". . . My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity."

This post is by Diego Carrasco Schoch, a faculty member in the School of Dance at the UNC School of the Arts and an ARTStem participant.

It is healthy to occasionally be nudged and prodded so that our perceptions, biases, and habits shift a little. So it was for me as a result of my attendance at the recent ARTStem summer seminar. As a result of four days of discourse regarding art, science, and curriculum, there has been a distinct shift in my everyday outlook. This shift has manifested in such a way that I find myself in a period of greater awareness and mindfulness about scientific ideas that unexpectedly pop up in my life. Have these ideas been popping up all along and I just haven’t been noticing them? I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain that I have encountered more scientific ideas in the past two weeks than I’m use to encountering in six months.

For example, I was recently at the house of a friend’s parents and I caught sight of a book called “50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know” on the shelf and I thought to myself, “Hmm, I should get my hands on a copy of that and take a look.” A day later at another friend’s house I see a book entitled “50 Physics Ideas You Really Need To Know.” Apparently it’s a series. And a popular one at that.

Needless to say, much to the consternation of my friend, I had my nose in the physics book excitedly telling my (unexcited) friend that I just saw a documentary about this guy and “…here he is, right here—Hugh Everett! He was a physics prodigy and used some really complicated math to postulate parallel universes and it flew in the face of these Copenhagen guys and the status quo and nobody really took him seriously until a whole lot later in his life just before he died. And all this was seen from the perspective of his musician son who never really understood science and math. It was really cool!”

I borrowed the book for a night.

I learned that the difference between weight and mass is that weight is the measure of force (gravity) that pulls mass down; mass measures the number of atoms in a body. This was interesting because I talk about the body’s mass all the time in my classes. And, luckily, somewhat correctly. Oh, and Einstein essentially proved energy and mass are interchangeable. But the first thing that actually really resonated with me was literally on page 4, Chapter 1, 3rd paragraph: “… Like graph paper, Newton’s space contained an engraved set of coordinates and he mapped all motions with respect to that grid.”

Geez, thought I, that’s pretty much what I do as choreographer or even as a dancer improvising – I map out motions (and shapes and gestures) and engrave my body onto that particular space at that moment. Reading on, I discover that: “… [Ernst] Mach, however, disagreed, arguing instead that motion was only meaningful if measured with respect to another object, not the grid.”

Wow. Some might say, as the late Merce Cunningham did, that meaning in dance is created by having two or more bodies in space together.

My point is that I am noticing things and taking an interest in things I may not have previously noticed. My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity. (I have other things to say about the notion of creativity, but that’s for another day.) My awareness of the world has shifted slightly and this also is good, since I believe that without these regularly occurring occasional shifts, my thinking would become intransigent and stagnate. What this may produce only time will tell.

—Diego Carrasco Schoch

" . . . the Concept of Parallel Universes Has Been Chasing Me. . . "

This post is by Matt Bulluck, a faculty member from the School of Drama at the UNC School of the Arts and an ARTStem participant.

Parallel Universes

I found the work we did this summer during the ARTStem seminar challenging and exciting. The readings asked of us made me question and think. I loved the documentary film on paper folding, enjoyed the trip to Duke, and got a lot out of our discussions. However, it was the film "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" and Hugh Everett's proposal of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics that captured my imagination most completely. Indeed the concept of parallel worlds has been chasing me ever since we finished the session.

The concept of parallel worlds or alternate realities has been of great interest to many artists: H.G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and Jorge Luis Borges have all explored this in their fiction. An alternate reality and a portal in which to travel into it seems to jump start the imagination and open up new possibilities for artists.

Ten days after our first ARTstem work session, I picked up my copy of Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union." The book had sat on my bookshelf since I picked it up at Border's a year ago, awaiting the moment when I could find time to read it. I liked his novel "The Wonder Boys" and loved the Pultzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," one of the best books of the century.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is a detective story set in a parallel universe. It takes place in the Federal District of Sitka in the Alaskan panhandle, a land which for sixty years has been a safehaven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust and the collapse of the state of Israel. Chabon's remarkable reworking of history in a land where Yiddish has replaced English as the native tongue is a dazzling mystery. Imagine a world where the events of the past have completely
changed the future: there is no Jewish state of Israel and the Federal District is about to revert to Alaskan control. Where is the promised
land?

Last night I took a break "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," stopped thinking about parallel universes, and went to the $2.50 movie theatre to see "Star Trek. However, the makers of "Star Trek" are also interested in parallel universes, and getting away from ARTstem is easier said than done. When I sat in the beat up movie theatre, the smell of popcorn triggered memories of my youth, not unlike Proust and his madeleine. Then, as I watch a young Spock meet an old Spock, I am began to think that there is no getting away from the discussions that Mike Wakeford led at ARTstem. For me, thoughts of parallel universes and alternate realities are everywhere.

In the upcoming weeks, after I finish "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," I am planning on putting together a list of novels, plays and films dealing with science. I am curious as to what alternate reality I would be living if I had not spent four days this summer exploring the concepts we examined at ARTStem.

--Matt Bulluck

Visualizing Knowledge

During the first ARTStem seminar, we talked quite a bit about the power of various art forms to give visual, tangible form to the knowledge that humans discover and create, including scientific knowledge. One of the places this came up was over at Duke University where we visited their immersive virtual environment and sound labs. In both, art (combined with technology)was helping translate one type of knowledge into a different form. Movement into sound, history into image, etc. But ultimately, one of the challenges I think most the group recognized by seminar's end came down to this question: How do we translate the playful, free-wheeling, imaginative conversation that the 4-day event allowed for into something more enduring? Put another way, if we created meaningful knowledge during the seminar (knowledge of each other, of our two institutions, of the different 'disciplines' we represent, how do we represent (i.e. RE-present, present again) and even recreate it in other places, even in our classrooms? That's a tough nut to crack, and one I suspect we'll be playing with a lot in the months to come.

However, one of the other participants, Jason Romney (a sound designer at UNCSA), had a cool idea on the last day of the seminar. He copied-and-pasted the text from some of the group's correspondence and blog material into a "word cloud generator." Word clouds are pretty interesting things, because they effectively take something fundamentally non-visual--a conversation--and turn it into an image. The terms used most often in a conversation (minus the usual suspects of "a," "an," "the," and other mundane words like that) are given more prominence and weight in the image. So a quick look at the cloud tells you a lot about the focus of the conversation. It's not a perfect, seamless translation. But thinking about how this little technological process both captures and fails to capture the intricacies of human conversation is, itself, worth thinking thinking about more.

Using the free online application, Wordle, I tried to recreate Jason's spontaneous image-creation. Here it is as a .jpg. I think it does a pretty good job illustrating the ideas that flowed during the seminar. (image credit: http://www.wordle.net)

Does evolutionary psychology explain why we make art?

On August 3rd, ARTStem participants visited the UNCSA Academic House where Dr. Rick Miller, Dean of the Undergraduate Academic and Graduate Programs, led a lively discussion about how a recent generation of evolutionary psychology is challenging older understandings of the origins of art.