Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
The EPA actually came into being after the whale songs were released and the huge public out cry against the near extinction of whales and that kind of save the rail campaign that launched all of this environmental movement.
Ari Friedlaender:I I was surprised actually interested students were in the the maps from our special collections. You know, they look at those and they say, we had no idea that whales were found throughout all these oceans because growing up in the twenty first century, we don't think about whales being everywhere.
Rachel Nelson:My name is Rachel Nelson. I I'm the director and chief curator of the University of California Santa Cruz's Institute of the Arts and Sciences. I teach. I made exhibitions, and, work with a lot of different people to think about how art and social justice intertwine.
Ari Friedlaender:My name's Ari Friedlaender. I'm a professor in the Ocean Sciences Department at UC Santa Cruz, and I'm a faculty fellow at the Institute for Art and Sciences. And the research we do on my lab focuses on understanding the underwater behavior and ecology of marine animals and how they are impacted by human activities.
Rachel Nelson:Ari, do you wanna get us started off by talking a little bit about Weather and the Whale, which is an exhibition catalog that we've created around a two year collaboration that we've had.
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. Thanks, Rachel. What really stands out for me about the book or catalog that we produced for the exhibition is that it it's a summary in a very different kind of structure, wording structure and writing structure and presentation structure to how we convey information as if we were only publishing in the scientific literature. And for me, one of the things that's really exciting is that it's allowed us to think about and communicate our science more as storytelling and describing to a broad audience rather than being a bit more constrained and constricted by structure of a scientific article. And I think what's really exciting is that we're able to express a bit more of the emotion, bit more of the sensation and the feeling that we achieve as part of this project and how that was provided to us through the interaction with artists.
Ari Friedlaender:You know, when we when we write in a scientific paper, we're just sort of speaking through one lens and the input and the connection we had with artists throughout this entire two year period really shaped the way that I now think about doing science, and I know my students do as well. And so it gave us an opportunity to converse and communicate in a much more creative and I think meaningful way about what the findings of our science, were really telling us.
Rachel Nelson:Weather in the Whale is a really interesting experiment in some ways. It looks a lot like an exhibition catalog, but it's more of a document about trying to work across many kinds of different ways of knowing. So scientific forms of inquiry, artistic forms of inquiry, humanist forms of inquiry, social science forms of inquiry, to think about climate change through the lens of really looking at whales. We undertook a two year project in which we created a working group with scientists at RA's lab to look at the effects of ecological changes and brought in other people, including artists that we knew from around The United States that we thought would be interested in thinking together about how we can talk and educate and feel things about climate change in ways that we don't already think about it. It was very much unusual project, and I think the book revels in that.
Rachel Nelson:It's a beautiful pearly cover. It has paper, radio pathology, and all of that trying to reflect our bigger goals. But it's also unusual in that it, like, moves between different kinds of information. There's science, data visualization. There's artworks.
Rachel Nelson:There's interviews. There's odd snippets of things that people said over the two years when we were in conversation together, presented in ways that are trying to get people to think. And Ari, I think it's really interesting because one of the things that we start with kind of early on after the forward is a little bit of a quote from one of the artists, Christine Howard Sandoval, who says something like, how people think that artists know something, but we don't have any answers. Or the nice thing about artists, we're not expected to have any answers. And then one of the scientists in your lab, Natalia, who says, you know, people always think that scientists have all the answers, and we certainly don't.
Rachel Nelson:There is this question of like, what answers are. So I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about kind of the process, what we did over the two years, why we were together, and then what you think was different about it as a scientist and a researcher.
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. Absolutely. And and, Rachel, I think you made a you made a really great point that that this book comes from so many different angles. On your side of the desk, you as an artist are used to working with different types of communicators. Like you mentioned, all of these different disciplines.
