ASU ‘Science Exposed’ blends arts and research
The lineup has been announced for the brand-new Lost Lake Festival in central Phoenix this fall. The Killers, Chance the Rapper, Major Lazer, Odesza, the Roots, Run the Jewels, the Pixies, Haim and Ludacris are among the higher-profile artists set to play at the inaugural music festival. Superfly, the cocreators of the iconic Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival, will launch the multi-format Lost Lake Festival at Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix the weekend of Oct. 20-22.
If art and science are vastly different languages, then an upcoming performance of music and dance works inspired by research into Alzheimer’s disease represents an experiment in translation.
As part of an Arizona State University project dubbed “Science Exposed,” students from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts crossed the campus to shadow researchers at the Biodesign Institute with a mission to transform science into art.
“One of the most interesting things was visiting with the scientists in the lab,” said Zachary Bush, who is working on a master’s degree in music composition.
“We went to the Banner brain bank in Sun City, and we got to talk with lab technicians there who were slicing chunks of brain.”
Bush and fellow grad student Stephen Mitton interviewed researchers and caregivers to learn about Alzheimer’s disease from both a scientific and a human perspective. The result was two chamber compositions to be premiered by student musicians at the “Science Exposed” event on Wednesday, April 26, at the Biodesign Institute on ASU’s main Tempe campus. (The performance is free and open to the public, but online RSVPs are required.)
The event also features new dance works by students working with the world-famous choreographer Liz Lerman, a MacArthur “genius grant” winner who joined the Herberger Institute dance faculty last year.
Lerman’s interest in science isn’t new. In 2010, she staged a work titled “The Matter of Origins” inspired by her visit to the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Europe.
“I wondered about the possibility of challenging my art students with this problem: How can we be fearless about any subject matter?” Lerman said.
“We think of a lot of art as self-expres-