Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Denise RQ
Today, the renaissance that we're experiencing
in art, science, and technology is over 500 years in the making.
I'd stretch it to millennia.
And it aims to do one thing, which is to integrate all of human knowledge
through collaborations that lead to endless innovations
in all fields.
Innovations that can help improve the state of the world
and also create a sustainable future.
To me, that's a future
that actually we can work together to sustain at any level.
And innovations that are coming out,
creating whole new fields of knowledge like nanotechnology and nanoscience.
You've probably heard about these.
They cross all different fields.
They're integrating knowledge in every way.
They're working at scales that are unimaginable,
smallest things, atom by atom,
and creating all kinds of new structures that will be useful for engineering
and maximizing everything from fuel cells to batteries to bioengineering
to the way we treat cancers.
What I'd like to talk about
is the fundamental process that underlies this ArtScience
and it was summed up, I think very beautifully,
by a science fiction author, Isaac Asimov,
and he said, "There is an art to science, and a science in art,
and the two are not enemies;
rather, they're different aspects of the whole."
And we need the whole to look at the big picture of nature,
to understand how nature connects everything,
and we need the whole, using our whole brains,
every aspect of what we've learned, and [how we] grow.
We need all of that in order to transcend our compartmentalized ways of thinking
about the world that tend to hinder our development,
hinder the connections and relationships we make
because we listen very, very different to each other.
So the essence of this is going to be focused on that understanding.
So those slides you see here
is one of the best inventors and innovators we know, da Vinci.
He was one of those quintessential ArtScientists,
who literally embodied and envisioned and built his innovations
inspired by nature, and I use him, we all do.
We go back to innovators like this,
that in fact, never mind that he looked and anticipated things like the helicopter
and hydraulic constructs that he used for waterways, grist mills, and so forth.
What he really taught us that was so valuable,
that we need to leverage and build on, is literally how to open our minds.
That's the first thing, and how to challenge our curiosity,
and also how to expand our imaginations, not our egos, our imaginations,
and how to be creative as critical thinkers,
but most importantly,
how to heighten our awareness of the world around us and ourselves,
and he did that in drawings, paintings, and everything.
And he's one of many, and I just told that example.
There are thousands of da Vinci-likes that are out there in every field
that are tying information together and growing beyond it.
So those are not simply good habits of mind,
those are actually skills and things that we need to actually do,
what ArtScience is about,
which is about connecting, again, integrating information from all fields.
Why?
To improve the human communication piece,
because that, in turn, makes more effective collaborations
where people can begin to understand each other
and know that when they take information from one field into another,
it's okay to understand that it's going to be messy.
Parts of it are going to be confusing,
and it doesn't have to be brilliantly clear.
You can muddle and grope, like Einstein did.
So pulling from all these different areas and understanding,
we have the World Wide Web and those kinds of inventions now,
to actually leverage that.
Look what's going on there.
If you think about ArtScience
and you want details of where is this stuff.
Well, it's in everything; it's ubiquitous,
because in fact, if you look at all the technology that we've designed,
including something as sophisticated as that,
we're creating and sharing new knowledge at light speed now, intuitively,
and that's our future, so it's how we build and grow from that.
I want to introduce you to the one idea,
the one process and practice that I come back to always
is something I call "ArtScience,"
but it has many different names.
It's like Joseph Campbell's
"The Hero with a Thousand Faces," and so forth.
It is that, in fact, when people are going through a set of these steps
of connecting, discovering, inventing, and applying knowledge
over and over again,
metaphorming is simply a word
of seeing everything in the world as a metaphor,
as a story, a symbol, a hypothesis,
as something that you can use in the most fluid way,
that everything is metaphorical and symbolic,
and you can use it in any way to transform
the information and ideas you have
in a personally meaningful, productive, and purposeful way.
That's what this process is.
It builds on, it's derived from, one of the greatest generalizations,
that is the scientific method,
the generalization about the creative inquiry.
The scientific method, which we use in many different ways
to create new knowledge, and then confirm it or not,
and we all see examples of that
when you're watching CSI, right?