Ari Friedlaender:And as scientists, I think we get a little myopic or kind of railroaded into just having one audience to communicate with. And I think this was, in a selfish way, a really great opportunity for us to just be one of many rather than one of one voices describing climate change impact in marine mammals. It was humbling in some ways, you know, and really insightful and really valuable for all of us to not have this kind of self righteousness about scientists having all the answers and being one of many and having the voices and the perspectives all contributing equally to what is the sensation and what is the exhibition and what is the meaning of what we found. And I think that's really, to me, the heart of this is how this collaboration brought together people who were looking at the same question and coming up with incredibly different ways of of experiencing how you answer the question and what the meaning of those answers were. And I think we see that in the way that the pieces of art are created as well, where if we all have the same information and the same knowledge and the same results, how does that manifest through different people emotionally and through the ways that they can create artworks around that?
Ari Friedlaender:And I know when every time, you know, folks in our lab go there, people are learning and gaining more insight, I think probably about themselves and about the meaning of information and science much, much more so than if we, you know, reread a scientific document a couple of times. The way that this worked was really amazing. You know, we I probably didn't explain it too well to my students ahead of time, and maybe that was a good thing, you know, sort of like what we were getting into, because we probably didn't even really know what we were getting into, aside from the fact that me and Rachel really wanted to be able to share the opportunity to do science and learning together. There was really this wonderful organic chemistry where we came together as groups. When we would present an idea about what we were interested in as a scientific topic, you know, putting putting tags on whales to measure their migration corridors or measuring toxic, you know, loads of chemicals in the blubber of of certain animals.
Ari Friedlaender:The discussions that came from this were so fun and interesting in us providing some information at the onset of of a conversation and then hearing from different disciplines. Well, why are you doing this? What is this gonna tell you? How are you gonna interpret this? What is the meaning of that?
Ari Friedlaender:It made us question more so than any other time why we're doing certain things and how we're doing it. And I think that was the real benefit for the scientists at the beginning of this. And then I think it became much more of a collaborative conversation once the artists and once the writers and humanists started understanding what it is that we were trying to do through science, they were putting their own sort of feeling and emotion into what their output was going to be. And instead of a back and forth question and answer session, it became much more of conversation about what we were doing, why we were doing certain things and how we were going to collectively create a story and, you know, a product and a catalogue that really has a red thread of each of these scientific questions through them. But, like Rachel said at the beginning, coming at it through these very, very different lenses and ways of communicating.
Rachel Nelson:I mean, one of the things I often say about this project is that I approach it as an archerier and in the kind of training I have in critical theory and stuff with a little bit of cynicism. And what I mean by this, and I'm never quite sure cynicism is the right word, but I know that I said to you right up front that, you know, people really, really like whales. And so when you talk about whales, you have an opportunity to actually begin to have people think in relations of things that perhaps many people in United States have proven that they don't care about as much. So if we're talking about, for instance, one of the things that I thought is really interesting and we decided to do really early on when we were talking about working collaboration was, as you mentioned, studying the the toxins and the contaminants and pollutants and plastics that are entering into the blubber of humpback whales, as well as the bloodstreams of sea lions and seals in Monterey Bay, which is, like, right outside my window, You know, here in Santa Cruz. And I was like, yeah, that's really interesting because, of course, those are the safe toxins that are entering into our communities, particularly our purity of farm workers and vibrant farm labor, our neighbors that are often abandoned by health care, by, you know, extended our school systems, by our financial systems, by any sort of social network of care.
Rachel Nelson:Right? And yet I knew that people were gonna care a whole lot about what we find in whales. And that that was something that sitting in the room was having to deal with the fact that not everybody in that room was always interested in the whales, but they were interested in the ramifications of how we could talk about what was happening to whales and other marine mammals, to think about the complexities of the time we're living it, and how difficult it is to get people to understand that climate change isn't something that happens to everyone and everything. It actually happens through the same routes of kind of marginalization and minoritization that all of US society is organized around. And I think that that was something that I was really impressed by you and your team, how you kept taking in that information when people would say, well, you know, how are we thinking about this in relationship to this?
Rachel Nelson:And the kind of openness you had to try to think about how to adapt data you were coming up with to accommodate these different forms of inquiry into this very tangled way of thinking about ecologies, and also, I think, what it takes to address climate change.
