[Music] Man: Artists and scientists, many of whom are driven by curiosity.

Man 2: We love to say that you're this type of person or you're that type of person: "Here's your box that you fit in."

And I just don't buy it.

Man 3: I don't want the responsibility of being a scientist.

Ha ha!

I just want to stay unemployed.

♪ ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the Frieda Berlinsky Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, and GRoW @ Annenberg Foundation.

♪ Man: Ah!

Ohh.

Look at my head.

Man 2: Ha!

Look how crazy it is.

You know what's weird is when you--Oh, look at my glasses.

Man 3: David, you need to sit here.

You need to sit here for a little bit.

Yeah, just kind of sit there and just, ba ba ba ba ba... And move over.

Move over.

Look at this chair.

[Laughter] Man 1: Oh, my gosh.

Dan Goods: I lead what's called The Studio at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

It's a team of artists and designers and strategists, and we love to be able to give people a moment of awe about the universe, and we also work with scientists and engineers, who are sort of brainstorming future missions and helping them think through their thinking.

David Delgado: What that means is using everything we can to help build the culture closer together.

This is 6,000 people from around the world all coming together to create robots to explore space, right?

So we want to make sure that there's a blending, so that people can act together to come up with better ideas and bring that diversity and, like, turn it into magic.

Woman: Hanging from the ceiling.

And so we're hoping that that catches the spotlight and becomes the piece, so... Delgado: It is amazing to see this coming together because we've been working on it for a long time.

What does it mean to actually have--to see the work form and, like, come to life in this space?

It's amazing, because a lot of times, the work that we do ends up in public forums, you know, festivals.

And so to be able to do it in a way where it's in this setting, there's, like, a seriousness to it that-- that we really appreciate.

You know, without PST, I don't know that we would have the same opportunity to create the things that you would see inside the gallery.

And I think that's really important that-- that the world of the arts-- Getty Pacific Standard Time-- is providing this opportunity for institutions, you know, all over southern California.

We happen to be, you know, a science--robotic space exploration institution.

So what we come up with is going to be different than the types of things that you are going to see in other exhibits.

And I think that's the value of the merger.

It's pretty exciting to see it come together.

It's all being built right now.

Woman: PST Art has interesting origins.

When it began, its initial name was called On the Record, and it was an effort initially really just to preserve the archives and the history of post-World War II art in Los Angeles and in California.

Delgado: The provocation, or the request, is "Art and Science."

You know, when we heard that, we were like, "Yes, please!"

Art and science is baked into the DNA of JPL right from the core.

Heather MacDonald: The interesting thing about this collision of art and science, the distance between them that needs to be collided is really a modern invention.

All of us probably can think of many figures who were sort of working, you know, in both fields.

I mean, Leonardo da Vinci is sort of the most famous, but there are, you know, there are plenty of others, as well, who were, you know, both prolific artists, you know, by any measure but also were doing important science.

I think, for visitors to "Blended Worlds," this, you know, really provides a very, very different way to talk about the work of JPL, to bring the kind of data that their work gathers into the space of an art gallery.

It's, you know, something very unique and very special.

Goods: So this is sort of a celebration of Frank Malina, who was one of the first directors of JPL.

After he was done at JPL, he went to France and he became a kinetic artist.

MacDonald: Frank Malina was a graduate student at Caltech in the 1930s.

He and a group of rather wild, you know, young grad students that earned the name the suicide squad because they were pretty, let's say, reckless in their experimentation, they would go off into the Arroyo Seco adjacent to the Caltech campus, and do tests with rocket-propelled engines.

Delgado: It's amazing to think of a time where nobody had done that before.

There's a sort of radical thinking that sort of started this place as a place where ideas have huge value.

Man: We have liftoff... MacDonald: You know, Frank Malina was also very, you know, keenly interested in art and the intersections of art and science.

Founded "Leonardo," a very important journal and sort of publishing organization that is still very active.

Delgado: When we talk about art and science, it's like, deeply, deeply integrated in the thought process here.

We have a director of JPL that, at the same time, is an incredible practicing artist.

The effects of that, I think, led to this.

MacDonald: What I've seen in the work that the studio creates and that they create both through the artists and designers that are part of their team and those that they collaborate with externally, is many times thinking about how to use and interpret the data generated by JPL's missions to carry a very, like, very clear message to a kind of public that is often encountering these works of art, you know, on their campus, in passing, not in an art gallery.

I think that they have a very strong sensibility of clarity that tells a story that's very quickly relatable, very human, and very engaging in that sort of moment of encounter.

♪ Refik Anadol: 2018, I was able to work very closely with JPL to visualize 60 years of JPL missions and transform them into a media wall installation.

Goods: Refik's team just sucked in, like, all the data that we had about all these different missions, and then he created these scripts to kind of build together a storyline about each of the different missions that we have.

Anadol: I asked the question, What could be the dreams of the machines that are doing these incredible missions?

Goods: It's great for people that are part of the missions to walk in there and see little bits and pieces of the history of a mission, as well as, you know, visitors, it gives them a chance to be able to understand what we're up to as well.

