Science Friday - Digital Art, Lava Lab, Desalination. Feb 1, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: February 1, 2019

A series of lines on a wall, drawn by museum staff, from instructions written by an artist. A textile print made from scanning the screen of an Apple IIe computer, printing onto heat transfer material, and ironing the result onto fabric. A Java program that displays its source code—plus the roving attention of the programmer writing that code, and the even speedier attention of the computer as it processes it. All three are works of art currently on display at the Whitney Museum of Art’s ‘Programmed’ exhibition, a retrospective of more than 50 years of art inspired or shaped by coding. Host John Dankosky is joined by Whitney adjunct curator Christiane Paul, plus artists Joan Truckenbrod and W. Bradford Paley, to discuss the past and future of digital art. If you want to make a lava flow from scratch, the ingredients are fairly simple: one big crucible, and 200 to 700 pounds of 1.2 billion-year-old basalt dug from a quarry in Wisconsin. Combine these two, at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have The Lava  Project—a scientific study of the flow of molten lava in an upstate New York parking lot. Syracuse University geology professor Jeffrey Karson tells SciFri more. Plus: Desalination is the process that converts saltwater into water that can used for drinking, agriculture, or industrial uses—but desalination produces brine, a salty byproduct that can contain other chemicals. Journalist Tik Root talks about the trade-offs when it comes to desalination in this week's Good Thing, Bad Thing. Finally, Vox staff writer Umair Irfan joins SciFri for a look at the Midwest's Arctic temperatures, and other top science headlines, in this week's News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about digital art. But first, I've got some news that may come as something of a surprise to you. Are you ready? You may not have heard, but it's been pretty cold in the Midwest this week. It's the result of a weather pattern known as the polar vortex. And here to talk about that and some other stories of the week is Umer Erfahn, staff writer for Vox. Welcome back, Umer. Hi, John. Thanks for having me.

We're going to skip the how cold is a question. We know it's cold, but why is it so cold right? Well, the phenomenon behind it is what's called the polar vortex, as you mentioned. This is actually something that's always going on in the Arctic. It's a counterclockwise moving mass of cold air, but it's usually bounded by the jet stream. What we saw, what that's unusual, is that the jet stream has started to become a little bit more unstable, and it's allowed the cold air from the Arctic to sort of extrude and squeeze out over North America. So does it have to do with the wind patterns that make the polar vortex dip down this far?

Partially. I mean, there's a high pressure system building up over the Pacific and the air. a low pressure system over North America. And so that kind of creates a pressure imbalance that allows the cold air from the far north just to get shunted right over much of the country. So it's really cold in a lot of the U.S., but meanwhile, it's really, really hot in Australia right now? Yeah, it's hard to believe that there are other countries in the world, but yes, there are. And in Australia, it's been extremely hot.

They just reported this morning that January was its hottest month ever. It's summer in Australia, and there are towns in Australia that have had two weeks. in a row of temperatures above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. They've had to euthanize horses and camels, and it shows that just the overall warming trend due to climate change is still in place. The planetary average this week has been about 0.3 degrees Celsius above the baseline. So warming is still taking place. So hold it.

If you look at the globe as a whole right now, we're slightly warmer than we should be, despite how cold it is here in the U.S.? Yeah, that's right. And scientists also detect an El Nino brewing in the Pacific, and they think that 2019 could end up being the hottest year on record. Really quickly, maybe you could remind us about the difference between weather and climate. People are always making jokes, you know, global warming during a polar vortex. Yeah, the short of it is that climate is what you expect and weather is what you get.

The climate is the statistics, what we kind of estimate the averages, and then the weather is what we experience on a day-to-day level. So on balance, we do expect that the climate is going to continue to warm, and those weather patterns will still continue to change as a consequence of that. All right, so here's some more depressing wintertime news. It seems there's a serious measles outbreak happening in the Pacific Northwest. What can you tell us? Yeah, the Washington State Governor Jay Inslee declared a public health emergency last week. As of this morning, there have been 42 confirmed cases of measles, and most of them are children under 10 years old. And that's really alarming because measles is a very, very contagious disease.

