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Janani Balasubramanian and Natalie Gosnell, "Art-Science Undisciplined: A Playbook for Transformative Collaboration" (U California Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Janani Balasubramanian
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- [00:29]
Caleb Zakrin
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- [00:53]
Janani Balasubramanian
Hank makes the pizza.
- [00:55]
Caleb Zakrin
Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more@m365copilot.com work have you ever rearranged
- [01:02]
Janani Balasubramanian
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- [01:31]
Caleb Zakrin
welcome to
- [01:32]
Natalie Gosnell
the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Natalie Gosnell and Janani Balu, Sabermanian, about their new book, Art Science Undisciplined, A Playbook for Transformative Collaboration, published by the University of California Press. While art and science are often presented as opposing disciplines, in reality they share a common thread of creativity. When Natalie, an astrophysicist, and Janani, an artist, came together nearly a decade ago to collaborate, they joined a small but powerful lineage of people who have sought to move across disciplinary boundaries. If you're an artist interested in the sciences or a scientist interested in the arts, or perhaps you play in both sandboxes like Leonardo da Vinci, you'll find this book a useful roadmap. Too often, we are compelled to work only with those who think like us. It's one thing to work with someone in your same field who has a different approach. And it can be even more daunting when considering working with someone in a completely disparate practice. Art, science and discipline helps you find your collaborators and gives you steps to explore your mutual creativity and eventually develop a project that incorporates both scientific thinking, research, and data, along with aesthetics, perspective, and artistry. To share about their book, I'm pleased today to have Natalie and Janani on the podcast. Thank you both for joining me today.
- [02:53]
Natalie Gosnell
Happy to be here. Thanks, Caleb.
- [02:55]
Janani Balasubramanian
Thank you, Caleb.
- [02:57]
Caleb Zakrin
I think that this book is important for a number of reasons. On the one hand, I'm constantly bothered by the extent to which people get siloed into disciplines, not just in academia, but really in every aspect of life, whether that's just the division of labor that happens in companies or just the way that people are pushed to specialize in their life, develop one aspect of themselves over others. And I think that this can be particularly depressing, especially for people that have some interest in the arts that then get pushed away from being artistic. And it's sad because I really do find that people can take their perspectives that they learn outside of the art world and bring it to the art world in a really exciting way. And likewise, artists can really help people working in the sciences, working in other fields think about their field in a different way, whether that's in presenting the ideas to a broader audience or really helping to reach rethink the project completely entirely. So I wanted to thank you both for being on, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the book and about the process. But before doing that, I was wondering if you could each just introduce yourself and tell listeners a little about yourself.
- [04:06]
Natalie Gosnell
So my name is Natalie Gosnell. I'm an associate professor of physics at Colorado College. I am an astrophysicist, an artist, and a longtime collaborator of my dear friend Janani Balasubramanian. In my work as an astrophysicist, I study stars, two stars that orbit one another in particular, and I'm particularly interested in stories where the stars change one another. And so I use telescopes both on ground and in space to help tell those science stories. And as a professor, as an educator, I'm really interested in bringing creative practices into the classroom in order to enable my students to be more of their full selves as they embark on physics or whatever they end up doing after their time at Colorado College.
- [04:53]
Janani Balasubramanian
And I am Janani Bala Subrahmanian. I am an artist. Broadly, within kind of art world terms, I make immersive, experiential and conceptual art. I am interested in one collaboration with many amazing scientists like Natalie, which is really core and at the heart of my practice and in helping my audiences find ways to relate to the natural world that reflect and expand their own lived experience. That's to me, kind of the joy of art science practice. I do it so that people can find perspectives, metaphors and frameworks in the natural world and in the universe through which we can construct and shape our own lives.