Anadol: Science asks questions.

Art also asks questions.

And I think there's this very exciting symbiotic relationship.

You know, this is like a very fun, playful world of, like, being human in the age of technology.

And I know very well that many scientist friends are extremely great artists, and I know many artists that truly have a scientific heart.

Anjali Tripathi: Whenever anybody asks me what it's like to work at NASA, my unequivocal answer is, the best part of working at JPL are the creatives.

Josh Willis: The studio here at JPL is this tiny cadre of brilliant artists nestled in a desolate landscape of engineers and scientists.

Delgado: On a philosophical level, I think it's really important because it allows people who either don't care necessarily about science or don't know that they care about science, it gives people a doorway to enter into a new world.

Goods: Some people love to look at just facts.

There are people that communicate to those people.

Other people need experiences.

They learn through their skin, they learn through their ears and through their eyes and the way it smells.

We're using taxpayer money to further the understanding of humanity.

You know, that's really what I care about, is being able to move someone in one way or another.

♪ Delgado: So we call this "The Pulse" because this is live data communicating back and forth to spacecrafts across the solar system.

Goods: So what this is doing is showing live communication between spacecraft that are at the moon or beyond.

And so when lights are going up, we're actually sending data to a spacecraft and when lights are coming down, we're receiving data from a spacecraft, and the amount of light you see represents how much data.

So it's lots of data, lots of light, a little bit of data, a little bit of light.

♪ Delgado: So this is a sculpture of "GRACE Follow-On," which is a mission for JPL.

These are two half-scale versions of the shape of the actual spacecraft.

What this mission does, they go around Earth--both of these spacecraft--one in front of the other, and they just measure the distance in between the two.

And just by doing that measurement, they can map the gravity field of earth.

By measuring the gravity field, they can look at the movement of water around earth.

So you think about the melting of the glaciers, rising of sea levels, we're trying to gain people's attention so that they can listen to the story of the data.

What it shows us is something incredibly special.

Shane Myrbeck: In 2015, I worked with the Jet Propulsion Lab to create the Orbit Pavilion.

Delgado: It's a giant silver seashell that you walk into that's filled with 28 speakers that allows you to hear satellites as they fly overhead that you can't see, but it feels like you have a superpower when you walk in it, because it feels like you could listen up into space.

And when you point your finger to where the sound is coming from, if you were to follow that line all the way up, that's exactly where the satellite is.

Myrbeck: It captured their presence and their kind of, you know, stewardship of the Earth.

Delgado: What NASA was interested in was, people forget that NASA studies Earth.

Myrbeck: I think art can really convey that, that wonder and that awe.

And I think that's all there in the science.

It just doesn't necessarily get communicated that way.

Goods: One of the challenges of science is that it seems so complicated to most of us normal human beings, and it kind of is, right?

[Chuckles] It's so important for us to understand these things.

We're trying to make it clear and compelling in a way that we can all understand.

♪ MacDonald: As we were starting to develop "PST Art: Art & Science Collide," I think we, you know, very quickly, you know, saw how similar the processes that artists and scientists use to kind of go about their work, you know, really are.

Delgado: Each one of the artists has taken a step into the unknown.

We don't know what the outcomes are going to be.

I guess it does feel sort of like a science fair project, because it's more about the question and less about the preciousness of the outcome.

We're very aware that we're not, you know, MoMA or the Hammer or these other great institutions of art.

We're JPL, and we're a place of experimentation.

And that's our whole approach to this project.

Anadol: I think the main challenge I can feel that they may be going through is, like, really, artistic mind and scientific mind sometimes are so different, but synching them and finding the harmonics between these two worlds, I think, probably the territorial challenge.

I can guess that artists are in this playground, there's so many ideas can be done kind of feeling.

So I feel like there's this easy part of it.

There is also, like, challenge part of it.

I think there are mixed feelings, most likely.

Delgado: So Saskia and Shane are making something really interesting, and it's based on the senses, that has two rooms.

And one of the rooms is looking back at earth, and that room will be dedicated to remembering through the sense of smell.

When you go into the next room, it'll be about looking out, and Shane's actually looking out farther into the galaxy through sound.

One room is looking back, the other room is looking out.

Liz and Raffi are working on a project where they're creating a technology to allow earth to speak.

They're doing that through earth science data, and they're doing that through poetry.

Raffi's a poet, and they're creating a series of, like, word shells to allow these poems to emerge out of the data.

♪ Goods: These are cool... Delgado: Yeah.

Goods: nice and big.

Delgado: It's kind of funny because I think, like, with the Golden Record, Carl Sagan and the whole crew only had a little bit of time to get as much on there as possible without breaking copyright law and, like, all that kind of stuff, and then sending it out with, like, the real intent that someday some other intelligent life form may discover it and be like, "Wow, those were, you know, incredible people living on that unknown place that must be right here, according to the graphic," you know.

The people in Shane and Saskia's story, they're, like, the ultimate golden record.

They just are.

