aggregating knowledge from
multiple disciplines.
Ackerson, L., & Chapman, K. (2003). Identifying the role of multidisciplinary journals in scientific research. College & Research
Libraries, 64(6), 468–478. Retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/content/64/6/468.short
Cronin, B., & Sugimoto, C.R. (2014). Beyond bibliometrics: Harnessing multidimensional indicators of scholarly impact. MIT Press.
Noyons, E., Moed, H.F., Glänzel, W., & Schmochl, U. (2004).
Handbook of quantitative science and technology research. Kluwer
Academic Publishers New York, EE. UU.
Van Leeuwen, T., & Tijssen, R. (2000). Interdisciplinary dynamics
of modern science: analysis of cross-disciplinary citation flows.
Research Evaluation, 9(3), 183–187.
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IF A TREE FALLS IN A FOREST…
By Luca Forcucci
As this wave forms, memories flow in, the city soaks it up
like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is
today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however,
does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a
hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of
the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of
the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment
marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
(Calvino 1974: 11)
(The Aleph) contains in its inarticulable shape all the
relations with the universe and it is, ultimately, the
universe itself.
—J.L. Borges
The walker is confronted with architectures, contexts, paths to follow
(or not) and people to listen to or not; revealing imaginary sounds
emanating from the past. A constant feedback loop between the
walker and the environment is activated. (Personal) memories might
arise from such observation.
Observing one self-observing
Listening
Walking
Memory
Discovering, casualty, accidents, improvements and knowledge
encapsulate the meaning of a recently rediscovered word: serendipidity. Apparently, the origin comes from a fairy tale (Merton & Barber
2006). It refers to an ancient king that sent his sons to discover
and experience the world (the three princes of Serendip). Following
their quest, they had experiences: not the originally planned, but
accidental and connected to their knowledge, taking them to new
horizons and therefore discovered by serendipity. Real or not, the
story behind the word serendipity enlightens a field of possibility
for the soundwalker: While walking, one is confronted with several
choices of roads, paths and sound(s) to explore. Walking (while
listening) is an art practice, and a mental map might emerge from
the experience of the (sound) walker; the city is therefore perceived
through this experience:
Cognition
Experience
Bibliography
Calvino, I., 1974. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt.
Merton, R.K., and Barber, E., 2006. The Travels and Adventures of
Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of
Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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LET’S SAY DIALOGITIVITY?
By Guillermo Muñoz
I like words, because all of them are metaphors. There are words
that we think that really are “things,” like “table,” “ball” or “door,”
for example. But, maybe it is only because we forgot their metaphorical sense. I guess that there would be some technical word to name
them, but, let’s play and, yes, use same metaphors. So, we can call
them hidden metaphors? Deadly ones? Zombie metaphors? Doesn’t
matter, whatever is your choice, I’m interested in the process, the
linking between the “object” and its name. During the process we
need to cross a frontier, from our perceptions through our imagination, and give it back. Maybe this is creativity? I don’t know, but,
in my opinion, creativity, rescuing all its metaphorical meaning,
maybe is not the best word. It comes from creation, and creation is
related to Demiurge, a religious entity that from nothing creates the
universe. Maybe now you are expecting that I would start to speak
about Big Bang, conservation of energy, and so on. However, this is
not the case. I would like to speak about Japanese gardens.
Many years ago, I was just listening to a very nice history about a
travel to Japan. An artist went there to enjoy a couple of years for
research, and he was surprised by these Japanese gardens, in the
middle of the houses. In some of them they replaced water with
white sand, and this sand was patterned all days. I was curious
about the patterning. What does it mean? function? Maybe it is to
create tensions, or flux, some idea of movement. You know it, the
link is done as a movement, connecting spaces. For example, real
and fantasy, as a mirror does.
Here at Djerassi we have our particular Japanese garden. Between
the Artists’ house and the Artists’ Barn we walk several times in
the day through a kind of “white sand” patterned path. We can call
it “the hunger white path,” because some of ours, when we cross it
upwards, we just go to have dinner. But I prefer “the dialogic stony
path,” because when we return from dinner we do it in couples,
having some feedback and dialogs following our conversation after
eating.
Yes, it is nothing related to creation. It is sharing, mixing, dialoging.
This is the deal in art/sci expeditions. Everything is in movement.
Even when we thought that our feet are fixed on the land, we discovered that our world travels through space as fast as we cannot
imagine. To catch up the picture, we use words from other. Ideas,
from a third one. Walking, watching, listening. Done in group. So, returning to this metaphorical playing, instead of creativity, let’s
say dialogitivity?
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DJERASSI DAY 1 – GRATITUDE
By Eathan Janney
We arrived at Djerassi forever ago, but only a moment has passed. I
have been collecting memories and it is time to share. My theme for
Day One is “gratitude,” and this may well be the theme of all days
that follow. Guillermo mentioned at dinner that this is the kind of
place you can quickly take for granted. Reviewing day one inspires
a new appreciation for the coming days.
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NOURISHMENT FOR THE MIND, BODY, AND SPIRIT
By Laurel Shastri
At Djerassi, avocados are a prime commodity. They seem to exist in
only two states: (1) unripe, and (2) in the stomachs of the residents here. There is a third, albeit fleeting, state that exists in the
moments from the time the groceries are unpacked to the next snack
or meal. Case in point, a plethora of eight avocados was reduced to
four between breakfast and lunchtime. I only mention this because
for me, the only thing worse than not having an avocado at all,
is eating one that is not ripe. Sadly, I have not actually eaten an
avocado in several days…
I do wonder if there is a link between avocado consumption and
the ability to make creative connections between diverse fields of
study. The residents here are all deep and considerate thinkers with
amazingly malleable minds. Their conversations are rich, velvety
and smooth… much like the avocados I yearn for.
Bird mask enjoying lunch of avocado
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NOT ART
By Allison Cobb
viewing. I want to focus on what is discarded here.
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NOT ART
By Allison Cobb
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DJERASSI DAY 2 – LIGHT RHYTHMS
By Eathan Janney
Day two: On my morning walk the early light through the dewy trees
creates a rhythm that enamors me. I’ve been studying rhythms of
the thrush nightingale in my research. I record a video on my walk.
I run my hand through the light patterns, creating a one-dimensional slice of luminosity through the complex patterns. It evokes
sonic rhythms in my mind. This is some of my art for the day: light
rhythms.
About the bars of light
across the trees
About the shadows blocking
each trunk into a geometric
stage for more shadow play
About the depth the eye
perceives through the limbs
when my shadow touched itself
torched it
where was your shadow?
—from “Shadow Zoo,”
The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead,
Eleni Sikelianos
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THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH
Here’s to my trial run as an artist-scientist (from my current writing
efforts), an account of my attempt at research before I went to
medical school:
Luckily, another job opportunity came along. Luckily, I say, for me. I
can’t say the same for my boss. It’s possible that the collapse of her
lab and her subsequent departure into administration was a direct
result of her undiscriminating choice of research assistants such as
myself.
The lab was ugly. Such places are made for scientists, meaning that
they contain no drapes, sofas, art prints, or nice rugs. The researchers stand with a touching sincerity at their workbench, as you’d
expect of anyone sacrificing themselves for higher truths, while they
shove around racks of test tubes and pieces of bubbling equipment.
Meanwhile, the supervisor sits in a back cubicle, surfing the Internet. In one such lab on the 14th floor of a research building at the
local medical school, I found employment, under the premise that a
literary scholar would be a valuable addition to the investigation of
the immune system’s major histocompatibility complex.
