This award provides funding to organize a conference on "Research at the Interface of the Life Sciences with the Arts." The PIs will assemble a two-day conference to explore the potential for research and scholarly interaction of science (especially the life sciences) with the arts and the humanities. The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., with the expected co-sponsorship by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The Conference will bring together approximately 25 participants, who will discuss the implications of their work, and/or form collaborations between and amongst themselves, in order to tackle problems in which both the scientific and the arts/humanities expertise are brought to bear on important public issues. Examples of potential discussion topics include how authors engage a person's attentional circuitry and mimic memory; how dancers explore methods by which body movements can be used to demonstrate and investigate concepts of neurobiology, etc. This Conference will bring seemingly disparate disciplines together to find some commonalities and complementarities, in hopes of advancing both fields. Both biology and arts/humanities experts are expected to participate, with a focus on intellectual, and gender and ethnic, diversity. The PIs, one coming from neuroscience and the other from arts/humanities, will identify and select individuals to create the right balance in order to increase the likelihood for productive discussions. The PIs hope that stimulating dialogues would lead to a broader array of tools that both artists/humanists and scientists could use. A likely outcome of this discourse is the use of visual and performing arts and humanities in communicating science to the public. For more information, please contact Dr. Chris Comer at christopher.comer@umontana.edu, or Dr. Ellen McCulluch-Lovell at emlovell@marlboro.edu.
This award supported a conference attended by 24 participants; life scientists, visual artists, choreographers, and literary scholars, held in Arlington, VA. They discussed the intersections among their disciplines, and the nature of collaboration between artists and scientists. Participants were selected because each had worked with or been deeply influenced by a specialist from one of the other fields. The meeting was experimental in format, using both a graphic artist as a facilitator, and a creative writer to react and report on the progress of the meeting. The meeting also was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The particpants represented large universities, small liberal arts colleges, and arts organizations. The participants discussed many questions, such as: Are the interactions of arts, humanities and sciences merely opportunistic? What is it like to listen to another discipline? What are the benefits of collaboration? How can one evaluate collaborative work? How are the methods and creative discoveries of the humanities, arts and sciences alike or different? Is experiential or embodied learning understood as legitimate? What are generative environments for interdisciplinary work? Participants reported on a very wide range of interactions between these areas is currently underway. A closer relationship occurs when scientists and artists contribute as equals and when each is open to changing their ideas, presentations, and teaching methods. The expressive power of the arts can be used to communicate scientific findings and to propel learning. Neuroscience, is offering insights into how the arts affect cognition. The arts "embody" the physical experience of a scientific experiment, as exemplified by recent dance works based on scientific ideas. Collaboration is is a symbiotic relationship, characterized by receptivity, trust, and a fascination with each other’s worlds. As one participant observed, if you ask a big enough question, you need more than one discipline for the answer. "We need alternative visions for they way things can be." The creative process itself was examined by participants from several areas. Though sometimes described with different language, the process was seen as the same for the artist and the scientist. Artists can assist scientists to break out of conceptual blocks to be more creative; artists, in turn, are inspired to discover by the astonishing content of the sciences exploring life. It was stated that scientists use creative methods like artists more than they rely on the "scientific method." Science can articulate "cognitive architecture," and the arts can "complicate our imaginations" by simulating lived interactions. Elucidating the common practices between the arts and the sciences can change the way science is taught. Some environments were found to be especially supportive of art-science collaborations. Small liberal arts colleges were seen as strongly supportive in most cases. Some participants at larger institutions did not feel equally supported. To some extent this can be offset by global networks. Final recommendations included: Create joint programs between NSF and NEA and NEH for funding collabortive work.Continue the work of the group to document collaborations and prepare a publication to describe findings. This work is ongoing.