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. That that's really poignant, Rachel. And I think the best manifestation of that is sort of the subsequent lecture series that our graduate students and postdocs put together to bring folks from these different communities and organizations that are trying to reconcile the human health impacts and the societal impacts and how they are disconnected from a lot of what most people think. If at the beginning of this, you told me that we would be writing a grant that's a follow on to this, to the Environmental Protection Agency, I would have said, like, I have no idea why we'd be doing that. And it's very clear that we are in a position now to be able to work across disciplines much easier and work with organizations and groups that, like you said, are using whales to sort of showcase how things are occurring on land and in human systems that then can be directly put back into those communities to better understand how what happens on land and in these communities impacts those people.
Ari Friedlaender:It's weird to think that whales are a vehicle for going back to, you know, these these communities and and some of the social justice issues, but I absolutely understand it and think it's an incredibly astute way to to get people to think about what's happening in your backyard, you know, or down the street through a vehicle of something that you have some heuristic value placed on, even though how many people are out there looking at whales every day, you know, and really interacting with them.
Rachel Nelson:Yeah. What, one of the other things I know that you and I have talked a lot about is the fact, and I think that our forward is called something like, you know, from save the whales to save almost everything. I would say, actually, it's not almost everything that you wanna save.
Ari Friedlaender:It's like saving the world. Yeah.
Rachel Nelson:Yes. But, like, how do move from because, of course, you know, the other thing that you and I were really interested in that I think really informs the book, And then also, all of the artworks, and the ways that people were thinking about it, is that we really were thinking about the birth of environmental action in The United States, which, you know, the EPA and those places actually came into being after the whale songs were released, and the huge public outcry against the near extinction of whales, again, take over not just The United States, but the world. And that kind of save the rail campaign that launched all of this environmental movement. And that now we realize that it wasn't enough, because in fact, we did save the whales largely. This is the way I tell it.
Rachel Nelson:I'm not a scientist, so I get to use the poker belief. The way I tell it is, you know, there is a we were at the point where whales were 90% extinct around the globe. A massive public outreach campaign inspired by the Lavies of the Whale song and the Jeep Palance record, you know, album and all of that kind of push drives people to come out, decide to say they're gonna save the whales, t shirts are made, people protest, Greenpeace swings, you know, horns swings into action, and we save the whales. Almost 90% of whales some some species of whales are 90% recovered. But now we're in a time where, again, with climate change, we realize that in climate crisis, that just saving the whales alone doesn't even save the whales, much less anything else.
Rachel Nelson:That we have to think about it in this way more complicated way. Because one of the things you said to me is, in that process, whales were given a unique right to live, to life that nothing else had.
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. It's in some ways, it's a burden, you know, as a scientist who who studies whales. I take it back even a little bit farther, maybe twenty years before that. And I think a lot about Rachel Carson, and I think a lot about, you know, her book, Silent Spring. It had a massive impact on our understanding of pesticides, chemicals and DVT in the environment.
Ari Friedlaender:But I, you know, I almost wish I'm like, man, if she'd thrown whales into that, you know, into that mix, like this could have been like the biggest thing like that ever happened in the environmental movement. It had such a monumental impact already. But, you know, then twenty odd years later, I guess, you know, ten years later from when the book was published, the MMPA or the Green Mammal Protection Act was passed. And yeah, like Rachel said, the difference between that and the Endangered Species Act are really compelling, right? The Endangered Species Act means that you're afforded federal protection as a species once you're basically about to go extinct and there is nothing else that can be done.
Ari Friedlaender:You need intervention to protect you from going extinct. Whereas the Marine Mammal Protection Act says if you're a marine mammal, you are federally protected for your right to life to exist and for your habitats to be viable for you, irrespective of your condition, whether you're a great population, whether you're healthy, whether you're endangered or not. It's as a proactive piece of legislation, it's really unique because we afford whales and marine mammals this value of having something that is so close to human in their culture, in their societies, and in the way that they nurture each other and how much we feel about them that they are given this above board right. And in fact, much more so than some people, you know, in our society. And it's just it's baffling in some ways.
