The Science-Art Discussion at ScienceOnline

About a month ago, I took part in the ScienceOnline conference, and with Glendon Mellow and John Hawks I moderated a discussion on the intersection between science and art.

The conference has made the video of the session available, and I'm happy to share it here. John and Glendon share some fascinating insights, and I'm not altogether embarrassed by what I had to say. Of course, talking about Victoria Arbour's Gwawinapterus and Brian Engh's Sauroposeidon couple is easy and fun.

Science-Art H264 Widescreen 960x540 from Smartley-Dunn on Vimeo.

I'm wearing an Arctodus simus t-shirt from the Field Museum, if you're wondering. For more of my posts on the conference, click here.

The Great Big ScienceOnline Wrap-Up

I'm still a little wiped out from ScienceOnline 2011. It was the first professional conference I've ever attended, and the constant stimulation and surprise stood in such stark contrast to my daily life that it's taken some time to process. The ideas that struck me, the connections I made, and the insights others offered have been bouncing around in my mind. It's focused my attention on where it needs to be. To list the people who touched me with their kindness and intelligence would surely only result in me leaving someone out, so let me instead thank everyone involved for making it happen. Please, if you care about science, check out ScienceBlogging.org, ScienceOnline2011.com, ScienceSeeker.org. They'll lead you down tremendously satisfying paths.

The most significant part of the experience was my stint co-moderating the Science-Art panel with Glendon Mellow and John Hawks, and I feel that's where I should spend the rest of this post. I had a few ideas in mind, starting points for conversations or bits to add to sympathetic lines of inquiry brought up by Glendon, John, or the attendees. I've discussed these in my previous ScienceOnline special posts. ScienceOnline is an "unconference," and the audience is expected to pipe up as much as the moderators. This was made a bit more complicated by the fact that the session was livestreamed via the ScienceOnline website, requiring anyone who wanted to be heard to speak into a microphone. This wasn't a huge problem, for us though.

People attending the sessions about how science bloggers should hold themselves accountable or how to best communicate difficult concepts generally had strong opinions of their own, potent experiences they wanted to share. I think it's different for the Science-Art panel, and not to the disparagement of the attendees. It's simply a more foreign concept, and I had the feeling that the audience was more interested in its moderators' feelings. Glendon is a fine artist as accomplished in his practice as he is enthusiastic about science. John is an anthropologist and illustrator who has an obvious empathy for his subjects and a desire to share the imperfect truth of the fossils he works with. I'm a graphic designer who finds it a little disconcerting to characterize whathe does the way I've done with those two gentlemen.

It seemed that one major theme was that accuracy is a false god. Glendon freely revels in the license to depart from reality to explore ideas. John discussed his desire to see our extinct Homo cousins depicted as more than grim-faced brutes, a convention that persists to today. He shared examples that delighted the audience, just as the keenest photographer might by capturing a candid moment of joy. Was there evidence that Neandertals smiled and laughed? Well, not quite. Did these depictions engage the audience and stoke their imaginations? Definitely.

I used this as a chance to bring up a recent piece of dinosaur art that speaks strongly to the need to step beyond accuracy. I wrote about it a little over a month ago. It's Brian Engh's Sauroposeidon couple, in full mating display mode. When Matt Wedel encouraged him to think boldly, to look at the outlandish inventions of extant animals and not be afraid to make wild leaps, Brian rose to the occasion and produced one of my favorite pieces of paleoart in recent memory.


Illustration by Brian Engh. Used with his permission.

What I love about this is that it's so much more than a story about these two dinosaurs. It's the story of Brian's love of dinosaurs: the viewer, who is probably unaccustomed to seeing such wild choices (though not implausible ones, it must be said), is forced to consider why Brian made them. It's a line of thought that necessarily leads to the communication methods of living animals.

It's also the story of how we connect to extinct creatures. I think that our willingness to reconstruct lost worlds, to read the clues left by bones and rocks to discover the history of the planet on which we live is one of the most admirable pursuits we engage in. It's poignant, really.

It's not science. And that's okay.

So many of us are infatuated with the natural world. There are the legions of backyard birders. The customer base for airbrushed wolf t-shirts. Heck, even pet owners, who may marvel at the way their cat's body is built for such wondrous gymnastics. I'd include dinosaur lovers with those people. Or protist lovers. The difference in those last examples is that it takes technology and/or logical inference to observe them, which necessarily casts scientists in the role of interpreters: the prophets who reveal these worlds hidden by scale or time's passage. So to like these things is to "like science." By that analogy, to like wolves may as well be to "like documentary filmmaking," since that's the only contact many of us, including many wolf t-shirt wearers I'd imagine, have with the iconic canids.

When I see a well-drawn theropod, I'm entranced by the shapes, the curve of the neck, the excuisite sense of balance, the life in its eyes. The prospect of it as a living creature once again feels more likely. So much of the urge to embark on the journey of science is rooted in that gut-level feeling of wonder, and when done skillfully, the many forms of science-art evoke just that, and the journey begins again.

