viz.

Image Credit: Aaron Chevalier and Nature

H/T to The University of Texas at Austin

Next month, I’ll be posting an interview with fellow Austinite Zack Booth Simpson, a video-game programmer, artist, and part-time research fellow at UT’s Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. On the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” lecture, in which Snow described a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between literary and scientific cultures, Simpson’s eclectic body of work suggests the value (and urgency) of a new synthesis.

Simpson’s ten-year-old company Mine-Control fosters collaborations among programmers, artists, and scientists on art exhibits that allow viewers to explore scientific and mathematical themes, from RNA-folding to fractals. For instance, “Moderation” draws on the ecological message and visual motifs of the classic anime Princess Mononoke. As Mitch Leslie explains, "How fast you walk around a pool projected onto the floor determines whether the virtual plants and other life that sprout in your footsteps thrive or die out. Walk too fast, and the virtual ecosystem dies out.”

An Austin Chronicle review of “Moderation” asks, "Can artists really modify behavior?" If so, these visual arguments must rethink the conventional relationship between rhetor and audience in popular science communication, which often takes a patronizing top-down approach. Like Satre Stuelke’s Radiology Art, Simpson’s art installations, which draw on his gaming background, challenge elite access to the tools of scientific investigation; in doing so, they offer a compelling invitation to see. Like Jean Painlevé’s nature films or Ernst Haeckel’s radiolaria drawings, they also feature an element of whimsy and playfulness.

In 2004, Simpson talked his way into a UT biology lab, which went on to develop an award-winning method of bacterial photography, manipulating microbes to act like the light-capturing pixels of a digital camera (Simpson’s colleague, Dr. Andrew Ellington, is pictured above using the technique). Last year’s profile of Simpson in Science notes that some critics might label him a “science dilettante” for his unconventional entry into the arena of scientific research, bypassing traditional channels of academic credentialing. If this term might also signify an intellectual curiosity and openness that takes one beyond disciplinary borders or left/right-brain categorization, then I say, hurrah for amateurs. Long live science dilettantism.

Look for a conversation with Zack Booth Simpson in January.