- [05:49]
Caleb Zakrin
One of the reasons I was really excited to speak with you both is I have this really distinctive memory. As a kid. I grew up in Los Angeles and I remember going to the California Science center, which for those who aren't familiar with this place, it's this incredible interactive museum. It's for everyone. But it does cater towards younger people and it features these interactive exhibits where kids can learn about everything from how gravity works to about surgery and things like that. I remember watching footage of heart surgery that was made interactive as a 6 year old and it really piquing my interest in the human body and in nature. And I just thought this was such an important experience for me. And I thought the blending of art and science was always something that I found to be exciting and got me really interested in the idea of sharing and exploring scholarly ideas, research based ideas in a really exciting new way. And you wrote this book. It's a bit of a roadmap. You call it a playbook, which I think is an interesting term to use. And it really does guide people through this process of thinking about their position as either an artist or a scientist and how they can then go about finding collaborators and then executing on projects. And I was wondering if you could first introduce how the two of you came together and the project that you first created together and what that was like.
- [07:15]
Janani Balasubramanian
I can kick that off. I'll actually start with the project that we intended to create together. So we met now almost a decade ago in Colorado Springs, where Natalie is based. And at that time I was based in New York City. And I was coming out to Colorado Springs to work on a project related to brown dwarf physics, which some of the listeners will know about, shout out to brown dwarfs. But I asked some of my astrophysics colleagues in New York City if essentially they knew any cool astronomers in Colorado Springs that I could hang out with for a day. One of our mutual colleagues introduced me to Natalie. We intended to work together for I think two or three hours. That was the initial conceit of how we met. And we were creating a movement based game to help Natalie translate some of her research on relationships between companion stars for her introductory physics class. So that was why we initially met and we did that. We built this movement based game that involves people banging on buckets and running around on a hillside. And I think the best way to describe that initial moment is that it felt like a spark or an inkling, which is a word that we also use very deliberately in the book, that there is this. Okay, there's this thread here. There's something that we want to continue to pull on. And I would say the trajectory of our collaboration was really just that. We kept saying yes to each other and yes to the next step of working together. The project that we eventually worked on, aside from this book, which is its own project, is rooted in Natalie's research on the science of mass transfer between companion stars. That is a phenomenon where one star towards the end of its life will give nearly all of its matter to its companion. And what we started exploring very early on in our conversations is what Natalie was voicing was a kind of frustration with the science journalism that had covered her research so far in narrating that phenomenon through a framework of violence and extraction, referring to it as stellar cannibalism and, or stellar vampirism. And, you know, looking back on it now, what we were doing was through this cross disciplinary, really this undisciplined exploration, we were creating a space with each other to make different choices in the narration of that phenomenon. So we would go on to develop this immersive experiential work called the Gift that deliberately chose to narrate that relationship of stellar mass transfer through a metaphor of care and connection. And it's designed as a reading experience that involves music, text, visuals. So that was sort of the trajectory of our collaboration. I'm going to pause there, see if Natalie wants to add anything.
- [10:32]
Natalie Gosnell
I think it's helpful to know a little bit about where I was when I got this email that introduced me to Janany. And I had just finished my first year as a tenure track faculty member and had really been enjoying my time in the classroom. I always knew I wanted to teach and work with students and but was really struggling with the fact that I felt I couldn't bring my whole self into the classroom, partly because of what Janani was explaining with the research that I was doing at the time being described in these hyper masculine, hyperviolent extractive terminology that how could I bring that conversation into my classroom and then also create a classroom that is inviting, that is welcoming, that is open to Students who maybe haven't seen themselves in the field of physics or astrophysics before. Also, by coming back and joining the faculty at Colorado College, which was my alma mater, and being in a liberal arts environment again where interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity is part of our normal conversation, I was starting to ask if there were ways that I could reconnect my own science and creative selves that had bifurcated over the course of my training and my academic trajectory. And wondering if there are ways that I could bring at the time I was calling like creativity exercises or creative problem solving exercises into the classroom, exploring research around like embodied knowledge and trying to find ways that I could be my most effective educator self. And so I got this email introducing me to Janany and I was like, oh, this is perfect. Like I've been trying to find ways for me to bring my research into the classroom, engage with these topics in new ways. And so because of a lot of what I'd been reading at the time about embodied knowledge, we embarked on this like movement based theater game that Janet Nee described. But when we first met that afternoon and I was explaining the struggles that I was having and essentially science storytelling about my research together we started asking what other possibilities are there if an artist and a scientist come together and co create science storytelling? Rather than me just handing facts over to Janany and then Janani crafting a story on his own and then bringing it back to me to share, or me taking some sort of like skills or bits of beautiful things from the art world and from Janani and then using it on my own, really coming together and co creating this way of engaging with the story and asking different questions of what is even possible in the world of science storytelling. And it is following that inkling that Janani was saying, following the sort of sparkling question that seemed like there was something more to learn, something more to explore in working with each other that led us on this multi year journey ultimately towards creating the gift or immersive installation piece of but then also towards writing this book.