You can catch measles just by being in the room several hours after somebody with measles was in it. It's one of the few viruses that can be transmitted using that method. And so public health officials are very concerned here. So even a number as small as 42 is a number to be concerned about. Yeah, that's right. And in this area, Clark County, which is sort of the epicenter of this outbreak, the concern is that they have a very high rate of children that are not vaccinated. They have some of the more relaxed school vaccination rules, and they estimate that there

are about 7% or more of children that are not vaccinated for this disease. The national average of unvaccinated children for non-medical reasons is about 2%. So it's a lot higher than what we expect in the rest of the country. So the school vaccination rate is really what the cause is of this outbreak right now? That's just that's kind of what the public health officials seem to be thinking right now. Measles is well suited to this kind of a wintertime outbreak. Why? Well, in the winter, people spend a lot more time in closed environments and so I spend a lot more time indoors. And even in the public spaces that people go out to, you know, you're going to be contained more closer together in places like stores and things like that rather than an outdoor marketplaces, which increases the likelihood of actually.

actually being around somebody who has the virus. You talked about the rates of people who are immunized. Do you have to get to a certain amount of people immunized in any one area to get that herd immunity effect that we talk about that actually allows people to not get measles whenever there's an outbreak? Yeah, that's right. I mean, it varies from disease to disease, but there is a threshold by which that public health officials refer to as herd immunity, as you mentioned. The idea is that there are people who can't get vaccinated for various medical reasons

if they're immunocompromised or what have you. And in order to protect them, they have to make sure that there's sort of a shield of people that are immunized that are constantly around them. And that ends up serving as sort of a barrier to prevent outbreaks. There's also been news this week about the twin babies in China that allegedly had their genomes edited via CRISPR. Maybe you can remind us what happened there. Yeah. Last year, Chinese scientist Hu Juan Kui announced that he had announced the delivery of two twin baby girls, Nana and Lulu, who were, engineered to be immune to the AIDS virus, HIV. And a lot of scientists, of course, were very

alarmed, but there was also no verification of that. But last month, the Chinese government did verify that this happened, and they're now considering punishing the scientist for it. And then this week, we found out that there was actually a U.S. scientist who knew about this experiment ahead of time. A U.S. scientists who knew. Did more people across the scientific community know about this as it was happening? Well, that's the speculation right now. The scientist in question, Craig Mell is a Nobel laureate. And he was a Nobel laureate. on the board of directors of one of Jean Quay's companies, but in some of the emails that were revealed this week by the Associated Press, they pointed out that Mello was trying

to discourage Jean Quay from doing this experiment for various reasons and said he didn't want to be a part of it, but the other question is why he didn't raise the alarm of it ahead of time. And then this morning, NPR reported that there is a researcher at Columbia University, Dieter Egli, who's also conducting human embryo research with CRISPR, though in this case he insists that none of these are designed to be viable embryos. They're not designed to be delivered as babies. These are strictly a laboratory experiment. A last quick thing about this, now that we have some more news,

it seems likely that these children in China actually do exist, that this isn't some elaborate hoax. Right. I mean, the fact that the Chinese authorities have acknowledged this, and they are seriously considering punishments for this, means that they are taking it very seriously. To my knowledge, nobody outside of China has verified this, but it does seem likely that this is something that has already happened,

and it's a sign that the science is moving well past, well ahead of the ethics and the rules and regulations around this research. We just have about a minute left, but I want to talk about a fun story, though. News this week about pickup trucks? Tell us. Yeah. US automakers have been saying for a long time that the future is electric, but their offerings have been meager. But in the middle of the month last month,

a senior Ford official said that they want to make an electric version of the F-150. It's the single most popular car in the United States, and pickup trucks are a huge cultural icon in this country. So the idea that they're going to be making an electric version seems to signal both a strategic shift for the company, but also sort of a cultural shift where electric vehicles are catching on. But electric vehicles are seen by some as wimpy. Trucks are supposed to be macho. I mean, can they sell electric trucks? That remains to be seen.

Yeah, I mean, will Toby Keith sing songs about an electric F-150? I don't know. But there are also some other companies that are getting in on the car. this. General Motors said they're investigating an electric pickup truck, so is Tesla, and then there are a couple startup companies, Rivian and Bollinger, that are working on pretty much just electric pickup trucks and SUVs.

So it seems like this is a market that could be ripe for it. Electric drive trains, they generate a lot of torque, which is useful for towing, and so that's something that could be an advantage in an electric pickup truck. We'll wait for the country songs to come out. Umair Urfan is a staff writer for Vox based in Washington. Thanks so much for being with us. Thanks, John. And now it's time to play

a good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. Water, of course, is a big battle. Cities are trying to figure out how to get clean water for growing populations. One solution is desalination, the process of turning ocean water into salt-free drinking water. Plants are popping up in California, but the technology is really taken off in the Middle East. The process also produces a briny byproduct that could be toxic. Here to fill us in on the good and bad is Teak Rute, who wrote about this for National Geographic.

