The stem cell revolution When I was in graduate school, I had to perform weekly dissections of neonatal rat brains to isolate primary neurons for my experiments. It was not a particularly enjoyable process and an ungrateful one too. After spending 2 – 3 hours meticulously dissecting a dozen brains under a microscope, I would... Continue Reading →
Purity of technique
SciArt Center Art Residency Program Week 12 - originally published on 12/5/18 As I have mentioned before, most of the time, art and science coexist in my brain. While the setting, such as being at work vs. at home, may dictate which side dominates, the other side rarely shuts off. In my scientific career, I... Continue Reading →
The Beholder’s Share
SciArt Center Art Residency Program Week 11 - originally published on 11/23/18 Over the past several months, I have been listening to a lot of art-related podcasts. Currently, my favorite one is “Your Creative Push”. In the process of listening to interviews of multiple artists, certain elements appear again and again. These include: The necessity... Continue Reading →
Evolution of ideas
The original idea for my current project was inspired by a specific series of events in my life last year. To me, using the layers of neurons in this work represents certain layers of my knowledge, interests and passions, which have been temporarily covered up and moved to the back burner. Looking through my... Continue Reading →
Propping up the cells
I am falling a little behind on posting these here, so I will put this blog post from the SciArt Residency program in quotes. Last week, Darcy, Kate and I had a very productive Skype call, where I expressed my concern about the technical challenges of attaching the beaded cells to the canvas in a... Continue Reading →
Mapping Manhattan
Darcy and I have decided to move forward with the image she called “Mapping Manhattan”. From the beginning of our collaboration, I told Darcy that I would like to create something that would represent the synthesis of the field of neuroscience and the context of New York. Initially, I sent her a sketch that I... Continue Reading →
Trash or treasure?
What defines a success or failure? Does it depend on objective data or a subjective opinion? And following that, can there be different views of the same physical object? Also, how much of this should be defined by the informed originator versus the unknowing spectator? During one of our conversations with Darcy and Kate, we... Continue Reading →
Why I am interested in cross-disciplinary collaboration
Now that I have joined the SciArt Center Bridge Residency program, I will be writing weekly blog posts about my progress in collaborating with Darcy Johnson. The posts will be published on the program website and I will be re-posting them here to continue using my blog for tracing the development of my art over... Continue Reading →