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T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Science and technology-based art.
00:29:54
Agnes Chavez created STEMarts with a mission to empower youth through art, science and technology. Find out how she creates interactive, educational exhibits.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:13]
Ann
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Maria Varmazes
In the United States in the early 2000s, the STEM movement was born to encourage more people to get involved in science, technology, engineering, and math and shore up the pipeline of engineers and scientists eventually entering the workforce. The drumbeat for STEM was seen as vitally necessary to ensure future American innovation and competitiveness. But all these years later, it's worth asking, did that enthusiasm to shore up these vital sectors also do long term damage to support for the humanities? And does it even have to be a binary Arts or science? What if there was another way, maybe a better way, to approach all of this? Welcome to T Minus deep space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmazes. Today's guest embodies what it means when we say that arts and sciences enhance each other and deepen our comprehension of each Agnes Chavez created STEM Arts Lab with a mission to empower youth through art, science, and technology. She has created several educational programs that involve students developing installations that communicate STEM subjects through art. Agnes starts our conversation by sharing with me how she started her company.
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Agnes Chavez
I am first and foremost an artist, so I studied art and always have been an artist. The kind of art that I do is new media art, digital art, creating experiences that are interactive and participatory experiences. And I didn't always do that kind of art because of course it evolved. It wasn't available when I started in art school, but I've always been attracted to science and technology and science and technology has always informed my art. And so as it evolved, I also found that I always wanted to incorporate education and working with youth in everything that I do. So through that exploration over time, I ended up developing several education programs that use art as a process, that use art, science, and technology as a way to empower youth. And that ended up turning into a nonprofit organization that I started in 2009 called stemarts.com and that is our mission, empowering youth through art, science, and technology. And we do that by having the students become part of of our process, of our exploration. So we're a digital media creative production studio. Like we work together as a team with coders and artists and scientists to design science art installations. So installations that communicate science through art and that are interactive and participatory and so forth. And the students become part of that whole exploration, first learning the science from scientists that are on our team and then designing these, how we're going to create these experiences. And then finally they're part of all the making of the art. And then finally at the end, when we present the installation as we travel in festivals, at museums, then they get to be the experience guides, we call them. And they are there to communicate to the public what it's about, show them, and help them interact. How do we interact with this? So they get to be part of the entire experience. So it's a STEAM youth leadership program as part of a sci art creative production studio.
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Maria Varmazes
That is such a great, such a cool idea. I was mentioning to you before we started recording that I looked at your website and it was sort of that visceral, like, wow, that looks really cool. And I'm sure if I was there in person, it would be even more so because it would be immersive. And I feel like I'm doing a disservice to people for not asking if you could maybe describe what some of these installations are like. I'm sure they're all very different, but I'm going to encourage people to go to the website to check them out for themselves because they are really cool. But maybe walk me through just some examples of what you might see and experience.
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Agnes Chavez
I think the materials that we work with are light and sound and data, data visualization. So what you often see is some kind of light projection. And in the piece called Space Messengers, for example, it is an actual projection piece onto a building. Large scale building, usually 40ft wide by 10ft high. So you can imagine that kind of scale. And there's this projection of moving images. Then you're also hearing sounds. We work with a sound engineer, sound designers, and they create soundscapes that are all integrated in terms of how you feel when you hear the sound and see the lights and see the movement. Then there's movement in the sense that there's some kind of interactive where the participant is actually using their body to interact. So it's very multimodal what you experience. So you use your body to. In Space Messengers, it triggers these silhouettes that are seen projected on the wall, your silhouette. And as you move your hands you know, it triggers content that comes out. So you'll, you'll hear a video that comes up, a little video clip from one of our youth or one of our scientists sharing their insights. You'll see messages floating around on the wall that are the voices of our youth that are sharing their ideas about space, about the universe and our place in the universe. Very often it's meant to make people feel relaxed and contemplative and reflective to think about, you know, provide thought provoking experiences. It's not meant to like, you know, play a game or dazzle or it's meant to really contemplate a space, to contemplate our role in the universe. It's very much, our themes are very much based on space in the universe. Then when we work with augmented reality, which is not a projection, it's your phone. And when you, when you scan a QR code, something appears through the phone in the physical space. And those objects are also meant to create an immersive experience because all of a sudden it transforms your, the outside world. Let's say you're looking at the mountains or you're looking at the buildings around you, and all of a sudden some art object appears in it to kind of take you to another place in your mind of what's possible. So it's another way of being immersive, even through the augmented reality and interactive too, because you touch the screen to make something happen. So we're always looking for that audience participation so that they become part of the art as well.