He's a freelance journalist based in Washington. Welcome, Teak. Hi, thanks for having me. So there are desalination plants in California, a lot popping up in other places of the world. First of all, tell us how widespread is this technique? How many places are using it? So I think there's about 177 countries using it, but it's mostly in the Middle East. About half of the desalination in the world happens there.

It's happening in the U.S. There's some big plants in California and in Florida, in Tampa Bay, actually. But they aren't the major players. It's mostly in the Middle East. What are the techniques that are used to desalinate water on such a large scale? So I think historically there's been thermal desalination, which is basically heating up the water to evaporate the fresh water out of the salt water. And then a newer one is reverse osmosis, which pushes salt water through a membrane, separating the fresh water from the salt water so that they can use it for drinking water. And it's seemingly being used for drinking water for a whole lot of people, not just in California, as you.

you say in the Middle East. This is providing a clean source of drinking water for lots and lots of people. Yeah, there's almost 16,000 desalination plants and the International Desalination Association claims there's about 300 million people who get some portion of their water from desalination. So it's definitely out there, and I think as water scarcity increases, it's definitely something that especially richer countries are going to look to as a solution. Okay, so it seems like a good solution. It's going to get water to people who don't have it. but there's a byproduct of this technique, and it's brine. Maybe you can tell us about brine and what the impacts are as this byproduct is created.

So brine is what's left over when you either evaporate or membrane out the freshwater. There's this concentrated saltwater that's a little bit warmer, and if you're on the ocean, which about 80% of desalination plants are within 10 kilometers of the ocean, then that usually gets dumped back into the ocean. And proponents of desalination will argue that you're just dumping salt water back into salt water, and it's not a big deal. But some biologists look at it and say that this is very concentrated saltwater, and when it goes back in, it raises not only the temperature of the water in the nearby area, but also the salinity, which will reduce dissolved oxygen levels and can be really harmful for organisms that live near plants. And it's not just brine that's in this substance. there's other chemicals in there too? What do we know about that?

Right. So when they push the normal seawater into a plant, they usually add like chlorine or copper to help it keeping from corroding the pipes inside the plant. But that substance also gets pushed back out with the brine and is potentially toxic. We don't honestly know a whole lot about it. There's not a whole lot of reporting on brine. And so there's just not much we know about what kind of substances are going back in with it. A last thing for you, desalination can also be pretty energy intensive, too. What can you tell us about that? Yeah, so I think that's arguably the biggest environmental effect of desalination is that you have

to use fossil fuels or electricity driven by fossil fuels largely to power these plants, which is one reason you're seeing it in the Middle East where there's cheaper or more abundant oil. Those countries can afford to pump out desalinated water, which, uses a ton of electricity and costs about twice as much to produce as, say, a reservoir or something like that. Ticeroot is a freelance journalist based out of Washington, D.C. Thanks so much for bringing us this story. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

We're going to come right back after the short break to talk about digital art. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. When I see something really cool or interesting out in the world, I do what a lot of people do. I get out my smartphone, I open Instagram, and I take a picture. And then I scrolled through all the different filter options to shape the photo into a piece of what I consider to be digital art. My phone helped me make it. A programmer created filter options that I chose from. The final result is mine to share with the world, even if it's not really all that interesting. Now, we take this ability for granted today, but the history of digital art stretches long before Instagram and iPhones.

Early computer artists had to learn to code by hand to create digital images that they could not immediately see on the screen. and conceptual artists like Saul Lowitz were creating elaborate instructions like, draw this number of lines on a wall at these angles and letting museums produce the final results. There are those who would argue that even virtual reality has its roots in cave paintings. Here to talk about this long digital history and take us into the future are Christian Paul, adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of Art here in New York City. Christian, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me.

Also with this is W. Bradford Paley, a digital artist, and cognitive engineer living in Willsborough, New York, but he joins us in our studio as well. Brad, welcome. Pleasure to be here, thank you. And Joan Truckenbrode is a digital artist living in Corvallis, Oregon. Joan, thanks for coming and joining us today.

Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. And you can see some of the examples of the art that we're talking about on our webpage, Science Friday.com slash digital. And I do encourage you to do that. To our listeners, what's your favorite use of technology and art that you've seen

or that you've used? Our number is 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sai Talk, or you can always tweet us at SciFry. Christian, I guess I'll start with you because you're curating this exhibit at the Whitney right now that looks at the last 50 years of digital art and what came before, especially where code and instructions are concerned. Why did you think this was a necessary project? Tell us about the way you created it.