Ari Friedlaender:But the best thing we can do is take advantage of this and say, great, if whales and these animals are so meaningful to so many people, then if that's the hook to get people to recognise and understand what's happening to these animals, and then the next step is, well, if it's happening to these animals, it's impacting the ecosystems, and let's think about where all of these things that are impacting the animals are coming from and redirect our attention back to those, then I think we're doing it right. You know, if we just end with the marine mammal and say, wow, these are very special animals and let's worry about what we're doing to them, we're missing a huge amount. And I think that this connection with artists and humanists and ways of thinking about this through this collaboration has really presented how to do this for scientists. And again, I almost always feel selfish in this collaboration and that we are gaining as scientists. We are being shown so much through this collaboration and this partnership of how we can behave and how we can be different and better for what we learn by taking a page out of what artists in these other disciplines really have at their foundation.
Ari Friedlaender:And I think, to me, that's what I really valued for my students was giving them that perspective and having them kind of take that forward and hopefully present that as they as they start their careers as well.
Rachel Nelson:I think that one of the things that was really important to us from the beginning is often when there's art and science collaborations, historically, there's different ways that they come into being. Sometimes it's artists using the technologies that are produced by scientists and through labs. Sometimes scientists really trying to find ways for artists to kind of illustrate. Right? Well, not really what we think of as the function of art, but finding ways to kind of illustrate science.
Rachel Nelson:And we were really convinced that neither of those two things were really what we were interested in. Right? And I definitely think the artists we invited were not going to do that, even if we tried to bake them. Right? We're not gonna do any of that.
Rachel Nelson:But they had other kinds of ways of taking it. One of the things that they honed in on really quickly, were the Marine Protection Act and the policies around whales that gave them that unique right to life, which I think is such an interesting formulation in a time when we see what is given unique rights to let live, and what is let to die. And they were really interested in immediately, and thinking of that next to what we could think of as disposability. Right? The disposability of some people, the disposability of some species, the disposability of people who are trying to migrate even as whales migrate through the oceans.
Rachel Nelson:Right? And putting this alongside of each other. I think that one of the things we could say is that when we brought the artists in, we brought people like Carolina Casado, who's a wonderful collaborative artist. She's originally from London and Columbia and lives in LA. And, you know, she's worked with communities really around the world, thinking about water rights and dams and, you know, all of these things and informing her artwork from the work she does at a community level.
Rachel Nelson:You know, but having different artists come in and immediately say, okay, if this is the case, how can we use this to look at these kind of issues around disposability? Like Courtney Leonard, for instance, who's an artist, who's a member of the Shinnecock Nation, so Long Island, what we know is Long Island, New York, was showed her work called Breach. Because, of course, when whales were given the unique right to life, but the Shinnecock, their right to life, and living the way that they lived, was taken away because they were, you know, they're a community that has historically harvested whales for sustenance and culture, and they were no longer allowed to do so. And in fact, now, aren't allowed to use the bodies of whales in their cultural work. Even when they're dot dead and shit strikes, and they wash up to shore, they're not allowed to access the bodies.
Rachel Nelson:So, you know, thinking about these even these policy arrangements are able to show us, and the regulations and laws are able to show us about how people are mobilized even through, say, climate protections, often to work in ways that continue to minoritize, marginalize, push out the right to life. And I think that that was really, really striking. What were the artworks you were most surprised about?
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. All of the classes that I've taught throughout this exhibition come in witness the exhibition, and I chat with them about what they find the most compelling as well. And what's really interesting is that there are different factions that find different components more compelling than others. I think Courtney's piece at the beginning, people are very struck by that and have said it's a perfect sort of entryway into the exhibition to show this contrast between humans, you know, the industrial use of the ocean by one group and then the the natural and the way in which other people who utilize the sea for resources, you know, have used animals. I was surprised actually at how interested students were in the the maps from our special collections.
