This conversation with Assistant Professor Susan Clark explores how violent metaphors in Astrophysics can be transformed through art-science collaborations, leading to fresh perspectives on the universe and our place within it.
Transcript: HERE
For more information on Janani Balasubramanian and the 2023 Denning Visiting Artist residency, visit our site.
Featured Guest: Susan Clark
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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.
When I first started working with my colleague and co-creator of The Gift, Natalie Gosnell, she shared some of the actual science journalism headlines that were used to describe her astrophysics research.
“Blue stragglers, the bloodsuckers of the universe”
"Beware the vampire suns, weird-looking blue straggler stars stay young by feeding off their stellar neighbors. And my personal favorite, "Blue stragglers can be either vampires or stellar bad boys.”
So I genuinely find these funny. But it’s important to point out that sensationalism and violence and extraction have really become the way that we tell a lot of our science stories.
I think a lot about how this affects our self-conception and our imagination of what our society can be. If we assume that the natural world and the cosmos are places governed by violence and fear and war, how does this impact the ways that we imagine showing up with ourselves and with each other?
I'm really curious about how existing scientific metaphors hold us back from both new scientific and ethical understandings of the world around us and of ourselves.
How might we engage intentionally with scientific metaphor and storytelling to further develop moral clarity and courage and create the kinds of societies that we want to actually inhabit?
And how might strategies like joy and play help us unlock new kinds of thinking and imagination and help us reframe our relationship with science stories?
I’m Janani Balasubramanian… and this is Encounters.
On today’s episode, you’ll hear me talk to Susan Clark, as I explore metaphor-shifting within her work on dust and the interstellar medium.
Susan is an astrophysicist and an Assistant Professor of Physics here at Stanford. She leads a research group dedicated to the study of ISM within the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. As part of my artist residency, I’ve been developing new work with Susan’s research group over the past six months.
We’ll also be taking you into a field trip I led with Susan’s research group for a playful exercise in reimagining dust and the interstellar medium.
Janani: I am so happy that you are here with me today. By way of settling us in and introducing us to what you do. I would love if you could describe your practice for us.
Susan: Sure. Thank you for having me.
Janani: By way of settling us in and introducing us to what you do. I would love if you could describe your practice for us.
Susan: Well, let's see. I named my group the Cosmic Magnetism and Interstellar Physics Group, as you know, because that is the shortest
Susan: We work on understanding the interstellar medium, the stuff between the stars and magnetic fields in many different astrophysical environments. My day to day is always different. A lot of my time is spent really talking, discussing, scribbling at the whiteboard trying to figure out some of the big questions we're asking about how matter moves and flows through interstellar space, how it gives rise to structures that eventually give rise to stars.
Janani: You know, in Astrophysics widely, the stuff that you look at is described as the interstellar medium. And I'm curious both about why that is the convention in your view and what you think about this convention.
Susan: We really do call it the interstellar medium. We actually usually shorten that to the ISM. It's an interesting question actually.
Susan: I think of it both as something that light passes through, which is, quite practically what we need to think about sometimes. But for a lot of the physics that I care about, I also think of the ways in which interstellar processes sculpt the interstellar medium. I think about old massive stars exploding as supernovae and quite literally punching a hole in the interstellar medium… transferring material and injecting energy and momentum into this medium in a way that sculpts it, that shapes it. And so that is a pretty direct analogy to.. your medium being clay or dirt or…
Janani: Yeah. I think most people listening will know the film Interstellar.
Susan: Hmm, yeah.
Susan: I was very excited when, you know, posters started going up for Interstellar on the bus stops. I was like, excellent.
Janani: You're like, "Oh me?"
Susan: This is good for the brand. Yeah!
Janani: You know, one of the things that drew me to the work you do in your group is that you're working in an area which is so interesting and odd to me because so much of the universe actually is under your purview. And yet, it is sort of pushed aside by a lot of public understanding of science and what the universe is.
Susan: Yeah, I think it's much easier to talk about your science in terms of objects, right? I study stars, I study planets, I study black holes. And we study the space in between the stars. And there's all sorts of really fascinating physics that we can probe in that environment that we could never hope to access in a laboratory or, you know, manifest it in a particular object. We are interested in physical processes. We’re interested in genuinely understanding how all this works. And I mean, the interstellar medium is just vast. And the interstellar medium is also physically very rich in the sense that you have very hot, dilute plasma, and then you have these very cold molecular clouds that get very dense, that are the eventual sites of star formation and everything in between.
