In conversation with Srinija Srinivasan, we explore practice and the role of art as a divine manifestation, capable of transforming our realities and fostering deep human connections.
Transcript: HERE
For more information on Janani Balasubramanian and the 2023 Denning Visiting Artist residency, visit our site.
Featured Guest: Srinija Srinivasan
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Credits
Host: Janani Balasubramanian
Creator/Producer/Editor: Taylor Jones
Production support: Edi Dai
Sound Designer and Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme song and Music: Juana Everett
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko.
Special thanks to Susan Clark and Tsachy Weissman.
Encounters is supported by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in honor of Roberta Bowman Denning.
<"The Gift" score plays >
That’s a very brief excerpt from my project The Gift. The story of this work begins over 6 years ago, when I met my colleague and co-creator, Natalie Gosnell, in Colorado.
Natalie is an observational astrophysicist. Which means that she uses data from telescopes in outer space and on the ground to tell stories about our universe.
In particular, Natalie looks at the science of companion stars.
Her research focuses on stars that, at the end of their lives, give almost all of their matter to a nearby companion. Something that Natalie said to me when we first started working together was that she was super frustrated that the media covering her research kept referring to this phenomenon of stellar mass transfer in really violent extractive terms like “stellar cannibalism” or “stellar vampirism.”
And as Natalie and I embarked on a multi-year journey of art science co-creation, alongside our colleague Andrew Kircher, what we really aimed to do was shift out of this framework of violence and fear and domination being the terms through which we understand outer space and into a framework of care, relationship, and complexity as the way that we tell stories about this universe we inhabit together.
Instead of reverting to these extractive metaphors, we chose a more complex telling of the story, “a gift.” So we designed an immersive experience called “The Gift,” with accessibility at its core. We wanted to create a welcoming place: an invitation to encounter fundamental, personal, and human questions by being in relationship with the stars.
I’m Janani Balasubramanian… and this is Encounters.
On today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Srinija Srinivasan. Srinija is a visionary, a practitioner at the intersection of art, commerce and technology, and my friend. She recently finished her tenure as one of the trustees of Stanford, and happens to be one of my favorite people to go on walks with.
My conversation with Srinija connects with a lot of the core intentions and themes of The Gift. In Srinija’s practice and in our conversation, she brings together several threads connecting not only art and science, but also the sacred and secular, research and co-creation.
But before diving in with Srinija, we’re going to take you to field scenes from the presentation of The Gift at Memorial Church.
When I was working with Stanford Arts to plan out my residency, we were thinking about where to present this project, The Gift. And I got really excited about Memorial Church. Partly because it's a super beautiful venue, right at the heart of the Main Quad, and its architecture and ornamentation naturally invite wonder and awe.
But I also wanted to make clear through the choice of space that the goals of science are not so far from the goals of sacred practice – to explore and confront fundamental questions.
We were also able to collaborate with the School of Medicine Orchestra, which is composed of students and employees of Stanford Medicine, to perform a live rendition of the score that my fellow alum Tina Hanae Miller wrote for the project.
The Gift is an immersive installation that animates Natalie's astrophysics research and opens up metaphorical space for grief, care, and renewal. The experience is composed of an all-ages illustrated book accompanied by an enveloping musical score.
Participants are invited into a music-filled reading room, where, when a seat becomes available, they sit down and read the book, which invites interaction both tactile and emotional. And connects this phenomenon of transfer of material between stars to human experiences of loss and change.
Throughout the event, my producer Taylor captured a few audience responses to The Gift.
Desiree: Yeah, it was beautiful. So the church was amazing. The scene was beautiful. The music was playing. Quite holy in nature. And then I read the story about what happens. You know, I feel a little bit more connected with our sun, our burning bright star, beautiful star in its prime. And I love that question about whether I'm in my prime. I'll have to think about that one. I learned about how, yeah, stars give the gift of energy to one another. And a lot of our natural world is very generous and also very present in the knowing when it's time to do that. And how, yeah… we can learn a lot of lessons from our natural world as humans to be more generous and more connected with everything around us.