Like, instead of sending the record, we send people.

Goods: Sending them.

[Tone sounds] [Electronic music, drums play] ♪ Man: 2, 1.

We have ignition.

Announcer: In the late summer of 1977, two unmanned spacecraft, "Voyager 1" and "2," lifted off from Cape Canaveral atop Titan-Centaur rockets.

In the event the spacecraft encounter alien intelligence, both "Voyagers" carry a copper phonograph record celebrating the sights and sounds of earth.

These unique discs contain photographs of everyday life, the music of Beethoven and Chuck Berry, a baby crying, laughter, rain, and a heartbeat.

[Sound of heart beating] Saskia Wilson-Brown: The Golden Record was a record of us here, now, you know, communicating to some unknown civilization.

What Shane and I are trying to do is communicate to us here, now, a potential future civilization.

So in a way, it's sort of we're the alien civilization in our project and these future humans are sending us a signal.

Tripathi: Before the Golden Record, there were plaques on spacecraft that came before "Voyager."

But saying, "I'm going to give you this snapshot of earth" is so tied in to what we're doing now because "Sensory Mementos" is grounding us in this future, right?

And you are that astronaut experiencing this world.

Wilson-Brown: "Sensory Mementos" is about creating mementos, you know, creating records of potential human exploration of exoplanets in outer space.

Myrbeck: The idea is that the exhibit is set on an exoplanet.

Right now we're thinking Tau Ceti, but that might change.

That's about ten light-years away.

You'll walk into the first room, which is the Earth Room, and in that room, there'll be two objects from the earth that will have an oral component, and then they will emit a scent that will, you know, evoke the earth.

Wilson-Brown: It might be something from the Mariana Trench.

It might be a big thing of earth.

We haven't quite figured that out yet.

Myrbeck: And then as you walk into the next room, that'll be the Exoplanet Room.

The fiction of the piece is that we would have sent probes to these other planets and captured samples and brought them back, and that will have-- those sound delays that are kind of describing the distances to all the other exoplanets.

It'll come on in a second here.

Tripathi: It was like, also, I feel like I'm going to need to help proofread the names of these because... Myrbeck: Yeah, this is straight from the Exoplanet Archive... Tripathi: Yeah, it's got some issues.

Myrbeck: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tripathi laughs] ♪ Tripathi: So what's the really high-frequency one?

Myrbeck: The closeness is only in time.

Tripathi: In time.

OK. Myrbeck: So, like, five notes of the chord happen right away.

You know, that P9b is further away.

Delgado: I just talked to Shane.

Incredible progress with this whole idea of using the galaxy as an instrument.

He was showing me-- We're probably going to have to build the wall out from in that room, because he's going to use the speakers from the Orbit Pavilion.

I didn't realize this until recently, but he's really, I think, turning it into a musical piece.

Tripathi: These are gonna be-- Myrbeck: Yeah.

So there are the jars.

There are earth jars, right?

Currently empty but soon to be populated with the wonders, the wonders of the planet.

I think we're both, like... we're both a bit along for the ride.

You know, we have to trust each other, right?

Because she's not a sound expert.

I'm not a scent expert.

We're just kind of waiting to be awed by each other, you know?

And that's been the experience, you know?

When we were down at the institute and experimenting with scents, there was just, like, a whole new sensory world for me.

Wilson-Brown: So this is for the Earth Room, you know?

Myrbeck: Yup, yup... Wilson-Brown: These are just some options we can consider.

Myrbeck: It's, uh, really interesting how they evolve.

Like, there's the onset, which is the attack and then the sustain and then the release.

Scent envelope is really interesting.

Wilson-Brown: That's actually an interesting way of looking at it because that definitely is how these things work.

They're kind of like your delayed sound.

Like, they come in slower.

Myrbeck: Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: There's a process where they evolve.

Delgado: It's so interesting that Saskia has so much control over that, the sense of smell, do you know, and Shane has so much control over the sense of sound, and, like, to be able to create an experiment of interplanetary connectedness using those powers, I just can't wait to see what comes out of that.

Wilson-Brown: We have these high-concept ideas of, like, this exoplanet.

There will be, like, fields of ice shards raining down.

And so maybe the object is some sort of ice shard-type thing.

Cool.

But then, how do you actually use terrestrial tools and objects that we actually have access to--molecule sounds or whatever--to convey things that are inherently unterrestrial?

So it's like, really hard!

You know, we're just, sometimes I'm like, What?

How are we going to do this, you know?

Um, yeah, I don't know.

Announcer: November 28th, 9:22 a.m. Man: Spacecraft to internal power.

Engines start.

Ignition.

Liftoff.

Announcer: The spacecraft would have to be placed on a precise trajectory.

Man: The spacecraft is flying toward Mars, about to pass within 6,000 miles of its surface.

One pass, a single chance for everything to work.

[Printers running] For eight hours and 35 minutes, the figures cascade to the earth, representing the shading of 40,000 dots that will finally make up the first picture.

But some workers decide to hand make their own picture of Mars by shading the numbers.

