This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as many variations on the interpretation of “art and science” as there were exhibitions.
From my perspective as a curator of one PST ART exhibition at UCLA Art | Sci Center, and an advisor and contributor to others, both a curious public and knowledgeable researchers are crucial to successful art and science collaboration. Concern about a lack of public investment in science prompted Getty to propose the topic in response to the first Trump administration’s hostility toward scientists and expertise in general. The hope was to educate a wider public about the value of science in the face of the climate crisis, including the wildfires in 2018 and 2020, and the global pandemic, which started only weeks after PST research awards were announced.
Research plans had to be radically adapted and were often delayed in order to accommodate over a year of travel restrictions and archive. Around the time that exhibition grants were awarded in 2023, the messaging took a different tone, less academic and airier. Promos produced by Getty PR consultants featured museum directors at the Hammer and LACMA touting the astonishing “newness” of the “collision” that Getty had orchestrated. And collide we did, with the debris of Cai Guo-Qiang’s capitalist hysteria at USC Coliseum in September, which both prefigured the doom that has enfolded Los Angeles at the start of 2025 and seemed to mock it. Many of the artists and curators who were in attendance agreed that the event was a misstep that privileged donors’ amusement while terrorizing the very people whose labor and intellect had gone into realizing the PST initiative. The Getty was compelled to issue an apology.
The objects on view took on nearly every form imaginable. At REDCAT, visitors could get a digitized reading of their coffee grounds in One Who Looks at the Cup / Բաժակ Նայող by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian with Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian. An immersive installation in the form of a kitchen patterned on Armenian embroideries housed the central, AI-powered oracle into which coffee cups were placed, which prompted printed out readings. At LACMA, Mesoamerican cosmological models were interpreted spatially through pre-Colombian objects from the museum’s collection, including a pair of ceramic Censer Stands with Solar Deities from Palenque, Chiapas, c. 650–850 CE and a selection of Indigenous flutes and ear trumpets all between 500–1500 years old. This edition of PST ART relied heavily on the Greek definition of techne (which encompasses craft and material science) to support a definition of science that included such pre-industrial methodologies as weaving, dyeing and ceramic firing.
El Palomar, Schreber is a Woman (film still), 2020. 4K video transferred to HD, 2-channel synchronized projection, color, stereo, 30 minutes. © El Palomar, image courtesy the artist.
The exhibitions that encapsulated art and science most successfully were the ones that combined audience engagement in the form of participatory actions and workshops, and academic conversations that brought innovative scientific research into conversation with artists. The shows that were the most interesting to look at had immersive, visually stimulating artworks and said something meaningful about our human relationship to other species, to the materials of our planet and solar system, and to the pursuit of ideas. Exhibitions at the Fowler, the Autry, and LACMA all took this approach to promote Indigenous and Latin American cultural inclusion in their projects. At the Armory, artists were invited to contribute works that treat seeds as a form of future archaeology. Citizen science is another model that dovetails with these expanded approaches, embodied in one of PST ART’s most historically significant shows, which was a posthumous retrospective of artist and UC Irvine professor Beatriz da Costa organized by LACE and hosted at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
Some of the most compelling moments of this season’s PST ART were the cross-disciplinary symposiums at UC Irvine, UC Riverside, ICA LA, and UCLA that brought artists and scientists into direct dialogue. Academic discourse is valuable for its informed approach to transformative collective imagining, and these symposiums addressed some ideas that couldn’t be practically realized in formal art environments. Experiments as form, particularly those involving live specimens, starved in airless and moisture-free museum environments. “Emergence,” Fathomers’ exhibition on biological art at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center included organically derived art and design projects under the category of “SynBio” that appeared more theoretically potent than invested with life potential.
At ICA LA, El Palomar brought early psychoanalysis, sublimated desire and the psychopharmacological critiques of Paul B. Preciado to life, and King Cobra and Xandra Ibarra both engaged the relationship between raced and sexed bodies and the social apparatus in provocative ways. At the Beall Center at UC Irvine, Chico MacMurtrie’s inflatable robots wheezed and struggled in a Sisyphean performance of artificial life, and Cesar & Lois proposed a biological-digital network synthesizing biofeedback from living plants and microbes with digital information flows. Hege Tapio’s thought experiment EPHEMERAL suggested that artificial intelligence could be deployed to synthesize human emotions using neuropeptides, effectively introducing a whole new way for corporations to influence and control us through commoditized feelings. The implications of such projects are vast and compelling, and sometimes deeply frightening, an aspect of scientific inquiry that PST ART shows rarely explored.
Lauren Bon “Concrete is Fluid,” exhibition view, 2024. Courtesy of Honor Fraser.
It did not always matter whether what was on view was artistic output or data visualization. A map created by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District in 1930 for a watershed with an explicitly racist name spoke volumes with minimal interpretation when presented in the CSU Dominguez Hills exhibition “Brackish Water.” Metabolic Studio exhibited earth excavated from underneath the Los Angeles River at Honor Fraser. Conceptual moments in scientific visualization can sometimes be viewed through the same lens as contemporary art. At Brand Library, Jet Propulsion Labs exhibited a symbolic impression called an “Astroglyph” that researchers had placed to mark different research sites on Earth. These imprints into soil and other terrestrial materials are temporary interventions, documented and catalogued as a conceptual archive long after the marks have faded or dispersed.
At the start of the initiative, Getty asked participating curators, “What is the benefit of art and science collaboration for scientists?” It is telling that an arts institution would not ask a similar question about the benefit of collaboration for artists, but the question is fruitful. At best, art and science can bring out dimensions of one another that the conventions of either discipline otherwise inhibit. Art and science are a conversation, not a collision. Scientists work with budgets that most artists can scarcely dream of, fueled by assurance of their discipline’s centrality to the values of both knowledge and commerce. Artists also trade in both knowledge and commerce, and we can learn from the higher expectations of scientists while also acknowledging the moral compromises that frequently accompany larger funding sums.
Scientists are specialized and trained, with hard-won expertise that is not readily translated to the lay public. Artists are adepts at visual communication who can synthesize complex ideas in a manner that becomes digestible for a broader audience. Scientists have a communication problem, too much information and too little connection. Artists are communication and connection experts. The PST ART exhibitions that were able to spark a meaningful collaboration were often the ones that presented fewer objects and more media, live performance, and scientific experiments as non-traditional formats for art. Here, art and science collaborations expand our imaginations by introducing possibilities that are fantastical but also deeply, fundamentally real.
