U Chicago Mfa Have to Upload 20 Images?

"Information technology's About Wonder" - Ten Years at ASCI

Arts, Scientific discipline + Culture: Jubilant 10 Years

By Ellen Wiese

Julie Marie Lemon has e'er been interested in revealing what cannot exist seen at first glance. While working on her Principal's thesis at The Academy of Chicago, she examined how images from the Hubble Space Telescope mirror the conventions of oil paintings from the Baroque period. In both the Hubble composites and the paintings, Lemon found, tiny details were made visible. "Deep downwardly," she says, "There are these connections."

These connections—invisible, powerful, and potentially field-altering—formed the basis for Lemon's abstraction: the Arts, Scientific discipline + Culture Initiative (ASCI).

The curricular programs and arts organizations at UChicago focus on innovation—a drive to discover the next great scientific breakthrough, shape the future of literary criticism, or craft a renowned work of fine art. The Academy defines itself by its soapbox, rigor, and commitment to producing the best possible results through critical debate.

Only the civilization of lively disagreement that the University is famous for is only half of the equation. The other component is collaboration, both within fields of report and across disciplines. ASCI, which recently historic the 10-year anniversary of its founding, has championed open up-minded, multi-dimensional, transdisciplinary understandings of the world and supported the collaborative creation of some of the highest-quality fine art, science, and social scientific discipline at UChicago as a result.

"Working with [Lemon] and ASCI over the past decade has produced some of the most memorable & dynamic collaborative programs in my time at UChicago."

—Zachary Cahill, Director of Programs & Fellowships at the Gray Center

Potent Foundations

In 2001, a report authored by faculty, students, and staff established the groundwork for a multidisciplinary arts middle—later to go the Reva and David  Logan Eye for the Arts—and the suite of innovative programs the building would house. Ten years later, while this new hub of arts activity on campus prepared to offer an array of programs, little formalized connection existed between the arts and Stem disciplines. Lemon found herself motivated by a series of constitutive questions: What can nosotros learn by bringing the disparate fields of the arts, sciences, and culture into dialogue? Will examining the spaces betwixt disciplines yield new ways of thinking? How does the exchange of methodologies, tools, specific questions, and curiosities advance our thinking?

The challenge lay in devising answers to these questions at the University of Chicago in particular. At the time, the University offered no sciences that were plainly cross-disciplinary in the way that fields like engineering, architecture, or design might be. And Lemon resisted familiar, cursory answers—for example, a painter illustrating a biology textbook. So, in 2010, she founded the Arts, Science + Civilization Initiative on the principle of bringing together graduate students and faculty from across disciplines and observing the results of their collaborations. Lemon'southward initial role was to find the people whose work and philosophy would speak to one some other—to play matchmaker for connections that could spark something profound.

Julie Marie Lemon, eye, poses with Josiah P. Zayner (left), PhD'13, and Francisco Castillo Trigueros, PhD'13, during their collaborative Chromochord project . (ASCI, 2012-thirteen). Photo: Robert Kozloff

ASCI was charting a new path for trans-disciplinary thought at the University, soon to be joined by programs like the Gray Centre for Arts and Inquiry and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. From the beginning, Lemon says, graduate students were some of the most enthusiastic participants—they were open to new ideas and settled easily into unfamiliar forms and fields of piece of work. Their enthusiasm resulted in the initiative's longest-running and perhaps all-time-known program: the Graduate Collaboration Grants. Awarded yearly since 2010, these grants fund teams of at to the lowest degree ii graduate students of dissimilar fields for a year of sustained work on a collaborative project. With the grant's financial support, participants weave together the unique perspectives offered by their disciplines into a culminating project, aided by staff support, monthly forums, and exhibition, publication, and presentation opportunities. Alongside the institution of the Graduate Collaboration Grants, faculty feedback resulted in a number of programs, symposia, and collaborations in which ASCI acted every bit a forum, amplifier, and artistic partner in the cross-disciplinary piece of work of faculty participants.

From these foundations, the plan embarked on a flow of thoughtful, flexible growth. The initiative, rooted in ideas of experimentation, innovation, and development, held shut to these values as it developed. "[Lemon] was smart plenty to think, okay, we're starting here," says Matthew Jesse Jackson, Professor in Fine art History, Chair of the Section of Visual Arts, and ASCI Faculty Leader, "But so she saw what came in, and she modulated the program to what would work. The program changed to answer to the producers, rather than making the producers respond to the plan. Information technology showed such a caste of respect for early-career makers and thinkers." The Neubauer Collegium and the Gray Center came online in 2012 and 2013 respectively, and faculty would often bring ideas to ASCI to incubate before seeking continued funding from these institutions.