Watch the Science-Art Panel Livestream

At 3:15 today, ScienceOnline will be livestreaming the Science-Art panel I'll be moderating along with John Hawks and Glendon Mellow. Of course, they'll be doing all the other incredibly interesting panels, too. To see any of them, head here.

ScienceOnline special: A Tale of Two Diablos

I recently wrote a piece for the SciAm Guest Blog. It was called "How To Name a Dinosaur," and it was a joy to be invited, a joy to write, and a joy to have some nice words said about it. It was also a joy to be able to include the work of one of my favorite up-and-comers in the paleoart world, Matt Van Rooijen.

See, my favorite recent dinosaur name is Diabloceratops. Matt's drawn Diabloceratops. I remembered that, wanted to put his name out there, and as we have a relationship already, asking permission to use it was a formality. Hear this, bloggers: it's good to have friendly relationships with artists. Credit them, link to them, purchase them tasty beverages and cozy knitted outerware. They are your collaborators.


Diabloceratops, illustrated by Matt Van Rooijen. Used with his permission.

Then, a funny thing happened. One of the commenters was Jim Kirkland, who happened to have been an author on Diablo's description. It was really cool to see - any time a real, honest-to-gosh scientist looks my way, I feel real nifty. But I was a bit dismayed when he wrote that Matt's art was "...nearly identical to Brad Wolverton's original art for our press release on Diabloceratops."

I don't agree. I don't think that Matt's illustration looks anything like Brad's - which, it must be said, is fantastic - save for the fact that A) It's the same animal, and B) it's viewed from a similar angle. "Nearly identical?" I don't see it. Compare Matt's, featured above, with Brad's for yourself.

My point here is most emphatically not to disparage Kirkland. I have a lot of respect for him, and hugely appreciate his ability to do public outreach. It's heartening that he's so willing to stick up for the artist who helped him publicize such a cool dinosaur. I also felt the need to stand up for Matt and left a comment of my own to that effect. I also notified Matt to let him address it, which he did, quite graciously, in the comments. It's a non-controversy, really. A nontroversy, if you will. A nontro, for the brevity-inclined.

Still, that gulf between Kirkland's perception and mine is fascinating to me. What do you think? Are they really that similar? Does the fact that Kirkland is a scientist have anything to do with how he saw the two? As moderating a panel at ScienceOnline is more about listening than talking, I'd like to hear the perspective of scientists on this - how do they view the relationship between themselves and the artists and designers that help communicate their research? Does this apparent Mama Grizzly urge to defend her cub seem familiar? If I get to touch on this during the discussion, and anything fruitful comes of it, I'll be sure to expand on this in the near future.

ScienceOnline special: Gwawinapterus

Gwawinapterus by Victoria Arbour, used with her permission.

When I checked in with Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings yesterday morning - a daily occurence for me as it is for many other paleo folks - I felt like a gift had been dropped square in my lap from the Olympian heights. Here I was, organizing my thoughts for ScienceOnline, and staring back at me from Google Reader was the fellow above: Gwawinapterus, a new istiodactylid pterosaur from British Columbia.

The pterosur's describer, Victoria Barbour of the University of Alberta, wrote a guest post at Archosaur Musings which discusses the critter itself and the scrappy fossils (are there any other kind) she had to work with. But I was entranced by the drawing. I emailed Victoria straight away, asking her who drew it and telling her how much I loved the native art influence. I took a stab and guessed at a Tlingit influence. Why Tlingit? Because that's the Pacific native culture that I'm most familiar with. I readily admit that it would be like someone hearing "Whip It" and remarking, "that's a rather nice Beatles song." I'm basically that dope.

I wasn't the only person to ask her about the illustration. Shortly after I sent my email, Arbour posted a nice, long piece about it on her blog, Pseudoplocephalus. It turns out that she drew the critter herself. About the distinctive style, she writes:

Based on comments on some of the news articles that came out yesterday, people seem to either love or hate the colour pattern I chose. That’s ok. The pattern I chose was inspired by the art of the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live on the northern end of Vancouver Island. The name Gwawinapterus is partly derived from the Kwakwala word for Raven, Gwa’wina, because the skull of many istiodactylids remind me of Raven masks.

If you read my recent SciAm Guest Blog post, you might guess that I dig what she's done with this pterosaur's name. I love it when paleontologists draw their nomenclatural inspiration from local history and culture. This doesn't just stem from some progressive desire to see science reach underrepresented people. It's also that inluding a cultural reference in a description of a fossilized animal's bones is a tacit acknowledgement that the cultures we create are part of the environment around us and the Earth under us. Pretending that they're separate is foolish.

I find Arbour's choice refreshing. An illustration of a prehistoric creature is a hypothesis. Given the power our visual sense holds over us, it's all too easy for the viewer to come away with the impression that it's based on more than it is. When people think "sauropod" they envision the Brachiosaurus of Jurassic Park or the Diplodocus herd of Walking with Dinosaurs. They don't think of the sparse collection of bones from which those visuals are built. The truth is, the brachiosaur Alan Grant gawks at on Isla Nublar is about as close to the real thing as the most whimsical children's book illustration.

