In our modern world of specific academic majors, pop culture stereotypes and sharply defined career paths, artists and engineers are thought to be like oil and water. But some engineers and artists are embracing the differences of their disciplines to find creative solutions to our day’s most challenging problems. And in finding solutions, they’re finding common ground, too.
Visualizing innovation
Genetic engineers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (known as Einstein, for short) in New York have access to vast amounts of biological data. While the information gathered by their computers has the potential to propel our understanding of the human body to new frontiers, there is one problem: there’s too much of it.
For the data to be useful for scientists and engineers, the researchers must be able to see it in a way that is informative, actionable and efficient. To solve this problem, Dr. John Greally, the director of Einstein’s Center for Epigenomics in the Bronx, reached out to Brooklyn-based visual painter and conceptual artist Daniel Kohn.
Known for preferring the company of scientists to other artists, Kohn had previously worked with the team at The Broad Institute for Genetic Research at MIT for 10 years, where, through open discussions, he helped the researchers think about data visualization in new ways. Dr. Greally brought Kohn to Einstein to serve as a similar kind of catalyst.
“A lot of the value of his input is jolting us out of our comfort zone, and making us aware that we can and should be thinking about the representation of data in new ways,” Dr. Greally told The New York Times in the spring of 2015.
Immersive collaboration
Step inside the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, and you’ll find a rather mysterious-looking, three-story cube. Within the echo-free cube is a sphere five meters in diameter and made of perforated aluminum. It is split open so that researchers can walk across a bridge and immerse themselves in a 3-D world created by the interacting lights of 26 high-resolution projectors.
This is the AlloSphere, and it’s the product of artists, scientists and engineers working together to build the coolest movie theater you’ve ever seen. But rather than showing the latest big-screen Marvel Comics movie, the AlloSphere transports you to unreachable places.
You can step inside an atom as you see and hear electrons spin around you. Or, if biology is more your genre, you can traverse the lobes of the human brain as you observe neurological activity responding to controlled stimuli. Even mathematicians can find entertainment: The 140 individual speakers – plus booming subwoofers – allow nanoscientists to actually listen to the 3-D sound of quantum flow.
A 360-degree virtual reality chamber, the AlloSphere is the result of years of collaboration led by JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, who is a composer, professor of the arts and a researcher in content and facilities design at UCSB. Professor Kuchera-Morin sees nearly unlimited potential for the AlloSphere as it reveals the inner workings of our universe on the smallest scales.
The data-based 3-D worlds rendered by the AlloSphere are as artistically beautiful as they are scientifically enlightening. And they are proof that when you dig deep enough, the lines between art and science can blur until there is no distinction.