Crime scenes investigators, and you're testing things,
and you're experimenting constantly, and you're looking at things.
But in essence that process is something I want to emphasize here,
and I want to just simply reference a couple of pieces
and stop and walk you right back to the bigger picture for me,
starting with my own work.
I would make these art installations
and I'll show you five of them very quickly.
That 130-foot piece with 515 images called "Thought Assemblies"
was trying to look at the nature of creativity,
how similarly as human beings we create and innovate
and discover and communicate
not differences, but actually looking for the similarities.
And you sort of need roller skates to go through that
and to get up close and back and forth to see it,
but that sprawling piece, as large as it is, is tiny
because it's looking at structures and events happening
about the creative process itself that are meant to say
when you look at it and say, "Gee, I kind of think like that,"
or, "I put ideas together like that."
And that's another installation view of that "Thought Assemblies" piece.
The second one is called "The Brain Theater of Mental Imagery,"
and I had to invent new technology that MIT patented for me
to make those giant monoprints.
That one is about 100 feet high.
But the piece is trying to look at and delve into
other hidden dimensions of the creative process,
namely, our more destructive potential.
I was trying to figure out why it is
that we're so good at tapping our destructibility
and terrible sometimes at realizing
and trying to draw out our creativity.
So this piece, this giant monoprint
that is representing sort of abstract images of the human mind
and you see examples on there with layers of paint and objects
and holograms on there,
are looking at a pattern that we have done
for millions of years,
namely, what we imagine, we build; what we build, we use.
It's a statement that applies whether it's poetry or it's advanced weapons.
And this is looking at what are the biological roots of that tendency,
that ability to manifest these things,
and here is a hologram that is a slice of the human brain
and its got this very hostile figure that's popping out, leaping out,
from this area of the brain, like the heart of the brain,
and sleeping on its side is a Buddha.
You can see a very calm image
on that temporal side at the bottom of that image,
and another that's restrained.
But you have these dynamics going on,
and so I use these mind icons to raise questions,
these brain-shaped mind icons to raise questions
about our creative potential.
This other installation is called, "Radical Futures."
It's called The Neurosphere,
and it's 200 feet long; it envelops you as you walk around in it.
I had built and made these structures in there shortly after the first Gulf War,
and started that over in Israel.
Those structures that look like steel rods kind of in the corners,
those are representing the essence of the human presence
if you removed age, race, and gender and all that stuff,
and you looked at the essence of our humanity is.
I asked three fundamental questions of those who experienced this exhibition.
The first question was, "What do we want our civilizations to become?"
The second is, "What vision do we have for education systems?"
And the third is,
"What would we like our sense of humanity, or ethics, or values to be?
What are those things?"
Those little beats you see along the top are measured in seconds or milliseconds,
and really, you immersed yourself and kind of walked around there.
Well, literally a day before this show opened
on February 26, 1993,
there was a huge blast that ripped through
ten blocks away from the World Trade Center.
That's where the gallery at the Ronald Feldman was.
And it was like a pre-9/11 call.
It was like you could hear Bob Dylan saying,
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
You could just feel what was going on there.
And this was a reflection about those experiences
that I had in building and making these objects
that were meant as a contemplation center,
as a place to ponder these fundamental questions,
to raise these questions about where our sense of humanity was going.
This fourth installation was called "Changing Minds,"
and it was inspired by a statement that H.G. Wells said in 1919.
He said, "The future is a race
between education and catastrophe."
What he was envisioning at that time, he was coming from the Victorian age
and the period of compartmentalizing knowledge,
and thinking in a very divide, compartmentalize, specialize mode,
and this exhibition was a reflection
of how we can constructively work differently,
and learn to learn at an accelerated rate,
which is what we are all faced with now.
And that jumble of wood that you see there,
that actually looks like a beaver's lodge,
it's about 4,000 pounds of raw lumber,
and inside it, was this cube.
You could go in there and it was like going inside the eye of a hurricane
and you felt very, very calm in there.
