Motivated by conversations with the artist and colleague Bill Gaskins (now Director of the Photographic & Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art) I explore the ways in which artistic practice provides blue prints to improve many of the deficiencies I saw in science practice. Creativity that is central to artists, is marginalized in the science projects and education. Bill and I put our thoughts together in this publication:
Together with the artist Ella Ziegler, we investigate the scientific practice of the maize geneticist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock. We realized that McClintock relied on visual recognition of what maize kernels looked like. Based on these conversations, Ella developed an art project titled BREAK-FUSION-BRIDGE-CYCLE that plays with assemblages of shapes and colors, much as McClintock did with the shapes and colors of maize cobs. Read more about this project here.
Rachel Garber Cole gave her performance “109 Questions to a Dinosaur” in the Plant Science building at Cornell University in Fall 2019. Obviously, a dinosaur must know all about how it feels to get extinct as a result of climate change,- but the dinosaur never answers. Questions is all the audience ever gets. And that is an important point I learned: creating questions is key, and Rachel and I are working on ways to learn from each other, and changing the way science starts.
(event details of her performance)
Lisa Schonberg brought her SECRET DRUM BAND to the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell in Spring 2019. Having several percussionists develop a sound experience inspired by the ecology of bees and ants in the Amazon, provided the kind of disruptive experience that a boring science building would need.
(event details and a video of their performance)
It is exciting to see that a group emerged at the School of Integrative Plant Science, Art of SIPS, which organizes and promotes art events.