"Working with [Lemon] and ASCI over the by decade has produced some of the almost memorable and dynamic collaborative programs in my time at UChicago," says Zachary Cahill, Director of Programs and Fellowships at the Greyness Middle. "Whether for partner programs that probed the ideals of Nuclear Scientific discipline and artistic responsibility during the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile-one; elaborated the differences and areas of overlap in the sciences and the humanities as information technology relates to what constitutes an experiment; or thought through the scientific facts of time travel in the context of Afrofuturist Art, Literature, and Music, the Gray Center has been enriched by Lemon's expertise in bridging the (mis)perceived divide between artistic do and scientific discipline—thus helping us to have a clearer movie of our earth."

In the first few years, a number of graduate students expressed a desire to engage more broadly without collaborating on specific projects. To that end, ASCI established the Graduate Fellows program in 2014 for students whose work is firmly anchored in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or sciences, but for whom crossing disciplinary boundaries—between physics and music composition, anthropology and visual arts, or art history and evolutionary biology, for instance—is integral to their practice and research. The plan emphasizes points of connexion between these fields; accordingly, Graduate Fellows meet monthly for discussion of their projects, tools, and methodologies. A year afterwards the Graduate Fellows program was established, the Graduate Collaboration Grants expanded to enable inter-institutional collaboration with MFA candidates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Also in 2015, ASCI launched Field Trip / Field Notes / Field Guide , a iii-yr airplane pilot programme designed to develop an interdisciplinary community engaged with Chicago'south vibrant urban environment. A consortium of Fellows from UChicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, SAIC, and Northwestern University built a serial of expeditions, readings, meals, and discussions utilizing the city every bit a unique platform for exchange and connection across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Later on an bookish year of research and urban exploration, each cohort produced a Field Guide highlighting and examining their distinctive approaches to inquiry and practice while "in the field" (all iii Guides are available hither).

In fall of 2016, Naomi Blumberg joined the staff of ASCI as Programme Coordinator and afterwards Assistant Manager. Her background includes positions at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the Chicago History Museum, but what drew her to this role, she says, was the opportunity to mentor graduate and undergraduate students. "We get extraordinary students with really good ideas—oftentimes very big ideas—and the results accept been so impressive and exciting to watch," says Blumberg. "I dear helping them forth the process. I learn so much from the students every year."

Success, Tangible and Intangible

The Phoenix Index (2014–fifteen)

Graduate educatee projects began to experience remarkable success—in the arts and across. "There accept been projects I've seen," says Jackson, "that I thought to myself, 'Wow, that is one of the best things I've seen on campus, period.'"

In 2014, Shane DuBay, PhD candidate in Evolutionary Biological science, and Carl Fuldner, PhD candidate in Art History, collaborated on a project that would eventually become The Phoenix Alphabetize: A New Method in Ecology History . In a survey of the extensive collections of bird species at the Field Museum, the pair noticed that birds collected over certain time periods had noticeably darker feather. By photographing consummate sets of select species, they devised a novel means of tracking industrial pollution based on the relative corporeality of soot roofing each bird; this method provided data dating back decades before coordinated systems for measuring air quality were put in identify. The photographic time-serial in The Phoenix Index are a piece of work of art, a reflection on pollution and the effects of humanity on our surround—and an entirely new, scientifically valuable method for assessing the rate of planetary change. The team's findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and covered by outlets including the BBC and the New York Times .

Dr. John Bates, Curator of Birds at the Field Museum and a fellow member of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, was first introduced to ASCI as Shane DuBay's faculty counselor for The Phoenix Index. Initially, he had no expectations for the project'south scientific bear upon. "Communicating the science to people who are not scientists is an amazing opportunity," Bates says, "So existence able to actually learn something about the science is an unexpected and amazing benefaction." That said, he adds, "It's non about getting science done or getting art done: it'south about the synergy between the ii. You don't know what'south going to happen until you put those two in chat."

