Exploring Science, Art, Music, AI & Consciousness with MAX COOPER - Highlights

Exploring Science, Art, Music, AI & Consciousness with MAX COOPER - Highlights

Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist

As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.

What can music teach us that science can’t? - MAX COOPER - A/V Artist, Musician, Fmr. Computational Biologist

What can music teach us that science can’t? - MAX COOPER - A/V Artist, Musician, Fmr. Computational Biologist

Electronic Musician · Fmr. Computational Biologist

As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.

What does it mean to have an ecological mind? - Highlights - PAOLA SPINOZZI

What does it mean to have an ecological mind? - Highlights - PAOLA SPINOZZI

Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.

Literature, Humanities & Sustainability: PAOLA SPINOZZI - Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing, UNIFE

Literature, Humanities & Sustainability: PAOLA SPINOZZI - Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing, UNIFE

Coordinator, Phd Programme, Environmental Sustainability & Wellbeing · University of Ferrara
Co-editor of Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing: Theories, Histories and Policies

The humanities are all about representing the world, while the sciences are all about knowing the world. But I believe the roles are deeply intertwined, and that literature, the humanities, philosophy, history, and the arts are all ways of knowing the world. They do exactly the same thing in our understanding of the world. And it is really important to try to put these things together to bring people closer in talking to each other.

Highlights - Julio Ottino - Founding Co-Director of Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

Highlights - Julio Ottino - Founding Co-Director of Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

Julio Ottino is an artist, researcher, author, and educator at Northwestern University. He is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. He was the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2008, he was listed in the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering.

Today's complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking — one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the leaders and innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is THE NEXUS. In this provocative and visually striking book, Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau offer a guide for navigating the intersections of art, technology, and science.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Riya Patel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Riya Patel.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

Julio Ottino - Author of “The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science”


Julio Ottino - Author of “The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science”


Julio Ottino is an artist, researcher, author, and educator at Northwestern University. He is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. He was the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2008, he was listed in the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering.

Today's complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking — one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the leaders and innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is THE NEXUS. In this provocative and visually striking book, Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau offer a guide for navigating the intersections of art, technology, and science.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Riya Patel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Riya Patel.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

Highlights - Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple” - Prof. Molecular Genetics, Assoc. Dean - U of Surrey

Highlights - Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple” - Prof. Molecular Genetics, Assoc. Dean - U of Surrey

Author of Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
Co-author of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Professor of Molecular Genetics & Assoc. Dean (Int’l) · University of Surrey

I think that's what art is all about is communicating these big, complex objects, which are ideas inside our head, but in a non-dissected way in which the object isn't completely dissected, or it's dissected in such a way it can be reassembled in somebody else's mind. So you get a full experience of what the artist had or as close as he or she can make it. So I think that to me is what art does. It's a way of communicating these wonderful ideas and feelings that we have inside our heads. And they're trapped there, and art allows you - by playing music or painting, or writing poetry... - it allows you to communicate this in this holistic kind of way.

Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe”

Johnjoe McFadden - Author of “Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe”

Author of Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
Co-author of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Professor of Molecular Genetics & Assoc. Dean (Int’l) · University of Surrey

I think that's what art is all about is communicating these big, complex objects, which are ideas inside our head, but in a non-dissected way in which the object isn't completely dissected, or it's dissected in such a way it can be reassembled in somebody else's mind. So you get a full experience of what the artist had or as close as he or she can make it. So I think that to me is what art does. It's a way of communicating these wonderful ideas and feelings that we have inside our heads. And they're trapped there, and art allows you - by playing music or painting, or writing poetry... - it allows you to communicate this in this holistic kind of way.

Highlights - Bruce Mau - Award-winning Designer, Author of “Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change”

Highlights - Bruce Mau - Award-winning Designer, Author of “Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change”

Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

Bruce Mau - Author of "Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work”

Bruce Mau - Author of "Mau MC24…24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work”

Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

(Highlights) DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

(Highlights) DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 in Montreal. She attended Black Mountain College where she met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory were deeply influential to her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with Judson Dance Theater, and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy and other performances. In the late 60s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite applied to paper and chipboard. Her “visual equations” based on set theory were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Her later paintings draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dia:Beacon, and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's interesting. Of course, he gave you these books, but it's interesting how those walks you took together with the mathematician Max Dehn also illustrated what he was teaching you about abstraction.

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

The walks were amazing. We walked up every morning at eight o'clock. There's a waterfall on campus at Black Mountain, and we walked to this waterfall, and he explained water to me. He explained how things worked. You know, when I was a little kid, I used to take alarm clocks apart and put back together and things like that. I don't know. Ever since the chip entered the universe, I don't know electronics now.

But when I was a kid, when I was even living in New York on Chambers Street with my daughter, we had a TV set which broke down periodically, and I would take out all the tubes, test them at the local store. I just was interested in how things tick. Always. In nature and in mechanics and so on. So, math just kind of was a natural for me the way Max taught it because what he was really teaching was astronomy.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And you can see that sense of wonder everywhere in your early artworks to the ones that you just shared with us today with the beautiful copper over paper and all these textures. They're just a wonderful meditation. I think the expression you used was on the nature of nature.

ROCKBURNE

Yes. There's something about this life I have, and I've had since I was a child, about studying the creativity of the arcane. I studied Egypt since I was six. That's where I go every day.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You were talking about time and your experience of time. And you said you don't experience it as...it's not linear. I don't know. How would you say?

ROCKBURNE

It's hard for me, for myself, to define what the past is. So when I was doing the work at DIA, I felt like I had found about this work and formed it yesterday. Then, as I said, I have extensive diary notes on it. So, it was easy to go back to '80. I have 73 diaries. And look at it and then share it with all the people that were working with me at DIA.

Of course, you know, like they have only seen this in reproduction. They don't know what the work behind the work was like. And so, once we were talking about, and we had to track it. The big reason it took three years is that none of the materials exist. We had to substitute and test new materials to substitute for the old materials. Nothing. You know, it's like Rauschenberg once lost one of the Coke bottles of his work, and he finally found one in a mountain in India or something like that.

It's that kind of thing. The stuff that was so ordinary. Paper that was so ordinary. We had a special paper made in it. So that's what really took the time. But in terms of the sequential time, I experience very little difference between yesterday and today in my work.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Benjamin Appel with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Elena Sperry-Fromm. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.