Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the 21st Century

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: November 5, 2005 10:29:25 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art  
and Science for the 21st Century
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

November 5, 2005
Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the  
21st Century

By JOHN MARKOFF

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/arts/05lab.html? 
ex=1288846800&en=aa5efaf84e49bac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 29 - As an actor and a founder of the politically  
active Electronic Disturbance Theater, Ricardo R. Dominguez is an  
unlikely faculty member at the nanoscience, wireless and  
supercomputing laboratory that opened its doors here on the campus of  
the University of California, San Diego, on Oct. 28.

However, Mr. Dominguez and an eclectic group of computer musicians,  
computer game designers and nanotechnology artists are very much a  
part of the futuristic research "collaboratory" being assembled by  
the astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute  
for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400  
million research consortium assembled over the last five years.

Mr. Smarr's idea can be discerned even in the architecture of the new  
Atkinson Hall, which is connected via 155 fiber-optic cables to the  
rest of the campus and to a smaller partner laboratory 75 miles away  
at the University of California, Irvine, as well as to research  
centers around the world.

The six-story Calit2 laboratory, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean,  
is designed for 900 faculty and student researchers. Two separate  
wings extend from the main building. On one side is an ultrasterile  
set of nanotechnology clean rooms designed for making devices like  
sensors for detecting pollutants, biological warfare agents and  
cancer cells. On the other side is a new digital media arts center  
composed of auditoriums and computer visualization laboratories,  
where the Calit2 scientists, engineers and artists can display their  
projects.

For Mr. Smarr - who as director of the National Center for  
Supercomputing Applications in the 1990's oversaw the development of  
Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser - this synthesis of art and  
science is vital in light of the role he expects artists to play in  
designing the future.

"Part of the artist's insight is to be able to interpret the future  
earlier than anybody," he said during an interview in the small  
hideaway conference room adjacent to his office. "We regard the  
artist as fully equal with any scientist at Calit2."

That idea, which is anathema to some in the engineering-driven world  
of science and technology, influenced the thinking of the building's  
designers in the San Francisco office of NBBJ, the international  
architectural and design firm.

"We put the clean room and the media artists as close as possible so  
we could see the artists talking to the physicists and telling them  
what to do," said Mark Whiteley, an NBBJ director in San Francisco.

Artist-scientist collaborations include work being done by the  
neuroscientist Mark H. Ellisman and Sheldon Brown, who is in charge  
of the New Media Arts group at Calit2. Dr. Ellisman's group was  
involved in the construction of a wall-size tiled computer capable of  
displaying 100 million pixel images of the brain, making it possible  
to view vastly more information than on a standard monitor.

However, the group found that it needed to design a new control  
language to deal with the huge amounts of visual information, and the  
scientists and artists are cooperating on ideas for visualizing  
scientific information.

Natalie Jeremijenko, who refers to herself as an "artist  
experimenter," is a former member of the engineering faculty at Yale  
interested in how society interacts with and uses toys. A current  
project is to create a pack of "feral" robotic dogs with artificial  
intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego  
neighborhood. The robots could be assigned some socially useful  
function, like searching for or "sniffing out" pollution.

Last year Ruth West became the first artist in residence linking the  
biological sciences and the arts here. As part of the Calit2 Research  
in Computing and the Arts project earlier this year, she unveiled a  
collaborative project, Ecce Homology, to explore the relationship  
between genetics and culture. Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's "Ecce  
Homo," the project explored human evolution by visually comparing  
genes from humans and rice plants. The installation was interactive,  
tracking the hand gestures of visitors standing in the gallery and  
allowing them to interact, using body movements, with an enormous  
projected wall display screen. They were able to discover  
similarities between the portions of the rice and human genomes  
stored in a computer database.

The juxtaposition of digital art with next-generation science and  
technologies like wireless networks, biosensors and optical  
supercomputers gives Calit2 a degree of panache that has largely been  
lost in the American scientific and corporate research worlds in the  
face of financial cutbacks over the last decade.

The project and the new Atkinson building invite comparisons to the  
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, founded by  
Nicholas Negroponte in 1980, which came to define a broad vision  
about the possibilities inherent in computing and technology through  
the rise of the dot-com era.

Now, however, it is possible that the torch of a new technology for  
the 21st century will be passed to Mr. Smarr and his laboratory.

"When I first heard about Calit2, I thought it was Media Lab West,  
but the context is so much larger," said Shahrokh Yadegari, a member  
of the music faculty who also has a degree in electrical engineering  
and is a former M.I.T. Media Lab student.

Having overseen the creation of the Web browser and watched its  
ensuing impact, Mr. Smarr has a good sense of the profound effect new  
technology can have on society.

[snip]

Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>


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