Man on recording: Here's Mars.

[Continues, indistinct] Man on recording: One of the most remarkable scientific photographs of this age.

Goods: You really see the, uh--ha ha--you see the excitement and the energy involved in creating it.

And you can just imagine that, uh, you're unfolding the first close-up view of Mars and how that must have been so exciting to watch it unfold.

Laurie Leshin: So the very first image of Mars came from "Mariner 4," and it came, and you can imagine, very slowly, like, the numeric data, that represented the colors.

At the time, the team went out down to an art store here in Pasadena and bought markers so that they could color in the different shades of gray that they were receiving back from the spacecraft.

Goods: It's been one of my favorite things at JPL besides the Golden Record, because it has a beautiful story and it's a beautiful, handmade, artistic work in itself.

♪ Woman: You know, as an artist, you want to work for one of the big animation studios.

NASA doesn't usually make that list.

I ended up starting there as a graphic design intern, and I was basically their illustrator.

I would be in a room with scientists and engineers, and we would be illustrating the terrain of a comet for the first time.

Their issue was that they had maybe one pixel of this comet.

They didn't actually know what it looked like before they were going to harpoon onto it.

Goods: It's really great because she ended up making pancakes and doing weird things to actually show the surface of the comet.

Lizbeth De La Torre: You know when you're cooking pancakes and they're bubbling up a little bit?

The surface of the comet had those bubbles.

So it was, like, really a mix of a lot of food, some dirt from the Mojave Desert.

Goods: At first, you know, some scientists loved it and some scientists hated it.

And then once it got here, it, like, looked exactly what she had originally imagined, heh, which is really beautiful.

De La Torre: So that was a really nice treat after a few years, ha ha, once we got there.

Goods: In our own ways, it's sort of like what Dick Grumm was doing with the paint by numbers.

De La Torre: And so for "Earth Speaks," what we were thinking was it actually might look something like this.

And so you might have, like, this pedestal that is-- maybe you see the layers of the earth within it.

This printer is kind of like the stethoscope.

When you go to a doctor and the doctor has a stethoscope, that's kind of what this project is aiming to be.

Willis: For me, I've been watching the planet change and listening to its voice for my entire career.

I think what's really exciting about this is that it brings it home to you in a way that's very personal and very, like, emotional.

De La Torre: We think that being able to attach data, whether something is--like, a level is rising, connecting that to emotions like frustration, anger, joy, we can start to use to give the earth a personality.

Delgado: Whenever I talk about this to anybody, their first thought is, you know, "Are you using A.I.?"

Because that's, like, the obvious choice, like ChatGPT-- it's like, where you can crank out poetry all day.

I think it's cool that it's not A.I.

Goods: Yeah.

Delgado: I think it's, you know, and that's where Raffi comes in.

Raffi Joe Wartanian: Poetry can help us better understand the earth, because we are creatures of the earth, and poetry is one of the most fundamental expressions of our identity.

It could be really cool to have options of, like, the shape of a star, the shape of a sun, the shape of a moon.

De La Torre: Yeah, this is great.

And I think, like, the thermal printer, the printer sort of situation, allows for, like, really complex forms that we could create.

Wartanian: I'd say what Liz and her colleagues are doing is bringing about the science, the data.

I'd say on my end, what I bring is the ways that we can interpret data into poetry.

The next few weeks and months are really about finding ways to associate specific pieces of data with form and language.

De La Torre: I haven't written on a chalkboard in a long time.

We want to talk about glaciers, which includes, of course, like, sea level rise.

Draw a little atmosphere here.

It'll say "CO2 rise."

Maybe "increasingly frustrated" was what I had talked about.

Wartanian: Are we assuming that our emotions are different from the earth's, or are we all part of the same system?

So I think there's that kind of, that sort of question that... De La Torre: Mm-hmm.

Wartanian: that comes out.

I believe that art and science complement each other.

I think, in fact, it's very important for any artist to have an understanding of science, like the science of their craft.

Similarly, I think it's very important for scientists to have an understanding of the arts, like the practice of the arts.

Both things coexist, and I don't think we can have one without the other.

Willis: I think it's super important for scientists to connect their work to people, and creative outlets help us do that.

Goods: You don't know where the idea is going to come from.

It may come from another engineer, it might come from an artist.

It might come from a singer.

It might come from a poet.

When you're in a brainstorm and someone says a little phrase and it all of a sudden goes from their mind to an engineer's or a scientist's mind, they're like, "Oh!

I have the answer," right?

To me, that's really exciting, that it's more than just, How do we inspire people, but how do we inspire ourselves and how do we really do the work that we do in a new and innovative way?

MacDonald: I'm not a scientist, but in the process of preparing for this edition of "PST Art," I've had the chance to, you know, hear from a number of scientists who have been part of these deep interactions with artists.

For the scientists who are really open to this exchange, this collaboration, it can be truly transformative for their science.

It's something you see, you know, again and again, you know, in this field.

Man: I keep thinking of something that one of my heroes said, a painter named William de Kooning.

