Educating Artists for the Future
In response to
In all honesty, I’m not sure how my interests in the intersections of art, science, and technology started. Perhaps I was simply unable to single out a single discipline for study. When I started at the University, my stated interests were communications and botany. My courses ranged from biology to photography and ceramics to film theory in those early years. Because I was increasingly interested in environmental justice, I started looking for ways to leverage the content of these areas and my skills in service to environmental justice issues.
During an educational exchange in Northern California, I was exposed to the conflict between industrial logging and ecological interests. This was the period in which Julia Butterfly had occupied Luna, a large redwood tree, as one of many ongoing direct action protests against irresponsible commercial logging operations. My commitments at the time came from my interactions with instructors and classmates at Humboldt State University where I was studying deep ecology and photography. My creative work became directed at finding visual ways of communicating sublime ecological and evolutionary interactions among community members–of all species. Eventually, I decided that I needed to know more about the scientific explanations for evolution and ecology. I studied ecology, evolution, and behavior at Indiana University for the next six years.
My experiences as a developing biologist brought me closer to some common threads among biology and art. I became interested in how art and design can inform and communicate scientific research, the role of biological signaling as an indicator of health and/or attractiveness, and the similar role that repetition has in the creation and study of art, genomics, and behavior. Following these threads has led to my current research including a forthcoming article on the relationship between the cinema and genomics (in Leonardo, forthcoming).
Finding a community that shared an interest in and the values of research at these intersections was key. I was fortunate to happen upon the SPARK! Festival in South Kensington in 2000, when organizations from the Royal College of Art, the Wellcome Trust, the Museum of Natural History, and especially the Victoria and Albert Museum were organizing and promoting public events aimed at dialogue and integration. Later, I attended the Art/Science Collaboration Inc. conference in NYC in November, 2001. I was then able to begin connecting within my own country. My involvement in the Leonardo Education Forum has allowed me to, at the very least, contribute to a landscape where new students have a resource for asking questions.
In some respects, I feel that I have strayed from my environmental justice roots. Maybe it has just been a shift in focus from ecosystems to genomics and how the human community recognizes and interacts with scientific methods for portraying nature. For some reason, I’ve always viewed art as a way to incorporate methods beyond the scientific into the social discourse surrounding biology-related concerns. How, for example, can interdisciplinary collaborative groups be innovative or take into account more perspectives. I started to recognize that my role as an artist involves what it called network entrepreneurship, which is not so much the creative aspects of making things so much as it entails the behaviors that allow the transfer of tools, methods, and language from one discipline and community into another (e.g. from biology into art and design or vice-versa). This leads me to my interest in pedagogy. I’m interested in how to develop methods for teaching and learning that promote network entrepreneurship and other ways of building relationships among diverse community members and commitments. This can be through art and science–as the perceived conflict also provides a much opportunity for resolution and mutual cooperation.