My first task was to kill mice. Simonetta, my tender-hearted Venezuelan bench partner, chloroformed them in a drawer, but everyone
else cracked their necks. I was taught to lift the mice out of their
cage by their tails and as they clawed their way across the metal
grate to escape, I pressed a scissors against their neck till I heard
the snap of the spine. I then operated on them, removing their tiny
spleens, which looked like a bean filled with blood. These I ground
into a solution, which I labeled with some radioactive material and
fed between gel-plated glass panes. May the mice forgive me for not
knowing why exactly I was doing any of this.
Because we used radioactive isotopes to tag the spleen cells, a
quality control team from Occupational Health and Safety would
burst into the lab with Geiger counters every couple of weeks,
waving the detectors in all directions. Whenever the inspectors got
near me, the Geiger counters began ticking and the needle would
swing wildly into the danger zone. Everything I’d touched would click
frantically. I must have absorbed so much of the stuff that I’ve had
to wonder if any problem I’ve had since, whether losing my keys or
my lovers, might be due to my underlying radioactivity.
The lowest moment on the job occurred when my boss designed a
new experiment, which I was supposed to run. In a rare frenzy, she
emerged into the lab, took down books with strange recipes, and
pulled out a machine that, when you plugged it in, sputtered and
gurgled like something in Frankenstein’s underground cellar. “Here,”
she pointed, “try this.” Then she disappeared as quickly as she
arrived; in fact, she went off to a scientific conference and I didn’t
see her for another three days. Meanwhile, I extracted a half-dozen
spleens and followed her instructions as faithfully as I could. On the
third day, after gelling, bathing and radioactivating the spleen cells,
I placed the resulting concoction into two test tubes, which I gently
twirled in my fingers while chatting with Simonetta, who was telling
me about an Australian lover who had jilted her.
Simonetta wore flamenco-red lipstick and body-hugging clothing,
so I could always vividly imagine the scenes in which she described
herself swinging around and slapping her lovers across the mouth.
Without thinking—perhaps as a gestural reenactment of her romantic disappointments—I emptied the contents of both tubes I was
holding into the radioactive waste. The instant I had shaken off the
last drops, I realized I had just tossed out my entire experiment and
that my boss was returning tomorrow.
“What will I do?” I moaned in despair. Everybody in the lab assembled around me, offering excuses I might try on my boss. “You could
say a starship sailed into the lab and knocked over the test tubes,”
Louise, the lab’s Trekkie, suggested helpfully. Simonetta offered to
blame the whole thing on her faithless Australian. But I doubt even
Tom Sawyer could have invented his way out of my dilemma. I had
to admit to myself once and for all that my destiny was not in the
realm of research.
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WHAT DO YOU SEE?
By Kate Nichols
Paintings in progress in Djerassi
studio.
A few weeks before heading down to Djerassi to participate in Scientific Delirium Madness, I packed up my messy, homemade gelatin
lenses and took them over to the California Academy of Sciences.
I used these lenses to photograph their collection of Xerces blue
specimens for a series of paintings I’m beginning here at Djerassi.
The Xerces blue butterfly was endemic to San Francisco’s western
edge and it was the first Northern American butterfly to go extinct
due to urban development. Recently, Xerces blue been identified as
a candidate for “de-extinction” by the Long Now Foundation’s Revive
and Restore initiative.
Working with these images in my studio at Djerassi, I paint the
lensed butterflies enlarged and distorted. White wisps elongate,
drag, and curl along the edge of one painting. These inscrutable
forms suggest divination systems—glimpses of the future in an
inkblot or in the silty grounds left on the bottom of a coffee cup.
What we see in such things reveals much about our desires and our
fears. Me, I see an animal liquefied, ready to assume new forms.
In another image, I see ruddy brown tufts morph into metallic
technicolor greens, evoking both a painter’s palette and a petri dish
growing wing material.
Looking at these, I ask myself: What is the relationship between
creating a painted likeness of a butterfly and engineering a butterfly
in a lab? If there is a continuum between “lifelike” (or mimetic)
painting and bioengineering—and I believe there is—how might
such questions help us better understand the nature of both practices? What impulses do they share? What anxieties do they bring
forth? What desires drive one life form to mimic another?
I feel incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to explore these
questions in paint and in conversation with a community of brilliant
artists and scientists here at Djerassi.
More soon,
Kate
www.katenicholsstudio.com
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HALFWAY POINT
By Christine Lee
Last night several residents and I were watching composer and scientist Eathan Janney perform an impressive improvisational piano
piece. I recall the sounds coming from the piano as he translated his
thoughts and feelings, the warmth of the room from the wood stove,
the way everyone was sitting or stretching out comfortably while
he played, and the conversation that ensued from his performance
regarding his approach and our responses to the piece.
I think about the details of that evening and how they are reflective
of the organic and supportive nature of this residency. The fluid
exchange of stories, experiences, thoughts, scientific data and
research, and the brainstorming of possible collaborative projects
happen anytime and anywhere. Whether during walks, breaks, short
rehearsals or mini-performances, while eating meals or playing
games, there is a high level of engagement that my fellow residents
are willing to participate in. The atmosphere has a nice balance of
natural curiosity, humor and respect.
Today marks the halfway point of the Scientific Delirium Madness
residency and the revelation that I have known these people for
only two weeks is kind of shocking. I am currently finding a balance
between working on the in-progress projects and pieces I brought
with, and the new ideas and possible collaborations that are developing (see images below, more to come). I am extremely excited for
the potential of the ideas being generated. I find myself repeating
how lucky I am to be here right now (sometimes silently, sometimes
out loud) with such an inspiring, creative, intelligent and thoughtful
group.
C
interwovenlabs.com
continued
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PRIVILEGES
By Karl Schaffer
On Sunday at Djerassi we did an open rehearsal of our show,
“Daughters of Hypatia,” about the struggles of women in mathematics, but I find unsettling contradictions. I ended this year at the
college at which I teach taking part in a day-long workshop on privilege; the discussions were intense and emotional, we heard many
dismaying stories of racist, sexist, and homophobic incidents, some
intense, others slight but still upsetting. The same week I learned
that our math department had lost a third recently hired tenure track
woman faculty member; all three were through resignations. This
last time it was a young faculty member who resigned expressing
extreme distress at her treatment, telling me she had actually
decided to give up teaching.
Our performance seemed to be enjoyed by fellow residents who
came to watch, and it is a great privilege to be here and to be able
to work amidst so many thoughful, talented, accomplished artists
and scientists, but the contradictions in being able, fortunate,
privileged to create this particular work, while being surrounded in
the workplace by behavior so antithetical to the purpose of that work
seem overwhelming to me.
The working environment at Djerassi is a big change. Typically I am
embroiled in the challenges of teaching full-time, running shows,
traveling to teach or perform, staying in shape, and rehearsals are
often stressful in that we have a short window of time with dancers
for creating, refining or rehearsing work. Here I find myself going
slowly, languidly, skipping steps, coming back to them. Again, a
privilege that all artists or scientists or anyone with a dream should
have from time to time.
The conversations are illuminating, insightful, exhilirating, delightful,
friendly, challenging, and full of shared experiences of living between
disciplines. More connected for me than the residency in 1999 that
Erik Stern and I did here, in which we shared the space with other
artists, but really worked on our own on a project, as did the other
residents. Reminiscent of time spent at the Bridges Math and Art
conference, surrounded by others existing in the worlds between.
