By Hannah Z. Morley
Artists and composers are visual and sonic mathematicians who can map data in ways that others do not understand, says UC Santa Barbara media arts and music professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, who champions a greater role for creative artists in scientific experimentation.
Kuchera-Morin, who directs UCSB’s AlloSphere research space and teaches in the Media Arts & Technology program, was the second speaker in the UCSB Music Department’s spring Corwin Chair Series. She spoke last week about her history as a composer and why it has qualified her to collaborate with physicists and other scientists.
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a music professor and the director of UCSB’s innovative research space, the AlloSphere. The space has become a place where artists and scientists collaborate to reimagine the different ways research can be conducted.
Such art and STEM collaborations, says Kuchera-Morin, represent academic research’s interdisciplinary future, one that spaces like the AlloSphere will facilitate.
“This is the point in time for each one of us on the planet to realize that we’re all equal. That we all have something to give,” said Kuchera-Morin said. “From the cook, to the migrant worker, to the Nobel laureate — there’s no difference in who we are.”
UC Santa Barbara’s AlloSphere is a a 3-story high metal cylinder that creates immersive multi-dimensional data sets for scientific and artistic investigation.
UCSB’s AlloSphere is a 3-story high metal cylinder designed to create “immersive/interactive” multi-dimensional data sets for scientific and artistic investigation. Led by Kuchera-Morin, the facility was finished in 2007 and represents Kuchera-Morin’s more than 30 years of experience in digital media research. Now the AlloSphere is used by UCSB’s scientists and artists, as well as visiting scholars and innovators, to reimagine how research can be conducted.
“We work with scientists to make their mathematical models and be able to visualize and sonify them,” said Kuchera-Morin in an interview with HFA prior to her lecture. “They can start to find and uncover patterns that maybe they couldn’t see just from looking at the numbers.”
Kuchera-Morin said that her life’s goal is to reform education to integrate the “holistic connection” between the arts and the STEM fields.
Both orientations, she says, have the same creative process but focus on opposite aspects of it. While artists tend to lean into their intuition, scientists tend to stop themselves and analyze whether their thoughts make sense before moving forward. Artists are the “missing link” in data science Kuchera-Morin said.
“My experimentalists in my labs sometimes do not know what they’re looking for,” she said. “When we start to visualize… [the statisticians] don’t understand it the way that we [the artists] understand it.”
Through her collaborations, Kuchera-Morin wants mainstream academia to realize that the arts are integral to STEM in ways that nobody would ever predict. Composers can help physicists visualize their equations because composers understand “perception.” For example, the composer can see how equations can look in physical and temporal spaces and share their perception on data in a way that most scientists wouldn’t think about.
“I’m composing with my scientists,” Kuchera-Morin said. “When they were in the laboratory working with their materials it was much like myself working with acoustic instruments.”
In 2009, professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin gave a TED talk about the AlloSphere and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Kuchera-Morin encourages future composers to seek out such interdisciplinary collaborations to give themselves a wider skill set. This system, says Kuchera-Morin, has transformed her from being just a composer to becoming a multimedia artist and scientist.
“At this point in time we can’t be siloed in disciplines. Everything is highly interdisciplinary,” Kuchera-Mornin said in her interview. “You have to push yourself beyond your capabilities to make creative discoveries.”
Hannah Z. Morley is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Writing & Literature at the College of Creative Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.