He said the most important thing about art is its total uselessness.

I like that.

Glass is available anywhere, it's not very expensive, and it's part of our civilization, and it has the ability to transmit, reflect, and absorb light all at the same time.

And with these techniques, it's possible to change any one of those things and make that piece of glass do something that's quite improbable.

That's what I like about what I do.

It's improbable.

MacDonald: Larry Bell has been a part of this really pioneering and, you know, important generation of California artists that were working outside what was then--you know, you could see as the sort of mainstream of modernism.

They were working in a different geographic context, a different cultural context.

Tiffany Kataria: He is really one of the pioneers, I think, in terms of thinking about and translating through art how humans perceive light and color and space.

MacDonald: There are, you know, I think, many instances of artists looking to the sciences to different sort of spheres of technology, pillaging them for ideas, but also, yeah, for equipment, for materials that they can then bring into their art making.

Larry Bell: I found this technique called front surface mirrors that was used in the film business.

The man who did the coatings had a piece of equipment that he wasn't using, and he offered to sell it to me.

It was a high vacuum thermal evaporator.

All I had to do was learn what it was all about.

I had no idea it was as exotic as it was.

The technical name for the device was a Kinney P5...[chuckles] whatever that meant.

Matthew Noyes: Larry's ability to be moved by light and have that drive him to then learn how to operate high-tech equipment to create that experience for others is profound and what makes Larry unique.

Kataria: He's basically fully self-taught.

You know, everything he learned about, you know, the best pigments to deposit and the processes by which he does them, like, that was all just trial and error, which, I mean, ultimately is the scientific process.

Bell: Well, this is the time machine.

I found this window at the Los Alamos dump.

I have no idea what they did with it, except they looked through it.

It's a very special piece of glass that filters out all of the infrared.

♪ Noyes: The time machine is a piece in which two individuals sit across from each other.

Between them is a window.

Half of the light from you travels through to the person opposed from you, and half of that light reflects back towards you.

The physics of that has to do with the coatings of metal that exist on that glass, the type of glass it is.

The consequence of that is an experience.

Bell: Light that is illuminating my body in this reflection is traveling at 186,000 miles a second to get back to my eyes.

What I like is what I sense of their feeling of themselves when they sit down in the chair.

Some people seem to get very frightened, and some people just find it totally amusing.

Noyes: If you're sitting across from someone, that person that you're seeing, at the same time that you're seeing yourself exists at a different age and at a different moment in time.

So you're not seeing the person as they are now but as they were some moment in time in the past.

Tripathi: One of the things that I think every astronomer uses in their outreach talks is trying to say, looking at the sky is like a time machine, depending how far you look.

Like, that's light that left its source when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, right?

It's one of these things that just sort of captures you.

Bell: Really?

Bell: Well, everybody gets-- everybody that does that has a very special feeling.

I've had people jump out of the chair.

The only thing I can deduce from people's response is that they're feeling the speed of light.

They're...

It's a time machine.

[Recording of men counting down] Man: We have ignition.

Man 2: Zero.

And with that... Man 3: We have liftoff at 21 minutes past the hour... Man 4: And the vehicle has cleared the tower.

[Indistinct transmissions] Leshin: I think the work we do at JPL is daring.

In that sense, it is exciting to people because it's out on the edge, and art can be out on the edge as well and evoke things in us that surprise us.

Delgado: I mean, I think everybody wants to push the boundaries of what's possible.

To come up with new mission ideas, to come up with new concepts, to come up with new possibilities, it's important to work with people who are also pushing themselves in their own capacities.

Wilson-Brown: Well, so one of the things that a lot of the scientists bring up as being present on these places is sulfur.

Myrbeck: Yup.

Wilson-Brown: Now, sulfur is actually odorless in its natural state, right?

Myrbeck: What?

Wilson-Brown: Yeah, it's only when it reacts to oxygen...

Both: Right, right... Wilson-Brown: So we need to convey the impression of sulfur.

Otherwise, it'll just be an empty thing with no smell, you know?

So I don't know how I'm going to convey these things without just faking it... You know, as an artist, you're typically engaging in, let's say, standard historical art.

You know, you're painting and you're putting a painting on the wall, and it's like, I'm sure there's science to how the paint functions, but it's a painting on a wall.

There's high concepts, but it's not beyond the capacity for most people to understand, like, religious devotion or love or blah blah.

When you're working with science, there's a learning curve in that a lot of artists didn't get that scientific education.

There's definitely a process where you're like, "Christ.

Am I smart enough for this?"

Like, "Can I actually understand the concepts I'm working with?"

And what you don't want to do is completely ruin or simplify or misrepresent these high-level concepts.

I mean, I'll be honest, that's a challenge for me because I'm not that smart, you know.

I'm just like, "I don't know.

Sounds cool."

But, you know, it's an opportunity to be better and to try to learn.

I guess my biggest fear is that I do my best and then the scientists come and they're like... Myrbeck: "Absolutely not."

Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: "Absolutely not.