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RECOMMENDATIONS
By Tami Spector
On a walk during the first days here with four of my co-residents,
our conversation was peppered with references to authors, artists
and movies. This struck me as one of the ways that we were getting
to know one another, and that, along with my cataloging instincts,
led me to collect the following list of recommendations from each
resident + two of the Djerassi staff (Celia and Alice). I began the
list the evening of that first walk and the last entries were provided
yesterday.
NameBook
Artist
Movie
Eleni
The Descent of Alette (Alice Notley)
Theresa Cha
Dead Man
Allison
Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes)
Pamela Rosenkranz
American Hustle
Karl
Any book by Alexander Cockburn
Daniel Nagrin
Dr. Stangelove
Alice
1Q84 (Huruki Murakami)
Rick Bardow
American Psycho
Deborah
AIME (Bruno Latour)
Rachel Mayeri
12 Monkeys
Luca
The Theatre and its Double (A. Artaud)
Bruno Maderna
81/2
Laurel
Ripe: A Fresh, Colorful Approach to Fruits and
Vegetables (Cheryl Sterman Rule)
Barry Vancura
The Gods Must Be Crazy
Caroline
Room (Emma Donoghue)
Gerhard Richter
Gett
Christine
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing
One Sees (Lawrence Weschler)
Robert Irwin
Manufactured Landscapes
Guillermo
El Hombre Inventó Manhattan (Ray Loriga)
Christina Finucci
Celda 211
Eathan
The Art and Craft of Problem Solving (Paul Zeitz)
Gabriel Orosco
Pootie Tang
Kate
Swamplandia (Karen Russell)
Sigmar Polke
Ghostbusters
Tami
State of Wonder (Ann Patchett)
Ana Mendieta
Fitzcarraldo
Rachel
Savage Detectives (Bolaño)
Janet Cardiff (art)
Balkan Brass (music)
Underground
Celia
Eva Ziesel
Kid with a Bike
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)
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ART AND MEDICINE
By Eathan Janney
A few days ago Caroline Wellbery, a colleague here at Djerassi, gave
a presentation on her work. She is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in comparative literature. She switched from literature to medicine midway into
her career. After a number of years she felt herself gravitating back
to the arts and found unique ways to integrate them into her life as
a physician. Her talk focused on the idea that patients can use art to
communicate about their illnesses.
I am reminded of my friend Anthony Ptak, an electronic musician
and artist, who developed brain cancer several years ago. He
survived a very rare and deadly type of cancer but in the aftermath
of treatment was left with severe pain and the inability to control his
left arm, leg and hand.
I have long been impressed by how he uses creativity to share about
experiences that are so hard for others to imagine. In an interview
with him he said to me that in the deepest moments of dealing
with his illness he was literally unable to express creativity. In those
moments it seems that art could not help him. Knowing this helped
me to more truly understand the extent of his pain.
Photo by Anthony Ptak. “What the pain feels like from a TBI neurological disorder”
It is a privilege to create freely. I’m glad that I feel I can. I’m deeply
thankful that Anthony continues to share creatively about his illness
and his life beyond it.
Photo by Anthony Ptak. “Yoga”
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SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS II – LEGACY?
By Laurel Shastri
July 20—the day after the annual Open House of the Artist
Residency Program. Yesterday over 250 people traipsed through
the woods looking at artwork, peered into open studios, watched
presentations, interacted with the residents, ate delicious chef-prepared food, and raptly attended the fishbowl conversation between
the residents about collaborations between artists and scientists.
At one point, I was ironing costumes on a table in the dance studio
as guests walked by, peering in on their way to the restrooms. I
resisted the urge to explain that I was an installation piece on the
value of gender roles in the behind-the-scenes preparation of dance
performance.
Each of the residents presented something about their work. There
was a video collaboration about nanotechnology prepared by Guillermo that many of the other residents helped design and participate.
There was our (Karl, Saki, & me) dance performance with mathematical connections including a dance with a visual proof of the
Pythagorean Theorem. There were readings by Allison and Caroline;
presentations by Eathan, Christine, Tami, Rachel, Deborah, and Kate;
a sound hike led by Luca…. Everyone contributed an experience or
collaboration in the world of art meets science meets art-science
meets science-art. (Even our artist in absentia, Eleni, was available
via the phone in the phone booth—her poetry, inspiration, notes,
decorating the walls of the phone booth and her voice via computer
reading her poems.)
The fishbowl was the last event of the day. Four residents and one
Piero sat at a microphone-filled table with Martin the videographer’s
camera staring at our faces and an audience of about 60 people. The
remaining residents were sitting in the couches behind the table,
waiting their turn to “swim” into the conversation. We all found
something to say about how collaboration is good.
Inspiration for the fish food bowl
After an event-filled day, the guests were ushered away and the
staff and residents were treated to dinner at Alice’s Restaurant.
But … after that, when the residents were back in the Artists’ Barn
… Scientific Delirium Madness really set in. We found ourselves in
the kitchen, rapidly exchanging various random food items out of the
refrigerator, redesigning the fishbowl conversation into a fish-foodbowl. We found ourselves saying: “Speak into the mayonnaise.”
“If you are going to disagree, you must have the mustard.” Vegetable items—including a tub of leftover quinoa and a bag of baby
spinach—were tossed in a counter-game of catch. New rules kept
emerging. If you were holding a carton of eggs or other poultry items,
then you could speak about art. Hot sauce and other spicy items
meant that you could talk about anything you wanted. Luca may
have been seen balancing origami on his nose. And Karl may have
been talking to the world and maybe it was answering back. Maybe
some new ideas sprung fully formed out of our frenzy…. Only time
will tell.
We are all looking forward to Scientific Delirium Madness 3.
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DJERASSI DAY 3 – CHILDISH
By Eathan Janney
I passed my Ph.D. thesis defense just a handful of days before
coming to Djerassi. When I did, my wife Christi and my friend Valeria
Lombo came to my lab and presented me with a mask as a gift.
This mask—made in the image of an Australian pied butcherbird
head—was a giant hit: I had spent six long years up to my ears in
song recordings of this species. This gift idea was so perfect that
when my wife met with our friend Anthony Villanacci to tell him of it,
she found out he had the same idea! Anthony—being an industrial
designer—got to work right away on the construction and completed
it masterfully in one late-night session. Christi and Valeria gave
it life with paint. It is magical. All my lab mates and my mentor
loved it. Everyone enjoyed putting it on and goofing around. With
permission from all who made it, I decided to leave it in the lab as a
mascot.
It is not childish to live with uncertainty. To devote oneself
to a craft rather than a career. To an idea rather than an
institution. It’s courageous. And it requires a courage on
the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped
to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that
they can only call it childish and so excuse their exploitation of you.
—David Mamet, from True and False
Just days after receiving this mask I lost it! This was seriously
devastating. The devastation stood out as very significant against
the backdrop of my general indifference toward material things.
Losing the mask reminded me of what it represents. It represents
the memory of celebrating with my friends and collaborators. It
represents friendship and collaboration … and fun. On Day Three
of this residency I was working on constructing a crude cardboard
mask. I wondered what would come of this childish impulse to which
I had committed. I wondered if my colleagues would shun me for the
immature gesture.
Last night at the Open House we asked ourselves who was more
obstinate towards collaboration: artists or scientists.
But really there are two types of people—those who can play
together and those who can’t. The people who are able to play
together can be artists, scientists, or anything else. But collaborative
play is not often given the respect it deserves.