Working with what little she had, Arbour made some conservative morphological guesses based on the relatives of Gwawinapterus. The choice of such a culturally resonant pattern of color, while not entirely implausible, steps boldly away from the notion of accuracy. It grabs the viewer's attention, makes an emotional impact, and draws them into the story of the animal that inspired it, the far-flung member of a small tribe of pterosaurs. The only pterosaur with teeth known from the late Cretaceous. The speculation this inspires is an important aspect of science, and I imagine that Arbour's fanciful representation of her raven-winged pterosaur will invite many readers to do just that.

Special thanks to Victoria Arbour for allowing me to use her artwork here.

ScienceOnline special: Vector Birds

As I get set for ScienceOnline 2011, I thought that it would be appropriate to share a bit of my own work. Though I intend to do a lot of design work dedicated to science in the future, I've had rare opportunities to do it so far. Of the hundreds of book covers I've designed for my employer, I'd guess that only a handful have been dedicated to science. A much larger percentage are dedicated to the opposite. It only occasionally bothers me; the skills I've honed will be used for science and reason when I move on.

I recently did some work at home that fits within the genre of nature illustration, and I'd like to discuss this as it fits in with my goals as a designer. Since they're birds, and therefore dinosaurs, I hope you can forgive this indulgence. I do have a few straight-up dinosaur projects planned and will share those, as well, when the time is right.

Almost every year for the last six years, Jennie and I have given calendars to our families, which include birthdays and anniversaries and the like. Though I did a "Birds of Indiana" theme a few years ago, I decided to take another crack at it, using some of my newly developed skills with vector art. I have posted a few of the birds to my Flickr account. I consider them works-in-progress on route to setting up an Etsy shop with Jennie. I plan on picking my favorites and refining them a bit more. Though I have a lot of room to grow, I think that they get across the way I've been working recently. Enjoy, and as always share comments and criticisms freely in the comments.

Some Thoughts on ScienceOnline 2011

To indulge in a bit of cliche, it seems like yesterday that I was eagerly waiting for registration to open for ScienceOnline 2011. Then, before I knew what had happened, Glendon Mellow tweeted at me and I found myself a member of the Art and Science panel. Me! A panelist! At a conference!

And, as it tends to do on the back end of the calendar, time slipped by quicker than I imagined it would. Between the holidays, putting together applications for grad school, keeping up with this blog, and work, ScienceOnline was able to sneak up on me. I'll be leaving for Raleigh-Durham, NC, on Thursday morning, and the next four days will be chock full of science communication talk. I'm really excited, and will not allow my newb status to be a mark of shame. The reason I'm attending this conference, the first I'll have been to, is that I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that I've found the thing I'd like to do forever. How will I weasel my way into the professional science communication community? I'm not totally sure. I know that I want to continue writing and doing graphic design. I'm just not sure what percentage of my time they will each take up, and this conference is going to be a way to help me figure that out.

My main point with this post is to discuss the Art and Science discussion. Glendon has been a leading voice in the conversation over how the two pursuits influence and comment on each other, and until he invited me to join in, I didn't realize that I had been taking part in that converstaion in my own way. But looking back at LITC as it has evolved, I realize that much of what I write about has to do with the line between the two. Glendon approaches it from a fine art background. I approach it from a design background and lifelong love of illustration. My own ability as a draftsman is, to put it punningly, sketchy. But I've always been a visual thinker, and in the last three years I've brought my design skills up to a respectable level, and am committed to improving them further in school.

To be honest, I feel that I have poor reading comprehension. I won't go into that in too much detail, but when I think about those things I've read, bemoaning the way much of the content seems to have slipped through my memory like sand through a sieve, I find that I still retain striking visual impressions of what I read. Taking Richard Fortey's Trilobite for an example, I can virtually see the author in the unforgiving cold of Spitsbergen, the titular creatures buzzing through Ordovician seas in multitudes, and treacherous Beeny Cliff in Cornwall. I don't think I'm alone in this, though I hope I'm in the minority when it comes to retaining so little of what I read, and I think it's because we cannot help but take the abstractions of written language and translate them into something that might live in the sensual world we inhabit.

This is fascinating to me. I'm thinking about this a lot, and I hope I that I can articulate it in a meaningful way at the conference. Hell, if I can articulate a single worthwhile idea at the conference, I'll consider it a victory!

I'm also thinking about the difference between art and design. Certainly, both are methods of communicating. And though I don't consider myself an artist, I know that there is something artistic in the choices I make as a designer. There is some expression involved. But it's not as free as true artistic expression. It lives within smaller boundaries and depends on the mercy of multiple masters. Design infuses science communication at all levels, and having spent the last year and a half writing this blog and learning about how science is done, I believe I can make a contribution. Feel free to share your thoughts on science, design, and art below.

Sorry for the lack of dinosaurian content here, but the blog will probably be a little quiet for the next week. I'll post what I can while I'm at the conference (follow me @anatotitan on Twitter, as well as the hashtag #scio11), and I'll share my experiences next week.