In our world, it makes perfect sense that some of our scientists also make art, and some of our artists do science.
Exploratorium Founder Frank Oppenheimer called artists and scientists “the official ‘noticers’ of society,” adding that “they notice things that other people either have never learned to see or have learned to ignore, and communicate those ‘noticings’ to others.” Many museums now incorporate both art and science, but this was a revolutionary idea when the Exploratorium opened its doors in the late sixties.
Today, visiting and staff artists and scientists continue to work alongside each other, separately and in collaboration (and with educators, exhibit developers, and other staff). Their common goal: to support a culture of experimentation and collaboration, inspire curiosity and understanding, and stimulate fresh ideas and directions.
Staff biologists, collaborating with research scientists and labs nationwide, created this groundbreaking microscope facility. The MIS allows visitors to do something the public can rarely do: explore the microscopic world by controlling research-grade microscopes to view living specimens, such as beating heart cells grown from stem cells.
Since the early days of the Exploratorium, this program has offered artists opportunities to work on exhibitions and other projects, to collaborate with our resident scientists and other staff, and to experiment and develop new directions for the museum and for themselves.
This Web feature explores the scientific process, revealing the journey from tentative theory to accepted fact. Using a case study in human origins, an Exploratorium team traveled to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany to work with renowned researchers, including Dr. Svante Pääbo. Dr. Pääbo later led the project that created the first draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome.
Our longstanding Cinema Arts program collects and screens films that capture the methods and aesthetics of both artists and scientists. Its primary focus: films that blend observation, poetry, and surrealism; and documentaries that exist in the realm between art and science, and fiction and documentary.
In 2005, twenty Russian and American scientists and graduate students traveled to Kamchatka, Russia, to study the unique microbiology and geochemistry of the hot springs in the Uzon Caldera. The research group gave up two very valuable spots, normally given to scientists, on this excursion to Exploratorium staff members, who documented the fieldwork to create a Web feature.
The Mind exhibit collection at the museum, inspired by influential research in the cognitive sciences, offers insight into our thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes. The exhibition team that created it drew on the expertise of a neuroscientist and a psychologist on staff, plus staff and visiting artists.
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