What are the tools that artists and scientists use to observe and measure the unknown?

On February 4, 2023, more than 400 guests joined The Block Museum of Art and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University to celebrate the opening of the exhibition “The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto.”

For Dario Robleto, the practice of art shares a key aspiration with scientific endeavor: both artists and scientists strive to increase the sensitivity of their observations. In her contribution to The Heart’s Knowledge catalogue, Jennifer Roberts (Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University) writes that “the act of measurement cannot be separated from the search for meaning.”  How might we use our tools of measurement collaboratively to construct new pathways of human understanding across time and distance? How might shared values of empathy, care, and curiosity guide such pursuits?

Robleto and Roberts were joined by Lucianne Walkowicz, astronomer and co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and curator of The Heart’s Knowledge, to reflect on these questions.

We are excited to share the full recording of this fascinating discussion that reached across boundaries to examine the shared pursuit of greater understanding that binds artists and scientists.

Watch the event

From the Program

“I do look at astronomers as a type of hospice nurse to starlight.”
–Dario Robleto

“I do look at astronomers as a type of hospice nurse to starlight.

I should say that when I grew up my mother worked and ran hospice for almost 20 years of my life. It’s a very important aspect of my philosophy, about how I think about arts’ function in the world and the attentiveness needed in particular by a hospice nurse or a palliative care nurse. There’s a philosophy embedded in it that I don’t know that everybody thinks about as obvious, which is: the last second of life matters as much as the first.

How do you rise to the occasion as a fellow human to show dignity at the end, as well as the beginning and everywhere, every spot in between? I do think about the skills of attentiveness needed by a hospice nurse in particular… What does it mean to look at the end of life with that type of attention?

And when I think of astronomers in a romantic sense, but I would argue it’s very literal, they are honing their sense of attentiveness to detect now dead objects, now dead stars and that light. And in a similar way, I like to think they have an obligation to capture it, observe it, analyze it, do all the wonderful things astronomers do. That’s a core philosophy of what I mean by observing.

– Dario Roblelto

“Art and science are both always looking into the past, into these material signals from the past” – Jennifer Roberts

I love that you recognize this weird connection that I think actually does exist between astronomy and art history. And it’s one of the reasons that I’m so interested in astronomy as an art historian. There are so many observational practices that apply across both of those disciplines.

So as an art historian, one of my jobs is to look at these strange configurations of light and matter that come to me without written instructions on how I’m supposed to interpret them and I have to make sense of this pile of material and try to understand what meaning might be embedded in it. And that’s not so different from what astronomers try to do with signals coming at them. I also work with objects that come at me from long distances in time and space. We are always looking into the past, into these material signals from the past .

– Jennifer Roberts

“It’s interesting to be paying attention to the past light of something that, for all you know might be also paying attention to you”
–Lucianne Walkowicz

For most of my research, I actually worked on stars that are the smallest stars in the universe that live for so long that none that have ever been born, have ever yet died. They will live for factors of 10 longer than our solar system ever will. And so it’s interesting to be paying attention to the past light of something that, for all you know might be also paying attention to you and that will essentially watch the entire arc of human existence within the solar system, whether it’s aware of it or not.

–Lucianne Walkowicz

Images from the Opening