The place artwork meets science | Fred Hutchinson Most cancers Heart

At first look, artwork and science may appear to be reverse worlds — one pushed by creativeness and emotion, the opposite by knowledge and precision — however at their core, each search to discover and clarify the world round us. When these two fields intersect, they spark creativity, deepen understanding and invite new methods of decoding concepts. 

Two years within the making, SxAffold is a brand new initiative designed to spark significant collaboration between scientists and artists. In early June, this system, sponsored by Brotman Baty, launched its inaugural cohort — six artists working throughout varied media — who got here collectively for a completely funded, week-long workshop at Fred Hutch.  

“We’re not really inventing anything new,” stated Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano, a SxAffold organizer and artwork historian from Cornell University. “We’re trying to bring back some of that collaborative process in science by including artists in the research process and the laboratory work.”

In addition to artistic collaboration, the workshop supplied skilled improvement alternatives for Fred Hutch scientific principal investigators, or PIs, together with steering on securing funding and finest practices for internet hosting artists of their labs. 

“The main thing I’m really excited about with Sxaffold and other projects that bring together science and art is the idea that we can reconstruct and redefine how scientists and artists might interact,” stated Sxaffold organizer and Fred Hutch assistant professor Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong, PhD.  

This interdisciplinary collaboration could not appear intuitive, nevertheless it highlights the mutual worth every self-discipline brings to one another.  

“They’re often thought of as completely separate, but in reality, scientists need art to be effective communicators, drawers, designers — effective scientists,” stated Sinnott-Armstrong. “And artists can profit from scientists by refining, redefining and restructuring their work. There’s an superior alternative to create collaboration and probably even outline new fields that work together between science and artwork.”