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SOFAlab Part Deux

May 5, 2010

the panel

SOFAlab is a joint project of Hamiltonian Gallery owner and George Mason physics professor Paul So; Helen Frederick, Director of the Printmaking program at George Mason; and Shanti Norris, Director of Smith Farm’s Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery. The general objective, as I understand it, is to explore the ways in which artists and scientists make sense of the world, identifying differences and commonalities and to look for opportunities in which collaborative efforts would be fruitful.

Helen Frederick and Giorgio Ascoli

Virgil Wong

So far, there have been two SOFAlab events. In the fall, Tod Machover of the MIT Media Lab - musician, scientist, composer, inventor of instruments that allow people with very limited muscular control to make music – gave a truly awe-inspiring lecture to a couple of hundred people at the Carnegie Institution. (Gotta say, I left that evening feeling like I waste space on this planet)
The second event was April 23rd at George Mason. (There is a rant which must precede my discussion of this fascinating event: It took me well over an extremely painful hour in stop and lurch traffic to get the 15 or so miles to Fairfax and I cannot understand how anyone lives in Virginia with that every day. It is mind-numbing, rage-inducing and incompatible with human life. Really – why aren’t you all marching every single fecking day in the faces of your legislators in Richmond who are clearly far more concerned about making laws that allow loaded handguns in elementary schools – I’m not making this stuff up - than in doing anything about your real problems?? OK then.)

Paul So and Helen Frederick

The second edition of SOFAlab featured three pairs of collaborators, one scientist and one artist in each. I was entranced by the work of Dr. Giorgio Ascoli of George Mason’s Krasnow Center for Advanced Studies. He is a biochemist and a neuroscientist and his interests center on the relationship between the structure of neurons at the cellular level and their functionality. He and his group make digitally reconstructed neurons, which are highly detailed drawings of individual neurons, each different, each with thousands of branching axions, the “output” branches that connect each neuron to the other neurons it is required to communicate with. Ascoli is just beginning a project with visual artist Michael Iacovone, whose artwork documents the navigation of space in directions mandated by either random or mathematically-driven decisions. While the fruit of the collaboration remains to be seen, I don’t think there’s any question but that Ascoli’s reconstructed neurons are artworks in themselves and hey have inspired me to think about some new work.

reconstructed neuron of a rat

Virgil Wong and Koan Jeff Baysa’s collaboration begins with medical imaging, but of a far more interactive and imaginative kind than an MRI or an xray. Wong, who is frighteningly qualified in both science and art, has created, for example, a medical avatar unique to an individual body that embodies – literally embodies – the patient’s medical records and conditions. You can use the mouse to explore throughout the interior of the body, enlarging and homing in on areas of interest. It is truly astonishing.

Frederick, Shanti Norris, Virgil Wong, Jeff Baysa

The final collaboration, one which has been going on for some time, is the work being done at Howard by Al Smith, chair of the art department, whose long-standing scholarly and artistic nterests involve the visualizing of music, and James Lindesay, professor of physics and founder of the Computational Physics Lab. Smith and Lindesay, whose scientific credentials include a raft of distinguished fellowships and publications, have developed a cross-disciplinary class called "Time as the Rhythm of Experience". They play with one of the central concepts of modern physics - that there is no "objective" time separate from the experience of the moment, an idea that can be traced through contemporary film-making, music and art.

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