Janani: The image that's coming to mind for me is a bustling city. And there's all this activity and most of life is sort of ordinary and overlooked. And I appreciate the kind of invitation in the research that you do to take all of that really seriously.
Susan: Our data are beautiful.
Janani: Yes, they are.
Susan: We make images. It's not true for every type of astrophysics. A lot of our data are really imaging the sky in different wavelengths. And the interstellar medium is incredibly beautiful.
Janani: I’m curious about this process of exchange that we've been in so far, and some of the shared inquiry that we're doing around metaphor in astrophysics, metaphor as specifically applied to your area of work, and how that has impacted how you're thinking about your research.
Susan: This has been really a fascinating thread for me during the time that you've been here. I was really moved initially to learn about “The Gift" and really inspired by the reimagining of some of the terms that we usually use in Astrophysics that are very violent. You know, the metaphors we use let you access the reality of the science that we're trying to describe. You can bring different aspects of a process into your conversation by the words that you choose.The interstellar dust in our galaxy… it absorbs and scatters certain wavelengths of light and in astrophysics, it's also kind of a nuisance to some people. And so, “dust” is an interesting word to me because it's actually in a way accessing some of the negative aspects of the way that people think about it scientifically. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
Janani: For me, the project of metaphor shifting in The Gift was at once a project of moving towards scientific precision and accessibility, and a project of moving towards our own humanity. And I think what we are embarking on with dust and the interstellar medium more broadly is like, what can this stuff teach us? What can this journey that light goes through in encountering all this stuff teach us? And how do we remove the things that are getting in the way of that learning process, and facilitate a real connection with this phenomenon?
Susan: Yeah, I love that. This is exactly the question, and it is a much more nuanced and interesting question than I, when we first started chatting about this, than I even had in mind, right? I was like, “Oh, good dust needs a rebrand.”
Janani: This is what I always try to hold onto and emphasize for people when they ask about, okay, what is artist scientist collaboration like?
Susan: Yeah.
Janani: You just gotta start somewhere. It takes time to access: what is the question that is frankly, infinitely deep.
Susan: Yes.
Janani: What is the question you won't finish in your lifetime, but you'll make a really good endeavor at?
On a bright afternoon in the middle of May, I led Susan and her research group on a field trip to Stanford’s educational farm for an art-science brainstorming activity.
The Stanford Farm is an actual farm. They host agriculture classes and volunteer days, and they grow a variety of fruits and flowers and vegetables.
Janani: Some of the things that we've been talking about are how dust is both individual and collective, right? It forms in these grains and also exists in these clouds. We've been talking about even the word “dust” and the word or phrase interstellar medium.
For this visit, I wanted to use play to unlock new ways of thinking about dust and the interstellar medium.
Janani: Let me count how many we are.... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay, so, what I want your group to do is to pick one of these things, either “light,” “bad winds,” “catalysts,” or “falling apart,” and build a game for us to play. You'll have roughly 40 minutes to develop a game. I encourage you to wander the farm, actually. See if there's any particular part of the farm you want us to be in or plants that you want us to encounter. Maybe there's a pile of dirt somewhere. I know there's a pizza oven over on that part of the farm.
So anything that is here is for you to use in building a game that can then be played, say, in a couple of minutes by the other people who are here. That is the exercise. I'm confident that this will lead to something fun. That much I know.
As the scientists wandered the Farm in small groups, I popped into their discussions to hear how each group was formulating ideas.
Susan: Ok, I'm getting myself into the space of games that can be played with no materials.
Researcher: Even like freeze tag.
Susan: Freeze tag, yeah, that's right.
Researcher: What if it's red light, green light, but you're doing it as groups? Then if anyone in your group is moving, you somehow get ruled out, but there's some way to get back into it. I don't know what that way is... Instead of red light, green light, it's shock front, not shock front.
Susan: Yeah.
(crossfades to game scene)
Susan: All right. 10! You gotta think about the strategy of Dust Grain Survivor.
Susan: Okay, nine… four… Oh, she's leaving you!
Susan: Shock!
Another group explored how photons travel from a star-forming region to an observer, which turned into a surprisingly rowdy Red Rover style game.
