SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Science and Culture: Q&A with Roger MalinaMaggie McKeeScience Writer

Professional astronomer Roger Malina ishelping to lead a PhD program that marriesart and science at the University of Texasat Dallas. Malina details the endeavor’smanifold challenges and his own artisticinfluences.Q: Many of your early influences were

interested in both science and art. How didyou meet them?A: My father, Frank Malina, was the co-

founder and second director of the NationalAeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)Jet Propulsion Lab, but when I came homefrom school, he was painting. That was whatI thought engineers did. Midcareer, he thenbecame a full-time professional artist. He wasa pioneer in the kinetic art movement—heput motors and light bulbs inside paintings.When my father had his home in Paris,where I grew up, we had a lot of visitors. Igot to meet people like Arthur C. Clarke andRay Bradbury—all these people who hadkind of created these imaginary futures aboutspace. Also Jonas Salk, Jacob Bronowski, andC. P. Snow—a whole generation of people inthe 50s and 60s who were really interested inviewing the essence of science and scientistsin some kind of integrated way.Q: You are an astronomer. Do you con-

sider yourself an artist as well?A: I sometimes joke that I’m an astrono-

mer by day and a member of the art world bynight. I’m an artist in the sense that I collab-orate with teams that produce artwork. Acolleague of mine who’s a musician and com-poser, Andrew Blanton, and I recently gavea lecture-performance in Paris at the GoogleCultural Institute. We created a 3D soundenvironment using data on the varyingbrightness of thousands of stars. You couldactually move the data sounds around theroom to create what might be called acousticecology. Occasionally we do things to scien-tific data that no self-respecting scientistwould ever do. We’re basically using the dataas source material for the performance in thesame way that some composers are inspiredby birdsong. We have this dual objective—we’re trying to develop data exploration toolsthe scientist might use, but also use the toolsto create artwork. In this case, we haven’tdemonstrated the first part of that objective,but it’s one of our hopes.

Q: What tools are you developing forscientists?A: We’re crowdfunding a collaboration

platform for art and science called CreativeDisturbance. We’re going to be using podcaststo enable people in very different disciplinesto connect and then eventually work together.The idea is when you listen to a short pod-cast, there will be a voice-activated functionwhere you say, “More.” Then you will get anemail with more information on the personyou’re listening to, and then a way to say, “I’dlike to contact that person.” And then wewould do the letter of introduction—I call itintellectual dating.Q:How common would you say your dual

interests are?A: We did this study funded by the Na-

tional Science Foundation called “Enablingnew forms of collaboration among sciences,engineering, arts, and design.” What we no-ticed was, of the 200 people we were gettinginputs from on an open access art-sciencewebsite, something like 20% had one highereducation degree in science or engineeringand a second one in some form of arts andhumanities. So it’s not as uncommon as youthink that people have these hybrid interests.Q: You recently helped launch a PhD

program for such people. What challengeshave you faced in setting that up?A: Where do you go for funding for these

programs? What does a PhD in art mean?For many of these PhD students, their crea-tive work is in digital media. You need torethink what a PhD document is. How doyou interface these programs with future em-ployment? The postdoc doesn’t exist in thearts. What kind of training do you do? Ourstudents range from almost doing com-puter science PhDs to art projects. Howdo you develop a core curriculum that isrelevant to that range of students? Exactlywhat curriculum you should develop isreally unclear.Q: What classes have you settled on

thus far?A: At the undergraduate level, there are

computer science requirements for the artsstudents. For the PhD students, there’sa course they have to take on quantitativemethods, which involves how you analyzedata. There are courses on research methods.Then there are a number of seminars—in

how one perceives sound, computer gaming,animation, video. There’s also a very big pro-gram in what we call emerging media andcommunications. That’s anything that makesuse of social media in a large sense and howyou go about doing interface design for thosekinds of systems.Q: What reactions have you had to the

new program?A: There’s a whole range of reactions. There

are the early adopters, who get really inter-ested really quickly. Other people obviouslythink this is distracting or confuses the focuson deep scientific questions. On the otherhand, they all realize they need to be involvedwith education outreach, and so many ofthem are very interested in these questionsas applied to that. Like all these interdisci-plinary projects, you meet people who arejust basically hostile. I think one of the wayswe’ve countered skepticism is student interestand enrollment. We have 1,300 undergradu-ate students this semester, several hundredMS and MFA students, and I think 40 PhDstudents.Q: What sorts of jobs might your

graduates get?A: There’s a whole range of profiles.

Andrew Blanton, who has an MFA in music,is now teaching data visualization at San JoseState University. Many of the undergraduatestudents go into educational technology. Thepeople in the emerging media program willoften find places in marketing departments,

Roger Malina. Image courtesy of the Universityof Texas at Dallas.

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1420365111 PNAS | December 30, 2014 | vol. 111 | no. 52 | 18403–18404

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helping to exploit the large data sets they nowhave access to. It’s a range of academic re-search and different sectors of the economy.It’s too early for us to really look and doan inventory—the undergraduate programstarted about seven years ago, the PhD pro-gram only two years ago.Q: Does science need people with this

training?A: There are certain problems where

you just need to drill very, very deep ina very disciplined and disciplinary way. IfI want to design better telescopes, then Iwant someone who’s the most amazingoptics and telescope designer on the planet.

However, if you’re talking about what we’reworking on right now, which are data explo-ration tools, clearly you’re dealing with bothhow people perceive things—which gets intothe area of art and art perception—as well ascomputer science or the science of applica-tions. Depending on the problem you’reworking on, you may need to bring differentkinds of people around the table. I woulddefine art-science as the areas where theproblem requires artists and scientists tocollaborate together.Q: Why do you think this marriage of art

and science is taking off now, as opposed toin your father’s time?

A: In the 50s, if you went to an artist’sstudio and a scientist’s laboratory, there werevery few tools they shared—probably a sta-pler, maybe Scotch tape. But when I go to anartist’s studio today, it’s sometimes betterequipped than many scientists’ laboratories,with prototypes of new kinds of interactivetools. There’s a new generation of artists thatare able to engage with science and technol-ogy in new kinds of ways.

1 Chan MY, Park DC, Savalia NK, Petersen SE, and Wig GS (2014)

Decreased segregation of brain systems across the healthy adult

lifespan. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111(46):E4997–E5006.

This image comes from a connectome dataset that is based on fMRI data and shows interconnections within the human brain (1). Malina’sArtSciLab, and collaborator Gagan Wig, are developing interactive data exploration tools that use both visualization and sonification. Imagecourtesy of Gagan Wig (University of Texas at Dallas).

18404 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1420365111 McKee

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