Thursday, April 5 – STEAM
6-8 p.m.
through April 7
UCF Art Gallery
University of Central Florida
407-823-5470
www.cah.ucf.edu
free
Seeing art and science as disciplines in opposition to each other is a mistake. Photographers, painters and sculptors rely on chemistry and engineering skills, whether they realize it or not; the parts of the brain that light up when a mathematician solves a proof are the same centers of creativity working when a poet fits the perfect word into a line. UCF’s STEAM exhibition is the outcome of a three-week collaboration between STEM students and faculty (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and students in the school of visual arts. It sounds like the setup for one of those teen nerd-makes-good movies, but in fact it’s a show of paintings, sculpture and illustration interpreting scientific research on genetic coding, string theory physics and nanochemistry. Next semester, we’d like to see the STEM kids teamed up with the theater, creative writing or music departments – opera majors singing pi out to million digits, a Beckettian one-act set in a Petri dish, or maybe a series of sonnets to Faraday, Ohm and Watt? – Jessica Bryce Young
This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2012.