Jorge: Definitely gave me Interstellar vibes, for sure. You know, there's a lot of themes there about reaching across time and all this really powerful stuff that makes me think about Interstellar.
Vivian: I thought the part about the idea of the gift being one that you give when you die, that people still… our beings still remain. That that is a gift to others. That it doesn't end. Life doesn't end with death, but actually maybe even begins.
Kat: I was also really touched by that. I'm really touched by the transferal of life rather than like this sort of birth and death cycle. But it seems like a constant sort of energy. I also really loved the location of this performance… project… I don't know what to call it. But yeah. But because of the ornamentalism of the church adds a majestic quality and this sort of transcendent quality that I think accentuated, yeah, the text of the book… That’s all, thank you!
It was really meaningful to me to bring The Gift back to my alma mater. To be able to share how various forms of inquiry feel connected to me. To show the threads of meaning pulsating between the personal and the cosmic, between art and science, between sacred and empirical knowledge. I’ve always felt that those things can co-exist and thrive alongside one another.
That together, these forms of inquiry can help us approach and deal with fundamental, universal experiences like loss and change.
Janani: Actually the place that it would be fun to start, and you can take this question however you want to take this question, but I am curious how you would describe your practice. What does that mean to you?
Srinija: I love the question because I don't know that I have a practice. I've never intentionally had what I consider a practice. However, at some point a dozen years ago, I had a kind of epiphany, and I've always loved the word practice. And I love how it has all these different meanings. I can practice the piano, I can have a law practice, I can have a meditation practice, like these really different contexts, you know? And so what is that?
That's the whole point we're practicing, so I don't have to be excellent at it. I don't have to have figured it out, but I can practice. So in that respect, I've come to really try, which sounds maybe really lofty and grandiose, but my practice is this life, life is practice. It's all practice. Everything. How I get up, how I show up, how I brush my teeth. What conversations I'm having today… this thing right now to get to spend this afternoon with you is practice of attending to a certain quality of attention.
Janani: That's really beautiful and resonates with me in so many ways, because I think, well, in the arts, artistic practice has such specific connotations, in the vein of, ‘Okay, your artistic practice is the things that are legible to us as the creation of the art.’ Like, what goes into the art creation. It's the output, it's output-oriented, and that framing has never resonated with me. For me, my practice is so much more rooted in relationships, in discovering questions as various compasses… in inhabiting contexts and spaces and communities and institutions. Like, that to me is my practice.
Janani: Are there aspects of your personal background or history that have led you to practicing in the way that you do?
Srinija: Oh, without a doubt. I feel so lucky that I was born kind of fish out of water. This immigrant experience, this Hindu in Kansas. This is a very specific contrast.
Janani: Basically been there. (laughs)
Srinija: And as a kid, I have no words for this. I'd have no ability to make coherent sense of this. But as I got older and you leave your home and you're able to reflect on it and see it, and you're a little older and you have more vocabulary, and I was able to see what was happening. And it was actually so useful because I think from an early age, I was in this “inside” household cosmology where the divine is in me as it is in you, as it is in everyone and everything. But then I was in this outside cosmology that God is out there perfect, and man is right here a sinner, and that… those are incompatible worldviews. And I think it was pretty more than being brown in Kansas. it was being non-Christian in the Midwestern American Christian sensibility of that 20th century thing where it wasn't even an acknowledged explicit Christianity because we were in the secular, liberal oasis of a university town, Lawrence, Kansas. Great, great, great, beautiful place to grow up. Wonderful community, wonderful public schools, all that. So the cognitive dissonance for me was: wait, all of this is so great, why does it…. What's the problem? What's going on in my mind that this… there's this war going on? Since we're rigged to not actually know how all this works and what we're doing here, what does it feel like to believe that the divine is in me as it is in you and everyone?