Power Structures: Connotations of the Facade in State Architecture (2017–18)

ASCI collaborations take been every bit fruitful between the arts and social sciences. In 2017, Elizabeth Jordie Davies, PhD candidate in Political Scientific discipline, and Ayesha Singh, MFA student at SAIC, collaborated on Ability Structures: Connotations of the Facade in State Architecture . They returned to their hometowns and took photographs and rubbings of monumental government structures: a Confederate monument outside a U.S. courthouse and the Rashtrapati Bhavan, a building used by the British during their occupation of India. By producing big-calibration recreations and photographs of these monuments, they considered the entrenched divisions of power in American and Indian guild and the structural legacies of racism and colonialism. "This is pushing u.s.a. towards these spaces where there are conversations that could be very fruitful to our ain societies," Singh said in 2018. In light of the protests confronting anti-Black state violence over the by year, this piece of work has attracted renewed attention. In a recent article in In Practice , Davies and Singh consider how contempo protests in both the U.Southward. and India have rejected monuments to Amalgamated and colonial pasts and taken upwards new monuments as a challenge to state power.

Even those who were initially skeptical of ASCI have come up around, seeing the success of the program. Many early doubters have become enthusiastic collaborators, including Jackson. "I went through a stage of transformation," he says. "For me, it'southward been centre-opening."

"I really call back that beauty, joy, & marvel should be good enough reasons to pursue what you desire to pursue."

—Tanvi Gandhi, PhD candidate in Physics

Dripping, Creaking, Flowing: Narratives of Hydrological Modify in Antarctica (2018–xix)

Invisible/Invincible: The Bacteria Survival Guide (2017–18)

Randomness and Mindgames (2016–17)

Molecular Movement (2015–xvi)

ASCI in 2021

These days, ASCI takes a iii-pronged approach to its mission of building an "ecology of perspectives." Its graduate student programs continue to provide support and date for students from more than than 25 disciplines. Between 2010 and 2019, ASCI awarded a total of 86 grants to cohorts and individuals. The Collaboration Grants program has awarded a total of $258,000 in back up of 49 collaborative projects among 118 individuals, while the Graduate Fellows Grant programme has awarded $90,000 in support of 37 private grants to six cohorts of Fellows.

ASCI has highlighted the work and accomplishments of these graduate students through a serial of video interviews. "I'thousand always and then thrilled and in awe of how these grad students put so much into their projects, and follow through, and keep to movement on after the program," says Lemon. While the initiative is co-curricular, it is not caste-granting: graduate students pursue their projects out of intense independent interest.

Beatrice Fazio, PhD candidate in Italian Studies, and Tanvi Gandhi, PhD candidate in Physics, make upward one of four teams that received a Graduate Collaboration Grant for the 2020-2021 term. Their project, Dante in the Lab , explores the interplay of contemporary physics and medieval literature past recreating the literary imagery of the Divine One-act in the laboratory. For both, this partnership has led to unexpected insights—and emphasized the importance of collaborations between arts and sciences in full general. "I really retrieve that beauty, joy, and curiosity should be proficient enough reasons to pursue what you lot want to pursue," says Gandhi, "Merely there'due south a more than serious issue, from a practical point of view, where people are losing their trust in science."

"This is my favorite program in the Academy. . .it'southward not only about teaching, it'due south virtually wonder too."

—Dr. Douglas R. MacAyeal, Professor, Geophysical Sciences

In addition to expanding the audience for science and building back that trust, scientists benefit from working with experts in other fields too. Gandhi knows of a robotics research group whose team includes a consulting origami artist. "They carry a lot of knowledge in their feel," she says. "It's actually practically useful. And and then nosotros're seeing a lot of really beautiful collaborations come out of assuasive people to bring their expertise together, rather than trying to invent the wheel from scratch." Finding a shared vocabulary has required both Gandhi and Fazio to dull down and examine aspects of their work through a fresh lens. "It brings such a huge divergence in the way you think," Fazio says. "When I talk to Tanvi, for case, I observe that the way I speak to her and explain things to her as a physicist—it's not simplifying my work, just it gets me to explain my work in a more articulate way, in a way that ane day I will express things to my students."

Dr. Douglas R. MacAyeal, a professor in the Geophysical Sciences whose focuses include glaciology, cryospheric science, and ice and climate, has been the kinesthesia counselor for several graduate projects funded past ASCI, including Scaling Quelccaya (2015-2016) and Dripping, Creaking, Flowing: Narratives of Hydrological Modify in Antarctica (2018-2019). "I absolutely dearest this function of the Academy," MacAyeal says, "Information technology's the nearly vibrant collaboration I've ever had with any other role of the University, aside from being in the trench, pedagogy." The central value of the plan, MacAyeal says, lies in nudging both the scientists and artists out of their "depression energy states." For him, it resulted in a renewal of his perspective as a scientist. "This is my favorite program in the Academy, except for yours truly's program," MacAyeal added with a laugh.

