Professional astronomer Roger Malina is helping to lead a PhD program that marries art and science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Malina details the endeavor’s manifold challenges and his own artistic influences.

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Roger Malina. Image courtesy of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Q: Many of your early influences were interested in both science and art. How did you meet them?

A: My father, Frank Malina, was the cofounder and second director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Jet Propulsion Lab, but when I came home from school, he was painting. That was what I thought engineers did. Midcareer, he then became a full-time professional artist. He was a pioneer in the kinetic art movement—he put motors and light bulbs inside paintings. When my father had his home in Paris, where I grew up, we had a lot of visitors. I got to meet people like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury—all these people who had kind of created these imaginary futures about space. Also Jonas Salk, Jacob Bronowski, and C. P. Snow—a whole generation of people in the 50s and 60s who were really interested in viewing the essence of science and scientists in some kind of integrated way.

Q: You are an astronomer. Do you consider yourself an artist as well?

A: I sometimes joke that I’m an astronomer by day and a member of the art world by night. I’m an artist in the sense that I collaborate with teams that produce artwork. A colleague of mine who’s a musician and composer, Andrew Blanton, and I recently gave a lecture-performance in Paris at the Google Cultural Institute. We created a 3D sound environment using data on the varying brightness of thousands of stars. You could actually move the data sounds around the room to create what might be called acoustic ecology. Occasionally we do things to scientific data that no self-respecting scientist would ever do. We're basically using the data as source material for the performance in the same way that some composers are inspired by birdsong. We have this dual objective—we're trying to develop data exploration tools the scientist might use, but also use the tools to create artwork. In this case, we haven't demonstrated the first part of that objective, but it's one of our hopes.

Q: What tools are you developing for scientists?

A: We're crowdfunding a collaboration platform for art and science called Creative Disturbance. We're going to be using podcasts to enable people in very different disciplines to connect and then eventually work together. The idea is when you listen to a short podcast, there will be a voice-activated function where you say, “More.” Then you will get an email with more information on the person you're listening to, and then a way to say, “I'd like to contact that person.” And then we would do the letter of introduction—I call it intellectual dating.

Q: How common would you say your dual interests are?

A: We did this study funded by the National Science Foundation called “Enabling new forms of collaboration among sciences, engineering, arts, and design.” What we noticed was, of the 200 people we were getting inputs from on an open access art-science website, something like 20% had one higher education degree in science or engineering and a second one in some form of arts and humanities. So it’s not as uncommon as you think that people have these hybrid interests.

Q: You recently helped launch a PhD program for such people. What challenges have you faced in setting that up?

A: Where do you go for funding for these programs? What does a PhD in art mean? For many of these PhD students, their creative work is in digital media. You need to rethink what a PhD document is. How do you interface these programs with future employment? The postdoc doesn't exist in the arts. What kind of training do you do? Our students range from almost doing computer science PhDs to art projects. How do you develop a core curriculum that is relevant to that range of students? Exactly what curriculum you should develop is really unclear.

Q: What classes have you settled on thus far?

A: At the undergraduate level, there are computer science requirements for the arts students. For the PhD students, there’s a course they have to take on quantitative methods, which involves how you analyze data. There are courses on research methods. Then there are a number of seminars—in how one perceives sound, computer gaming, animation, video. There's also a very big program in what we call emerging media and communications. That’s anything that makes use of social media in a large sense and how you go about doing interface design for those kinds of systems.

Q: What reactions have you had to the new program?

A: There's a whole range of reactions. There are the early adopters, who get really interested really quickly. Other people obviously think this is distracting or confuses the focus on deep scientific questions. On the other hand, they all realize they need to be involved with education outreach, and so many of them are very interested in these questions as applied to that. Like all these interdisciplinary projects, you meet people who are just basically hostile. I think one of the ways we've countered skepticism is student interest and enrollment. We have 1,300 undergraduate students this semester, several hundred MS and MFA students, and I think 40 PhD students.

Q: What sorts of jobs might your graduates get?

A: There's a whole range of profiles. Andrew Blanton, who has an MFA in music, is now teaching data visualization at San Jose State University. Many of the undergraduate students go into educational technology. The people in the emerging media program will often find places in marketing departments, helping to exploit the large data sets they now have access to. It’s a range of academic research and different sectors of the economy. It’s too early for us to really look and do an inventory—the undergraduate program started about seven years ago, the PhD program only two years ago.

Q: Does science need people with this training?

A: There are certain problems where you just need to drill very, very deep in a very disciplined and disciplinary way. If I want to design better telescopes, then I want someone who’s the most amazing optics and telescope designer on the planet. However, if you’re talking about what we’re working on right now, which are data exploration tools, clearly you’re dealing with both how people perceive things—which gets into the area of art and art perception—as well as computer science or the science of applications. Depending on the problem you’re working on, you may need to bring different kinds of people around the table. I would define art-science as the areas where the problem requires artists and scientists to collaborate together.

Q: Why do you think this marriage of art and science is taking off now, as opposed to in your father’s time?

A: In the 50s, if you went to an artist’s studio and a scientist’s laboratory, there were very few tools they shared—probably a stapler, maybe Scotch tape. But when I go to an artist’s studio today, it's sometimes better equipped than many scientists’ laboratories, with prototypes of new kinds of interactive tools. There’s a new generation of artists that are able to engage with science and technology in new kinds of ways.

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This image comes from a connectome dataset that is based on fMRI data and shows interconnections within the human brain (1). Malina's ArtSciLab, and collaborator Gagan Wig, are developing interactive data exploration tools that use both visualization and sonification. Image courtesy of Gagan Wig (University of Texas at Dallas).