Crossing stars and Intersections: A Reflection on Art and Science

Art and science. Two seemingly unrelated disciplines on other sides of the world—no, galaxy.  Finding a link seemed farfetched, which I guess brings us to today’s thought of figuring out that, “Hey, they really are similar in some ways!”

Enter: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. We learned about rovers, the lives of scientists, how things were made and which cafeterias had the best burgers. We learned about Mars: how they map it, its atmosphere, its surface, distance from the Earth and its time relative to ours. We saw how the artists of JPL bring simple knowledge to the public through short animations and graphic design concepts that advertise the planets as vacation destinations. We were given the opportunity to pick some of the greatest minds in science. There was nothing that we didn’t know beyond the parameters that we could.

Enter: Janna Levin. One of the most incredible speakers I have had the pleasure of listening to, to this date, I believe that her talk is the auditory equivalent to the intersections of art and science. Why? Because she has a way of creating examples about her works with black holes and working within limits that is understandable to the average person using creative example that create a mental picture in the listeners head. Levin does not describe herself as an artist, but her ability to create mental pictures of complex physics says otherwise.

So how does art and science intertwine? Both start with a vision, develop a process and produce a conclusion in which time varies. In Janna Levin’s talk about the Mobius Strip, we can compare art and science to the glove that goes in right and comes out left. At its core, art and science are both gloves—they have a purpose and have to think creatively in order to come to new conclusions or come up with new questions about the universe or their crafts. The only difference is that in the end one comes up with a new formula, equation etc., and the other has a new installation, painting etc..

For my final project, I was inspired by our lecture at JPL about the gullies and our quest on Mars to gather samples of the Earth in order to find out whether life was viable on the red planet. I wanted to take that concept of gathering samples from Mars and that lecture on gullies and combine them to create a piece that reflects that. In my piece I wanted to convey a sensibility that we had taken back a sample of a gully from Mars and held it in place in a large reddish brown rectangle petri dish that we have zoomed into.

Art and science from a distance look distinctly different, but up close it seems that they aren’t as different as many would think. In this class we have been given so many amazing opportunities to visit once in a lifetime places, meet once in a lifetime people, and learn lifetime knowledge. Experience isn’t everything, but it sure makes a hell of a difference. It seems that art and science aren’t a galaxy away, but are instead crossing stars soaring towards each other perpendicularly; meeting not at a point… but at an intersection.