Visualizing the Cosmos: Science | Art | History is a panel presented by the Wende Museum and the History of Science Society. Nobel laureate and astrophysicist Kip Thorne, artist Lia Halloran, and NASA historian Lois Rosson, co-curator of the exhibition Competing Cosmologies: Interpreting the Sky, discuss how visual artists and scientists have inspired each other to build a deeper understanding of the universe and the forces that shape it. History of Science Society president Soraya de Chadarevian and the Wende’s Chief Curator Joes Segal moderate.
How did we arrive at the images in astronomical reference books, and what aesthetic decisions stood behind them? How have scientists developed their work through collaborations with artists? And how have the interactions between artists and scientists changed over time?
Kip Thorne is an astrophysicist and author. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish for their contributions to the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detector and the observation of gravitational waves. Thorne was the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech from 1991 until 2009. He was a longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan and a scientific consultant for Christopher Nolan’s films Interstellar and Tenet. In 2018 he received the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing.
Lia Halloran is an artist who often incorporates science and nature to create projects that draw from scientific materials, flying, skateboarding, historical influences, and identities. She has taken part in a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists and architects, including a book with Kip Thorne, The Warped Side of Our Universe. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and is a professor in the Art Department at Chapman University, where she teaches painting and courses that explore the intersection of art and science.
Lois Rosson is a historian of science and technology based in Los Angeles, where she is a field historian in the NASA History Office. Her current book project traces the impact of Los Angeles’s art and special effects industry on the look of the space environment in planetary science and popular culture. She has held the Guggenheim Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and the Octavia E. Butler Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Her work has been supported by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Berggruen Institute, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.
Soraya de Chadarevian is the president of the History of Science Society, an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences, and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. She is a historian of science, technology, and medicine with a background in biology and philosophy. Her main areas of interest are the life sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Joes Segal is the Wende Museum’s Chief Curator and Director of Programming.
As this event takes place during museum open hours, guests may check in at the front of the museum. The garden side gate will open 30 minutes before the start time and is available for ADA access and check-in. Theater doors open 15 minutes before the start time. Seating is first come, first served. An RSVP does not guarantee admission once capacity is reached. No late entry.
Image: Lia Halloran, Andromeda, After Mollie O’Reilly, from the series Your Body Is a Space that Sees, 2017, cyanotype, United States. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.