- [14:07]
Janani Balasubramanian
I want to add one thing that ties back to what you were talking about, Caleb, which is the I think very natural childlike curiosity and wonder that a lot of people have around this intersection of art and science. Like it speaks to something that's deep and arguably kind of intrinsic to us. And then through processes of specialization and quote unquote growing up, I think those capacities can start to slip from us. As a kind of minor example, one trend in science museum audiences is people often go to science museums as children. These are the memories we have. And then if as adults we do not have children, we're not really going there. We're not really engaging with stories about science in that way. Um, and then maybe we go again if we. If we choose to have kids later, later on in life. Um, but there is this gap where people feel not part of that world anymore unless they are professionally part of that world in some way. Um, and what I was actually exploring artistically, kind of parallel with Natalie, I. I was in residence at the Public Theater at the time, and I was really curious how designing accessibility and invitation explicitly into the making of these kinds of immersive and experiential works could help my audiences grapple with new and complex scientific ideas. Like how if we really work with the whole human body as something that can engage with knowledge, not just the mind, but every sensory capacity that we have, how can you create a space where people, many of whom have felt disinvited from math and science for various reasons, many of them related to education and educational experiences they've had, how can we invite them back in and invite them to see it in a new way? That's really what we had aimed to do, and I think accomplished with the gift is brought people back into astrophysics who maybe didn't see their story or aspects of their own life reflected in what they perceive astrophysics to be.
- [16:27]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, there's something that I find that both science and art, on their own as disciplines, do feel uninviting in this way, where if you're a scientist working in science or you're studying science, there's a big focus on the very top performers, people at the very most elite aspect of, be it physics or mathematics, and then oftentimes in these college courses, an attempt to kind of winnow out the people that aren't maybe up to snuff. And in art in the same way, too oftentimes, if you go to a contemporary art museum, the art can be very abstract. There can already be multiple layers where if you're not a part of the conversation, you might not even understand or know what you're doing, what you're looking at. But there's something about art and science, when you put them together, that does feel a bit more inviting. And you have this concept of undisciplining, which I find very interesting. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about this idea, what it means to undiscipline in this context of art and science collaboration.
- [17:32]
Natalie Gosnell
So for Us undisciplining is speaking to the long term, transformative, mutual exchange between art and scientists, artists and scientists that we are calling for in the book. To be clear, there are quite a few art science programs, interactions, sort of transactions that currently exist in the world, but there are very few undisciplined art science collaborations that we have found in our work. We found some. We interviewed a few other long term transformative art science teams who also embarked on what we would call an undisciplined way of working. But what we're calling for really is a paradigm shift in the world of art science. And for us, an undisciplined art science collaboration is one that is mutually beneficial and mutually transformative. So this is not about a superficial transaction of ideas or information. It's about artists and scientists coming together with their hard earned expertise and building toward a new way of working together, bringing together their experiences and their knowledge in order to ask and answer a question that they would not be able to do on their own. It really is a matter of like transdisciplinary research or exploration or where we're venturing into ways of working that have not been modeled for us before.
- [19:10]
Janani Balasubramanian
Agree with that. And I think hearkening back to something you said earlier too, Caleb, the degree of specialization that is often demanded from our careers, regardless of which kind of practitioner we end up becoming, often means that we can even be discouraged from having curiosity, let alone actual practice in this other field. Right. That Natalie writes in the opening of this book that as the scientific community, that process of scientific specialization means often abandoning aspects of a creative or artistic practice that in your earlier life, and we deliberately chose the word undisciplined because it also has this unruly and rule breaking and mischief making connotation that we actually want to productively create some trouble in these systems, make space for us to do things that we haven't been able to do for us. That was, for instance, questioning the way astronomy stories are told in a contemporary context. That's a uniquely art science question, arguably an undisciplined question. It requires a lot of different kinds of knowledge and then an intent to not just critique the way the world is, but to make something new, to imagine, create that actual alternative.