ASCI has also grown into an bookish incubator for UChicago's kinesthesia, supporting and profitable in the evolution and organization of projects beyond the disciplines through collaborations with more than 40 kinesthesia members. Faculty projects include multidisciplinary classes such every bit "Images and Science," co-taught in 2014 past Professor Westward.J.T. Mitchell and Norman MacLeod, and "Exploring the Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts," co-taught in 2016 past Assistant Professor of Medicine Brian Callender, MD, and Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts (DoVA) Catherine Sullivan. The former led to Mitchell's 2015 book Paradigm Scientific discipline: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics , while the latter was recently offered for a second time through the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. Sullivan'southward class was developed as a result of an earlier proposal with longtime collaborator, dramaturg, and performer Assaf Hochman on somatic practices and pedagogies that apply the trunk equally an instrument for inquiry. Later on developing a video annal called the Corporatoreum, they devised a serial of short musical compositions based on movement pedagogies from the Alexander Technique to butoh. "This work would not exist possible without ASCI," says Sullivan. "There wasn't annihilation like the Corporatoreum on campus—pedagogy that conflates somatic do with the histories and methods of the pedagogies nosotros studied."

In 2017, ASCI hosted a residency with Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno, who worked with astrophysicists, cosmologists, and soft matter physicists to visualize cosmological systems and catholic dust. A conversation between Saraceno and MoMA associate curator Yasmil Raymond, co-presented with the Goethe Institut, was included in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and his work with scientists at the University culminated in the video artwork The Politics of Solar Rhythms: Cosmic Levitation , which was function of the 2018 exhibition Card Blanche to Tomás Saraceno: On Air at the Palais De Tokyo in Paris. In addition to specific collaborations, ASCI has worked closely with faculty on several conferences and symposia, including Communicating Science (2014); Fabricating Color: A Multidisciplinary Briefing on Colour and Method (2014); and Discovering New Truths: Exploring the Concept of Experiment Across the Disciplines (2018).

Finally, ASCI conducts a multifariousness of public programming—from video installations and exhibitions to roundtables and creative person talkbacks—with the goal of engaging with and disseminating information to the UChicago community, the urban center of Chicago, and beyond. These public programs have focused on topics as wide-ranging as digital culture, sci-futurism, experimental imaging, and cabinets of curiosity. In 2017, ASCI commissioned a sculpture past creative person and alumnus Dan Peterman in conjunction with the second Chicago Architecture Biennial called Slipping and Jamming: Variable Installation of Z-Forms . Working with the physics lab of Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor Heinrich Jaeger, Peterman utilized granular material research to build a large sculpture in the Eckhardt Center composed of thousands of mail service-consumer reprocessed plastic elements, each cut into the shape of a Z. The column is secured in its stable shape not by orderly arrangement of the pieces, merely by random, disordered configurations that are more alike to a liquid than a solid. In Peterman's sculpture, these concepts of physics, commonly studied at a micro level, take on a human scale, pointing non just to the scientific ideas at play but also the stability and menstruation of invention, production, and generation (check out the public talk with Peterman and Jaeger likewise as the sculpture's installation and deinstallation).

Temporary installation of Slipping and Jamming in the atrium in the atrium of UChicago'southward William Eckhardt Research Centre.

ASCI's unique focus on collaboration betwixt the arts, concrete and biological sciences, and social sciences is just function of the program's boggling success. The residue is built on the attributes the plan draws from all three areas—and the ways it resists classification into whatsoever. "Information technology functionally occupies this undefined anarchic infinite," says Jackson. "That's been an amazing strength for the program, because it meant that zippo was out of premises." ASCI refuses to exist lumped into any restrictive category while maintaining a commitment to improvement—in its evolution since 2010, information technology has redoubled its support of the things that worked, set up bated the things that didn't, and continued to reinvent what it could be. "This is a complimentary space," Lemon says. This ethos results in a rejection of simple ideas or predetermined outcomes: the programme and those involved share methodologies, approaches, and ideas from widely ranging fields, creating a relationship in which each political party is both apprentice and expert. SAIC MFA candidate Meredith Leich, who worked with glaciologist Andrew Malone in 2015-2016 to create a 3-D map of the retreating Quelccaya Ice Cap overlaid on the city of Chicago, highlighted the complexity of idea her project was able to engender. "It illuminated what's actually happening in a globe that's changing in a mode that allows for a greater diversity of reactions than only 'I'm scared' or 'the globe is ending,'" she says (the full-length picture show that Leich created as a result of the collaboration won the video fine art competition MACHT KUNST; Malone presented their work at the American Geophysical Union in 2017).