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Maria Varmazes
Yeah, And I imagine that they would also retain through that interaction more easily retain than being just a sort of quote unquote, more passive recipient of that information. Can you tell me a bit about the. So you're talking about space, space communicator, space messengers. Tell me a bit about the science that's going on there too. And sort of the what, the what the students are working on in terms of the data, what they're doing there. Because it sounds really neat.
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Agnes Chavez
Yeah, yeah. So what we do is we bring in experts in different fields. So it's an interdisciplinary curriculum or it's an interdisciplinary research. So we'll bring in astrophysicists, particle physicists, native cultural specialists, talk about Lakota cosmology, philosophers, space lawyers, all the different ways that people explore space. And we bring in these experts to talk to the youth. And they do that through zoom calls, or we have one day boot camps or many different ways that we bring them in to connect with the students. And that's how they learn the science, that's how they learn the space science and everything about space. And then that is the inspiration. That's what informs the content, that then is communicated through the artwork.
- [09:36]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, I'd love to hear what have the youth said after they've been through. They've worked on this. I imagine this is very transformative for them because it's not every day you get to work on an opportunity like this and do something. I imagine many of them have. I'm just thinking, if I was much younger, I don't even know when I would have had an opportunity to work on something like this. So, I mean, this is just quite an amazing thing to be a part of.
- [10:03]
Agnes Chavez
I know it is. It's like, I wish I had this when I was young. I had Star Trek. That's all I had. Same, you know, and even if you take physics in school, you're going to take it in a textbook format. And this is learning about physics through a physicist working at cern, working at lanl. And these. We bring in people who are researchers. You know, this is their passion. They're looking for black holes. They're looking to understand the fundamental, you know, nature of the universe. These are the big questions of humanity that they're asking. And, you know, they get to hear it from people who are doing the work, and so they can tell the difference, and it definitely expands their mind. We have students that have been through the program for years, and they're still involved with us, and they talk to us about how it's changed their perspective on humanity because we ask those big questions. A lot of people forget that scientists are asking big humanitarian questions like where do we come from? Even though they're doing it in a scientific way. The fundamental question is, what are we made of? Where do we come from? Right. So I think that when they hear that from a project that's doing it through art, you know, and through. Not just from the learning the math, right. But they're learning like, what is the reason why science exists, right? Then it kind of expands their minds. And that's kind of what we're trying to do. We're trying to build a sense of connection to our universe and to each other. One of our missions is to expand our identities as planned planetary citizens to have understand that we are a rock in space, you know, connected to outer space as our backyard. It's not something that's out there. It's where we come from. You know, we come from exploding stars. These concepts seem abstract, but if you really take time to contemplate them, then I believe that it can build a certain connection to Earth itself and to each other as citizens that share this planet, this delicate planet. So it's very much in a way, environmental in the sense that it's environmental because we're looking at the whole environment that we live in, which includes space. But we're doing it through really developing science literacy. So we make sure that the scientists are communicating the science directly. So they're learning the science directly from scientists. So it's not just too abstract in that sense. But then when it comes to the art making, we get to use poetic license, right, to. To interpret that in a personal way, whichever way you want to interpret that. So it has both. And. But fundamentally, I think that that is the mission of STEM Arts and of the Space Messengers project is to develop that artistic, scientific and what I call humanistic literacy and to expand our identities as planetary or even interplanetary citizens.