All wrong."

You know?

I mean... Myrbeck: Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: So I've been trying to tell them all, like, "Look, this is interpretive.

It's art.

You know, most people get it."

Myrbeck: Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: If we can convey a feeling, then that's what we're after, you know?

Myrbeck: Yeah...I agree.

That's a huge thing.

It's like we want people to, like, feel the experience, right?

Wilson-Brown: Given that the story is that were sort of humans without a home... Myrbeck: Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: I think the focus will be on conveying some sort of emotion, like you said.

So the chemical knowledge that I've been presented with is I wished I had studied chemistry, not art.

That way, like, my M.A.

in art is, pfft, useless.

Myrbeck: What fascinates me about how speculative our piece is, is that the people that we're working with at JPL are doing hard science in that same realm of speculation.

Where we fail science, if you will, like, where people misunderstand science is, like, thinking that it's true.

Like, the whole, like, foundation of science is that you may discover something that refutes the thing that you know.

OK.

This...[indistinct].

De La Torre: What we're trying to do is take the average.

So, you know, we have a specific data set here and the year.

And there's a lot of other numbers here, ha ha, that are more-- they might be location-focused for some of them.

And maybe just taking the one number that is the most helpful for our use.

And we really want to see that increase and decrease.

Even if it's a tiny nuance and it's only a decimal, you know, decrease, that still means something.

Wartanian: We're trying to find the limits of our understanding and occupy that space.

I mean, when I'm working on a creative project, it's a lot of trial and error.

I'll try something.

I'll share it with other people.

Does it work?

Does it not work?

How can the lessons from that inform the next project?

I share, like, this concern that, you know, I think there's a lot of wonderment that is going into the creation of this exhibit.

For me, one question I have is, Will the participants, like, once they press that button and once they get that poem, will the poem itself give them that sense of wonder?

Ultimately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and each individual is going to have their own experience.

De La Torre: Part of this, too, is that we're not meant to really, um--Sometimes it's like, some of these poems are, like, whispers.

They're, like, repeating words.

Like, you've written some really beautiful ones, like, "Will I?

Won't I?

Will I?

Won't I?"

was one.

That was really beautiful.

It leaves room for people to attach their own thoughts to it.

I love personally when things glitch a little bit.

Ha ha!

Or there's, like, maybe one letter that didn't-- that didn't print.

It somehow gives some humanity to it a little bit.

Bell: Curiosity, you know-- When something happens in the studio that transforms where I was a second before to another place, it's a feeling that initiates the desire for more of the same feeling.

It's an addiction.

Sometimes vast amounts of time relative to my life goes by, and I don't have that hit.

I'm reworking something I discovered before and changing it or losing something, but I haven't had a breakthrough to another feeling until it happens.

Myrbeck: This project was originally--you know, it was originally called "Sensory Mementos," and it was about this idea of using senses other than sight to preserve experiences from earth, right?

There was always this idea of, like, this sound clock that would, like, just kind of scan things throughout the universe and delay sounds.

And then there is the scent idea, and then there is the objects themselves.

And I think one of the hardest things about a project like this is, like, you have to take these deep, almost incomprehensible concepts and create an experience that can make people feel something about it.

So I think when we came upon the idea--like, Saskia's great idea of just, like, just focusing on the scents and not having objects, and then the sound room could just be scanning the universe, it was like, the two purest ideas of the piece were completely intact and they came, into, like, clear focus once we made that call.

We basically had to sweep it all out, you know, and then kind of get back to the core concepts.

And I'm really happy with where it is.

Like, if you had talked to me two months ago, I would have been pretty despondent, I think, because none of our ideas were still in the piece.

And now, you know, I think we've gotten back to, like, the real experience that we wanted to capture at the beginning.

Willis: And you can see, like, this is one of those pools that, like, melts down through the ice and eventually drills a hole and runs out along the bottom.

Wow.

So I'm kind of curious, you know, like, this is my, like, this is my bread and butter--global sea level rise.

You know, it's going up.

And to me, you know, I have a list of numbers like that, and I turn it into something like this to make sense out of it.

But how do you turn, like, the numbers into words?

De La Torre: Really, the relationship is between the numbers and a noun or a verb or an adjective.

And I'm just going to draw really crudely here a little box.

And within this there's a lot of different nouns, maybe adjectives and verbs.

I mean, this is basically-- these numbers here are the chart--Actually, that looks exactly like that on climate...[indistinct].

[Willis chuckles] De La Torre: So it's basically this, and we're taking each of those points basically and adding a noun or an adjective or a verb.

Willis: You know, I've been listening to this curve talk to me for my whole career, but I don't think it's said anything quite as exciting as what I'm hoping will come out of this, so I'm really stoked about it.

Myrbeck: If you smell that and you're like, "That's the moon," I think that's so... Wilson-Brown: Yeah.

Myrbeck: inspiring because that's a really-- Wilson-Brown: It's not what you think of.

Yeah.

I mean, another thing, we could go the interpretive route and make it out of cheese or whatever, you know.