- [20:46]
Natalie Gosnell
And importantly, I think with regard to that mischief making is that our book is written for artists and scientists, but it's also written for the decision makers, our supporters, those who have the power and the privilege to make art science collaboration happen because we need them to open the door for this type of work. I said that when Janani and I first met, I was on the 1st. Had just finished the first year of my tenure track position. I am now tenured. And the work that Janani and I did together was part of my tenure portfolio because of supporters in my life who said yes. And so we speak to supporters as well because this work can't happen without them. We need them. And they can awaken their own undisciplined mischief making curiosities within their own sort of institutional and positional context to join this fun journey that we're inviting people on in this book.
- [21:56]
Janani Balasubramanian
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- [22:12]
Caleb Zakrin
Do you hear that?
- [22:14]
Janani Balasubramanian
Sounds like breakfast is ready. Because Quaker's coming in hot with morning nutrition 100% whole grain oats and a
- [22:22]
Caleb Zakrin
good source of fiber to fuel the
- [22:24]
Janani Balasubramanian
rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day. And that sounds absolutely delicious. Fuel to start whatever's next. Quaker Official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26 I go.
- [22:39]
Caleb Zakrin
Let's go.
- [22:41]
Janani Balasubramanian
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney.
- [22:44]
Caleb Zakrin
Let's go get ready for a new case.
- [22:46]
Janani Balasubramanian
We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time. New friends you are Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream team.
- [22:56]
Caleb Zakrin
New habitats.
- [22:58]
Janani Balasubramanian
Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home.
- [23:04]
Caleb Zakrin
You're clearly working at Zootopia 2.
- [23:07]
Janani Balasubramanian
Now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG.
- [23:11]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah my. The, the. The university I went to, it was by the time that I graduated. But they, they have recently implemented a new major called the ideas major. I believe I. I don't know what it actually stands for but it's at Wesleyan University and it is a kind of art science combo. And I think part of the reason why they created it is because there was a lot of interest among students who were both interested in the arts and sciences, but also among a lot of faculty in seeing these sorts of project develop. Especially I think under the. Sometimes I feel like design or industrial design. These tend to be the topics where the fields where there is overlap between artists and science. And it's nice to see that, that it is something that's being recognized by more institutions as like a very worthy field to invest in. Because obviously the two of you when you first set out to do this In a way, obviously there are many instances of artists and scientists collaborating through history, but you were sort of doing it on your own, out of your own interest. And I'm wondering what that process is like for the two of you when you first started working together, how you both communicated with each other to get a grasp of each other's approach to thinking about the topic that you wanted to, to, to explore, you know, like, like, like Janani. I'm curious for you, like, you know, I don't know much about your background, if you have a background at all in the sciences, but what it was like, you know, learning from Natalie about, you know, about astrophysics and then Natalie for you as well too, like learning about Janani's artistic practice and how to approach your own scientific topic from an artistic lens.
- [24:57]
Janani Balasubramanian
Yeah, one, I do have background in the sciences, so some of the thread was there and by the time I met Natalie, I had been embedded with an astro research group in New York for some time that works on a different, smaller objects than the ones that Natalie works on essentially. So I wasn't coming in totally cold. And you know, astrophysics is literally vast field, so every area is so distinct. So there was a lot of learning on my part. I find Natalie to be a really generous and inviting teacher in, in the space of our collaboration and, and generally. So that was a real blessing and I, you know, we kind of lay this out in the book, but I think for these collaborations to work, everybody involved kind of needs to be open to stepping in and out of teaching and learning. Like you need to be an amateur, you need to be an expert, you need to move between those roles pretty fluidly over the course of any single collaboration, over the course of maybe even a single hour of conversation. That is what it means when you are trading strategies and know how across fields. I think the early days of our collaboration, things that helped in addition to, you know, getting to know one another's research and practices was also getting to know one another's contexts. Like we already spoke about how, you know, we got to learn the kind of landscape of journalism around Natalie's work. Something else that was inspirational to us as we by chance ended up at a meeting on kind of devised creative processes like unusual team based practices in the arts and how you create collaborative agreements around them. So one of the very early things that we did as a team was generate a collaborator agreement that was both around how do we work together, how do we show up, you know, low phone use, present attentive for our collaboration, but Also, what are we trying to shift in the world through the process of collaborating? For us, it was, you know, we are trying to make this area of science more accessible and inviting. We are trying to invite people's life experience and subjectivity back into science storytelling. There were some very explicit kind of mission related points in that early collaborator agreement. So I think one of the things that's important in these early stages of team building is not only trading of knowledge, but trading of, like, what is this world that you operate in? What are the rules of that world? You kind of need to know them. Then you can figure out, okay, these are the ones we want to break. These are the ones that are pretty good. This is fine, we can work with this. But this maybe is holding us back from being a better service to our community, our audiences, ourselves, what have you.