- [13:15]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back. I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Ann. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by bank of America. I run for Dana Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer. Join bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can, @b ofa.comSupportAnn what would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025.
- [13:50]
Ann
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- [14:38]
Maria Varmazes
That is a powerful, powerful, powerful set of statements. I'm just sort of letting that marinate a little bit for me because I. I find what you do incredibly amazing and inspiring and I wanna see a lot more of it in this world. Cause I think I love that you're making that happen. And I'm just kind of like, wow.
- [14:58]
Agnes Chavez
This is so cool.
- [15:00]
Maria Varmazes
And a lot of what you're saying also resonates with me personally because we were talking about this earlier about. I hate seeing the arts often sort of shunted to the side in a lot of these discussions about arts and, you know, about the sciences, but also when we're talking about these deep, fundamental questions of, like, what is science trying to do? Why, you know, art has an incredible role to play in not just helping us communicate, but also helping us really resonate with what we're learning and applying it to us as human beings. I think that is just what you're doing speaks volumes about that, and I just want to see more of that in the world. I love to hear from folks like yourself about the importance of the arts in this context, especially because, I mean, we don't have to really sell. Well, maybe nowadays we do a little bit more, but we don't usually have to sell people on the importance of science. Usually it's like, yep. But often arts are the first things that get cut from curricula. And it's heartbreaking to see, and I would just love to hear. I guess this feels very transactive. But your pitch on why the arts matter so much, if you don't mind indulging me on that.
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Agnes Chavez
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny because STEM Arts was born in 2009 as a reaction to the STEM movement. Like, it had just started in 2007, 2008, 2009, and. And I was seeing all of these announcements for the government looking for innovative solutions to STEM because our kids were really lagging behind in science and math. And it was determined through a paper that was written that identified that gap, and that if we didn't do something about it, it was a matter of national security, because if you're not able to be competitive in science and math, you. You would lag behind in the world. So it started as that. I heard that call, but it was at the same time that the dot com was happening, the dot com crash. And the art and science department, the art and music departments were being cut. Like, budgets were being cut. And that's when I kind of put the two together. And the steam movement had not started yet. The STEM movement was there, but adding a. Adding a to stem, Adding the arts to STEM had not started at that point. But I asked that question, why not? And because the arts, very often the arts incorporate science and math into it. You know, it's in there. And so I started the program based on the idea that they were equally important and could support each other if it was taught in an integrative way. So that's how STEM Arts started. So I think that. And you know, the arts, just like the humanities, because there used to be also very much interconnected, and now they're kind of separated, but really arts and humanities, I see it as one. And so it's about really going back to ask the why questions, and then the how do we understand ourselves in the universe through whatever medium, whether it's through the art or through the science or through the technology. Even being in from New Mexico, we bring in a lot of our cultural specialists from Taos Pueblo and from Lakota communities to share their particular Native science, which is the way that they understand the universe through their cultural references. And that is important, too. Another way to understand ourselves, living in more balance with nature. So all of these different ways. So I guess the short answer to your question is that it's just art and science are just one of many ways to understand the world around us. And I think that that's the perspective that we take. But art in particular, is a very powerful way to communicate what it is you're discovering or you're learning. It has that power to reach human beings through their emotions, through all the senses. And that's what makes it like we teach it as a process. We say art is a process through which to understand ourselves. Yes, you can make art that hangs on your wall and beautifies your home. But our particular goal in this project within STUM Art's Lab is not so much to do that. That's an outcome that could come out. You can create some pretty cool things that come out of it. But what we teach is how to use art as a process to understand ourselves and the world around us, and in our particular case, to communicate science concepts. It's also really a powerful tool. So we teach that way of understanding art, and then it's something that is so natural, right. That if you. You don't have to be an artist to understand the power of art in that sense.