Although we expose children to a wide range of subjects in school
early on, we shun broad interests later in life: the process of
becoming an adult is the process of specializing. Thus, those who
have multiple passions or defy categorization are often considered
childish. It’s a shame.
In this residency I feel childish in the best sense possible—playing
along with other children: wonderful, curious, smart and courageous.
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NANOSEQUENCES
By Guillermo Muñoz
Last Sunday was the Open House, an important date for our Scientific Delirium Madness residency. It was exciting to see the work of
our colleagues, and the fruitful collaborations. Here I would like to
present one of the collaborations that I’ve tried to carry out for the
last two weeks. This is a video concerning exploration, relating to
some nanotechnological concepts. From my point of view, exploration is an experience connected to both art and science. Here,
exploration arises in many ways.
As I said in a previous post, my impression when I arrived at
Djerassi is that it would be good to start a work on nature. And this
was what I did. I took an old idea from a past work, where I had
mixed cave paintings with nanotechnological concepts. So, first of all
I needed to find a rocky wall around the Djerassi landscape. With the
help of Tom Shean, I found the correct one: the Solstice Cave made
by Mel Henderson in 1986. I liked the idea to work with the art piece
from a past residence.
So, with the help of my colleagues Luca, Deborah and Eathan, we
arranged an expedition to record the sounds from the cave and the
videos of the exploration itself. After the exploration, we started an
incredible history of collaborations, to make the final edition of this
video. I was helped through interesting questions by Allison Cobb
and Eleni Sikelianos. I was inspired by a fabulous piano concert in 4
sections by Eathan. And Caroline Wellbery made interesting suggestions for the edition and helped with the English. Luca made a great
sound composition from our visit to the cave, and finally Eathan,
Caroline and Allison put their voices to a child’s tale.
My purpose with the video was to put me on the other side (art), to
understand the methods, the complexity and the difficulties. And,
yes, there are many. Regardless of the final result, this has been an
adventure for me, and it has helped me to understand by myself the
power of audiovisual communication, the importance of poetry for
science (to make interesting questions), and the difficulties in art to
perform a powerful and suggestive material. But, at the same time,
this has helped me to make a short list of the main ideas that come
from Nanotechnology.
In the first sequence, Nanoscales, I used the video film of the exploration to the cave, trying to reduce it as much as possible, in order to
condense all the time that we spent to just a few seconds. Visualization of the scales is always a problem, and art could help to do it.
In the second sequence, Nano-Approaches, I drew on the experience
of entering a cave to understand the two different approaches used
to build nanotechnological systems (Bottom-Up or Top-Down). I
understood that there is a symmetry between both approaches
(just the C2 symmetry group described by a 180° rotation). A gecko
walking along a wall serves me to situate the axis of the rotational
symmetry, as geckos can walk around walls upwards or downwards.
The third one, Nano Myths, is a composition of videos from general
culture, usually used to explain basic ideas in nanotechnology. But
these examples are so recurrent that, in some way, they are composing a kind of nano myths (icons).
Finally, I wrote a small tale, connecting the words nano and dwarf,
since it is well known that nanotechnology is not only related to very
small scales, but to the strange effects that arise on these small
scales.
This was a multi collaboration process that came up here. As my
colleague Luca said to me, what matters is the process, and in this
case the process was just an art/science exploration. Thank you all
for your help and participation—it was fun !!
You can see the video here, and access to a more developed explanation here (in Spanish).
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NOT ART
By Allison Cobb
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NANO TABLE
By Guillermo Muñoz
In my presentation talk I’ve just presented the problem, circulating
around one idea: thinking about a third dimension for the periodic
table. Nanotechnology could be thought as a kind of this third
dimension. For example, nanoparticles could be arranged as a third
dimension along a vertical axes of the Silicon position in the periodic
table. However, with this approximation it was only possible to
arrange a small amount of elements, since semiconductor nanoparticles are most of the time binary or ternary alloys, even more
complicated.
3DPT (3D Periodic Table. Michael Aldersley)
I had noticed about this fantastic Scientific Delirium Madness Residence on the Yasmin list, which by the way is having days of struggle
these last months. Quickly I sent my proposal, including two projects
related to nanotechnology. Here I would like to present the preliminary results that I’ve developed on one of these projects during the
residence, which I called the “Nano Table.”
In my scientific research I study the emission from single semiconductor quantum dots. These nanostructures are fascinating, as
in many ways behave as single atoms. They are called “artificial
atoms” because we can control their properties by changing the
size, shape, chemical composition, crystal structure, lattice parameter…. This made me think about the possibility to arrange a particular “periodic table” for these artificial atoms. I came here with
the idea to develop some interaction with the artists and scientists
to answer to these questions: Is there any possibility to think about
a periodic table for these artificial atoms? Would it make sense any
possible periodic table for nanostructured elements?
My starting point was that periodicity with semiconductor quantum dots maybe has no sense, as any change in shape or size for
quantum dots is translated into different electronic configuration.
So, we can say that there is a continuous “artificial atom” evolution,
instead of this discrete configuration of the periodic table. However,
maybe it is possible to find some periodicity, even if it is not composed by discrete arrangements.
Returning from the dinner, Luca and I were speaking about the
possibilities, and he just asked me—why are you thinking in three
dimensions? Why not four? Or even more? I was answering him,
trying to imagine in which way I could represent more than three
dimensions, when I understood his question. Yes, I just needed
another parameter, and before entering my studio I visualized that
this fourth parameter would be the frequency from the quantization
energy for each nanoparticle. Yes!! Each nanoparticle has its own
confinement range, and this is just the range where nanotechnology is important for semiconductors: the area where the exciton
(electron bonded by a hole in the semiconductor crystal) is confined
by the size of the nanoparticle.
The next day I selected the mathematical expression to relate
semiconductor materials with nanoparticle diameter and, finally,
excitonic energy. I used the easiest model, just considering effective
mass approximation and spherical nanoparticles. This model is too
far from any realistic approach, but it is the starting point to make
some calculus and pictures.
I just arranged some information from different binary semiconductors (effective masses for electron and holes, and their dielectric
constants). With this information I calculated the excitonic radius,
and then the excitonic energy, following these expressions:
continued
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Next step was to plot these results, and I did it arranging different
materials with increasing energy gap. So, this was an important
decision. In this step I forgot any input from the periodic table of
elements, and began a new arrangement basing the classification
on the energy gap of the semiconductor. Here you can see the first
result using a double log plot:
As you can see, for each material, as nanoparticle diameter
increases, the excitonic energy decreases until reaching a stable
value (energy gap). It is very important that semiconductor nanoparticles with lower energy gaps have large confinement range. However, this is not completely true, as it must be taken into account in
more realistic phenomena (related to atomic size, crystal structure,
growth process…). But, the figure could be used to visualize the
area where nanotechnology is important for semiconductor nanoparticles. In order to get a clearer picture of this region, I plotted a 2-D
image:
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Here it is shown in a clearer way the evolution of the excitonic
energy for each material as particle sizes increase. All lines tend
to the large particle limit, where nanotechnology effects (quantum
confinement, in this case) don’t apply. In my imagination, the area
between the top line (corresponding to the small particles) and the
limit case (bulk limit), corresponds to a visualization of the quantum
confinement for semiconductor nanoparticles. It seemed to me a
triangle, and I just plotted the following arrangement:
As we go upwards in this triangle, material energy gap increases,
excitonic bohr radius decreases, and the theoretical range for quantum confinement decreases in a first approximation of the effective
mass approach.
