Almost Scientific on The Steampunk Workshop

What interests you in the art and science worlds, and how do they connect for you?

Well my core interest in science is Neurobiology, the field I’m completing my Ph.D. thesis in down at Stanford.  So, yeah, obviously I’m interested in my thesis work on how sensory and reward information are dynamically combined in the brain.  But beyond that I think there is allot going on in science that is mind-blowing.

I’m really fascinated right now by Astrobiology, which is the study of biology in the context of cosmology — life on other planets kinda stuff.  The discovery that there are living organisms in some of the most extreme environments on our planet (like the high-pressure, incredibly hot, pitch-black depths of the ocean and the ice-cold, low pressure, low oxygen heights of the stratosphere) and that biological fundamental molecules are produced in nebulae has really changed how we think about life on this planet and the potential for life on other planets.

I’m excited to see what the Phoenix lander turns up on Mars — I lost my keys at a party on the martin polar cap in 2002, hopefully they’ll show up when the Phoenix starts digging.

In the art world I’m excited by how technology is changing what and how we create.

I think the impact of the internet on the arts is just beginning to be felt.  And I’m not even talking about using the internet as a medium (thought that’s got some dope potential).  I’m just thinking in terms of communicating aesthetic ideas.

If I was making art twenty years ago it’s likely very few people saw it, unless I was lucky enough to live in a cultural epicenter (and connected enough to be part of their art world).  Today, I can take my own fantastic photos, make my own video and show people what I’m creating.  Text alone does not communicate the visual arts well — but now, with the internet, it’s not “hey let me tell you what I’m doing,” it’s “let me show you.”

Additionally, the internet is fantastic for picking up new techniques and method.  Websites like this, where artist share their methods are fantastic.  Sharing methods is something I try to do with my blog.  I post about all the nitty gritty of how I make stuff.

I’m also curious to see what happens as CNC fabrication and rapid prototyping technologies become cheep enough for allot of artists to really start playing with them.

Art and science connect in a very specific way in my life. Art and creation are something that, in retrospect, had always been a major component of my life but that I had never fully embraced until recently.

I was one of those oddball arts kids in high-school but was too much of a hell raiser to every apply myself to anything other then trouble.  Then in collage I became fully engrossed with science.  But really it was art that brought me to science.  Very early on in collage I was doing an independent study and I was writing a paper about the Dutch painter Modrian.  I wanted to interpret one of his paintings (Broadway Boogie Woogie) from neuropsycholgical perspective.  But I knew nothing about the visual system of the brain so I started to study it and that spawned an almost fourteen year Emerson in neuroscience.

But, around my fourth year of working on my Ph.D. I discovered that science, at the end of the day, left me very unsatisfied.

To me science is largely about taking concrete aspects of the world and abstracting so that they can be communicated.  I would spend weeks and months working on my thesis and the result would be some bit of data that only existed on the computer and in the mind of my peers.  I realized that I need to create real objects, things and stuff that existed in the world.  Art, to me, is the flip side of science; it’s about taking the abstract ideas that exists in you mind and communicating them by instantiating them in the real world as solid objects.

Do you criss-cross your arts and your sciences to make well-designed but “affront to humanity” type cyborg or evil android super weapons?
After I graduate collage I spent two years living down in DC doing research for the government  — all that work is very hush-hush and I’m not permitted to discuss it at all.

But I built a series of cyborg, miniature schnauzers with the capacity to communicate by yodeling punk rock song; they could also launch gherkins from their anus at supersonic velocities as a defensive measure.

I also weaponized two of the English vowels.

Neither project got beyond the beta stage of field-testing and two of the schnauzers are AWOL somewhere in Switzerland.  Schnauzers are vindictive and never forget — Sometimes I fear for my safety.

Almost Scientific in Wired again

Mad Labber Scientist Tinkers With Time

By Jenna Wortham May 03, 2008 | 9:12:20 PM

Stanford grad student Alan Rorie shows off his hand-built, steam-powered time machine.

SAN MATEO, California — In-between conducting lab experiments as a Ph.D candidate for a degree in neurobiology at Stanford, Alan Rorie builds time machines.

Of course, Rorie’s machines don’t actually bend the laws of physics, but he credits his creations with helping to pass the time and “keeping [him] sane.” His steampunky time machine, or “dihemispheric chronaether agitator,” as he calls it, was handcrafted over the last few months, in his down time between research.

Rorie, who studies neuroeconomics (or the mechanics of how we make decisions) at Stanford, builds all of his own scientific apparatus to run experimental trials — everything from sensor-equipped headsets to eye-movement tracking devices.

“In my lab, we have our own custom machine shop,” said Rorie. “So I play around and build art in my spare time.”

Created out of copper, sheets of steel and nitric-acid etched brass plates, the sculpture is hooked to a steam engine with a steam boiler to power its movement.

Almost Scientific in Wired

Lights, Rockets, Robots Take Center Stage at Maker’s Faire

By Alexis Madrigal and Jenna Wortham

Almost Scientific in Nature

Almost Scientific on BoingBoing TV