Science-Art

[Rough Draft]

After having given one of my scientific presentations, I was given the feedback that when presenting science I should be more formal...that a scientist should almost disappear and only the beauty of the science should remain.  And while I found  that to be profound, I believe that Science and Art are on the same journey: The journey of the Human Identity through Truth and Beauty.  I believe that the Vision of Artwork is what gives Science its meaning and allows scientists to dream. 

In this section I start with very standard forms of science-art and end with much more surreal examples that live in my mythological universe of SOMDEland.  Below is a table of contents whose content you can access by scrolling down. 


1. Science-Art Gallery for the Brandeis Festival of Arts with 3D printed towers of data

I had obtained a small art grant to curate a science-art gallery for the Brandeis Festival of the Arts in April 2015.  All of the images were collected from the data of Brandeis graduate students and professors.  After I resampled them and printed them out, I had them dry mounted.  Because I didn't have enough money, I made  a deal with the art company to do some work in exchange for a lower price that fit my budget.  After the festival, all of the pieces were permanently installed in Bassine. 

In addition to curating the gallery, I also contributed artwork.  The piece below consists of position-velocity phase plots of a blindfolded person learning to balance the machine that I use in my research.  The circle to the left is data from early in the experiment where the person made wild out-of-control oscillations with very  large positions and velocities.  The circle to the right is the same person at the end of the experiment, where they made controlled small oscillations.

During a lab Christmas Party, Sacha Panic and I came up with an epic idea for artistically representing these phase plots.  Below are 3D plots of all 20 trials that I generated from my data.  On the left is the data of someone in the Upright condition, where each layer is a phase plot from a trial. The first trial is at the bottom and the final trial is at the top.  In the Upright, you can see that the person learns very quickly to minimize their oscillations.  In contrast, to the right is the same person balancing in our spaceflight condition where they get disoriented.  You can see that they learn very minimal. 

 Sacha, with the help of Alberto Pierobon and Ian Roy, 3D designed and 3D printed the towers of data and it was displayed in the gallery. 

2. Rock Art expressing simple science concepts behind research

On October 10, 2019, in partnership with the Office of Arts at Brandeis, we organized an event where people drew and decorated rocks with something representative of their research.   Once they finished, they communicated that simple idea which they drew on the rock.  On my rock, I drew the phase plots described above, where the huge circle to the left represents very large oscillations with huge positions and velocities for people when they first get into the machine; and the much smaller circle represents performance after learning, where they learn to minimize position and velocity during oscillations around the balance point. 

3. Physics model of the effect of climate change on island nation of Tuvalu 

I founded and ran a group called Deisortium: The Brandeis Multidisciplinary Consoritum.  One of our objectives was to explore, collaborate and facilitate multidisciplinary projects.  In 2018, I was invited to a class taught by an Arts professor, Aida Wong, at Brandeis on eco-art.  The class was particularly focused on the effects of climate change on the island nation of Tuvalu.  As I listened to how Tuvalu was an atoll, I thought about the work of a Brandeis physics professor who studied granular materials.  So, I connected both of them, and the physics professor, Bulbul Chakraborty, gave the project to an undergrad physics student, Steven Tarr.  

He 3D printed a replica of the bottom of the atoll on which Tuvalu sat.  I believe he used a ceramic 3D printer to create it, so that it would faithfully represent the actual material of the atoll. This was one of his great innovations.  He then assembled a plexiglass box with laser etched holes and put it into an aquarium. I helped some minor manual labor.

He then added a layer of coral and a layer of sand.  Next he filled the aquarium with salt water to represent the ocean. Finally, he 'rained' blue colored freshwater on the top of the model of Tuvalu. The objective was to show the formation of something called a freshwater lens.  

Prior to the completion of this model, I had organized an event for the Science-Policy Club at Brandeis (which I help found), where two professors talked about Climate Policy.  In one of the discussions, they talked about how facts alone could not convince climate deniers and instead other forms of communication needed to be established.  To address that discussion point, I arranged an event during the Brandeis Festival of Arts, where the undergrad talked about his model and the effects of climate change on Tuvula.  The motivation behind this was that when people saw this science-art, it would speak to them more deeply than just facts.  A summary of the event can be found in the student newspaper: http://brandeishoot.com/2018/04/20/physics-and-fine-arts-collaborate-on-climate-change/ 

4. Clothing Art motivated from Science

From the Clothing section of my portfolio, much of my artwork has symbolism and ideas derived from science, biology and neuroscience. 

When designing this patch, I was inspired by the anaphase stage of meiosis and mitosis.  It plays with the idea that while Life and Death are diametric opposites they are also the same entity: an expression of the flow of Energy (where Life and Death have opposite directions of flow necessary to create the dynamic cycles of energy).  In this mythology, when a person (or soul or idea) is born, the Energy-Unity of Life and Death are temporarily mitotically separated by the spindles of destiny.  Eventually, however, when a person dies, these two come back together.  To represent Life, I used a vegetation-green Creature of Destiny with a turbulent pattern of swirling lines (hard to see in the picture).  To represent death, I used an earth-brown Creature of Destiny. Because Death assimilates and reorganizes Life, I used an orderly box pattern.  The spindles that pull apart Life and Death are represented by smaller Creatures of Destiny and are submerged in the directional flow of energy (the blue) which symbolizes the placenta.  In the background, I used my mother's wedding sari because that symbolizes my birth.  The naturally occurring rips symbolize my  mother's (Rita Pandey) difficult journey in raising me.  The sari has a womb-red sky and a fertile green field with germinating Life. 