- [28:23]
Natalie Gosnell
So, in discussing setting up these collaborations, particularly with other scientists, I remind scientists that they usually have no problem putting themselves in the position of an amateur when they want to learn about a different scientific discipline. Myself, I remember distinctly learning about organic chemistry from a chemistry colleague of mine because we're going to teach an astrochemistry course together. I hadn't taken chemistry since high school, so I had a lot to brush up on. And I entered into this with joyful glee that I was able to learn something new about this field that I knew very little about. And that is also true when scientists are engaging with the rigorous world of art, that there is deep curiosity and exploration and iteration in the world of art that we can sort of ask questions of and learn from in the same way that we would want to learn new things from our scientific colleagues. And so putting yourself in that same type of amateurism curiosity is what enables these first stages of the collaboration to build a strong foundation that then it can grow from.
- [29:32]
Janani Balasubramanian
I think in parallel, something that is important from the artist side within the space of building an undisciplined collaboration is we really need to not go in there thinking, oh, I'm gonna go harvest some facts to put in my art, both because that's not great. That's not a good way to look at another human being's body of work. But also, I guarantee what you can create by being in deeper collaboration and conversation with someone with that level of knowledge in something, and like a depth that you know you're not going to glean in a month, a year, even several years. What you create through that exchange process is going to be so much cooler than anything that you can kind of build by skimming a Few facts off the top. And I think the art world can get a little too jazzed about novelty at our own expense. Sometimes when taking a moment to pause, dig a little deeper, brings out surfaces. Work that is richer, more rigorous, more interesting, hopefully more compelling to the people that you're trying to share it with, who are, you know, ultimately that's, that's why we do this. It's both, you know, because we love it, we care about it, it brings joy and fascination into our lives, but we also do it for a greater public on both sides. Yeah.
- [31:17]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm wondering, and this is sort of, I'm thinking in my head, like, what would people, skeptics on either side say? Like, what would the skeptical artists say about why engage with science? I mean, I'm sure there might be certain biases that artists might have against the sciences, seeing it as rigid, seeing it as too over disciplined, lacking perspective, objectivistic in a way that, you know, lacks any, any aesthetic sensibility. Have you encountered the kind of those sorts of arguments, pushback from people? What do you say to these people?
- [31:54]
Janani Balasubramanian
I want to first say, like 90%. Like, overwhelmingly, I have heard from other artists. I'm super interested in this. There's like a million lost threads in my life where if things had gone differently for me, I'd probably be a scientist or like, I really want to work with another scientist in this way that mostly I hear joy, excitement, interest in doing this kind of work. So I want to foreground that because that's exciting to me. That's what I hear among my peers. I have heard, oh, scientific culture is rigid, it's strict. It has these rules. It's very different from the work that I do. I don't know if I have, like a way in that's real. There's difference between differences between the cultures in which we work. I would argue we have our own rules of constraints and weird patterns of domination and things that we have to wrestle our way out of in order to make the work that we actually need and want to make that are different than what scientists are wrestling with, maybe in their own kind of apparatus. And I am skeptical generally of if you have not spent that much time with another kind of category of person, making sweeping generalizations about that category of person feels unfounded and ungrounded to me. I think there is a huge variety in the scientific community of how people position themselves, practice their science, think about their relationship to society. I have met, worked with so many scientists, including Natalie, who are really living and breathing this sense that Science is not this closed set of facts held by a small community of genius experts, but it's a living and breathing cultural, social phenomenon. It's something that we all deserve a relationship, a meaningful relationship to. So that's. And you'll find people who don't feel that way. So that is what it is. I think you'll find a kind of an equivalent set of characters within the art world.