This visualization doesn’t make sense to describe any realistic system, since many simplifications have been made. However, it could
be understood as an example of how scientific imagination could be
engaged by the artistic community. In this case, trying to understand
how to visualize a nanotechnological arrangement of semiconductor
materials. For sure, the more interactions with artists, the more
esthetical and sophisticated final graphics and ideas would be
developed.
Note: I used only a small group of the possible binary semiconductors, as here I don’t have access to all the parameter information for
all materials.
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ON CARING
By Allison Cobb
Deborah Forster gives Feldenkrais to
Djerassi dog Hank
I’ve been thinking a lot about caring—”taking care,” having an
attitude of care and concern—and what that might mean for we
humans now living in the Anthropocene. While here at Djerassi, I
came across some of my old notes about “care and concern” related
to Donna Haraway, whose work is often discussed here. I hadn’t
cited the source, so I asked the primatologist and cognitive scientist
Dr. Deborah Forster about it. Our discussion and an internet search
led me to this beautiful blog “Care” by Thom van Dooren over at the
multispecies salon.
van Dooren, citing Maria Puig, writes that care is a “particularly profound engagement with the world, ‘a vital affective state, an ethical
obligation and a practical labor.’”
This is the kind of engagement I’ve been attempting over the past
few years with plastic trash as part of Plastic, an autobiography.
I work to engage with plastic garbage with a level of care that
demands, as van Dooren writes, a “deep contextual and critical
knowledge about the object of our care, a knowledge that simultaneously places us at stake in the world and demands that we be held
accountable.” How would practicing that radical form of care—even
in regards to garbage—transform our relationships?
I’ve been humbled by the artists and scientists here at Djerassi and
their profound engagements with the world. The artist Christine Lee
works with painstaking devotion to transform the discarded into
objects of aesthetic beauty and power. Eathan Janney spends countless hours understanding the rhythms of bird songs. Eleni Sikelianos
meditates in elegiaic poems on the species that have disappeared
from our planet.
I’ve also been moved by the way in which the people here care for
one another, both as people and in our work as artists and scientists. We have opened ourselves to one another, sharing expertise,
offering time and energy for collaboration, developing new ideas. The
results have been beautiful, transforming.
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DEAD RABBITS, LIVE NEWTS
By Eleni Sikelianos
What a rare privilege to be at work and walk here among such a wild
profusion of intelligence, inventiveness and ethos. The poet Robert
Creeley once said that you forge ahead, writing poems “because you
care about the kind of world you live in.” What I have found here at
Djerassi with my cohorts is a burgeoning sense of world-building,
made of scientific and artistic imagination.
During a walk with poet Allison Cobb in the first week or so of the
residency, we stumbled across a recently dead rabbit, whose eye
had been eaten right through, while the rest of the body was left
fairly intact. Later, we witnessed a couple of clumsy salamanders (or
newts?) falling off a log and scrambling into a damp palace of rich,
madrone-colored leaf litter. (At www.sfbaywildlife.info/species/
caudata_notes.htm, I read that the Coast Range Newts, Taricha
torosa, are “highly toxic and shouldn’t be ingested”—glad I didn’t
pop one in my mouth on our stroll.) That evening I wrote this:
if you like let the body feel
all its own evolution
Inspired, I realize now, by the detrivores, I began this meditation on
the evolutionary ancestors we carry around inside us while we type,
snack, blink, think, sleep, wake, eat, dream. I’ve been adding lines
each day, and am beginning to recognize a kind of catalogue of ships
(to steal Homer’s form)—a taking stock of phylogenetic indebtedness. Although I’m not sure how long this will get, I love the idea of
a book-length poetic inventory of phylogenesis, tracing the ways in
which we’re evolutionarily or imaginatively connected to all the other
animals around us.
grope toward the protozoa
snagging on the rise toward placental knowing
who developed eyes for you agape in open waters
the worm that made a kidney-like heart burrows in
directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your
hagfish spine who
will bury your bones
inside, opening flagella
& feathers & fingers
door by door, a ragged
neuron dangling like
a participle to
hear a bare sound
red-eye-hole rabbit, fat
of the bulbous stalk pecked out
to the core so you can
bore back to the salamander you
once were straggling under the skin
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COLLABORATIONS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE
By Laurel Shastri
Exploring “Door-Space.”
Ephemera. Is it meaningful? A dance is but a moment. The seasons
change with the cycle of the earth. A sculpture lasts maybe decades
or centuries, if it’s lucky. The hills are shaped and changed over
eons of geologic time. Yet within its own scale, each creation will
leave an imprint; and at the confluence of an intersecting moment,
many such creations will converge to something new entirely.
I wanted to collaborate through time and space with previous
resident artists, whom I have only met through their artwork here at
Djerassi. Could I, with my dancer’s tools, create new space within
an already existing work of art? In the photo above, I explore Peter
Mueller’s “Door-Space,” created in 2006. The photographer is Karl
Schaffer.
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By Allison Cobb
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QUANTUM DOT MUSIC EVOLUTION
By Eathan Janney
A few weeks ago Guillermo and I posted about our first foray into
representing quantum dots musically.
We realized there was much more potential to explore this idea. In
our subsequent days at Djerassi we developed another, richer, Quantum Dot Music collaborative project. Through this project we mixed
concepts of nanostructure semiconductors, single Quantum Dot (QD)
optical emission and music. We translated emission spectra of QDs,
to produce a visual/musical interface that allowed users to explore
the unique sounds that our methods generated for each QD. The
interface was presented at the Open House at Djerassi on Sunday,
July 19, 2015. Below you can see an image of the interface. We also
include several sound sample that you can listen to.
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CHINNECK COMES IN OFF THE ROOF.
By Eathan Janney
Documentation of the Mask’s True Origins
I think I hear footsteps on the roof of the barn. Could it be Tom, the
groundskeeper? Or maybe—because of some strange sequence of
occurrences—it is James Chinneck in his flying helmet, having just
disembarked from his alien craft.
Chinneck is the one who left mysterious “state certified fact”
plaques along the trails here—marking the location of, and telling
about: the rusty old sausage truck shot up with bullets; the most
unstable piece of ground in America; the events leading to the dissolution of the last known elephant beetle orchestra.
I wonder if Hank is near—if so, that’s probably Tom on the roof
because wherever Tom goes Hank goes. I set off to circumambulate
the barn looking for one of them.
My wife is jealous about Hank—that I’m spending time with him,
tossing pinecones with the old boy. She loves Australian shepherds.
Tom told me that Hank—rescued by Tom’s daughter from a sack in
a ditch—used to be a runner. One night in desperation Tom drove
the wily dog to a busy roadside truck depot at 4 a.m. Tom opened
his vehicle door and nudged Hank out. Hank bolted, and cruised
haphazardly around the concrete expecting Tom to chase after. Tom,
aloof, didn’t pursue him, but the Mack trucks barreling by soon disoriented Hank. “Go ahead run all ya want. There’s nowhere to go….
I’m all you’ve got.” This ritual took just under an hour but it cured
Hank of his fits of escape.
There’s no sign of Hank or Tom outside the barn.
I do run into a man leaning a ladder against the building. I say to
the back of his head: “Was that you walking on the roof?” “Yes, the
shingles need work,” he replies.
continued
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They take good care things here: the land, the buildings, and the residents. However the sculptures must endure the vicissitudes. There
are a multitude of sculptures on this property. The program makes
no attempt to preserve the sculptures, so a creation can forfeit its
legacy if it succumbs to the elements. A weak structure can live on
though if its story is meaningful.
