“Stepping away from your science…can be a
great way to break down mental barriers and to
think about your question in a new way,” said
Harvard’s Ward. “That might be a motivation
for connecting art and science, because after all,
artists have to break down barriers and think
about [things] in a new way...and we can learn
from them.”
Similarly, Maryam Zaringhalam, Rockefeller
University Ph.D. student and ArtLab founder,
said that talking with artists helps her think
about the big questions at the root of her work.
“Our job is to study a lot about very little. Day
to day, there’s very little zooming out to get a
broader perspective on our work. It’s only every
two to three months that I talk about my work
to someone who isn’t doing it.”
Talking with other scientists, who may be
competitors, has limits, she pointed out. Scientist to scientist, “there’s a guard that goes
up, because you don’t want to get scooped.”
“Scooping” another scientist means publishing
results of experiments similar or identical to
theirs before they can publish them, either by
chance or, sometimes, after finding out what
another scientist is working on and copying the
idea.
In addition to this competitive chill, there can
be pressure to emphasize the practical applications of science to a degree that can feel artificial. Scientists often have to tailor their work to
fit within the constraints of a particular grant,
making explicit how their work will benefit
society and human health to justify funding
with taxpayer dollars. While Zaringhalam certainly cares about these concerns, they are not
necessarily a primary impetus for her research.
As there is “l’art pour l’art,” so there is science
for science’s sake. “Down the line,” she said,
“someone will find a use for [my work].” But the
practical applications of her work are not what
drive her, in part because it’s hard to predict
what those applications might be.
If not the urge to cure cancer, then what does
motivate scientists like Zaringhalam to get
up and go to the lab every day? The answer is
probably different for every person, but that is
the kind of question that artists tend to get at,
Zaringhalam said. “What an artist is asking,”
she continued, “is why you personally care...
[artists] ask you the hard questions, innocently.”
Though it can be difficult to explain, it’s satisfy-
8
ing, she said, to “blurt it out and give birth to
why you’re actually in this field.”
Speed Dating: Collaboration in Miniature
The challenge of articulating her work is
one of the things that Zaringhalam likes about
collaborating with artists. She was surprised,
she told me, by how long it took her to explain
her work, even to other scientists. Wouldn’t
it be the ultimate challenge, she remembered
thinking, to explain her work to someone in six
minutes, as in speed dating? From that conversation, the story goes, the seed of SciArt speed
dating was planted in her mind.
Her dream of getting scientists and artists to
speed date materialized when Julia Buntaine,
science-based artist and founder and editor-inchief of this magazine, agreed to co-host the
event. Buntaine and Zaringhalam signed up
about 20 people and arranged to hold the event
at The West, a bar and café in Brooklyn. The
name of the event was Speed Date//Collaborate;
the drink special was “SciArt on the Beach.”
Despite the gimmicky speed date format and
endless puns, the aim was not romance but professional/intellectual collaboration, Zaringhalam
said.
Though it may come as a surprise, Speed
Date//Collaborate was not the first SciArt
speed dating event in New York. In fact, reporting this story, it was comical how something as
seemingly esoteric as SciArt speed dating took
on an element of “oh, that again.”
Speed dating for artists and climate scientists is one of the many interdisciplinary events
organized by Positive Feedback, a joint effort
that initially began at Columbia’s Earth Institute, New York University’s Center for Creative
Research, and City University of New York’s
Institute for Sustainable Cities and is now
housed primarily at the Earth Institute. Positive
Feedback has hosted four speed dating events
since 2009. In Canada, Toronto’s York University hosted a science-art collaborative speed
dating event in April 2009 (watch the event
trailer here); also in Toronto, the interdisciplinary organization Subtle Technologies, “where
art and science meet,” has had “Speed Networking” events for artists and scientists at its annual
festival since 2011, according to artist Roberta
Buiani, an adviser to the festival.
SciArt in America April 2014