The motivation for it was actually two-fold. On the one hand, we are living in an increasingly encoded algorithmic work. So we're communicating with our smart devices. We're on social media. Economics are dominated by algorithms. And I thought that it would be really important at this time to look at artists who for a long time have really explored the potential and the limits of rule-based and algorithmic art. and look into how we express ourselves creatively through that. And the other motivation was really to counteract the assumption that digital art is something that happened in the 90s earliest, while it really has, as you say, a long, long history.

Maybe you can give me your definition of digital arts. If people ask you what exactly is this, what do you say to them? It's not an easy one because technologies and practices have been fluctuating so much that it's hard to get it. under one umbrella. I say that it's art using digital technologies as a medium. That is very important to me making use of the computational, real-time, interactive, generative characteristics of it and reflect on them. So it's very different from using digital technologies as a tool to print a photograph, for example. And in the narrow definition, people have often said it's born digital art, it's created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies.

but that would leave out early practitioners, computer drawings from the 60s, or Joan's work for that matter, and that by younger artists who today are often create very material work such as weavings that would not exist without the use of algorithms and digital technologies. Joan, maybe I'll go to you for that broad question, because I'd like to talk specifically about your work in just a moment, but maybe you can give us a definition in your mind of what digital art is. Yes, I think it's really an integrated media, and it facilitates an integrated creativity. And by that, I mean you can create a variety of forms. The artist really gives form to the artwork.

The medium doesn't create the form. Digital data, of course, can be sound, image, motion, all of those kinds of things, and all of those kinds of expressive forms. And also there's this simultaneity of multiple layers of realms of creative expression. So the digital artwork is in the data in the computer. It also can be simultaneously in virtual reality, and it can also be in physical form. So there's this complex layering of the simultaneous expression through these different realities, I would say.

Brad, how about you? Do you have a definition that you use? I think you've heard a couple of excellent definitions by people who are more qualified than me at defining them. I just make objects and they can be taken as art or as tools or as one woman once looked at something of mine and said, I don't know what I'm looking at, but it'd make a nice scarf. And as far as I was concerned, that was perfectly fine. But that's important. And maybe we'll get back to this more with you, but you're not necessarily,

creating something that people might say it's art, but other people might look at something that you've done that you didn't expect to be art, and they say, that's beautiful. I find that to be art. As a matter of fact, Christian and I met because I made a structuralist literary textual analysis tool called text arc, and it got written up in the New York Times as a piece of art, and I imagine you saw it either. You may have seen it before that, but at that time. And Christian said, later I'd like to commission you to do an artwork. And I said, but that wasn't art. That was just a tool.

And I've come to learn that I'm not the person who's qualified to apply that word art. I pondered it for two decades as a kid, didn't come to an answer, and I'm glad other people have an answer now. Well, I want to get into some specific examples, and we've got to some of your phone calls in just a moment, too, as we talk about digital art. Joan, one of the works you have on display at the Whitney is one you made back in 1978, and it used an early version of an Apple person,

computer, it's a textile, but the process to make it sounds pretty involved. Maybe you can explain exactly what you had to do in 1978 to make this tactile piece of digital art. Yes, my interest was in and continues to be in sort of invisible processes, invisible phenomena in the natural world that are physically palpable. So playing between these realms, I programmed using mathematical descriptions of like wind currents or light waves reflecting off of irregular surfaces. I embedded those in algorithms and then wrote code for the Apple 2E, which had to be in basic at that point. And in order to get it onto textile, the monitor was turned upside down on a 3M color and color

copier, which had a backlight setting, so it understood the image on the monitor. and it used dye sheets with magenta, cyan, and yellow, and it would create color prints of each in a series of images that reflected this ongoing process in time. And I printed them on heat transfer material. So after I had the series printed, and there are always artifacts of the process and the media. So one interesting thing that was happening is monitors didn't like to be upside down.

So sometimes there would be a little bit of color fading as if the color was shifting into one corner or such. And that became part of the artwork. So each of these images on heat transfer material was cropped down and then hand transferred onto the fiber by using a hand iron. The fiber was a polyester satin because the, dye was micro-encapsulated and actually melted into the polyester fabric. So each of these panels would then be hand-ironed. And in that piece, I superimposed another pattern of flow on top by cutting up each panel of the print into a new pattern and then arranging them and hand-ironing them onto the fiber.