5. Fashion, Identity and Science

This is part of a larger project on exploring Fashion and Identity to learn more about it, you can check out this page. 

6. Science-Art made from the tumors of my pet rat, shown at the Cambridge Science Festival

I had two beautiful pet rats, name Her Royal Majesty Queen Herpes The First and Her Royal Majesty Queen Herpes The Third and they adventures have now been chronicled in a myth that lives in my mythological universe of SOMDEland.  Sadly, they grew many mammary tumors which were removed by a vet across multiple visits. At first I wanted to destroy the tumors, however I felt that since they formed, some good should come from the pain they caused.  So, I created artwork. 

If you are interested in the process that I used to create the artwork below, go to my page on the Mythology of the Tumors.  As a quick summary, one of my friends sliced the tumor and then stained it with DAPI which florescent dyed the DNA.  The image below is the result.  This image was shown during the Cambridge Science Festival in a science-art gallery. 

To immortalize the tumor, in collaboration with Ian Roy, we 3D scanned the tumor of Her Royal Majesty Queen Herpes The First.  Click on the image, which will send you to a site where you can explore, in 3D the tumor.  Eventually I will use this 3D image in a virtual reality game that I will design with my friend. 

7. The Landscape of SOMDEland

SOMDEland is my mythological universe, where I consume elements of my Reality, then digest it artistically and finally give birth to Ideas that exist in my universe.  Since so much of my reality consists of Science, which is the entire bed of human knowledge since the beginning of humanity, it is often re-expressed in the landscape of my mythological universe.  In the image below, the creature (who represents my subconscious and consumes reality, digest it and gives birth to my universe) is like a transmembrane channel and the walls of SOMDEland are like a semipermeable double layered membrane. 

 Within the body of the creature, ideas from reality are digested and formed anew.  I take inspiration from the images below. I found the Magenta Coral at Brandeis and it is a saprophyte which consumes death and makes life, which is a process that is outlined in the figure below from a research paper.

Here are some more descriptions:

Zzymbrr’s body is a saprophyte (see my previous post on the Magenta Coral which is pictorially represented by the faint lines along the edge of the body) where Reality is digested into new ideas that live in SOMDEland.  In the first step, the real life letters and numbers are collected and broken down by little Creatures of Destiny that are like enzymes. Before the next step, more Creatures of Destiny are added and a byproduct is created that consists of letters and symbols of SOMDEland which represent idea-fragments.  The second step represents the Gestation of an Idea and added to this are more Creatures of Destiny (and more idea fragments are created as byproducts) which leads to the third step: the Birth of an Idea. This Idea is seen leaving the vaginal opening, within a stream of imaginary language, and enters into the Domain of SOMDEland to start its own cycles of Cause and Effect.  Entering into the vagina are sperm that encase old ideas. These ideas are used in the fourth step: the Death of an Idea where the idea is broken apart and used to start the next cycle.  

More examples of how I use science to motivate artwork that represents my mythological universe can be found in the Creatures section. 

8. Augmenting the Human

I believe that Science has become too esoteric and too hidden behind scientists.  I believe that Science  has become detached from the collective Human Identity and the collective dreams that guide the trajectory of Human Destiny.  I feel that Science should be seen as a fundamental right because it is the collective knowledge of all of Humanity.  I also feel that Science Outreach shouldn't just be scientists talking about science but rather it should be regurgitated and fed to the public so that they can use it to create and construct. 

I attempted to do this with my own research in the Augment the Human Party, which contained the 3 domains described above:  Reality (my research on Augmenting the Human through many presentations by different people) and Digestion  (through socialization and artmaking) and creation of SOMDEland (through a ceremony saturated with my symbolism).

One piece of artwork that emerged from the Party/Ceremony was this mannequin that I gave birth to in 2 different pieces. The bottom half represented Technology and the top half represented Humanity.  The audience balanced both pieces on fabric that represented the placenta and then my mother married the two pieces together to create the whole mannequin which represents the idea that we must balance both technological innovation and the human spirit when exploring the Augmentation of the Human.  People placed notes that were generated from the discussion phase. 

9. Research on River Herring expressed as a fun Fish Dance

I met Meghna at an open mic where I had performed a small piece on the beauty of milkweed and Meghna had presented a fascinating butterfly dance.  I initially approached Meghna to collaborate on my rebirth ceremony where I was choreographing dance that represented metamorphosis.  However, once I learned that she was a graduate student studying Alewife (the fish) and did educational outreach, I immediately wanted to do a collaboration that mixed those two themes.  We pulled in Sohini and Shahjehan and our team was created.  For the next year or more we met (COVID really slowed us down) and fleshed out the main scientific facts from Meghna's research that we wanted to express.  Then we went to the  actual locations that Alewife inhabit and choreographed dances to express their life cycle. 

Meghna also designed a small project for WHS students who, after watching the video, actually used real data that she had collected.  Finally, we all performed this dance at the subdrift open mic.  This project was a fun way to hang out with friends and create an educational and funny video on fish research.  It was a really neat way to reach out to the public and grow awareness of Alewife which many people think is just a train station here.