The story of this place is meaningful. Djerassi’s daughter, Pamela—a poet and painter—took her own life in 1978, here on this
land. Carl Djerassi, a wealthy scientist, commemorated his daughter’s life by starting this artists’ residency in which I now participate. When his wife, Diane Middlebrook—a Stanford professor like
her husband—died in 2007, he added more artist housing to the
campus. Carl died in January of this year. This special session of
the residency incorporates scientists among artists—a nod to the
program’s founder.
I continue around the building, with plans to complete the circuit; I
run into Karl. He is in the sun with a mask across his mouth shaking
a can of spray paint. He tells me he’s painting props for an upcoming performance. He has choreographed a dance that proves the
Pythagorean theorem. He’ll perform it soon in New York City.
I tell him that I dreamed of tessellation last night. I explain that
though I quickly picked up the dance routine he taught me yesterday
it was more on intuition than explicit understanding. However, last
night in bed at 4 am I awoke and realized that the rhythm of the feet
in the first half of the dance is the rhythm of the hands in the second
(clap-step-clap-clap, step-clap-step-step…).
I short-circuit my tour of the building perimeter and head back in,
walking through the expansive shared space of the Artists’ Barn.
There are doors everywhere: entrances and exits to bedrooms,
studios, workshops, a fully stocked kitchen, and the outside air.
Throughout the year ad hoc tribes of a dozen humans move in and
out of this place transiently.
I walk by Deborah, the primatologist who used to consult for design
teams at Nissan, and Katie, the artist whom I saw earlier studying a
piece of leather she had molded and coated in home-made aluminum paint. She makes art using the tools of nano-chemistry.
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I live in a large and lovely room with a Mason and Hamlin grand
piano, a record player, a desk, a couch, a wood burning stove, a
Wurlitzer electric piano, closets of sound equipment and a lofted
bedroom and bath. I was one of the first to arrive here. Alone in
the Artists’ Barn that first day I ran about, inspired by the sunny
mountain scene I saw through the expansive glass wall of the barn.
I jumped up and down in my room and buzzed with joy. I did a few
cartwheels.
That’s when I first encountered Chinneck in his flying helmet, having
just been dropped off in the dry grass by the silent, weightless alien
machine. He walked in my room and shrugged his shoulders in
questioning judgment of my childish behavior. But then he introduced himself and took me on a tour of the grounds. He showed
me all the art. He foreshadowed what Margot Knight, the program’s
director, was going to tell us residents the following day. He told me
she would say that we all had a job to do here at Djerassi and that
the job just was “to be.” He said not to listen to her though. He said
this was all some new-agey rubbish and that I better accomplish
something real professional-like while I’m here.
He reminded me that Jim Crutchfield had been here the year previous and that Crutchfield was a big-shot physicist. He asked me to
explain my research on birds to him, but then he interrupted me with
abrasive questions. When I faltered he barked louder. He asked me
to play a tune on the piano for him. I began the second movement
of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C. “Really? he scoffed, “That’s such
a basic piece.” Then he smacked the backside of my head, told me
to get up and played the piece himself. “That’s how it is supposed
to sound!” he gloated. All the while he was still wearing this flying
helmet.
Finally I broke. I said “What’s with that ridiculous head gear? You
look like a fool in it.” The helmet was big and boxy; black like tar
paper; spackled with silver mirror splotches. It was adorned so as
to evoke a bird’s head, complete with a beak. The beak was shiny—
stainless steel. The helmet looked intense and mysterious but
also crude and mask-like. It was somehow very enchanting and I
coveted it.
I grabbed the helmet and snatched it from his head. He yelped “My
flying helmet!”
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He swiveled around to grab for it and briefly his eyes met mine
before he looked down—away. I saw his face though. It was grotesque, misshapen, like a twisted rag with skin and sensory organs
attached. I still held the helmet but I offered it back. The pain in
his eyes when I saw them moved me, despite his biting cruelty. He
reached for the helmet and placed it back over his head.
I tried my best to just get on with the residency. Chinneck disappeared rather quickly once I challenged him. Nevertheless his words
still haunted me. There was enough skepticism among the other residents about Margot’s existential imperative to amplify the echoes of
Chinneck’s voice.
It is now the fourth day of my stay. Back in the barn I head for my
room to play piano. I sit down and begin to improvise. The sounds
are jagged, disjointed, dissonant and rapid. I am discharging my
anger with Chinneck. Why did he deride me? I ponder at how I’ve
already grown to love his plaques, his enchanting tales. How he
must suffer though. The footsteps are above me now. I play in
rhythm to them. I close my eyes and dive into a trance but am soon
yanked out by a knock at my door.
I open my eyes. As I zip to the door I sense a dark mass on the floor
in my peripheral vision—it was not there before. Deborah beckons.
She says “Hey, James Chinneck is here. He’s showed up unannounced. Come say hi!”
It is indeed the same man I met my first day. He is engaged in
unabashed affability with the residents. His mangled face is not covered. It is somehow painless now, though still alien—there is a new
softness to his visage. He is all smiles. I am introduced as though
we have never met. He does not let on—though he does reach out
to hug me as though we are long lost friends. He holds me in an
embrace for a split second and in my ear he whispers, “I’m sorry.”
The day winds on and everyone falls in love with James. He tells
us wild stories of his adventures here. They are farcical, bold and
ridiculous, but we cry for more.
James packs up his Prius and drives off after a bout of sentimental
farewells. I return to the room and discover Chinneck’s mask there.
The following day I begin to justify its presence. I tell the other
residents I made this mask.
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DJERASSI DAY 4 – BANANA SLUGS ON THE TRAIL
By Eathan Janney
I am leaving Djerassi today, but just arriving at an understanding
of the experience. On Day 4 I was only beginning to know my fellow
residents. There was a sense of suspense about how our relationships would develop and what kind of themes would emerge among
us. Theme 1: Banana Slugs on the Trail.
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GRATITUDE
By Laurel Shastri
Onward and away!
Thank you, Djerassi! Thank you, Leonardo! Thanks to all who made
this amazing experience a reality. Thanks to the other residents
(past, present, and future) whose creativity, excitement and interest
abounds in all that they do and permeates this magical place. As I
prepare to leave here, I just wanted you to know that this experience
is something that I will cherish for the rest of my days. And I will
continue to realize its impact for many years to come.
The photo is my collaboration in time and space with Ann Weber &
William Wareham’s To Market To Market from 2000. I hope I may
share the bounty of my experience with those whom I touch through
my work and play….
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QUOTES FOR GOODBYE
By Guillermo Muñoz
This is my leaving post. A set of quotes, to say goodbye. Nos vemos pronto !!
“Most of the things I’ve done that have ‘architectural’ implications are really about non-architecture, about
something that’s an alternative to what’s normally considered architecture…. We were thinking more about
metaphoric voids, gaps, left-over spaces, places that were not developed…. Metaphoric in the sense that
their interest or value wasn’t in their possible use…. It’s like juggling with syntax, or disintegrating some kind
of established sequence of parts.”
—Gordon Matta Clark
“The space in which we live is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind
of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things (…) we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”
—Michel Foucault
“Walking conditioned sight, and sight conditioned walking, till it seemed only the feet could see.”
—Robert Smithson
“But error was basic to their lab culture. Hansma’s great proverbs, for instance, were: “do everything as
poorly as you can” and “make as many mistakes as you can as fast as you can.” Sometimes this produced
smashing successes. Sometimes—particularly when other groups tried to mimic this style—it could bring
glaring failures.”
—C.C.M. Mody
POSTED ON JULY 28, 2015.