And once in a while, the image of the hand iron would appear in the piece. But for me, it's important that the hand is part of the artwork. It's such an interesting involved process that you had to go through to do something that starts with code. I guess I should ask you, as an artist, when did you think I need to learn to code? I need to learn how computers work in order to make my art. Well, initially, I was interested in making an impression or an experience. of these invisible phenomena that I felt, and I discovered that there were mathematical descriptions of these. So in order to then make a mark or a line drawing, I understood that I had to develop

algorithms and write code. So I took two semesters of Fortran programming language before I began, and then had to learn the process of writing code for the CalComp. pen plotter. Bradham, what do you tell us a bit about your early relationship with computers and design and how you began in this world? Yes. Strangely enough, I was 13 years old, 1973, and there was an experimental teletype terminal in my high school connected to, I believe it was Cornell University's mainframe.

I was in Michigan. And somebody sat me down and said, here's the basic language. We share that, John and I, do something. And I'll tell you what you should be doing later. It was the teacher. And the first thing I did was I printed a bunch of M's. And then I said, well, let me see if I can print a circle. I knew how, you know, I measured how many characters away I was from a center on the page in my head.

And then plotted an M. And I noticed that was squished into an ellipse because letters aren't square. Yeah. So I corrected for that. by just measuring it and putting in a correcting factor. And the circles were boring. So then I did algorithmic stochastic shading. I picked an arbitrary point on the circle and said, don't draw M's there.

And the farther away from that point you get draw more and more M's, so it looked like a specular highlight, as they call them in computer graphics. And so, you know, 13-year-old was doing all this stuff. And then I was told very clearly by my teacher, that's not what computers are for. They're for writing amortization tables, which killed my interest for about a decade. and then I got back into it, you know, in college. Well, I have to ask, Christian, how did the art world take in the idea of computers? Because here you have a couple of artists who clearly were inspired by the idea that they can do something using computers.

But maybe you can talk about that early history because I'm sure not all artists had the same reaction or relationship to computers. Well, the artists I know and some of them are in their 90s were really intrigued by the potential of COVID. of algorithms, of writing it, of computing. So they just got into it with passion. The art world hasn't been responding that well over the decades, so it comes in waves. Digital art has had a notoriously conflicted relationship with the art world at large.

So some of the early coders tell me anecdotes about tomatoes being thrown at them when they exhibited their work. There are all these prejudice. of it's done by a machine, there's no artistic hand in it, it's pure automation, it's cold, etc. And right now I think we're once again in a wave where you see digital art increasingly accepted within the art world. We're living in an increasingly digital world and art has a lot to say about it. So I think it's only natural that the integration into the fine arts world

is happening a little bit more. We're talking about digital art, and you can join our conversation, 844-724-8255 or 844-Sy-Talk. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's go to a caller here. Kevin is calling from Berkeley, California.

Hi there, Kevin. I'm sorry. Kevin, go ahead. Hello. Hi there. Hi, yes. I had a comment and a thought. You know, back in the 50s, John Cage was using the E. Ching as a binary system of generating random operations so he could

randomize the processes that he was using as compositions. And first of all, E. Ching itself is a binary process of generating meaning and content, and specifically very emotional or imagistic or even social commentary based on binary permutations. And so John Cage got so into this that he was having people throw the each in constantly for him so that he could just look up stuff and then randomize his compositions. And eventually he got around to writing a program that did it for him. So, and this was very well accepted in the art world because John Cage was, you know, pretty much a high priest with the pop movement. And Kevin, I'm going to break in because Christian wants to say something. And thank you for that. I love talking about John Cage. Go ahead.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Kevin, because this is really an excellent example. and this is what the programmed exhibition really is about building those connection to the practices of Cage and others. But I also have to say that people who accepted Cage, of course, were not necessarily seeing that work as digital. And Kevin is absolutely right about the strong connections to the program and to digital art. But for example, fluxes and other artistic practices. at the time, all used instructions and rules. And what we want to make clear with programmed is precisely that there was a deep connection

between these practices. Joan, I'll go to you and talk about how you've been responding to new digital technology, new materials over time. Obviously, you're not still flipping over old apples and scanning them. How has your work evolved as technology has evolved? Yes, I have been able to adopt new technologies, and I've done digital painting, different kinds of digital photography and visual image manipulation. I'm doing a couple of things now that involve digital processes.

I have a new digital loom, which has been a challenge, every bit as quirky as computers, I would say. And that's one interesting thing of working with technology is the ability you develop abilities to do a lot of problem solving. But I'm using images from underwater and images. I'm creating digital compositions of the light slats in the atrium at the Met combined with images of my warp.

