Interactive and Informative Art

Central London. He spotted an antique pen shop, and wanted to stop in. It was 1998, and we were in town to meet with some folks helping to build the digital dome system for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, to open in 2000. It turns out that Tyson is an antique pen buff. He's also a lateral thinker, and looking at the old fountain pens and pencils got him going. There isn't much difference, he said, between these old writing implements and the state-of-the-art star projector for the planetarium; the dome is the paper, and the projector is no different than the modified quill pen that Leonardo da Vinci used to render the astronomical phenomena he observed. Like da Vinci, we had to have the eyes of an artist as well as a scientist to communicate our ideas most effectively. One of my goals in designing interactive museum exhibits has been to do just that— bringing art to the service of science, to make art that informs. Before my postgraduate work in interactive media, I studied traditional art, using my own share of pens and paper; and journalism, in which the TV camera is called the " 400-pound pencil. " I also studied anthropology, which devotes itself to observation and description. What storytellers in all media share is the need to make the complex understandable while reducing, compressing, and editing to fit space and time restrictions. Computers were, of course, created by the scientific establishment, and the continued infusion of scientific knowledge—most recently from biol-ogy—now enable the nearly complete simulation of nature. Genetic algorithms let software and hardware evolve, self-modifying and selecting versions with desired traits (see for example Flocking and swarming behaviors in animals show animators how to make crowds move. Cellular automata based on simple rules can recreate the intricate, complex patterns found in nature. 1 A hundred years ago, art was at a similar stage, with photography and film having attained a pretty accurate representation of reality. In response, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Vasily Kandinsky began to experiment with different sorts of visualizations—of the world, of the mind, of subjects not grounded in reality. Some sought a vague spiritual aspect while others wanted merely to make the invisible visible, instead of merely reproducing reality. Coincidentally, the concepts of relativity and cultural relativism arose at …