- [34:01]
Caleb Zakrin
Natalie, I'm curious for you for the flip side. If you have encountered scientists who have questioned why spend time working on an artistic interpretation or artistic approach to scientific work isn't that they might think like that will only if they were to spend time thinking about how to translate their scientific research into artistic project, that it would only take away from their ability to further their own research and that it wouldn't necessarily open up interesting new routes for them. I think I could imagine this coming up maybe a bit more with certain types of scientists that don't see the value of art. Have you ever encountered this at all?
- [34:52]
Natalie Gosnell
Well, similar to Janani, I would like to foreground that the majority of scientists I have had the opportunity to speak to about this work want to know how they can do it too. I think similarly, there are a lot of scientists who have lost threads of creativity or artistic practice in their past. Maybe found as a child that they wanted to be both and then they couldn't figure out how to be both. And so they picked a path and happened to pick a science path along the way and so see our collaboration as a inspiration point for them that maybe that they too can reopen themselves to being across this science art boundary. There really is a wide shared, deep interest and curiosity in doing this type of work on the science side as well. And yeah, there are also scientists who don't get it and they're missing out. This is beautiful work. This is joyful work. The reason why we call the book a playbook is because play is actually really integral to doing the type of work that we're calling for. It has to be from a place of inspiration and joy, partly because what we're calling for is. Is not easy to do. And so if it's not easy to do and it also is not joyful, then that's not something I want to be spending my time doing. Being able to find inherent joy in doing this work is where I think a lot of the kind of drive and motivation comes from when it gets tough to be navigating these institutional structures that don't enable this work. So in some ways I Feel bad for the scientists who don't have the imagination and the curiosity to see beyond their own disciplinary boundaries. And I would only hope that over time they can learn to trust the results if they can't at least trust the imagination.
- [36:53]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. This book is filled with not just examples of your own collaboration through the Gift, but also many other examples of collaborations between artists and scientists. And of course in this interview we don't have time to go through every single collaboration. I really recommend that people go and read the book to see how you look at and kind of pick apart the different forms of collaboration that people have taken. But were there any collaborations that you found particularly interesting that you found was influencing your own collaboration or continues to influence your current collaboration to this day? Examples of artwork, scientific artworks that, that really inspired you?
- [37:33]
Janani Balasubramanian
I mean everyone we highlight in the book, I can maybe talk about aspects of different collaborations that I think are really cool and challenging, pushing paradigms in a really creative and exciting way. One project that we highlight in the book, we interviewed the Margaret and Christine Wertheim, who were the kind of co creators of this work Crochet Coral Reef, which involved this massive global community of people crocheting coral reef structures that look these up for the images. I cannot do them justice by verbal description. They are haunting and magnificent and the way they are crocheted is driven by principles of hyperbolic geometry. So it's a work of math and environmental mourning and sincere beauty.
- [38:26]
Caleb Zakrin
And.
- [38:26]
Janani Balasubramanian
And one, it was engaging a group of people, in this case middle aged women who are deeply under engaged by a lot of other networks of science communication and science engagement. And they were challenging a paradigm in the art world which plagues us, which is the idea of single authorship. Like they would insist on all the crocheters involved in the creation of work being listed on the walls in the museums and galleries where they were showing, which is so subversive within many art world contexts, to understand the creation of an artwork in that kind of collective way. I think that's so beautiful. Another work that we profile and we interviewed this team, we talked to them about their process, are Jean Shin and Desiree LeBeau. Desiree LeBeau is a epidemiologist and pediatric infectious disease expert. Jean Shin is a sculptor. They worked on this project around plastic medical waste that was again like another kind of big social project. Hundreds of people involved in the creation of these sculpted works involving plastic waste. And I love the, the provocation inside this work, the way that it is built, it's making holistic what is often split up disciplinarily, right? Public health, environmental health, medical, like infrastructure, it's. It's questioning, hey, like the. The plastic that we use ostensibly to create health for people in our medical practice is creating ill health for people by being part of a force for pollution. And I love that through this holistic, participatory sculpture, it is at once doing all of those things. And these are some common threads that I think we found across a lot of different teams, that there was this real social and public engagement aspect to the creation of the artwork, to the sharing of knowledge, this kind of opening up of the doors of art and science. And I think that feels really important to what we understand undisciplined practice to be that the goal is not to bring artists and scientists together and then somehow make something that is more esoteric than either of our fields already is, but to do the opposite, to invite more people in, to understand what we're doing, to participate in the creation and sharing of knowledge.
