ASU's Biodesign Institute, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts team up on 3 diverse projects ranging from dance to dementia

Artist vs. scientist. Right vs. left brain. Creativity vs. stark logic. When the seemingly separate worlds of art and science collide, will they produce chaos or a masterwork?

This semester, in a new “Science Exposed: Bringing Science to Life through the Arts” initiative, a dozen of ASU’s Herberger Institute artists and Biodesign Institute scientists are about to find out what happens when art and science collide.

Three diverse projects now underway may give audiences pause and challenge their intellectual and emotional ideas about science. 

“They certainly have inspired new ways of thinking among scientists and artists alike,” said Dianne Price, Biodesign Institute director of communications and marketing.

“The lightning-quick advance of science and technology can make understanding science nearly impenetrable for those of us not in the lab every day. At the Biodesign Institute, we consider it a privilege and a responsibility to engage others in our work. Our goal with ‘Science Exposed’ is to transcend sometimes alien scientific language and communicate with sound, movement and art.”

Movement can evoke how the body labors through the ravages of cancer. An original, orchestral score can give listeners a new way to understand the minds of those afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Students at ASU’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering are grappling with the social implications of genetic engineering as part of an international Biodesign Challenge competition.

For artists, designers and scientists, these projects are a chance to guide students and challenge them to dive deeper into subjects with the folks who are at the front edge of knowledge, and to stretch everyone’s skills in new directions.

“Our faculty mentors are great examples of the ‘new American artist’ at ASU, said Tamara Underiner, associate dean for research for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. “They’re at the top of their artistry and craft, but they’re not content to develop that craft in isolation from other disciplines or indeed the world itself, and they’re modeling for our students a new way of being artists in the world.”

Together, they may very well change our perceptions of the prevailing cultural norms, myths and stereotypes of both the artist and the scientist through the creation of indelible works of art.

Contemporary movement, dance and theater

Liz Lerman, a world-renowned modern dance choreographer and MacArthur Fellow, is leading the dance collaboration, engaging tools of movement, performance and media. Lerman and her students are meeting with a handful of scientists from Biodesign to discuss and better understand the motivations behind their research.

“I want to give my students an opportunity to see how personal various subject matter can be, even when the scientific jargon may be difficult or quite esoteric,” she said.

She has two overarching goals for the project.

From the perspective of dance, theater and performance, she wants her students to “realize that there is no subject matter that they cannot take on. I want them to see that sometimes you have to tell other people's stories, that the stories of our time may live in science,” Lerman said. “On the science side, showing scientists the creative process may affect not just their communication, but the way they think about reaching the public or even what’s important about their own work.”

Charles Rolsky, a graduate student in the Biodesign Center for Environmental Security who is working with students in Lerman’s class, agrees.

“I thought I was simply going to be discussing my work and fielding questions,” Rolsky said. “After meeting with the professor and students in the class, I am now thinking so much more about how to find and utilize creativity and imagination within my own research. How can I find creative ways to connect people with what I am doing? How can I display this data in a different way, which may reach more people and open more doors into their minds and hearts?”

Lerman’s students have been shadowing scientists in their labs at the Biodesign Institute so they can better understand what motivates the research and what can be made meaningful to the public. The students are crafting unique site-specific performances that will animate the research, bringing complex subjects to life — such as the interpretative dance routine of scientific research pictured at the top of this story.

A neuro-classical composition

As part of Herberger’s new Design and Arts Corps, graduate student composers Stephen Mitton and Zachary Bush are spending time at Biodesign in residency at the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center. The composers are learning about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia with lead neuroscientists Diego Mastroeni and Paul Coleman. From this very intimate look into the science, the composers will construct a symphony of the brain.

“Artist and scientist are both wandering minds, always searching for the unknown,” said Mastroeni.

“Most often what musicians and scientists find in their investigations are not planned. The unknown often illuminates new directions for research or music. Maybe it’s a crescendo where a decrescendo was planned, or sequencing the genome for a specific polymorphism and finding another.”

