2012–13 Grantees
An Artistic Collision
This project is a “collision” of visual art and particle physics emerging from the collision of subatomic particles at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Although visual representations have been produced independently and in collaboration with CERN, the topic of representation has evolved over the past decade as the focus of the science at CERN has evolved. And no representation has yet taken the planned form of this project. Anthony Adcock (Visual Arts) will paint a series of panels forming a “3D painting,” that together represent the full process of producing and subsequently detecting particles, like the Higgs boson, which Samuel Meehan (Physics) studies. It will take the audience from the chalkboard of the theorist, to the quantum mechanical interactions in the experiments that give science insights into the fundamentals of our universe.
Faculty Advisors: Jessica Stockholder (Visual Arts) and Mark Oreglia (Physics)
Wishful Permutation
On earth, the energy and information transmitted via the light of the sun is the source of most experience. What if this earthly experience was not driven by light, but instead by sound? What sound would this sun make, and how would that universe be different from the one we know? Jen Smoose (Visual Arts) and Scott Waitukaitis (Physics) explore this alternate reality with Wishful Permutation, a sculptural work that reinterprets the light of the sun collected from online databases as radiated sound.
Faculty Advisors: Jason Salavon (Visual Arts) and Heinrich Jaeger (Physics)
No Man's Land: Reinterpreting Land Use Behavior through Mende Folktales in Sierra Leone
Land use in developing countries is suspended in tension between the interests of local farmers, often living hand-to-mouth off of the land, and foreign donors and governments seeking greater investment in conservation. Carbon markets transfer funds from rich countries to the poor with the hope of reducing deforestation and changing the traditional land-use practices of subsistence farmers. Sophia Rhee (Visual Arts) and Ty Turley (Economics) will investigate how farmers in Sierra Leone relate to efforts by Western donors to change farming patterns. They will contrast local conceptions of appropriate land use as represented by local folklore with policy efforts by development economists and NGOs to encourage conservation. Rhee and Turley will create a film on this subject using the narratological and mythic structures of the folklore of Mende tribes. Specifically, the film will concentrate on Mende folktales that model appropriate use of land. The film was shot on location in rural Sierra Leone with the help of local folk performance artists and farmers.
Faculty Advisors: Catherine Sullivan (Visual Arts) and John List (Economics)
The Chromochord
Music, science, and technology have been intimately linked throughout history. Using protein nanotechnology Josiah Zayner (Biochemistry) and Francisco Castillo Trigueros (Music Composition) will develop a musical biosensor that will allow people to both hear and see the chemical reactions of a light-responsive protein. A public audio-visual installation will be created with this musical biosensor. The device hardware schematics and software will be made freely available to the public in an Open Source manner.
Faculty Advisors: Howard Sandroff (Music) and Tobin Sosnick (Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics)
Nostalgia: A Digital History
This project uses emerging techniques of digital analysis to reconstruct the history of nostalgia. One of the chief problems we seek to answer is how “nostalgia,” which designated a medical pathology in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, was transformed into a retrospective, wistful emotion in the twentieth century. Through the permission of Hathi Trust, Rebekah Baglini (Linguistics) and Jonathan Schroeder (English) will build a digital database with over 200,000 public domain documents to construct a precise account of the evolution of nostalgia. The larger purpose of this case study is to show the value of constructing and analyzing targeted databases for the writing of conceptual history. To this end, Baglini and Schroeder plan to show how the large-scale analysis of nostalgia transforms established scholarly understandings. This history will serve as a model of how new approaches can contribute to future research in the humanities.
Faculty Advisors: Jason Riggle (Linguistics) and Eric Slauter (English)