Genomics

Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Bang Wong

Wednesday, October 2, 2013, 6-7 pm

Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
in partnership with the Four Sculptors series at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In different ways, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Bang Wong both transcend the traditional division between science and art. Each uses data as a starting point and then employs tools and techniques from both the science and art realms in order to visualize that data. One place where they diverge is in the outcomes of their work. For Bang Wong, the outcome is essentially scientific: the results seek to explicate patterns and understand relationships in the data in order to make sense of complex systems. In the case of Heather Dewy-Hagborg's Stranger Visions project, the result is essentially artistic: she uses a visual art piece to provoke thought and conversations about the role that DNA plays in our public interactions by creating an object. For Dewey-Hagborg and Wong, the boundary between science and art is fluid; and each is central to our understanding of the world.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist who is interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. Traversing media ranging from algorithms to DNA, her work seeks to question fundamental assumptions underpinning perceptions of human nature, technology and the environment. Examining culture through the lens of information, Heather creates situations and objects embodying concepts, probes for reflection and discussion.

Bang Wong is the creative director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His work focuses on developing visual strategies to meet the analytical challenges posed by the unprecedented scale, resolution, and variety of data in biomedical research. He also writes a monthly column for Nature Methods that deals with the fundamental aspects of visual presentation.