And then I have been weaving those images with various colors. it's very interesting because it goes back to visual color mixing of the pointillus and so on. So that has been one aspect of my current studio practice. The other is extending these digital image compositions into lithography, and I've been working with a master printer in Portland, Mark Mahaffey, and we have been doing some lithography involving both hand, and drawn scientific sort of pseudo-scientific diagrams

and images that I've worked on on the computer, I construct small mylar houses with the windows and the doors drawn, and it relates to the current housing crisis, both for homeless and low income. And then I do, I blow soap bubbles into these homes, and they sort of come out and overflow, and you can see the soap bubble geometry. And so I work on those on the computer, and then they're printed.

We're using a handmade kiddie-cata Japanese paper. It's amazing. The old and new technologies you're able to blend. We're going to talk more with Joan Truckenbrode, a digital artist who lives in Oregon. W. Bradford Paley is here as well as is Christian Paul. They're all part of a Whitney Museum of Art exhibition about digital art, which we're talking about here on Science Friday. This is Science Friday.

I'm John Dankoski, sitting in for Irafledo. We're talking about digital art, computer art, internet art, art that's emerged from creative uses of new technology over the past 50 years or so. Things like advanced computer graphics and virtual reality, but also video sculpture, digitally produced tapestries, art built from social media, and a lot more. Christian Paul is adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of Art here in New York City. There's a big digital art exhibition there happening right now. W. Bradford Paley is a digital artist and programmer who lives in New York.

York joins us in studio and Joan Truckenbrod is a digital artist who lives in Corvallis, Oregon. Brad, the piece that you have in the exhibit called Code Profiles is, it's one of the first times I've looked at a piece of, you know, Java code and thought, this is beautiful. This is gorgeous. Maybe you can explain exactly what this piece is and how it works. Sure. I guess I'll start with what it physically looks like. It's a 77-inch 4K OLED monitor, which unpacked for normal people is, think of a... a three-foot high by five-foot wide piece of glass. What I did with that monitor,

I'm very pleased with how far technology has come, because it really does just look like glass. It doesn't look like video. It doesn't look like film. I just wanted the information to be foregrounded. I'm not talking about the medium. I'm talking about what you can see through the medium. So on that piece of glass,

I put five columns, just like in a newspaper, five columns of text. Those five columns are the Java program you were talking about. That's the Java program. In fact, that was my response to Christian's... Earlier, I said Christian commissioned a piece from me after seeing Tech Stark. So code profiles was, how do I move... The commission was, you're an artist, move three points in space, do what you like with that.

But I want to, this is Christiane speaking, and I'm going to terribly paraphrase you, but I want to show people where computer art comes from. So I'm going to show them your code first, and then they can click on it and see which you did with the three points. She was trying to demystify the process of coding and where computer art came from. So I was lost for a while. I was used to hundreds of thousands of points

because I do data visualization and find beauty in the relationships of those. Until I realized, well, wait, code is a space, which is why I put those five columns of code on the screen. Now I just had to figure out how I move three points through that space. So if you see this thing, and there's a picture of it on the web that people could look at,

if they want to. But there are five columns of text. And the three points that I moved through are your fixation point, which is what scientists would call where your eye looks as you're reading. So there's a simulation of your fixation point plotting through the code because that was one of the points of the exhibition. Sure. There's my insertion point, which is how I typed the code.

And I think that's one of the key things that I'm pleased that the exhibition and the piece brings forward. my insertion point doesn't plod through the code from beginning to end. I'm not Shakespeare. I didn't imagine the whole thing in my head and then commit it to paper later. Code grows like any humanist writing. It grows from the inside out. And so there's a little bit of, you know, so I'll write two or three lines in the lower left-hand corner.

And then go conform something in the upper right-hand quarter and then the middle. And then the third point is the execution point, how the code is executed by the computer. And you actually can see these lines cascading across. the screen as the computer would read it. Did he respond appropriately, Christian, to your prompt? Oh, absolutely. I kept it deliberately vague, and I'm really fascinated by that piece. My background is in literature, and this idea of having the reader, the writer, and the machine all in their different ways reading and executing was so beautiful to me. And also having the code itself, that renders the code to the screen as the actual work was just fascinating.