But... [Myrbeck chuckles] Myrbeck: No, I love this, though, because--like, you get up there, you smell it.

You're like, "Why would it smell like that," right?

I think it's great.

I think that's the kind of thing that we need, right, is for people to, like, smell something and be like, "What?

I need more," you know what I mean?

Wilson-Brown: Yeah, yeah.

"I gotta go find out for myself."

Myrbeck: Yeah, exactly.

"I had this, like, really, like, special experience, and I have so many questions," right?

I think that would be a good... Wilson-Brown: Yeah, maybe that's the win, right, is it just triggering curiosity.

I think that's what David and Dan want, really, is to trigger our curiosity.

Myrbeck: It's a really nice smell.

Goods: Artists and scientists, many of them are driven by curiosity, and the work that they do is driven by that curiosity.

It's, What is this thing?

Why does it do that?

So there's curiosity that, then, moves into experimentation.

And so both those worlds, those are key to the whole endeavor.

Bell: Every effort is a piece of evidence of something you learned.

I'm totally of the feeling that your work is your teacher.

You follow the work.

What you end up with is a lot of evidence of your various investigations.

Whether it's art or not is a whole nother issue.

I'm firmly convinced that art is a teacher.

It's not an object.

Anadol: In our work, we literally use art, science, and technology every single moment.

We sometimes tackle very big challenges that even... very major science institutions cannot handle.

And we can find sometimes even a solution for a very big scientific challenge.

For example, a human cell, the 3-D scannings, which are very hard to open and look for, like mitochondria and organelles, but we found a way to 3-D, like, visualize 1,000 times smaller than, like, a little human cell and transform into a sculpture.

Or we can even, like, find a way to quantify an emotion, such as joy, inspiration, and transform into an architecture.

MacDonald: Probably a lot of us have an emotional understanding of feeling overwhelmed by scientific data, feeling intimidated by it.

You know, I think what artists and designers, you know, bring to data, particularly scientific data, is not--You know, it's not about making them more attractive or more visually pleasing.

The interest really is in, I guess you could say, storytelling and how to take that data and really find that important message.

♪ Bell: There are three tools that an artist uses, which maybe a scientist uses, also--intuition, improvisation, and the third one is spontaneity.

If you got those three things going for you, then probably your direction is good.

If you trust those three things, you trust yourself, then you may be making art.

♪ Wilson-Brown: Nice.

Myrbeck: It should work.

Wilson-Brown: How tall a wall is this going to be?

Myrbeck: Two feet.

Wilson-Brown: Two feet.

OK.

Perfect.

Yeah.

It's only two.

I'm kind of like, [Bleep].

It's like, In two weeks?

Like... Myrbeck: Uh, next week.

Wilson-Brown: No.

Myrbeck: Yeah.

A week from today.

[Tones playing] Wilson-Brown: Oh, [bleep].

It's like next week.

Myrbeck: Yeah.

Wilson-Brown: Oh, [bleep].

OK. All right.

Ha ha!

The glass guy has the glass things ready on Friday, thank God.

It's pretty dope, though.

Myrbeck: Thanks.

I'm super happy with the sounds.

Like, it's a funny thing.

The sounds came pretty easily.

Wilson-Brown: Yeah.

Myrbeck: So it feels like cheating.

Wilson-Brown: No, but that's actually not cheating.

Myrbeck: Ha ha!

Yeah!

Wilson-Brown: Expertise, you know?

But I know the feeling.

You're like, "Oh... that was really easy."

Myrbeck: "Wait a minute.

OK..." Wilson-Brown: "Did I work hard enough for this?"

Like, yeah, but it makes up for the times where you struggle and it doesn't work out, you know?

Myrbeck: Yeah.

And I think we spent so much time, like, trying to figure out the context of it.

Wilson-Brown: Dude, I mean, it's been a lot longer than that.

Myrbeck: There's plenty of struggle.

[Drills running] Wartanian: Yeah, this seems, like, more practical than, like, 50 things around a pedestal.

De La Torre: Yeah.

Or we could have both, too, to be honest.

I mean, we could do-- For example, there's, like, the entryway itself is-- maybe it's not completely covered all the way, but you can still kind of see through it.

Maybe it's on the sides or something.

Like, you still have to move past them.

And then we also still have the hanging ones from the ceiling.

Myrbeck: You know, just kind of like, every single aspect of the project is taking longer than expected, just like every project.

But, luckily, no, no false presumptions, no bad assumptions.

Nothing.

No catastrophic failures yet.

It's like, it's all working.

It's just...taking some time.

Delgado: Uh, OK.

So, yeah, we have all of the data in the subdirectory here.

It's Earth Speaks data.

We just have to do Python 3 and then Earth Speaks.

[Indistinct].

So we'll give it a try.

There you go.

Wartanian: This is beautiful.

Wow.

"Oceans, my heart bear this burden.

Waves whisper tales of ruptured currents.

Can you taste the bitters of my lament?"

