NASA scientists team with artists for sprawling ‘PST Art’ liftoff

PASADENA, Calif. — Surveying the convoluted amalgamation of equipment in his windowless lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory the other day, Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist, said he sees “a massive experiment to simulate Jupiter’s moon Europa.” But visual artists looking at the same tangle, he noted, might “see this as some sort of bizarre sculpture.”

Pointing out a direct-to-Earth antenna, Hand added, “an artist comes in and says, what is this pointillism creation that you’ve got going on here?”

Hand is among the scientists working with artists to create “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination,” one of about 70 installations in “PST Art,” the behemoth of an exhibition that officially opens Sept. 15 and runs through Feb. 23 at museums and other nonprofits across Southern California.

Originally called “Pacific Standard Time” and funded by the Getty, “PST Art,” on its third iteration, will explore connections between art and science. Artists are digging into topics ranging from climate change and ecofeminism to environmental justice and medieval astrology.

With earlier editions focusing on Los Angeles (2011) and Latin American art (2017), “PST Art” has become an embodiment of the region’s vibrant art scene, a uniting force among museums and an opportunity for smaller institutions to gain more visibility among their higher-profile counterparts. In 2023, the Getty announced that “PST Art” would occur every five years, rather than periodically, starting in 2030.

“It’s a huge glue for bringing together all sorts of organizations across Southern California at the same time, and it has this reputation and reach nationally and globally,” said Katherine E. Fleming, the Getty’s president and CEO. “We’re not commissioning. We’re responding to ideas institutions have with support. Everyone is doing things their way but with this shared common theme.”

A wide variety of other projects are underway at institutions throughout the state. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, for example, will examine the power of color as a filmmaking tool and science fiction’s impact on cinema, while the Autry Museum of the American West will show how visual technologies have evolved with the frontier landscape.

The California African American Museum will present artworks by agricultural scientist George Washington Carver alongside his laboratory equipment. And the San Diego Museum of Art will investigate intersections of art and science in Islamic culture from the seventh century to the present.

The Getty has donated $20.4 million toward “PST Art,” which is apportioned to institutions based on the scope of their projects and level of need.

The new collaborations in part reflect growing concerns about climate change, which intensified after the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the international accord designed to avert global warming.

“Science is something that the entire museum sector is now looking at internationally. It really came after the Paris accords,” said Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation, who oversees “PST Art.” “The art world was late to this.”

For “Blended Worlds,” about a dozen artists have worked with scientists at the Propulsion Lab, in the verdant San Gabriel Valley, on projects that focus on how human beings relate to the natural world and the cosmos.

The Propulsion Laboratory — NASA’s only federally funded research and development center, which is managed by the California Institute of Technology — is a leader in robotic space exploration that has included work on the Mars rovers and the Europa Clipper. The clipper mission is scheduled to launch in October to study whether Jupiter’s moon — thought to have an enormous ocean beneath the ice as well as volcanic activity — may have conditions suitable for life.

The Propulsion Lab comes to the PST project with a long-standing commitment to art and design. Its Design Lab Studio — established in 2014 and led by Dan Goods — works on the visual presentation of NASA’s projects in public spaces and cultural institutions as well as in outer space.

For PST, the Propulsion Lab sought to explore the idea of “connectedness.”

“We wanted to create a series of earth science experiments based on questions of how to create new pathways to empathize with things you may not understand,” said David Delgado, a “cultural strategist” at the Design Lab Studio who is leading the “Blended Worlds” project. “How do we engage with the unknown?”

Hand, the astrobiologist, for example, is working with Annette Lee, an Indigenous artist and astronomer, in blending sound data from the electromagnetic field of Jupiter’s moon Europa with Earth sounds, like a whale song and a human mother’s pregnant womb.

“I’m trying to create a soundscape that will connect these water worlds through sound,” said Lee, adding that she’s interested in exploring the “revitalization of our humanity through our senses.”

Just as artists are learning from the scientists, Hand said, “I, as a scientist, benefit from opening up and unlocking some creative pathways that in my normal, everyday discussions with other scientists and engineers are just not open.”

The Propulsion Laboratory is collaborating with the city of Glendale’s Library, Arts & Culture Department to present “Blended Worlds” at the Brand Library & Art Center there.

Delgado said they invited science-oriented artists to the lab to meet with scientists and engineers, “ruminate on what they’re interested in doing as an artist, and then try to find a match in the world of science and technology to create these cross-disciplinary experiments.”

Shane Myrbeck and Saskia Wilson-Brown are imagining a future scenario in which human beings look back at life on Earth through scents and sounds that conjure memories or associations, like “a blade of grass or the ocean or grandma’s pearls,” Myrbeck said. “We’ve had a lot of rich conversations about communicating science and getting people to have some emotion around it.”

The premise, Wilson-Brown said, “is that we’ve left the planet and we couldn’t take anything with us — certainly not the smell of rain. But what we could take is the knowledge drawn from the aromatic chemical components of planet Earth to get nostalgic.”

They have been working on the project with Anjali Tripathi, an astrophysicist and the science ambassador for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program.

Tripathi said the experience has forced her to “rethink a lot of what I’m doing.”

“For a while, we were actually trying to make the exhibits smell like exoplanets. And so when you’re playing with a world that’s hot and full of lava,” like Europa, she explained, “you think, is this going to smell like sulfur? Is it going to smell like cinnamon and an oven full of baking cookies? How can we convey different aspects of it?”

Darel Carey, who specializes in optical art, is using Kapton Tape, a material common in NASA spacecraft, to create a mural; Moon Ribas, a cyborg artist from Catalonia, Spain, is implanting vibrating microchips into her body that allow her to perceive earthquakes in real time, so that she experiences each tremor, making the planet an extension of herself. (She also translates the seismic activity of Earth and Mars into a drum score.)

Viktoria Modesta, a Latvian-born British performance artist, is working with Starshades, flower-shaped screens used to block starlight and help space telescopes identify exoplanets, which are “magnificent,” Modesta said, “really visually striking.”

Kinetic sculptor David Bowen worked with Rishi Verma, a data systems specialist at the Propulsion Laboratory, to connect tilting mechanical devices to thin grass stalks that move in response to Mars wind data collected by the NASA rover and lander missions.

“I’m usually DIY — obviously I don’t have my own Mars rover kicking around,” Bowen said. “So having the opportunity to use the data in this way really expands the scale of the project.”

Verma said the project has made him think more about the larger impact of his day-to-day work at the Propulsion Lab and how young viewers might be affected by the “PST Art” exhibition.

“It’s all about inspiration,” he said. “What kid is coming through that experience and seeing something that stays with them?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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