Janani: You are someone who has various engagements with the arts in, kind of, your present context. And I'm curious, in your life path, when those turns or shifts or turning to the arts, or maybe it was always present for you… When do those happen?
Srinija: My first piano lessons, I think, were the age of three. My first voice lessons starting at the age of five, saxophone throughout junior and high high school, so all the choir, band, recital, concert, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, pervaded in my childhood, but it wasn't all I did. I was an Indian girl that got good grades. I did the thing. But I realized at the time I was just gifted with parents who had a reverence for the arts. My dad was a mathematician. My mom really is a polymath. First Master's in Sanskrit, second Masters in art history. Taught art history at the Kansas City Art Institute when I was growing up, and then did a pivot in midlife to boards, computer science before that was fashionable. I was watching all these things happen, but as a mathematician, my dad too had a great reverence for art and artists, and would help sponsor artists to come to the University of Kansas and crash in my brother's bedroom and play concerts in the university, ya know? And so as we were trying, trying, trying all these different things, I kept being drawn to art and artists.
People ask me if I'm an artist sometimes because I've been involved in the arts so much in both coasts, and I always say, “No, I'm artist-adjacent.” Because I think as a kid, it was just a recognition, “Oh, this is my tribe. These are my people.” And it had something to do with their quality of attention. It had something to do with their insistence on curiosity and discovery and joy and creativity as opposed to just the sort of quotidian “get stuff done.” That whole output thing… Now, having had a life immersed in tech and in science and in the practical, earthly stuff of building a life, I'm just so interested in what is about the human consciousness that at our… I think, highest and deepest level… have crafted a technology to explore and express that consciousness. We call it art when we do it. And how can we attend to that and let that guide all the stuff, the problems we're solving in this material earthly existence.
Janani: You know, I know a number of people, a handful of people, yourself included, who are identifying this sort of artist-adjacent way. And I'm always so curious about it because I'm curious what brings you all to that love of being artist adjacent, because I witness in each of you some shared modes of operation in how you build community and seek out artists for this kind of community.
Srinija: Like, we have to have an agreement about this reality, this so called reality of ours. And if we agree that we're more than bags of bones. We have to start there. We're in Silicon Valley, we're in this tech center where there is not agreement about this. We're in a hyper-rational, analytical, material, empirical world here where… I am not confident that there is broad agreement that we are more than bags of bones operating under mechanistic physical laws. And if we're not in agreement on that, then I don't even know how to have a conversation. I don't even know what we're doing here. I just don't even know the point.
Srinija: We have a line on creation. We are co-creators. This consciousness is world-making, as you say, and I just think that art is what we call it when, in human form, we manifest something of the divine in us.
Janani: Yeah
Srinija: And so that is literally our creative capacity. We can make realities. But we have to start with a agreement that there's more to this reality than meets the eye. But if we can start there, now it's endless. Now it goes to what are all these questions? This is why I love to follow your curiosity. The questions are their own answer. They're just… they take you, propel you to what's next, what's next, and you just… it's endless miracles unfolding. You couldn't have known.
Srinija: If I'm encountering art that speaks to me, I just feel so alive because all these affirmations of my aliveness and also all these curiosities about, but what is that and where can it go? They're all activated, and I don't think it's about judging or telling you, “You should have done it this way or that way.” It is just about taking it as your expression and saying, “So what of it for me?” Now we're in a conversation, and I would assume if you've created the thing that you might be curious about how that landed here.
Janani: I have a little passage to read to you that I picked out, not by me, but by the poet Muriel Rekeyser, but about art being a meeting place or a meeting point.