Ari Friedlaender:You know, they look at those and they say, we had no idea that whales were found throughout all these oceans because growing up in the twenty first century, we don't think about whales being everywhere. And these maps really show that they were everywhere. They were these ubiquitous animals in the ocean. So every piece that they see, I think they're really grabbing something from. Students have been really captivated by Mia's video.
Ari Friedlaender:I think that's one that silences people, and that makes them just think afterwards. You don't come out of that being happy. I think you come out of that questioning a lot of things and trying to reconcile a lot of things about human nature. I think Sine's work, the work in The Gulf and the acoustic work, is very visceral for people because it allows them to sense things in a couple of ways using acoustics as well as visuals. In there, people are able to understand what that threat and what that risk is really, really well.
Ari Friedlaender:Visually, people are really attracted to and taken by Christine's wall with the with the paperworks on that because it's so grand and so massive. I think you're immediately drawn to it. And I find people, you know, you start far away and you start getting closer and closer to it. And people are having this realization and recognition of there's more there than just looking at something that's visually really compelling, but that the statements on there are really, really meaningful. And then the last one that people are really drawn to Carolina's pieces for the aesthetic, you know, people look at the mural and are just every facet of it and every anecdote in there tells a story and a very rich story that that people are able to recognize.
Ari Friedlaender:I see a lot of people nodding and pointing at parts of that and and consuming that in a really profound way. And then the last piece is the room with the migration stories of people. And I think that one for me is the most different. Maybe it's because we didn't work directly with that artist throughout the process. So it was something that I kind of didn't see coming as part of the exhibition.
Ari Friedlaender:But to go into that room that has this white light that is very sterile and very medical sort of feeling. And to see these maps on these people and to see these different body types and morphs of legs and how their stories really do parallel migration stories of marine mammals really strikes a chord with me. And I think a lot of people also kind of come out of that room going like, wow, that was really cool. I guess that's a very long way of saying everything in the exhibition really has something to offer people. And obviously, you know, Ashley's work and the rest of the work in there also really inspires people.
Ari Friedlaender:But those are the ones that I find myself hearing from my students and when I go in where I wanna go back to and sort of revisit to get some inspiration or some perspective.
Rachel Nelson:Yeah. I think that one of the things that I've enjoyed about working between the arts and sciences and actually in the I mean, I I enjoyed all of it. The the conversations that we had when we sat, you know, we would meet every month with the working group of both artists and the scientists involved in the project, and then we had some other folks that were joining us the entire time, and Zaksimmer, Kehlani, and yeah. It was an amazing group of people sitting around and thinking about these things. And that, you know, science is often trying to tell a story to tell kind of almost a linear story out of some things that are very, very in flex.
Rachel Nelson:That artists, they have to kinda have an answer or a hypothesis or something that they can sum up in this way that they can test and say yes or no about. But artists aren't obligated to do any of that. Right? That they're, able to ask a whole bunch of questions. I mean, you ended by saying something about Ashley, and, yeah, Ashley's work, he's did this he's an artist also based in LA, but did this kind of amazing work that connects, like, the fires in LA, so, like, the Calisades making fires and things of that to the whale.
Rachel Nelson:Right? To thinking through the whale about how to connect wildfires, how to connect what's happening in Palestine, how to connect the Irish potato famine. You know, all of these different things in this way, in this really complex thinking. And I think that one of the things that we try to do in the book is to show these complexities even as we give people these more you know, give people the data. Like, this means this.
Rachel Nelson:Right? But then also, give them other places that it could possibly meet, and that that was really important. It was also really important that the science really be there. Because, I mean, the so that the data I mean, one of the interesting things about this is we've made public all the data you collected over the two years, like, immediately. Like, everything went online.
Rachel Nelson:When you collected and did the toxicology samples in Monterey Bay, we immediately just put all that information out, so that anyone can kind of use the data and not just the artists. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that kind of expansive ideas of what the book is, and how you're kind of thinking about science differently?
