Hannah Munguia Flores is a third-year student at MIT pursuing a dual master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Technology and Policy. She spends most days researching the carbon cycle and searching for sustainable crops that can be converted into biofuel for her jet engine. But on this late summer day, Munguia Flores was decorating a paper fighter jet with a computer-designed collage of grains and algae.
“My supervisor asked me to draw a diagram of the carbon cycle,” says Munguia Flores. He spent the summer taking “Making Art for Scientists: Materials, Processes, and Information Relays” with instructor and artist Timothy Lee. This course, offered through MIT Arts Studios (formerly Student Art Association), encourages scientists and engineers to explore new ways to visualize and express their research. “And then I realized that there was a part of me that was missing. In this class, I was able to draw, sorry for the joke, but in the empty space. To do research, I just sat at my desk. I learned there is more to it than just sitting there.”
change abstract ideas
Over eight summer sessions, Munguia Flores and her fellow students learned how to create art using a variety of media. Some works, like Munguia Flores, combine digital art and paper cutouts. Some worked in the fields of animation and oil painting. And while learning to make art, they all learned a new language that helped them articulate their research and gave them a new perspective on their chosen field of study. “This is not a class about data visualization design or medical illustration,” says instructor artist Timothy Lee. “It’s about taking that information and data, interpreting it in a new context, and turning that data into artwork that conveys things that the raw data can’t.”
An interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes such as racial politics, immigration, and sexuality, Lee is the ideal guide for students who want to combine their passions for research and art. He studied neuroscience, biology, and studio art as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, and earned a master’s degree in computational arts from Goldsmiths University, London. “This course came to me naturally,” Lee says. He will present a major project at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts next summer. “It combines both of my interests, science and art, two fields that are often presented as completely opposites that are said to use different hemispheres of the brain. Fields can cross-pollinate and feed each other.”
Transform data into artistic insights
Creating Art for Scientists is not for complete art beginners. Lee recommends students demonstrate proficiency or experience in art production or take an introductory drawing or painting class before enrolling. In her first class, Lee asks students to think about the most enjoyable aspect of research and describe what images come to mind when they think about that aspect. “This exercise helps students frame how they will observe their own research,” she says Lee. “They may already know how much they love what they do. But this exercise will help them understand why.”
Marcelo Barazza, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy, was already an experienced painter when he enrolled in this course. He took Lee’s course to help develop more effective means of representing the process by which planets and planetary systems come into being. “It’s a process that’s always happening in the universe,” says Barazza, a Chilean native who completed his doctoral studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. His project was an oil painting depicting planets forming from rotating plates of gas and dust, known to astronomers as protoplanetary disks. “However, we are rarely able to observe the formation processes. Most of the time we work using numerical predictions. In essence, we need a way to visualize these processes, that is, to transform abstract concepts into concrete ones. I wanted to find a way to do that.”
The influence of art on the future of science
Once students choose a theme and medium, Lee introduces them to the work of other artists who explore similar themes and techniques, whether it’s analog techniques like oil painting or digital art like animation. Most class sessions begin with a series of projected art images, and Mr. Lee prompts students to consider how the work they present relates to their class project. “It’s very helpful to see artists trying to express something similar to what you want to express,” Barazza says.
Harrison Canning worked on the early stages of computer animation that correlated brain waves with a person’s mental state and emotions. “I started thinking about the ocean, where there’s ebb and flow at the surface, and there’s deep currents beneath the surface,” says Canning, who works in communications at Blackrock Neurotech. “This animation juxtaposes avatars with happy and not-so-happy facial expressions with images of waves that correspond to those emotions. It makes complex ideas more accessible, tactile, and human-like. It’s a way to consider things while making them.”
Lee, who teaches several courses at the MIT Arts Studio and is also an instructor in the Tufts University School of Art Museum, plans to offer the course again during the 2023-24 academic year. He hopes more students will learn to think of themselves as artists and scientists. “I think making art helps people think in new ways,” he explains. “It challenges you to let go and teaches you that things don’t always have to be done in a linear way. You take something abstract like data and use your artistic skills to move it into the realm of understanding. There are a lot of artists who blur the lines between technology, science, and art, and what better place to do that than at MIT?”