It's hard to believe that I'm holding this piece of paper and all of the collaboration and meetings and brainstorming and refining the ideas and then actually getting the hardware to manifest this reality from an idea into an actual poem, you know.

It's just a piece of paper with some ink on it, but the story behind that paper is so layered, and there are so many people involved and so many conversations and relationships.

So for me, this piece of paper really represents all of those things coming together.

And so there's a lot of weight and humanity in this paper.

♪ Myrbeck: Oh, that's interesting.

I think it depends on the art and the science.

You know, I think that there's certainly art that can capture the imagination of, you know, millions, right?

But then think about the moon landing or something like that, right?

I mean, think of how generationally impactful that was to, you know, the people that were there to see it.

Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Myrbeck: People tend to put them in different emotional boxes, like, "Oh, this is truth, and this is feeling," or something like that.

But I think each can be as impactful as the other.

You think about, like, Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" thing, right, where they sent "Voyager" out.

It was getting to the point where it couldn't see Earth anymore.

And he's like, "We gotta turn around and take that picture," right?

You know, like, it just captured everyone's attention, right?

That's like, "That thing is that far from... That's us down there," you know.

Delgado: There's this really interesting nature that happens is, the farther we look and the more that we look outside of this world, the more we realize how special it is to actually be a part of earth.

And so I think that's, like, a really strong revelation.

I think that happens the more and more you look into space exploration.

Wilson-Brown: You know, there's just a fundamental experience of being human that I think transcends time and space.

So that's what I find very interesting about this project, is imagining how someone like me--you know, a 45-year-old woman artist-type-- 20,000 years from now will relate to her world.

I mean, the environment will be totally alien, the technology will be totally different, but the fundamental humanness remains the same.

Tripathi: Ultimately, in the search for life across the universe, we will probably find something, and when we do, it will probably look nothing like us.

And then suddenly, you will find all of the things that you thought, "Oh, I took that for granted."

So this exhibit is an opportunity to think about, What do you take for granted and what is the wild possibility that we can all sit and wonder about?

Delgado: We can look at all of these other places.

You know, it's going to be incredible if we find microbes on Europa.

I think when NASA talks about, "Are we alone?," or they talk about, "Is there other life off of Earth?"

But when I think of that word, are we "alone," is, Are we painting ourselves into a very lonely corner with ideas with the way we think about who we are within the scope of all of the rest of nature?

I think a hopeful future is when we start to realize that we're all part of it, the same thing.

And so I think space exploration does a really elegant job of showing us that we're very special by showing us what else is not out there so far.

Go back and look at any of those pictures--many of the missions, usually there's a point where the spacecraft turns around and you look back at Earth and it's a magic moment because you're like, "Oh, my God.

That's who we are."

It's that "Pale Blue Dot" moment from "Voyager," where everything-- Like, Carl Sagan said it best: "Everything..." Carl Sagan: Every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust... Delgado & Sagan: Suspended... Delgado: in... Sagan: in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Delgado: Sorry.

I get worked up because it's one of those things where we're on something that is fragile.

♪ We have to do something about it.

♪ Leshin: So "Dare mighty things" is our motto-- our sort of unofficial motto at JPL, and it's really taken from a Teddy Roosevelt quote.

"It's better to try and fail than not to try at all."

And we absolutely believe that.

Delgado: How do you see yourself as being part of something bigger than yourself?

And I think that's what the phrase "Dare mighty things" does.

It places you inside something that's bigger and more powerful and impossible to do without the whole.

And I think that's why the lab has gravitated to that phrase, because it fits this place.

Tripathi: I think that that invitation to dare mighty things is really the driving force for us, that it says we are all going to do this together and we are going to go in the place where people haven't really been before, and in some cases, quite literally.

Leshin: We purposely try and be bold.

If someone else can do something, we're not as interested in doing it.

We have been, from our founding, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in deep space.

Delgado: JPL is specifically oriented to do one-off projects.

They're not going to be mass replicated.

You know, one rover that's going to go to Mars, it's going to land and do science.

One spacecraft is going to fly around Saturn over and over again, getting this huge amount of information, but then there's just one of them.

What's the difference between a viable idea and fantasy is something that's just really interesting that people are constantly exploring here.

Goods: It's really easy to dare mediocrity.

"Do something mighty.

Augh.

You know, just do it well enough," right?

When I'd given a tour to someone who had just graduated from college and I was asking, "Why do you want to work here?"

And he said, "Because you do what's on the edge of possibility."

And I heard that.

I was like, "Wow!

That's really amazing."

You know, it's like, there's a line.

If you go over that line, you crash and burn, and if you are too far away from that line, then it's boring.

It's just not really interesting.

But if you kind of work your way up that little line, then that's exciting and it's allowing us to do things that we've never been able to do before.

To me, that's a big part of "Dare mighty things," is trying to figure out, Where is that line of possibility?

How do you not go over it?

How do you push it, so then the line goes further away and further away, and it's always out there for the next person to solve?

♪ ♪ [Indistinct chatter] ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the Frieda Berlinsky Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, and GRoW @ Annenberg Foundation.