- [41:16]
Natalie Gosnell
The first thing I thought of, Caleb, when you asked your question, was a comment that another member of a team, Brenda Bowen, who's a geologist, collaborated with Wendy Wisher, a visual artist and sculptor. And when we were interviewing Brenda and Wendy, Brenda said that she is better at her job now, which is running this multimillion dollar center at the University of Utah. She's better at this job because of her collaboration with Wende, because she understands now that it's okay to be in a room and not know all the answers to say I don't know and ask questions. And she understands now how to be in that place of discomfort and move through it to a place of understanding. And I think about that a lot in my work now as a faculty member and I have the honor of now being a department chair, that in my work, in this collaboration and working with Janani, I too have gained that skill set of being able to sit with the discomfort and move through it, and being able to learn and engage across difference is something that I think we can all be better at. And engaging in this type of work requires one to develop that skill set to an expert level. And in the end of the book, we start talking about the real benefits that engaging this type of work can offer, not just to the collaboration itself, but to the practices that each practitioner has in their own lives and how the benefits sort of spill over into our spheres of influence, impacting for me, my classroom, my department, my institution, and that all three of those things have changed because of me being part of this collaboration and being able to take the lessons that I'm learning into the other aspects of my life as a professional astrophysicist. And so I think that being able to see those overflowing benefits and all these other teams affirmed them for us as well. We're like, oh, this is real. Like the huge benefits that we have both gained by being in this collaboration do actually have meaning and impact and are now impacting others in really beneficial ways. And so that was just a very affirming reflection for me personally.
- [43:45]
Caleb Zakrin
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- [44:16]
Janani Balasubramanian
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Natalie Gosnell
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Janani Balasubramanian
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- [45:12]
Caleb Zakrin
book is obviously mostly written to practitioners, the artists and the scientists that are interested in collaboration. But Natalie, as you pointed out earlier in the interview, it's also written for supporters, people that might be looking to help facilitate these types of projects, whether that's at universities, at libraries, at museums or other institutes that are interested in this kind of cross disciplinary project. And throughout the book, obviously it would take a few hours to read for someone or to months, potentially years, potentially to work through for individuals. But for supporters, they could pick up this book and kind of get the snapshot of how they might think about helping these projects in probably just 10 minutes. So like if, if you're, if you are a person who works in administration or faculty and are interested in this, like go and just get the book and go and look, look for these boxes. There are these These, these dark colored gray boxes and you can just read. And it has some really great, I think, advice for thinking about how to support these types of projects. And I was wondering if you could just share a little bit about the information that you've placed there and how supporters can think about using the information in this book to launch some of these projects.