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BODYSCAPE
By Luca Forcucci
The main request of the residency was to BE. A paramount condition
in order to let ideas flow in total freedom. There was no obligation
of outcomes. Ideas (at least for me) appeared in diverse situations,
such as discussion during trails or while having a coffee in the
kitchen. I worked mainly on the following projects:
• Soundwalks during the Open House of the residency: The participants were free to speak, but all of them stayed silent during the
30 minutes trail. Another interesting aspect was the discussion
following the trail: Two groups that attended the walks mentioned
self-awareness in relation to listening to their own bodily sounds.
Moreover, they both started a discussion about the importance of
music in neurodegenerative diseases, although I only proposed
to listen to the environmental sound and never mentioned music,
apart from the fact that I introduced myself as a composer;
• During a discussion with Guillermo Muñoz, a physicist, after a
dinner, who was looking for ways to develop a periodic table for
nano particules, I suggested to investigate a fourth dimension.
leonardo.info/blogs/nano-table/;
• A sculpture in a tree, as a deprivation (of sound) chamber, to be
installed in the coming week in the trails, in collaboration with
Christine Lee;
•Writings;
• Bodyscape, a composition based on biological and sonic information of the body of a dancer, I developed the strategies while in
residency. It was then developed as a work in progress at the Lab
Gallery in San Francisco from July 30, and premiered on August 4.
continued
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Bodyscape
The piece is a work in progress that changed during its five-day
installation at The Lab gallery in San Francisco, where it was performed along with musician Cheryl Leonard and dancer Crystal Sepulveda. The main idea was to focus on the body of a dancer as the
main sonic source. The information was taken via biosensors and
microphones, which recorded movement of and events generated
by the body. In this ecosystem, where the dancer produces sounds,
mainly inaudible, we as composer and musician amplified and sent
them back to the performance space, where the dancer interacted
with them as biofeedback. A member of the audience mentioned at
some point that it was difficult to know who was producing what.
In a sense it was an accomplishment, because I didn’t want to
have sound responding to a precise event or gesture, but instead a
(organized) chaos in which we tried to discover the rules.
The performance is site-specific and a work in progress. It means
that each time we will perform in a new place, debate new ideas
and progress on the base of the knowledge acquired in the precedent
performance. The site-specificity of the work relates to the spatial
considerations of the performance space (e.g. size, resonance,
reverberation, sound system equipment, luminosity). The improvisation relies on the set of rules we define between the performers
and that which will be improvised. The biofeedback is an interaction
between the movement of the dancer, the performance space, the
sound and the other performers. Thus, it is an ecosystem that is created and on the base of which all the performers react and interact.
Therefore, the improvisation part is also linked to the reactions of
each other.
The piece will be developed again in the coming months and
presented early in 2016 at The Friedrich Dürrenmatt Museum in
Switzerland.
Pictures taken during the performance: https://www.flickr.com/
photos/swissnexsanfrancisco/albums/72157656413117579
POSTED ON AUGUST 20, 2015
T H E
B LO G
S C I E N T I F I C
D E L I R I U M
M A D N E S S
2 0 15 :
T H E
B LO G
ARTISTS’ & SCIENTISTS’ BIOS
ALLISON COBB, Writer
Portland, OR
DEBORAH FORSTER, Primatologist/Cognitive Scientist
San Diego, CA
CHRISTINE LEE, Interdisciplinary Artist/Designer
San Diego, CA
Cobb is the author of Born Two (Chax Press, 2004)
about her hometown of Los Alamos, NM, and GreenWood (Factory School, 2010) about a nineteenth
century cemetery in Brooklyn, NY. The New York Times
called Green-Wood a “gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic
gem.” Her work has appeared in the selected journals
Aufgabe, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary
Poetry, The Volta, C-L Newsletter, Poetry, Big Bridge
Magazine, and Poetry Project Newsletter. She is the
recipient of the following grants and awards, PLAYA
Artists Residency (2014), Career Opportunity Grant,
Oregon Arts Commission (2013), Individual Artist
Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission (2011), Regional
Arts and Culture Council Professional Development
Grant (2010), and New York Foundation for the Arts
Fellow (2009). Cobb currently works for Environmental
Defense Fund and lives in Portland, OR. She received
her BA from the University of Arizona and her MFA from
George Mason University. www.allisoncobb.net
Forster’s projects include developing and implementing
the use of social robots in early childhood education
(RUBI Project) as a member of the Machine Perception
Lab at the Qualcomm Institute of UC San Diego. Other
projects involve design-context research activities
in areas as diverse as gut microbiome, equine pain
detection, and infant biometrics. Forster continues to
integrate her field research on social complexity and
distributed cognition in olive baboons with research on
learning and human-robot interactions. She is training
as a Feldenkrais practitioner, having just completed
a semester of teaching Feldenkrais in a Mind-is-forMovement seminar in the local school of architecture,
and collaborating in research on the influence of short
Feldenkrais Awareness-Through-Movement lessons
on 1st and 2nd graders. Forster has had a long-term
collaboration with artist Rachel Mayeri’s Primate
Cinema series. She is currently a Project Scientist at
the Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego. Forster received
her BS in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, her MS
and PhD in cognitive Science from the University of
California, San Diego. www.visarts.ucsd.edu/events/
alumna-rachel-mayeri-primate-cinema-and-nonhuman-demographic
Lee works on functional design, sculptural objects and
installations to explore the latent potential of mundane,
surplus, and other disregarded materials. She experiments with multiple configurations and patterns to
transform these overlooked materials beyond novelty
and to reveal their unbounded value. Lee is also collaborating with engineer John F. Hunt of the USDA Forest
Service Forest Products Laboratory on naturally bonded
non-toxic interior composite panels. Their research has
been presented at the BMRA Decon Conference at Yale,
the Furniture Society Conference at MECA, and at the
Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU. Lee received
her BS in art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and her MFA in the furniture design and woodworking
program at San Diego State University.
www.missleelee.com
LUCA FORCUCCI, Composer, Media Artist, Writer and
Scholar
Switzerland and Berlin
In order to explore the field of possibilities for sound in
a context of music and art as experience, Forcucci’s
works converge with dance, digital performance,
poetry, architecture and neuroscience. In this context,
he is interested in perception and consciousness.
Forcucci conducted his research at GRM (Groupe de
Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and at the Brain Mind
Institute in Switzerland. His artworks are presented
worldwide on a regular basis (Biennale of Sao Paulo,
Akademie der Künste Berlin, MAXXI: Museum of XXI
Century Arts Rome, Rockbund Museum Shanghai,
Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel, Présences
Electroniques Festival Geneva). Forcucci’s works are
in the collections of the Swiss National Library and
Swatch, received awards from the Swiss Federal Office
for Culture, Pro Helvetia, Swatch, Cité Internationale
des Arts Paris, and he was nominated in the arts at the
World Technology Summit in New York. His compositions are published on Subrosa in Belgium. In 2015,
Forcucci achieved a doctoral research conducted at De
Montfort University in UK (Mapping Dynamic Relations
in Sound and Space Perception). He received his MA in
Sonic Arts from Queens University of Belfast.
www.lucalyptus.com
EATHAN JANNEY, Musician/Scientist
Brooklyn, NY
Janney is a musical composer and performer, honored
to have shared the stage with artists including Conor
Oberst, Jenny Lewis, Son Ambulance and many others.