We got a tweet from John here who says, I think video games don't get recognition for their art. Some of them are really beautiful. And at least some video gaming is represented in your exhibition. Yes, and I absolutely agree. There's a lot of game art, and there are video games that themselves could be recognized as art, and institutions such as MoMA has already started.

collecting it. So I think it is indeed true that that's under-recognized. The piece you're referring to, I think, is Lorna by Lynn Hirschman-Liesen, probably, which has similarities to a game in that you navigate the story-making choices on a remote control and it unfolds on a video monitor. And it's really a predecessor of things like Bander Snatch. the latest Black Mirror episode on Netflix, which you navigate. Someone has actually done a breakdown of Bander Snatch,

a diagram of it that you can easily find when you Google it, which looks very similar to the initial drawings that Lynn Hirschman-Lieson did for Lorna, her piece. I want to get to some phone calls as well, because a lot of people want to join us. Let's go to Rosie, who's calling from Wisconsin. Go ahead, Rosie. Hello.

My son-in-law, Mark Abel, used to do kaleidoscoping whatever picture you happen to have with a digital program. The program he wrote for Apple was called Colliderverse. I don't know if it's still available or not. Oh, interesting. And this is yet another way in which we talked about this, Brad, at the top of the segment. there's so many ways in which people can apply technology and then make their own art at home. I'm wondering, as we have this conversation about digital art amongst artists, you're on the fence about whether or not your work is art or not sometimes.

But maybe you can talk about that, about all of the things that are available to people now to create art at home. You know, sadly, because I started coding in 73 at 13, and when I sat down and I typed code came out, and half of the time it worked. I'm the worst person to talk to about tools. I just, I tend to prefer to write all my own code from scratch because it leaves, it doesn't, when Photoshop released drop shadows, you could see the Photoshop drop shadow, five pixels down, four pixels to the right, on everything. and that was helpful. But like when digital, when desktop publishing happened, it didn't actually improve people's ability to express everything.

It just brought up the level of mediocrity. And I'm aspiring to break out of what the tools help you do. Does that make sense? Do you have a thought, Christian? Yeah, absolutely. I think there has been a very interesting shift over the decades, Because artists such as Brad and artists in the 60s, they had to write their own code. They invented languages.

There were no tools to do this. And many of the younger artists have switched to using tools. And I mean, creativity resides in all different kinds of practices. You can also create very sophisticated, beautiful work using commercial tools and break them and tweak them and push them to limits. My experience as a curator is that sometimes I ask younger artists, oh, you know, how exactly was that written? How does that AI respond? And there, I don't actually know.

So that was a very new thing to me, because someone like Brad would go on an hour-long detailed explanation of what's happening here, which I find fascinating. It's a very different practice. Joan, I'm wondering how you view the computers that you work with. Are they tools? Are they partners? What's your relationship?

Yes, one thing I'd like to add to the previous discussion is this idea of subverting the media, making it do what you want to do. Because the artist comes up with an idea and digital media is really malleable and can take many different forms. So artists today, the computer has a new sense, a new ability to reach out into the world in an interesting. way, using all kinds of sensors that can make work interactive. I have a friend using a 3D printer for ceramics. I've done a public art installation where I created the work on the computer, and then it was laser cut, both in steel and then an eco-reson. So for me, the computer needs to be pretty much invisible in the work because it's not it's not relevant to me it's what I can do with that what I can make it do and what I can create with it which is what is important to me so it

I don't even think the computer is a partner even though I've said that previously it's a vehicle for me in the creative process and it sort of undulates I suppose in and out but I prefer for the computer not to be visible in the final work. Christian, we just have a few seconds left that I wish we could talk more. I mean, what do you think the future of this is as technology changes? Well, I think in the future we're going to see a lot more work related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, because that's an area that is really exploding right now, and artists are very interested in exploring that.

And also virtual and augmented reality, we're in the third wave of... VR and I think artists are doing very interesting things with that right now. Christian Paul, adjun curator, digital art at the Whitney Museum of Art, W. Bradford Paley, a digital artist and programmer, Joan Truckenbrod, digital artist in Corvallis. Thank you all so much for being part of this conversation. And if you want to see images or find out more, go to our website at sciencefriety.com slash digital. Thank you, folks.

