What Matters: May 2001
Us and Them: Technology Meets Art
By Min-Hank Ho '00, MNG '00
We are used to art and science being on opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum. The disciplines are always separated. At the Oscars, the artistic and scientific awards are given at different ceremonies. On college campuses, these two disciplines occupy different buildings on different parts of campus. In fact, entire groups of colleges separate themselves by claiming expertise in liberal arts or in engineering. Of course, nothing proves to be a better example of the dichotomy between the two than a dictionary definition of art (specifically, liberal arts) as "a nonscientific branch of learning."
Given that art and science are fundamentally different, it would be foolhardy for anyone to marry the two fields of study in a curriculum. Sure, MIT can justify the humanities as a communications requirement, but a study of the arts beyond the requirement rarely follows in a typical student's curriculum. An aspiring scientist or engineer simply has too many other classes to take and knowledge to assimilate. The arts, being irrelevant to our technical pursuits, must give way to another class in mathematics or another lab in our major. Granted, if you believe that mastery is measured by the accrual of knowledge then I have no case. But, if you believe that being a good engineer or scientist or even artist is an understanding of an approach, then I propose to you that education in the arts has more than a superficial place at an institute of technology because art is little different from science at a fundamental level.
If my theory proves false and we must choose sides, I have no doubt where I stand. As a course 6 graduate who spent countless hours frying chips on my nerd kit or crashing programs at an Athena cluster, I've long since considered myself an engineer by training and by occupation. Products of clever and efficient design excite me much more than oil on canvas or rhyme and rhythm. I understand more about the composition of sound than the composition of music. And, as odd as it sounds, mathematical theorems can seem as beautiful to me as a Shakespearean play.
Take the Fourier transform as an example. We learned it to be a limit of an integral expression. A set of convenient transform pairs in a table allowed us to use this newfound knowledge to quickly solve frequency domain problems on our problem sets. However, if we forget about all those times that we stayed up until 3 or 4 am because of those problems and focus on the nature of the transform itself, we can catch a glimpse of its intrinsic beauty. We often credit novels and movies with artistic genius for creating a world that allows characters to better tell their story and to give us a better understanding of the world we live in. In the same way, the Fourier transform allows frequency related problems to better tell their story. These mathematical functions have a new existence in the frequency domain created by the transform that gives us more insight into what they represent and how to solve them. Though the frequency domain exists in mathematics, it tells us so much about how our natural world functions. What's more incredible is that the Fourier transform has an author just like a novel or a play, someone who came along and created this new world from thin air.
If the creative process isn't exclusive to artists, then the scientific process probably isn't only for scientists. It's too bad some artists often fail to look beyond the white lab coats and technological gadgets to see the science in their own occupation. No artist would claim that a masterpiece was the result of a single foray into the studio. The struggle to make great art is more like a siege involving layers after layers of paint or drafts after drafts of writing.
I spent more than two years doing research under Elizabeth Goldring, an artist fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. During that time, I learned that scientists and engineers are not the only people who achieve their goals through a process of directed trial and error. All of the work that I helped her with required multiple iterations of reviewing and improving. While the results may appear a product of serendipity at times, the process of creating art had little difference from a scientific experiment. At the onset, Elizabeth would always have an idea or a mental of image of what she would like to create, a hypothesis if you will. If she realized that she lacked the information to complete the work with her existing knowledge, she sought advice and assistance from various sources, a research phase. Finally, like all great scientific endeavors, her product would be the culmination of many trials and changes. The whole process may have begun with an inspiration, but it could not have reached an end without a lot of thought and effort.
In truth, I set up a straw man with my earlier rhetoric. Most of us realize that there's a kinship between the arts and sciences. We only hesitate to make this fact explicit because the products of these disciplines are so very different. However, these differences in the results provide poor excuse to avoid learning about the common process they share. How many times have we justified teaching biology to a physicist or chemistry to mathematician? The knowledge from different technical fields may never have direct application to each other, but we learn from the process that they share. In the same way, an education in the arts is more than learning about how to paint, write, dance, or compose. The value of such an education is in the creative process that we as scientist and engineers share with the artists. It's the ability to build objects and create worlds still unknown today because no one else has recognized the pieces let alone the potential of what they can become.
Arts and sciences are not like Montagues and Capulets, though it would truly be a tragedy if we failed to recognize the similarities between these two families. Some people call it daring to dream; others call it genius. Whatever lofty phrase you want to associate with it, that gift of being able to build things and bring things into existence shared by artists and scientists alike is our motivation and our reward. And, if we as scientists and engineers make an effort to develop that gift through the arts as well as the sciences, we would pave a wider road for future discoveries.
About the Author
Min-Hank Ho graduated from MIT with a B.S. and M.Eng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2000. His research work under Elizabeth Goldring at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies focused on developing a virtual architectural environment for the visually challenged. He is currently working as software developer at Oracle Corporation in Redwood Shores, CA.
What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email whatmatters@mit.edu.
