Artist Ranger Liu, right, shoots video of Zachary Amador of rhe Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology during "SxAffold," the science and art program sponsored by BBI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center,
If it were not for a biotechnology course at a community college, Zachary Amador, a Ph.D. candidate in the UW Medicine Department of Genome Sciences, would be pursuing his other passion: art.
But, for five days in June, he was able to combine science and art in a program sponsored by BBI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He was teamed up with Ranger Liu, a Seattle artist and UW graduate student. The pair were two of several scientists and artists, including Genome Sciences Department Chair Maitreya Dunham, Ph.D.
This unique endeavor with a unique title, “SxAffold,” (“Scaffold”) was co-hosted at the Hutch by Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in the Hutch’s Herbold Computational Biology Program. Their colleagues, Callie Chappell (a Postdoctoral Fellow from Stanford) and Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano (an art curator and Ph.D. candidate at Cornell) came up with the idea and jointly ran it.
“The goal of SxAffold was to enable artists to experience scientific spaces that are otherwise inaccessible,” said Sinnott-Armstrong. “We also wanted to create a fun environment for scientists and artists to explore and learn together and from each other!” Indeed, watching Amador and Liu together in a lab, it is quite apparent they learned a great deal from each other, exploring their respective work over five days.
“It’s been exciting for me to participate in SxAffold,” said Amador, who works in the lab of Sudarshan Pinglay, Ph.D. at the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology.
Liu offered interesting observations of Amador’s lab procedures.
“I see science as physical craftsmanship,” said Liu, who is also studying toward a Ph.D. in Astronomy at the UW. “I’ve watched him unscrewing test tubes one-handed, with a pipette in the other, then lifting the pipette and controlling the plunger with his thumb. For Zach, all these techniques become second nature. But to me, it’s a finely choreographed motion.”
Observing them in the lab is an informal study of two young professionals seeking to learn and understand each other’s crafts.
Amador, wearing a t-shirt with M.C. Escher art, uses a sophisticated microscope that projects images of cells onto a screen. Liu asks probing questions about the cells, writing quickly in a spiral-bound notepad. Moments later, Liu grabs their smartphone to shoot video of Amador working with a pipette. At one point, Liu looks confused as Amador tries to explain the procedure. Liu hands him the notepad and Amador draws an image and writes the steps taken in the experiment. He hands the notepad back to Liu, who looks at the image and the words, then nods knowingly.
“It’s interesting to take a lot of these procedures I have learned over the years and teach them to Ranger as I am actually doing them,” Amador said. “These are steps I do constantly, over and over again – and then over and over again. It’s really the story of the stuff I have learned in the lab.”
At the end of the week, Liu reflected on the previous four days.
“I’ve learned how biology labs work, it’s very collaborative with people working closely in the vicinity of each other,” Liu said. “I was struck by the physicality of movement and the repetition; how certain procedures must be performed at the same time of day across several days.”
Later that day, in a room full of the artists and scientists participating in SxAffold, Liu shares impressions of their time with Amador and offers a hint of the art they intend to create:
“Notation vs. performance; protocol vs. follow-through; unique instantiations of standard instructions, parallels between science and art; science as performance, ritual, choreography; science and art as CRAFT, above all; the body as the instrument through which science and art are made possible… ultimate devotion to your craft; care, obsession, devotion, disruption of ‘normal’ life in service of your craft; ritual… Representing a palette of general movements, expressed uniquely tracing a temporal lineage of technique. Documenting a specific scientist’s motions ... can then be interpreted as video/performance/sound!”
Sinnott-Armstrong, clearly pleased with the scientist-artist collaborations, hopes to offer similar events.
“We would love to run SxAffold again!” they said. “The biggest recommendation from attendees has been making future SxAffold encounters longer, and being able to do that mostly depends on whether we can secure additional funding to run more and longer programs in the future.”