“Has this surprised me?” he continued. “No. What surprises me are those who cannot see the overlap between the disciplines. Pursuing inquisitive scientific hypotheses in concert with musical talent is the kind of collaboration that brings humanity to science. Science is often not approachable, but music can bridge this gap."

Graduate composer Mitton may have just the right mind-set required to decode complex scientific information and bridge the gap Mastroeni mentioned.

“I receive a lot of inspiration from biological processes, natural phenomena and scientific inquiry. When I learn something from one of these areas that catch my attention, I often find myself imagining how I can translate that concept to music,” Mitton said.

Movie starring George Lopez, Nia Vardalos uses innovative model to get made, with ASU students on crew and professor at the helm

On Friday, the film industry will see an unprecedented event with the premiere of “Car Dogs” at Harkins Theatres across the Valley: It’s the first time a film has been financed, made and released in a single, non-Hollywood locale, according to the film’s director, Adam Collis.

Collis, a professor of film in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, said, “It’s a movie that’s written by a Scottsdale native, it’s set in Scottsdale, shot in Scottsdale, by students at Arizona State University and being exhibited in Phoenix’s own Harkins [Theatres]. … That is a bona-fide, innovative model for releasing a film.”

Collis said it was the culture of innovation that thrives at ASU that inspired him to take such a bold, new approach, leading to the creation of the Film Spark Feature Film Internship Program.

The idea for the program came to him in 2009 after his students’ rave review of a video-conference session he arranged with the cinematographer of “The Hangover” films. Since then, Collis has connected ASU with four Oscar winners; five Oscar nominees; three major studio chiefs; the presidents of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America; the producers of “Batman Begins,” “The Help,” “Star Trek,” “Requiem for a Dream,” “Foxcatcher,” “Moneyball,” “Boyhood” and “Dazed and Confused”; and many other active film-industry professionals.

“It’s an entirely new way of making movies through a teaching model for aspiring filmmakers,” Collis said.

Video: 'Car Dogs' red-carpet premiere Monday in Scottsdale

“Car Dogs” stars Patrick J. Adams (“Suits”), comedian George Lopez (“Lopez Tonight”) and Oscar nominee Nia Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”), with a special appearance by Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer (“The Help”). The plot centers on car salesman Mark Chamberlain (Adams), whose team has just eight hours to sell hundreds of cars to earn a new dealership. As the clock ticks down, outrageous tactics, shady tricks and hilarity ensue.

Work on the production commenced in summer 2012 when Collis and former ASU film professor F. Miguel Valenti, a producer on the film, introduced students to the “Car Dogs” script, breaking it down to its budgeting and production elements. After Collis spent a year securing independent funding, the film was finally greenlit and shot over 21 days in summer 2013. Some 271 students applied for jobs on the crew, of which 85 were given internship opportunities in the form of a 10-week, one- to six-credit class.

“It was a lot of fun with the cast and crew fully understanding that this film was in conjunction with the ASU Film Spark Program,” said Janaki Cedanna, ASU clinical assistant professor of film who ran post-production. “As a result, there were teaching moments every day, and it created a fun and exciting atmosphere.”

Actor Chris Mulkey plays the father of Mark Chamberlain in “Car Dogs.” When filming began, he wasn’t aware there would be students working on the crew. He remembers telling Collis, “This crew seems really young,” but at the same time being impressed by their professionalism.

Collis told him they were ASU students.

“I said, ‘They're amazing. They're doing great.’ They helped me run my lines and learn my stuff. It's a great program at ASU,” Mulkey said.

Film Spark has produced three feature films since 2012: “Car Dogs”; “Justice Served,” written and directed by Marvin Young (Young MC), which was shot in the summer of 2014 and will be released this year; and “Postmarked,” a dark comedy written by ASU Film Lecturer Gene Ganssle and playwright Ron Hunting, which was filmed in the summer of 2015 and directed by Ganssle with support from ASU (Ganssle said the production is working on a deal for distribution to release the film later this year).