Thank you. It's time again to remind you about our fantastic Science Friday book club this winter. we're reading N.K. Jemison's apocalyptic novel, The Fifth Season. It's a story set in a world where earthquakes, volcanoes, and related disasters are constantly upending society. As usual, everything you need to know to participate is on our website. It's sciencefriiday.com slash book club. But in the meantime, we're talking about geological turmoil whenever possible, and so it turns out the scientists studying volcanoes still have a lot of questions about them. One of the most basic ones, how does it flow down surfaces, and how, and what can its narwhal,

old final shapesay about the processes that it underwent when it was hot. These are some difficult questions to study in the middle of, say, a volcanic eruption, more difficult to interpret from the long past geologic record. But at one lab in Syracuse, New York, a team of researchers found a safer shortcut. You just make your own lava. Here to explain more as Jeffrey Carson, geology professor at the University of Syracuse principal investigator at the lava project. Jeffrey, welcome to the show. Good afternoon. And we've got some gorgeous pictures of his lava lab, plus a write-up by digital producer Lauren Young on our site at Science Friday.com slash lava.

So maybe you can set the scene for us. You're pouring lava in a parking lot. What does this look like exactly? Well, as unlikely as this may sound, especially for a place like New York where there's certainly no active volcanoes and, in fact, no volcanic rocks in New York to speak of. Basically, we had this large furnace. It's made for melting metals. and inside it has a large crucible that we put some ancient lava in.

It's about a billion years old. It's old lava flows. It's all ground up into sort of gravel. It looks like it came out of your driveway. And we heat it up with natural gas overnight, and then we pour it out to make new lava flows. And we can do this under highly controlled conditions, and we can, in very detailed ways, is document that lava flow. One of the interesting things, and relevant to your show today, is it's absolutely beautiful.

And it has a very interesting and unique sort of texture to it. People who are familiar with cooking and pour viscous sorts of materials, even like cake batter or to concrete, anything in between there, will be familiar with the kind of general shapes that are made, but because the lava solidifies relatively rapidly as it cools, it freezes these beautiful dynamic shapes in this glossy black basaltic lava. And as we say, we've got some pictures, ScienceFriety.com slash lava. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Where do you get the source material for this? Where do you get the stuff to make the lava that you flow into the parking lot in New York? Well, we get our material from Wisconsin, actually, where there, a billion years ago, there was an ancient rift zone, very much like the East African Rift today, and there's just loads of basaltic rock there. Basalt is the most common type of lava on our planet. In fact, on all the terrestrial planets and many of the moons in our solar system, it's just black rock.

It is not very sexy-looking stuff at all, but we just get it ground up. It's used for road metal and driveways and all sorts of things. So it's very inexpensive. And we can just put it in our furnace and melt it up. Not all lava is created equal, from what I understand. There's different types of lava. Some of it behaves differently than others. Absolutely.

The main thing that governs the behavior of the lava is its composition, and specifically how much silica is in the lava. but about 90% of the lava that we study on our planet and other planets is this black basalt. It has about 50% silica in it, and an array of other atomic species are in there as well, aluminum, sodium, potassium, iron, magnesium, and so forth. Different lavas have different proportions of those materials in it. That silica content makes a big difference. It controls the viscosity of the lava.

There are also some other factors that are involved. The amount of water dissolved in the lava, bubbles that occur in the lava crystals that develop in the lava. All of these things affect its viscosity, and hence the way it flows. You've obviously been able to learn some things about how lava works by doing these experiments in your parking lot. What have you learned? What have you learned about lava that maybe you couldn't have found out by going to a volcano site? Well, I can give you a couple quick examples. One is that as a geologist, you typically see these old lava flows,

and we have to kind of guess what the eruptive process was like. How do the lava move across the landscape? And, of course, we'd like to know this in order to predict where active lava flows go and so forth. But one of the things we've been able to do is begin to calibrate the shapes of the lava flows. Under different conditions, we make very different shaped lava flows. And by, you know, experiments doing these lava flows over and over again under different conditions, we can see the temperature, the rate of flow, and the kind of slope that different shape lava flows form in. So we can compare those to the lava flows we see in nature.

I know they're interesting and more these sorts of things. And very quickly, if you would, go ahead. We also see huge balloons that form when water vapor expands rapidly. those bubbles in the balloon. And also we see that lava can sometimes hydroplane down slopes of wet material by making a vapor layer underneath. It's sort of like an air-hacking game. See, that's very cool. That's something I wouldn't have known about lava if you hadn't have told me. Thank you. We've run out of time, but I'm so glad you brought us the story. If you want to see more about what we're talking about, go to Science Friday.com slash lava.

Jeffrey Carson's professor of geology at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Thank you so much, sir. Thanks so much. And we've got a welcome to the newest member of the SciFri family, Dylan Rose and Taliatta, born of course on a Friday. Dylan Rose, Mom, and SciFri senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta are all doing well. Congratulations, guys. Charles Bergquist is our director.

Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. You can email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. In New York, I'm John. Pankowski.