Jumpsuits & Teleporters
Whitney Dail was born in Alexandria, VA to a Naval aviator and an artist-entrepreneur, and was raised in Annapolis, MD. For five years, Whitney worked as a graphic designer in the comic book industry but returned to school in 2009 to pursue a better-suited Master's degree in Arts Administration. She is currently in the process of writing and researching her thesis on expanding art, science, and technology interactions in U.S. cultural institutions.
Credit: Image by Jonathan Yoerger.
|
|
Search
Additional pages
Twitter feed
Loading Tweet...
Find me on...
Posts I like
-
-
Mars Science Laboratory: How Do You Get to Mars?
So you want to heave a couple billion dollars worth of robotic science...
-
-
“From the belly of the peloton, I can identify the riders in front of me by how they sit on their bikes and the way they pedal. American Chris...”
-
What he is talking about is to common sense: abandon the “grandeur and excelse ideas” that came with decades of blockbusters show, monumental...
-
Orion Nebula
-
Mod fashions from Elle, Mexico.
-
lykke li // i know places (live on the moon)
-
What day is today?
This is an image from a poster in a museum. Should we say things are in order now?
-
Tag Results
21 posts tagged science
Art-Sci-Tech has so much going on in various avenues, areas, and communities. Its complexity makes it difficult to visualize.
There’s the blanket term “new media art.” Then there’s bioart, information art, algorithmic art, genomic art, maker/DIY art, hacker art, eco art, cybernetic art, video art, kinetic art, interactive art, etc. Other areas of experimentation include robotics, virtual reality, gaming, citizen science, and more, which just touches the surface.
I like Andrea Grover’s simple chart trying to explain the areas (above):
…the practice has mostly moved outside rarified institutions and industries (the relationships were too complex and tied to capitalism and results-oriented economics), and into the hands of individuals and collectives (facilitated by networked communication which gave agency to maker culture, the open source movement, peer-to-peer sharing, crowdsourcing, etc.). From there, the types of activities exploded and yielded a variety of subtypes of Artists/Scientists/Technologists.
How would YOU make a map, diagram or chart of the many communities at the intersection of art, science, and technology?
“…an alliance is overdue, and can be achieved through the medium of interpretation. Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science.”
E. O. Wilson, from “The Arts and their Interpretation” in Consilience.
Calling ArtScience Practitioners!
I’m writing my master’s thesis on cultural institutions that foster the art, science, and technology nexus. The goal is to examine how institutional growth within this field has taken place in the United States compared to Europe as well as around the globe, and make recommendations for expansion in the US.
My research involves two survey elements:
1. If you work at an organization (arts- or science-based) that supports this field, please take this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R3BPVCV — there are 22 questions (10 multiple choice and 10 written response).
2. If you are an artist, scientist, or engineer that collaborates and creates work at this intersection, please take this survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8XGC6GS — there are only 10 questions (one of which requires a typed answer).
All information will remain anonymous and used only for academic purposes.
It would be a HUGE help if you participated in the survey or forwarded it to a colleague. Thank you for your help! Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards, Whitney Dail MA Candidate, Arts Administration Savannah College of Art and Design
From the Moon: Mapping & Exploration
I’ve been working on a project with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC - From the Moon: Mapping & Exploration, part one of a two-part NASA-sponsored exhibition and it opens this Saturday! For more information, visit moon.cofc.edu. Also, check out this article in The Post and Courier: Lunar Exploration: Art and Science Interact in C of C Exhibits, Moonfest.
The experience has been a dream come true! For one, I’ve had the pleasure of working directly with curator Mark Sloan and meeting many wonderful people such as scientists from the College of Charleston and South Carolina Space Grant Consortium like lunar expert Dr. Cass Runyon. This week, I’ve been working with Mark to create displays of rare, antique lunar maps, books, and illustrations at the Addlestone Library in the archives department.
Fun fact: Jules Verne predicted that we would travel to the moon from Florida.
I’ve learned a LOT in the process including the history of mankind’s fascination with mapping the Moon since Galileo and the various ways that artist-scientists have studied it. Each day I’ve been blown away by the the ways that people observed and illustrated the moon. Additionally, lunar visualizations have different styles depending on the observer. Some were drawn to look like microscopic organisms and others were modeled such as James Nasmyth’s below.