- [46:27]
Janani Balasubramanian
Yeah, thanks for shouting that out. The book, as a playbook for practitioners is organized in kind of a phased way. So we go through from early to mid to late stages of a collaboration and the kinds of support that we need from administrators, curators, funders, et cetera, at each of those stages is also phased. So, you know, in these early stages, we're saying to supporters, like, mainly the things that we need you to do are kind of say, yes, toss order of magnitude a couple hundred bucks at this, make it real in some way, allow us to do these early experiments. Don't shut us down from doing these early experiments, like kind of socialize why this kind of work is important. In the middle stages. Then we're wrestling with, yeah, okay, more funding, more resources needed. There's like more permission structures that need to be opened up. For instance, Natalie needed to get explicit permission from her department chair to say, like, hey, I can work on this. And this is part of my work as a faculty member. And I want to also shout out the last chapter of the book, which is called the Jump. This is the one chapter that we say to supporters, kind of why you read this whole thing, because this is not just a vision of how to support any individual project. This is looking at if we build an ecosystem where undisciplined collaboration, where this kind of transformative art science collaboration is not rare, but well resourced, well positioned to help us keep decalcifying the ways that we work to work on compelling problems across many different aspects of human life. Like, what does that look like? And we lay out what are some of the structures and systems we think need to be in place to make that possible, to allow many more people to participate in this kind of work as artists and scientists and for the world to then enjoy the fruits of that labor, which is this beautiful, rigorous, imaginative work that is speaking to, you know, big ideas. Like our work is speaking to how we process grief and loss. Crochet Coral Reef is talking about that also, but also how we make sense of environmental change and destruction, like it's contending with very present and enduring parts of human life on earth in a way that again harkens back to a childlike Curiosity and wonder and that kind of capacity for that that for many of us has eroded over time, like it brings us back into that space. So anyway, those are my thoughts on how supporters can think about how to engage with this book.
- [49:29]
Natalie Gosnell
Yeah, as you mentioned, Caleb, our idea is that supporters can flip through the book, find these gray boxes, and learn about what they could do in that moment to make art, science collaboration a little bit easier for practitioners. But those boxes are placed within the context of the work that artists and scientists are doing in their collaboration. Because we think it's actually really important for supporters to learn and understand how this work happens so that they can be effective supporters and champions for us. And a lot of the questions that we have fielded from those in decision making positions come from a lack of understanding of how this work needs to happen. And that makes sense because if they haven't seen it before, why would they know what we need? And so we're trying to tell them what we need and give them the opportunity to get the quick reminder in the gray box. But then when they have a few more minutes, they can read about the stories before and after that box to understand the context in which their decision making is going to happen so that they can be the most effective within their particular context to help make these collaborations happen.
- [50:46]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I feel like both funding for science and funding for the arts, they're sort of well worn fields in a way, and there are institutions that are dedicated to funding them. Obviously there are constant threats to various funding sources, but even harder then for the projects that cut across both disciplines because it's kind of hard to shoehorn it into one or the other box, which I think makes it important and also makes it really exciting for institutions that want to support this. Because I really do feel like it is a growing field or it's a growing form of collaboration that is seeing a lot of interesting outcomes, whether just in the form of creating beautiful works of art or in actually helping to communicate scientific ideas in ways that couldn't be done otherwise, which I find really exciting. So I know both of you, you met sort of in this kind of serendipitous email way. Do you have any advice for anyone who might be listening to this and might think, oh, I have an idea for a project, but I don't know how to find a collaborator. How do I get started? What advice would you have?
- [52:04]
Natalie Gosnell
Start telling the people around you that you have this idea and you're interested in working with an artist or working with a scientist, or exploring these cross disciplinary ideas. In every case, for the teams that we interviewed, there were only one degree separated. It was a mutual colleague, a mutual friend who introduced these new collaborative team members to one another. Because the person who knew both of them thought, I think these two people should meet. And then that initial spark of curiosity grows on its own. And so if you don't tell your network what you're interested in, then the person who knows your future collaborator won't know to introduce you. And so that's the biggest piece of advice, is just be open about your interests and your goals so that those who can enable those connections know to make it happen for you.
- [53:00]
Janani Balasubramanian
Yeah, you need to come out to your friends as being undisciplined, curious.
- [53:05]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. Well, if anyone's listening to this, I do recommend share this interview with your friends and collaborators and share the book because I think it is a useful playbook, as the title says, for thinking about how to find collaborators, but then also how to approach these projects and in a thoughtful way, without. And what I also like about it, too, is that the book isn't. It's not too overbearing in terms of you must follow these rules. It's really, you know, opening up people's minds to ways of thinking and ways of working with other people and learning about them, learning about yourself to find a mutually beneficial project that, you know, can, can, can be really exciting for people that end up experiencing the work of art in the future. So, yeah, I want to thank you both so much for being guests on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you both about art, science and disciplined.
- [54:08]
Janani Balasubramanian
Thank you, Caleb.
- [54:10]
Natalie Gosnell
Thank you, Caleb. It was a pleasure.