Researcher: So we're going to play this over there, but first we can explain the rules, which is that each of you will get a Post-it note with your role on it. Four of us will be photons traveling from a star-forming region towards an observer. Now if you are a photon, then you're just going to be walking through the ISM.
Researcher: Good dust is trying to help the photon to reach the observer, so if they can do that, they are the winners. The bad dust, obviously, they're trying to stop them. And if they can extinct all the photons, they win.
Janani: Got it.
Researcher: Are we trying to catch the photons or are we moving more randomly?
Researcher: If you're a bad dust, you can do anything just to block them. You can push them backwards. There's just some new physics coming up.
After we finished playing our games, I gathered the full group back at the patio deck to ask them what they took away from the experience of reframing their research through play.
Researcher: When you said, like, make a game with, like, 40 minutes, I was, like, really scared. I was like, “Oh, no.” But then, like, we started walking, and then, like, everyone had, like, very good ideas. And so it was actually, like, really successful, to like, make games out of, you know, different stuff on the farm and connect it back to the research.
Researcher: I guess these type of exercises help us to think of, like, science, you know, I would say more from an artistic perspective and make it more accessible to more people.
Researcher: Sometimes we're also, like, focused in on one single aspect of that specific phenomenon, but, like, seeing the big picture of how, like, dust connects so many different aspects of astronomy, like supernovae and magnetic fields and, you know, scattering and absorption. It was nice to, like, put it into the broad picture from everyone's different perspective and how we all think about these things in a different way.
Janani: Thank you all. I hope you enjoyed group meeting slash recess. Let’s try to gather up all the post-its.
Seeing things from a different perspective. That’s it. By engaging personally with scientific phenomena, by befriending them even, we find new ways of conceptualizing them both scientifically and aesthetically.
I think play is also core to building trust and relationships across disciplinary cultures. It’s really hard to access creativity when you’re burnt out, which is all too common in both art and science spaces at Stanford. Making space for play and joy helps us get back in touch with our capacity to imagine.
Janani: You know, I think everybody has these moments of doubt and fear and vulnerability when we're in these fields where we're kind of probing the edge of human knowledge and understanding, right?
Susan: Yeah.
Janani: And the things that ground me in the most clarity and joy are things like this field trip to the farm, actually. These moments of shared inquiry and discovery across disciplines.
Susan: Yeah.
Janani: And seeing people and seeing myself as, as one of these aforementioned people, being able to ask questions we did not think we were allowed to ask. That is the most deep and interesting and joyful part of my whole job.
Susan: These conversations let us think about the science in a new way and we do get, you know, stuck in the ruts of our particular metaphor or our particular way of imagining something. And sometimes all it takes is to hear someone's completely different way of visualizing something, someone's completely different mental image, and you're in, in a new way, and you have a new idea.
Janani: Absolutely.
Janani: You know, the work that we've been brainstorming and dreaming up… that takes this form of plants and can inhabit a space where people just happen to be wandering or hiking because they wanted to take a walk. I love art when it functions that way and kind of moves beyond the very narrow constrained imagination. Cause this is the traditional historical position of arts in society… is not some cordoned off, rarefied experience. It's something that pervades our lives and that we should have meaningful access to regardless of the shape of our lives.
Susan: I think we talk a lot about art as a way for people to access science but there's something I think very powerful about art that is painted onto the everyday of your life. What I love about your work and about these sort of art-science collaborations is… I feel like they have the potential to collide organically with a different set of people that I can't in my normal day-to-day reach.
Janani: I think the other thing that inspires me to think so much more expansively about space is that the work of my colleagues in the sciences, yourself included, is innovating at such a high level, like that's the level at which I want this artwork to innovate at.
(pause)
Janani: Thank you. Thank you for spending some time in conversation.
Susan: Thank you.
Janani: Yeah, thank you for the space of collaboration we have shared and will continue to share.
Susan: Yes, no thank you. It's really been such a joy.
I want to thank Susan again for joining us, as well as her research group for a fun and enriching time on the farm.
In our next episode, we’ll explore the future of co-creation. I’ll be sitting down with Tsachy Weissman and Natalie Gosnell.
Subscribe to the show wherever you listen for future episodes and follow Stanford Arts on social media for more updates.
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 mixing engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Everett.
Series artwork is by Connie Ko.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Special thanks to Susan Clark, Tsachy Weissman, Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts, and Stanford Live.
Encounters is recorded at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University, and supported by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in honor of Roberta Bowman Denning.