ASCI cultivates an intentionally welcoming, friendly atmosphere. "You go there to feel that y'all're going to be in a rubber space—with no negative connotations attached to 'condom infinite,'" says Jackson. "It's a place where you can try stuff and talk to people." It is precisely this collaborative, process-centric approach that has led to the program'south success. Many of the students who started their collaborations with funding from ASCI have continued their partnerships later on the program, and piece of work that began in Graduate Collaboration Grants or Fellowships has expanded into the world in impressive ways. Often, says Blumberg, participants "discover this really important bond that turns into friendship, but also turns into long-term collaboration. People continue to piece of work together, and we hear back from them a few years after. It's really heady to meet that information technology comes from this small, risk moment where they run across and they say, 'This is an idea nosotros tin work on together.'" Shane DuBay, the evolutionary biologist behind The Phoenix Index, has continued his work on charting pollution through soot aggregating on bird feathers; he is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biological science at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, his partner in the projection, art historian Carl Fuldner, went on to work in the Photography Department of the Art Establish of Chicago. An independent evaluation past the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in 2019-2020 found that 92% of participants said that the plan had influenced their professional work in the long term.

Ultimately, ASCI succeeds considering it doesn't lose track of the curiosity and surprise of discovery and creation. This is partially due to a concept information technology adopted from the sciences: welcoming productive failure in the procedure of playful experimentation. "Ane of the things that is certainly true in art, simply I'm guessing any scientists volition tell you likewise—not a lot of major breakthroughs come up from people existence angry," says Jackson. "The fact that there'south a little chip of pleasure in it is underestimated as a tool for insight and knowledge. The program is very much cognition-bearing, it's very much related to enquiry, but information technology doesn't necessarily feel or look that way." MacAyeal agrees: "It'southward not only about pedagogy," he says, "It's most wonder as well."

"This is a free space. . . the programme and those involved share methodologies, approaches, and ideas from widely ranging fields, creating a relationship in which each political party is both apprentice and expert."

—Julie Marie Lemon, Managing director & Curator, ASCI

What Comes Next?

In improver to standing to back up and appoint with the extraordinary piece of work of its graduate students, kinesthesia, and public programs, ASCI is looking to expand its programming into new areas. Lemon and Blumberg are developing a version of the Graduate Collaboration Grants aimed at undergraduates; instead of collaborating for a yr, pupil participants from different fields will be paired up for a quarter-long collaboration. While the ongoing uncertainty of COVID-19 makes long-term planning difficult, the pilot program is scheduled to commence potentially as early as 2021-2022.

In 2018, ASCI launched The WATER Project: Research and Cultural Production to address critical international problems related to climatic change. The program is designed to provide a platform for discourse effectually local and global issues related to water and includes faculty and scholars in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Biological Sciences; 26 scientists at Argonne National Laboratory; and artists working with h2o equally a social issue and material. The ongoing projection offers dynamic and far-reaching infrastructure for h2o- and climate-related programs on campus, including roundtables, performances, exhibitions, commissioned artworks, research efforts, public programs, and course offerings. As the WATER Project expands, Blumberg is excited at the prospect of more long-term projects on that scale. "Every twelvemonth is a new beginning of great ideas and new relationships," she says.

The H2o Project is at present in its tertiary year, while the undergraduate pilot program will launch in the adjacent few years. These initiatives will join the remarkable and ongoing piece of work undertaken by kinesthesia and grad students and continue to facilitate insight, research, and chat at the overlap between disciplines. ASCI has ambitious plans for the future; at the same fourth dimension, part of the dazzler of the program is that it's impossible to predict exactly what innovations will result from these collaborations. "You can't even begin to overestimate the potential for those kinds of collaborations," says Bates. At this point, more than 10 years since the program's founding, "it's had fourth dimension to distill exactly what it wants to be," says Jackson. "It's a natural time for growth."

lawsonnaletunt.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.uchicagoartsblog.art/archive/2021/4/21/asciten

Share this post