I can’t wait for the opening reception! Did I mention there’s a moon rock on view from where Apollo 15 landed at Hadley Rille of the Apennine Mountains? Apollo 15’s storyline is followed throughout the exhibit. There’s also a spacesuit glove, meteorites, and more. The exhibit is both artistic and scientific. In the gallery is a small theater room with a film collaboration by artist John Reynolds and composer Lee Donaldson. If you’re in Charleston, it’s a must-see.
The Arts as a Scientific Tool
This week’s thesis research has involved reading scholarly works from Edward Shanken (New Media Historian), Brigitte Steinheider (Psychologist with a focus on interdisciplinary collaborations), and Robert Root-Bernstein (Physiologist with an interest in art-science interactions). Generally, I’ve been reading about interdisciplinarity. However, these individuals believe that artists are capable not only of anticipating scientific breakthroughs, but contributing to research and development for innovations. I can’t stress enough how important this nexus is.
In a 1997 article, The Arts’ Unsung Role in Supporting Science, Root-Bernstein explains how some scientists utilize the arts as scientific tools. He briefly mentions the influence of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and Kenneth Snelson’s tensegrity structures. Bucky’s patented domes are made of lightweight but strong and efficient materials advantageous to sustaining maximum volume. Root-Bernstein writes:
Fuller’s geodesic domes can be used to describe not only architectural buildings and soccer balls, but also the structures of viruses and a whole new class of recently discovered chemicals called “buckminsterfullerenes,” commonly known as “buckyballs.”
A microscopic look at Buckminsterfullerene (via).
Tensegrity, a term coined by Fuller, is a structural concept invented by Kenneth Snelson. Snelson describes it as “floating compression” where it balances tension with wires and compression with rods. He was a student of Fuller’s briefly at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1948 where he created sculptures using this design. Fuller then adapted Snelson’s invention. The tensional integrity allows for the structure to bend and move without breaking apart. This concept is also found in cytoskeletons of human cells as discovered by the biologist Donald Ingber. Tensegrity structures are apparently being applied to space exploration now, but aside from some journal articles, I couldn’t find any photographic documentation.
Kenneth Snelson, Needle Tower, 1968. Photo: I. Peterson (via).
The crossover is expansive. I’m excited to explore it further in my thesis to demonstrate the ways art-science collaborations are improving research with creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. There’s a wealth of information on this kind of work, but it’s often hard to find. So far I have a three-inch wide binder that I’m using to catalog my research and it’s almost full. I’ll keep you posted!
More About Tensegrity: Tensegrity, R. Buckminster Fuller (1961). Kenneth Snelson, website. Cells as Tensegrity Structures, Donald E. Ingber & James D. Jamieson (1985). Tensegrity in a Cell, Children’s Hospital Boston.
Thesis Progress
This week was tough. I had a meeting with my committee chair about the work I’ve completed thus far on my thesis only to find that I was off-task; my new direction was too specific to NASA. The point of the Arts Administration Master’s thesis is to make the research specific to the field of arts management—take the subject of art-science collaborations and make it applicable by explaining the ‘lessons learned’ for other organizations working in the area. This revelation ruined any productiveness for the next two days. Today, I’m back on track with a breakthrough. I now have three case studies to conduct—including NASA. The working title is: Making Space for Art-Labs. I’m interested in the originality and possibility of art-labs for derivative outcomes.
Luke Murphy Lecture
Luke Murphy, Certainty Shelter, installation shot (via).
Canadian tech-artist Luke Murphy (now living in NYC) visited SCAD on Thursday to talk to the Painting Department about his digital art. His work is non-narrative. It explores “disembodied digital line” and a completely aesthetic use of digital media using algorithms and programmed code. Interestingly, Murphy said that the dividing line between traditional and new media art is randomness. This is the basis for his work, which he says gives digital art a touch of ‘naturalness’. He collects Geiger counters and uses them in reaction to uranium glass objects to produce random, unrepeatable visualizations. Take, for instance, his piece Barney’s Next Step After Canvas. This is, of course, a result of one interaction with a radioactive object so it recreates Barnett Newman’s zips inspired by the painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51). While I enjoyed his humor and experimentation, I’m not sold on a fixation with randomness. Art of this nature, in my opinion, is more intelligible when it has a greater purpose for interacting with science. Also, Murphy started this work in the early 1990s and his aesthetic hasn’t really changed since. It would be interesting to see the results of a collaboration with more skilled programmers.