He’s also currently a PhD candidate in Neuroscience
at the Graduate Center of CUNY studying birdsong
under the mentorship of Ofer Tchernichovski. His
thesis project investigates the structure of birdsong
and its possible similarities to musical structure. Other
projects include locateflow.org, a website dedicated to
exploring the nature of creativity, and Dirt Works, which
won 4th place in the 2012 Smart Pitch Challenge, an
entrepreneurial competition sponsored by IBM, the
CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise, the Lawrence M.
Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College
and the Sunshine Bronx business incubator. He also
founded and oversees an acclaimed piano tuning
business in NYC called Floating Piano Factory. Janney
received the Centro Stefano Franscini (CSF) award
at the Monte Verita Workshop on Music in Neuroscience (2012). www.newmedialab.cuny.edu/people/
eathan-janney
RACHEL MAYERI, Media Artist
Los Angeles, CA
Mayeri’s videos have shown at the Sundance Film
Festival, Park City Utah; Berlinale Film Festival;
Documenta13, Kassel Germany; Ars Electronica, Linz,
Austria; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and
MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. She is the recipient
of a Wellcome Trust Award to create films for chimps,
commissioned by Arts Catalyst (2011), the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute Computational Biology Grant
(2012), and Creative Capital. Mayeri is a guest curator
of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.
She received her BA from Brown University and her
MFA from the University of California San Diego. Mayeri
collaborated with Deborah Forster while in residence.
www.rachelmayeri.com
S C I E N T I F I C
D E L I R I U M
M A D N E S S
2 0 15 :
T H E
B LO G
GUILLERMO MUÑOZ, Physicist
Valencia, Spain
KARL SCHAFFER, Mathematician/Choreographer
Scotts Valley, CA
ELENI SIKELIANOS, Writer
Boulder, CO
Muñoz is a Post-Doc researcher in the field of Nanotechnology and Applied Physics, with a PhD in Physics
at the Optoelectronic Materials and Devices (UMDO)
group integrated in the Materials Science Institute
of the University of Valencia (ICMUV). His interest in
scientific research covers single semiconductor nanostructures for quantum technologies, single photon
emitters and light-matter interactions in confined
systems. He is also interested in science popularization
topics. He is the president of Piratas de la Ciencia
association. His interest in science popularization is
focused on interdisciplinary relations. He has been part
of the YASMIN moderator team from 2007, and was the
director of Nanoconnections Week (2008), dedicated
to promoting exchange between professionals from
science, arts and humanities through nanotechnology.
Schaffer’s dance work plays with ideas and movement
in original, surprising, and entertaining ways, and
often explores imaginative connections between dance
and mathematics. His works have been performed
at Kennedy Center, Washington, DC; Mondavi Center,
Davis, CA; Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, PA; the
Bridges Art/Math Conference, Seoul, Korea; and West
End Studio Theatre, Santa Cruz, CA. He has been
Co-Artistic Director with Erick Stern of the Dr. Schaffer
and Mr. Stern Dance Ensemble for over 25 years and
was recently appointed as a Participatory Performing
Artist in Residence at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art
and History. Schaffer and Stern are on the Teaching
Artist Roster of the Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts Partners in Education, and travel frequently giving
workshops for major arts venues on integrating math
and dance in the classroom and studio. He received
his BA from the University of Alabama, Birmingham,
his MA and his PhD from the University of California,
Santa Cruz. Schaffer collaborated with Laurel Shastri
while in residence. www.mathdance.org
Sikelianos is the author of The Book of Jon, (City
Lights, 2004), a hybrid memoir; You Animal Machine
(The Golden Greek) a hybrid memoir/essay (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013); The California
Poem, book-length poem (Minneapolis: Coffee House
Press: 2004); and The Loving Detail of the Living &
the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013), named one of
Library Journal’s Five Best Poetry Books of the Year,
Publisher’s Weekly starred review. Her selected grants,
fellowships and awards include Lannan Foundation
Residency at Marfa; Centre National du Livre Bourse
de Traduction; New York Foundation for the Arts
Fellowship; Fulbright Scholar (Writer’s Award), Greece;
New York State Council for the Arts Translation Grant;
and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing
Fellowship in Poetry. She received her BFA and her MFA
from the Naropa Institute.
KATE NICHOLS, Interdisciplinary Artist/Designer
San Francisco, CA.
Nichols is an artist who synthesizes nanoparticles to
mimic structurally colored animals, grows artificial skin
from microorganisms, and cooks up her own paints,
following 15th-century recipes. She has exhibited
in solo shows at The Leonardo, Salt Lake City, UT;
Materials Research Society Conference, San Francisco,
CA; and LMan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and in group
shows at Studio for Urban Projects, San Francisco, CA;
Lafayette College, Easton, PA; and MDC Freedom Tower
Gallery, Miami, FL. She has given lectures at TED, New
York, NY; 3M corporate headquarters, Saint Paul, MN;
TED Active, Palm Springs, CA; TEDxRainier, Seattle,
WA; and Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Nichols
received her BA in Studio Art from Kenyon College, her
MA in Visual Studies from UC Berkeley, and an MFA
from California College of the Arts.
www.katenicholsstudio.com
LAUREL SHASTRI, Choreographer
Scotts Valley, CA
Shastri performs with MoveSpeakSpin, a contemporary
dance company directed by Karl Schaffer. She served
seventeen years at Ballet Tennessee, as Associate
Director, company dancer, faculty, and grant writer.
She was on the faculty of the model outreach programs
Dance Alive and Talent Identification Program. As a
professional dancer at Ballet Tennessee she danced
in full-length classical and contemporary ballets. A
modern work based on the life of Pocahontas was
choreographed for her by Barry VanCura, winning 1st
place in the PANOPLY choreography competition in
Huntsville, AL. Shastri is a seasoned teaching artist,
currently working as SPECTRA artist with the Artist
Teacher Partnership, and the Special Initiative at Hall
District School. She specializes in integrating dance
with science and language arts topics. She presented
workshops for educators through Value Plus, Creativity
in Education, Arts 360, National Association for State
Arts Agencies, Southeast Center for Education in the
Arts, and Arts Build. Her work is featured in the college
text “Creating Meaning Through Literature and the
Arts,” by Claudia Cornett. Shastri received her MS in
Geology from the University of New Mexico. She collaborated with Karl Schaffer while in residence.
TAMI SPECTOR, Physical Organic Chemist
San Francisco, CA
Spector’s scientific work has focused on fluorocarbons,
the transformations of strained ring organics, and the
molecular dynamics and free energy calculations of
biomolecular systems. She also has a strong interest
in aesthetics and chemistry and has published and
presented work on “The Molecular Aesthetics of
Disease,” “John Dalton and The Aesthetics of Molecular
Representation,” “The Visual Image of Chemistry, and
the Relationship between Chemistry and Contemporary
Visual Art.” She currently teaches “Organic Chemistry
and Molecular Gastronomy: The Science of the Food
We Eat” at the University of San Francisco. Spector
received her BA from Bard College, her PhD from
Dartmouth College and was a post-doctoral researcher
at the University of Minnesota.
https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/tami-spector
CAROLINE WELLBERY, Medical Doctor/Writer
Bathesda, MD
Wellbery is Professor in the Department of Family
Medicine at Georgetown University. She serves as
Associate Deputy Editor of American Family Physician
and as Director of the department’s Medical Humanities program. Her recent work has focused on artistic
representations of trauma, and climate change and
health. Wellbery earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University prior to pursuing her
MD degree at the University of California/San Francisco
and continues to use art and literature as a means of
introducing learners to the human side of medicine.

SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS 2015

Transcription

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