Janani: The relations of poetry are very close to the relations of science. It is not a matter of using the results of science, but of seeing that there is a meeting place between all kinds of imagination. Poetry can provide that meeting place. Skipping a bit... A poem is not its words or its images any more than a symphony is its notes or a river its drops of water. Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time expressing and evoking the moving relation between individual consciousness and the world. The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy. And I think human energy may be defined as consciousness. The capacity to make change in existing conditions. To accept poetry in these meanings would make it possible for people to use it as an exercise, an enjoyment of the possibility of dealing with the meanings in the world and in their lives.
Srinija: Oh, wow. That's magnificent.
Janani: I know
Srinija: I mean, it's not a cop out. It's not... We're in such a results-oriented, answer, motivated, solutions driven… Talk about collective consciousness. This modern western thing we've made is so obsessed with control and prediction and knowing, and it's literally killing us. We're literally self-terminating over the need to control and over the need to know. And meanwhile, while we're doing this, every tree is miraculously breathing out the exact thing I need to breathe in right now. And it's just doing it all day. I guess that's a deliverable, but it's just-
Janani: No, no, we can't refer to oxygen as a deliverable. I refuse from it. (laughs)
Janani: I think the sense of humility is also what has drawn me for years to many things because every time I'm encountering a new research community, I go with so much not-knowing. I think particularly in astrophysics, but essentially any kind of scientific field… we are working and dealing with things that are grander and vaster than we can really contend with, so humility is really the only approach. If we're thinking about, okay, what is non-esoteric knowledge and art, that can… lessons that can be brought to people from sort of the edges of scientific knowledge. One of its primary functions is to situate us in acknowledgement of our own wonder and splendor and our own humility.
Srinija: We've talked a lot about humility, but it's always right next to the marvel that we're consequential.
Janani: Yeah!
Srinija: There's a reason to get up every morning just to puzzle over and then try to do something with that. The humility and the consequential nature of us. It's like art is our greatest technology for exploring and expressing collective consciousness. It helps us explore and express imagination, for certain, and in this hyper material, rational, linear, kind of modern, western world, we really just give such short shrift to the miraculous and the possible. And I think cultivating imagination is maybe the most important and least understood capacity right now.
Srinija: This is why I'm artist-adjacent. This is why. It's because it's a way to be constantly attending to what nourishes, nurtures, makes possible creativity itself and what stifles it. Where do we get in our way?
Srinija: What if we're not here to know the things and solve the things? What if we're here to be our greatest selves? Porously, permeably, with life on earth as it's unfolding, this human body like a giant gill. Taking in and breathing out this life that's unfolding? What if just doing that is making more life possible? What if the doing of that is what makes worlds?
I'm just in collaboration and connection with other kindred spirits who just are jazzed about some similar stuff. And then guess what? We end up making stuff. You can see it and it's empirical and material, and you can say, “Look, mom, we did that.” But the best things happened because we were enthralled in the questions. And what propelled us into those questions and in each other? And wait, what do you know that I don't know? And then what do I know that you don't know? And then what if we put those together? If we really are curious and interested and exhilarated by refining better questions, and we do it together and we find the ones who care about these questions, I think…just think solutions happen.
Janani: Well, thank you for joining me today. What is light? This is so much always
Srinija: It's always it's, it is. It's affirming and expansive. Your company is affirming and expansive.
Janani: I'm so grateful to have gotten the chance to get to know you the past couple years and I'm looking forward to more.
I want to thank Srinija for joining me on the podcast, and thank my collaborators Natalie and Andrew as well as the folks who came out to Memorial Church to experience The Gift.
In our next episode we’ll explore Astrophysics & Metaphor. I’ll be sitting down with Susan Clark, professor of Physics here at Stanford, and a scientist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics & Cosmology.
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CREDITS
From Stanford Arts, this is Encounters.
Janani Balasubramanian is our host. The show is created, produced and edited by me, Taylor Jones, with additional production support by Edi Dai.
Chase Everett is our sound designer and mix engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Everett.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Artwork is by Connie Ko.
Special thanks to Susan Clark and Tsachy Weissman.
Encounters is supported by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in honor of Roberta Bowman Denning.