Unfiguring
Experiments in the practice of science and art
One night, some Harvard friends got drunk on margaritas and, as graduate students do when drunk on margaritas, they had a really good idea. The unusual part of this story is that they actually went through with it. Even more, it was an enormous success. They created a conference called “Unfiguring: Experiments in the practice of science and art” at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. It had sponsors and featured a Fields Medal-winning final keynote speaker. Its purpose was to explore how we could escape the bounds of the scientific figure in “multidimensional and sensorial” ways, or as the first keynote speaker called them, “alternative forms of knowledge expression”. They invited an esteemed panel of “critics” to respond first to each talk before opening it up to the audience, creating an environment that was both lab meeting and studio critique. The entire program including organizers and critics can be found here.
Forms of expression shared included dance, performative art, sonification (using sound to convey information, sometimes even by ants with tiny microphones), public art installations of bacteria (pungent was a word used to describe these), poetry, gaming, dance, architecture, documentary film, animation set to original music, weaving, and more. The scant science illustrations were purely for historical context. There was no cover art. I imagined myself an ethnographer of this mesmerizing world but felt completely at home.
Two graduate students from Cornell gave a talk on the fruits of their collaboration between one’s plant biology lab and the other’s lab in the Matter Design and Computation program that studies “the intersections of architecture and science while applying insights from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures.” Byron Rusnack and Ivania Rivera’s work involves 3D-printing a flexible polymer on a cheesecloth-like fabric in the shapes of Arabidopsis thaliana cells to mimic the flower’s initial stages of growth. When removed from the printer, the polymer contours fold into saddle shapes, like laterally conjoined Pringles, giving the overall material an undulating quality similar to the layers of dividing cells in the budding flower.
They continue to experiment with the polymer stiffness to better mimic the cells, which led me to wonder how they will know when they’ve achieved the conditions to best model the biological reality. If they had a large enough 3D printer, could they create a sheet that folded up faithfully into a sepal apical meristem and, still thinking about this through the lens of an erstwhile biochemist, could they experiment on it? But I quickly realized that this was not the point. Because while I was imagining what might make a better model I began finding the holes in my own understanding of exactly how and why it happens this way at all. It occurred to me how amazing it is that the cells grow into a flower instead of a mound of cells like a tumor. It made me wonder whether tumors might grow into shapes that more efficiently stole nutrients the way leaves absorb light if they didn’t have the immune system to hide from. Days later I found myself reading a paper on cell division patterns in Arabidopsis shoot apical meristems, which, with all due respect to plant biology, wouldn’t have occurred to me to do before this talk. It didn’t matter if their model was true. It mattered that it captured imaginations. I was curious.
Alexander Betz earned a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and a Bachelor of Art in art history at the University of Washington and is now getting his master’s degree in art history at the University of Arkansas. Among other things, he studies a Japanese photographer named Shimpei Takeda who made the word exposure a double entendre by sprinkling his photographic film with soil samples from areas around Fukushima after the nuclear disaster of 2011. Takeda reasoned that the energy from radioactive soil samples would have the same effect as visible light on the silver halide in the film, so he sprinkled them onto film in his studio and put them in a light-proof box for a month. In a series entitled Trace, Takeda produced twelve images from twelve different sites that bore a wide range of radioactivity. One image is the moment the first few stars appear on a clear night sky when, spotting the first, you rush to make your wish. Another image—from the most heavily affected area sampled—is the entire Milky Way as seen from miles away from any artificial light, or so it seemed. What better imagery to evoke a sense of wonder and vague terror. I was fascinated by these exposures, wondering if they were more art or data, and when exactly data becomes art.1
I found myself looking again through the science lens, evaluating the images as data. I wondered whether a Geiger counter would be a more accurate if less beautiful way of making the invisible visible, or at least audible, until I imagined the clicking of the Geiger counter as a song. Hearing its mournful staccato notes in my mind, suddenly it was art too. Talking to Alex later, I found out that Takeda did incorporate a Geiger counter into his work. Alex’s talk was called The Photon and the Scar but at least three people (myself included) misread the title slide as The Photon and the Star, only realizing the folly during the discussion. As Alex pointed out, the scars Takeda intentionally made in silver halide symbolized the chemical scars in the DNA of so many tragically affected people. Sometimes these led to scars in their tissues, and sometimes in the hearts of those they left behind.
Every single talk made a strong impression on me, but there was one more that left my head spinning. A Harvard postdoc wanted to use dance to describe her work. I learned that this is more mainstream than I realized when an earlier speaker alerted us to the journal Science’s Dance Your Ph.D. contest.2 I thought back to the time I got my undergraduate chemistry students to act out the hybridization of carbon atoms to form bonds. I guess this was performative art but I wouldn’t have known then to call it that.
Andrea Unzueta Martinez, Ph.D. first came to the US from Colombia to study dance but was exposed to science in college. Now she does both. She has been dancing for 24 years and even made her own Dance Your PhD submission. For this conference, she enlisted salsa dancers to perform her work on biomineralization of oyster shells to the audience’s absolute delight—one audience member asked whether the dancers might be co-authors on her paper. A young listener right next to me asked whether they might develop “a choreographic syntax for chemistry and biochemistry”. I’d had a similar thought, but when I caught up with Andrea after the conference, she shared with me that it had been a choice to conserve aspects of salsa rather than invent a new style because she wanted to honor Latin music and dance “so that Latinos and other salsa dancers could feel represented.” Once again, I'd missed the point.
But really I’ve buried the lede here, because when Andrea advanced to her acknowledgements slide, I looked from a photo of her postdoc advisor to the man filming the presentation like a proud parent and was dumbstruck. Her postdoc advisor, Dr. Peter R. Girguis, not only supported her doing this, he brought his family on a Saturday to cheer her on. I’ve met enough scientists who’ve felt the need to hide their creative practice in order to be taken seriously that this advisor filled me with hope. My own Ph.D. advisor was a painter herself and I never felt the need to hide the fact that I painted at night. Then again I've never been too concerned about being taken seriously. I often wore shoes that I’d painted to lab. But I know that some advisors would see Andrea’s work as a distraction. I’m so glad hers doesn’t.
Throughout the jam-packed two days, my thoughts kept returning to my perennial question of how art can advance science. I have clung hard to the hypothesis that the process of making art will prompt scientists to look at their science in different ways, leading to new questions. However, I have asked multiple scientists and science artists about this, some at this very conference, and though it’s still a small sample size, the data is not bearing out.3 A wise mentor once told me that you shouldn’t let negative results get you down, because it only gets you closer to the truth. These two days gave me three new hypotheses: 1) Setting an intention to use the art process as a way to meditate on assumptions being used while making the art might give way to more flashes of insight along the way. Failing that, then 2) giving scientists who want to build a creative practice into their work not only permission but encouragement to do so will keep more of these people in science, and we need them. And finally, 3) exposing all scientists to science-inspired art, whether they practice it themselves or not, will ignite their curiosity, as it did mine again and again in this fabulous conference.
I should ask Georgia Lupi I guess.
2024 winner — totally worth the watch.
Exception: Ph.D. scientist and 3D molecular animator Janet Iwasa, now on the faculty at the University of Utah has worked for over a dozen years making animations with scientists. They truly have to question every step because they are animating it in such intricate detail, so she has many examples of the animation process leading to new questions and insights