So instead of running from chaos,
the invitation was to embrace it, to experience it,
to understand the complexities in chaos that we are experiencing today,
all the unpredictabilities that are going on today.
How we cope with it, how we manage it, that is our world.
So those disconnected, disassociated elements,
that's what those wood pieces were,
and as you looked at the mind icons,
those brain-shaped icons throughout the whole gallery in that space,
each of them were raising fundamental questions
about what we were evolving towards, what we wanted to envision for ourselves.
There was a brilliant piece
that Ornette Coleman and his Harmolodics group were performing
to this particular exhibition
that gave it a whole other depth and meaning.
This last installation is called "Split Second,"
and in that I raised one question only.
In the face of our precarious future
as the human race brazenly dares to be the most endangered species,
given all the technology that we've invented
to look out and scope out our place in the universe,
and destiny, and so forth,
so much that we have that we're wagering on
when you talk about risks and reward,
it asks how, in fact, we will have the agility and the wisdom
to actually resist and maybe dodge
nature's demonstrably negative forces that can absolutely obliterate us
if we make dumb or irrational decisions.
So that reflection was about this piece.
You'll see those pieces out there.
All these art works in there were asking these kind of questions.
They're brain-based because in fact the science of my studies in neuroscience
are actually imbedded in the art.
As you go around you'll see pieces of it, even in the titles of them.
That's called "Love Thalamus",
and it's looking at a particular area of the brain
that in fact our emotions and logic and so forth are infused.
Just to make a point,
to move from the fine art, what for me was the journey,
was taking this process of looking at art,
and understanding that art really encompasses
all representations of thought.
Everything that we have generated in terms of symbolic languages,
everything that you could imagine.
As they say, "In art, anything goes because imagination goes with everything."
You can take and repurpose everything
in personally meaningful ways,
and that is principally what these individuals are doing
when they're giving form to their thoughts, feelings, and ideas,
by making symbolic models
and not necessarily making art as we would say,
with all the judgments and value judgments to it.
It's putting all that aside and looking to the essence and saying,
"How can I show you what I'm thinking and feeling?"
and allowing that to speak for itself, and be present, and to see,
and enable it to be, as you see in that statement there,
to create and envision in the most free-form way
without the judgment and value judgments to it.
So that process we have used in so many areas and ways,
literally from A to Z.
Here are people who have come together.
They're educators, they're science people, they're people from the administration.
This was at the Smithsonian.
It's called "The Art of Science Learning,"
where they're actually looking for how we can apply the arts
to help and enable the science, technology, engineering, and math,
all these different fields that are trying to build a 21st century workforce.
So, the point of it
is that you can use any materials in any way that you ever envisioned,
not necessarily with the angle to make a work of art,
and in doing that process,
in experiencing the kinds of communications that happen
at a very deep level,
all kinds of breakthroughs naturally happen.
And what I have found when I challenge, and I challenge you with this,
because in fact, the whole risks and rewards of doing something
is when you take a concept, an idea, that you want to explore with somebody,
instead of simply talking to them,
make a structure and talk through that structure.
It doesn't matter with it looks like, the aesthetic of it,
but try to represent as best you can
what your thoughts, feelings, and ideas are,
and invite others into that conversation
because you will find that as you're doing that,
and then as you go through that four-step process in here,
you are, in fact, as you're metaphorming,
you are thinking like a genius.
You are absolutely connecting your world, your experiences,
your metaphorms with others, and are able, no matter how personal they are,
to actually envision things and then create what you envision.
And to have that connection
at a profoundly personal and universal level,
and those tools and that process,
again, think back to the generalization of science
and the scientific method, is so purposeful and useful.
We have done this program, and that "Think Like a Genius" program
that grew out of the ArtScience program, is on-going,
there's a foundation around that,
and the reality is, when you're metaphorming,
you're metaphorming everything all the time, endlessly.
So that is what I challenge and task you on,
and it's something that you have in your own creative engine there
to use and build on.
So, enjoy.
(Applause)