Herberger Institute artists, students work with scientists and big data in multidisciplinary projects

Microscopy. Big data. Seismology.

These are just some of the tools faculty and students at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts are using in their research and their work — work that also gives back to technology, science and other disciplines outside of design and the arts.

“The multidisciplinary environment of ASU and the energy and curiosity of the Herberger Institute faculty have fused to create this incredibly rich environment for the intersection of the arts and sciences — and beyond,” said Jake Pinholster, associate dean at the Herberger Institute. “We are rapidly moving to a place where design, the arts, the sciences, engineering and the humanities are drawing from one another to solve big problems and find new areas for exploration.”

“The art and science collaboration is an opportunity for art students to become exposed to areas of science to spark new concepts for their art as well as to open their mind to utilizing new techniques and materials,” Beiner said.

In 2015, the Herberger Institute’s School of Art partnered with the ASU ­School of Life Sciences (SOLS) for Sculpting Science, a project where art students worked with faculty in the SOLS Electron Microscopy lab to create works of art that represented electron microscopy images of various materials, from plant parts and pollen to sludge and fired clay pieces. The artists received inspiration for their art, and the scientists saw new ways of presenting their information and communicating their work.

“It was so successful that I decided it needed to be a class,” Beiner said.

The new Art 494/598 course expands on the collaboration with Robert Roberson, associate professor in the School of Life Sciences, and using scanning electron microscopy scans. Students visit multiple labs and research collections in the School of Life Sciences and hear professors present their areas of research.

“In this ongoing relationship, the art students will translate new scientific hypotheses into visual imagery,” Beiner said, “and the scientists will gain rare insight into what their research could look like as real 2-D or 3-D objects.”

Roberson said he’s excited to continue working with the School of Art.

“Collaborations between scientists and artists can result in a beautiful piece of art for the artist and a means of communicating for the scientist: a win-win situation,” he said.

In the same way that Beiner’s students translated scientific scans from the Electron Microscopy lab into sculpture, Jessica Rajko uses dance to present big data beyond its purely technical aspect.

Big data is full of numbers and databases, charts and graphs, terabytes and gigabytes. But when Rajko, an assistant professor in the ASU School of Film, Dance and Theatre, looks at big data, she sees art. Her latest work, “Me, My Quantified Self, and I,” which premiered Feb. 10 at Unexpected Art Gallery in Phoenix, is the culmination of the past two years she spent researching big data.

“I was interested in how we make data tangible so that we can start to build meaningful tangible metaphors about humans’ relationship to data,” Rajko said.

Rajko’s research started with a project called “Vibrant Lives,” funded through seed grants from the Herberger Institute and the ASU Institute for Humanities Research. Rajko and her collaborators built interactive installations where people could feel their own data. In one installation, guests plugged their mobile phones into wearable devices that provided haptic feedback when they scrolled through their information, so they could feel how much data they were using. 

“We were really interested in human experience of data,” Rajko said. “In this research we realized more and more how much people are implicated in big data infrastructures, because really big data is about people. It’s about human activity.”

One way her piece aims to make data feel less elusive is with the example of a giant 20- by 20-foot hand-crocheted net. Through a grant from the city of Tempe, Rajko enlisted the Tempe Needlewielders, a volunteer organization that creates and donates handmade items to local charities, to crochet objects onto the net during the performance.

“I really wanted to think about metaphors for data that more accurately reflect what data feels and looks like, which is messy and improvised,” Rajko said. “Having these women crocheting and building and growing this net live through the performance harnessed a lot of what I see as the behaviors of data.” 

By creating these new metaphors and exploring the everyday experience with data, she’s reframing big data, both for a new audience and for those inside the bubble.

“Technology always feels like an insider’s game — we often feel like you have to be a computer scientist to understand,” Rajko said. “The arts in this particular case offer a different type of dialogue around technology, one that feels like it doesn’t talk at people but includes them in it.”