- [19:51]
Maria Varmazes
What always strikes me when, with what you said and often when I reflect on the process of art, is how much it parallels the process of science, the scientific method, and how it just always. It gets me so much that in a lot of our discussions, at least in the United States, how much we try to separate the two. And they really are in parallels. And I love the kind of work that you're doing that really just shows that and that the youth can experience that also for themselves, so they don't have to separate them as two opposite worlds. They're very much siblings. Let them be together. Right. So it's a wonderful thing. I would love to give you the opportunity to last word on our interview and leave our audience with anything you Want them to think about as. Any parting thoughts? So over to you on that.
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Agnes Chavez
So, yeah, I think the other thing that is really core to what we do is the exploration of technologies, emerging technologies. And why is that important? So why do we not do, for example, landscape painting or clay sculptures? Why do we do digital media art? Why do we use emerging technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, projection, mapping, data visualization? These are the tools that we explore. And I think the reason is that technology is so much a part of our world that if we're really preparing students for the 21st century, which is part of what STEM Arts is doing, because we talked about how it's expanding their mindset. Right. And their connection to the universe, but it's also about. It's also a STEAM youth leadership program. So we're preparing students for the 21st century. And what that means is they have to be really up to speed on how to use technology, embrace it and know how to use it to communicate and express themselves. And not just as, you know, not as a consumer. So meaning creation tools. So we teach them how to create using technology. And I think that is a really big part of what we do. The art and the technology are so interconnected now. So you can create art using technology. And recently we started to integrate artificial intelligence. So that's the latest technology, but we're always on the cutting edge. Whatever is the latest technology, we bring it to people, bring it to the students. The other thing that's really important to us is the democratization of technology. So what we do is we work. Since we're based in Taos, New Mexico, which is northern New Mexico, we really work with our rural communities. Because if we really want to create equity in the world where everybody has access and everybody has a chance to have a voice in what's going on in the world, then we need to find a way to reach those communities, those rural communities. Technology is a way to do that. And we make an effort to make sure that these students have access either remotely to it, and then can actually have hands on experience working with these technologies. I think that aspect is also really an important aspect of the STEM Arts lab mission. More recently, we're teaching them artificial intelligence. We got a grant from the Patrick McGovern foundation to bring AI for Social Good. Their whole mission is AI for Social Good. And so we're bringing that new technology to students in all these rural communities and teaching them how to use it within their own communities. So it's a little bit of an example of some of our outreach initiatives.
- [23:32]
Maria Varmazes
That's fantastic. And Agnes, I have really enjoyed learning about what you do and talking to you about something, as I said many times, is really near and dear to my heart. So I want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to talk to me today about the incredible work you're doing. And I'm going to also encourage our listeners to please check out stemarts.com because there's so much good stuff on the website. I had a blast looking through it and I'm just like, I hope I can go see some of this work in person because it just looks amazing. So thank you for what you do.
- [24:06]
Agnes Chavez
Thank you. And I'll just say if you want to see it in person. We will be bringing Space Messengers to the Taos. There's a festival called the paseo. It happens September 12th and 13th, and we're going to be bringing our new launching our new Space Messengers AI at that festival. So you can mark your calendars and see it there. We're also going to be presenting our augmented reality installation at the Atomic 66 Festival in Albuquerque in June, June, I think, 11th through the 13th. And hopefully we are planning to be also at the Las Cruces Space Festival in September as well. So there are several opportunities. So if you go and visit our website, you'll see the latest opportunities to see the work that we do. And if there's any youth out there, and if there's any youth out there that want to get involved, they can come visit our site, too and sign up to be an ambassador. It's all free. All our programs are free. It's for New Mexico youth. So we are not in other states. We're in New Mexico right now. And so New Mexico youth from any part in the state can participate because we do remote learning and be a part of these projects.
- [25:28]
Maria Varmazes
That's it for T minus Deep Space, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us@spacen2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
- [26:41]
Ann
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