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah, I think that's a good point that when you have very little amassed, you fight really, really hard to control it because every little piece means sort of that much more to you. And I see that in our science community really manifesting to the point that people just really don't share data. They're very suspicious of data becoming public. And there's some inherent concern that someone's going to steal your data and use it, you know, without your knowledge or or publish it without you being part of that. One of the things that I think we can do, and and in this case, lead by example, is by going against that and saying, you know what?
Ari Friedlaender:Look. We were fortunate enough to be able to collect this information, and if it only has value in a small publication, that mean a small number of people create and then disseminate, are we doing really value to the people who help to sponsor that work and to the animals and the systems that we are trying to protect and conserve and share information about. And so I can't think of a more rational thing to do than to present it and broadcast it. And hopefully, are people out there that are smarter than us, that are more nuanced than us, that can take that information and create something even more telling about it than what we did. And if the goal is to do something beyond yourself and work for something bigger than just yourself and your output, then that should be exactly what you're kind of signing up to do.
Ari Friedlaender:In that sense, I wish we had even more ways to sort of get on a mountaintop and say, here's all this data we have. We've collected it, and we've made some sense of it, but who else can use it? And who can do something with this? Oh, you know who can do something with this? All these different artists that we've worked with.
Ari Friedlaender:And look at the ways that people can take this information and turn it into something absolutely profound and compelling in ways that we had no idea you could do. And I think that's a process and something that I really hope we can continue to do and foster, you know, at UC Santa Cruz, in my department, in IAS, in as many sort of bubbles as we expand out to and make this the norm, not the exception, I think that would be a really awesome thing to have. And I think the book and the catalog is here's that physical manifestation of that. You know, it's 300 and some odd pages of people talking about, you know, a little bit of science that we did in a lot of different creative and and really interesting ways.
Rachel Nelson:Well, I was thinking when you were talking that this is so much it's so interesting because the methodology of this is something that is, I think, at the core, but we were trying to do. And actually, the book tries to show the methodology of it, which is it's not about coming up with answers. It's about trying to come up with models and of working together, a collaboration and relationships between people, between things, between ideas that refuse the ideologies that we've been given the kind of blueprint for how the world is supposed to work. Like, the importance of the individual, right, over the many. The, the idea that somebody always has to be the thing, know, or the leader as opposed to the many as opposed the the idea of authority.
Rachel Nelson:Right? Let's get rid of the nobody's an authority, obviously, on climate crisis or else we probably have figured it out. Right? This stems, and Ari knows this, that, you know, this stems too from, you know, most a lot of the work that we do at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, I mean, we're really the art the art galleries. Right?
Rachel Nelson:But that name actually gave us the kind of ability and a demand to think interdisciplinary, like think across disciplines. And one of our major initiatives, all of our work is around what we call the critical issues of our time, but one of our major initiatives is around prison abolition. And it proves it for which seems really unrelated, perhaps, to the work we do, but I actually think the methodological basis of weather and the whale, has a lot to do with the way in the abolition movement, people are trying to think about how can they different kinds of relationships, that do not rely on the same idea of reward punishment that carceral systems have developed and normalized in society. How to not think that a problem can be solved by taking one person out of society and putting them in prison, but realizing that the cosm was bigger than any one person. So this working with you has been about trying to take some of these methodologies that we've studied now for decades in kind of in the movement in the anti prison movement, and thinking about how they can also illuminate other modes of working and putting together these giant issues.
Rachel Nelson:We had told Ari right at the beginning of this, said, we had to think this through the prison, or the site of the prison, and you kind of looked thinking like, what? And I'm like, that it had any presence in the space. And I think that a lot of the artists we work with, people like Ashley Hunt, who is an artist who's worked within the prison abolition movement for a long time, also tried to keep us thinking about this. Like, how can we always take it from the point of the most vulnerable, the most vulnerable to climate crisis, the most vulnerable to the systems that propelled the climate crisis, from racial capitalism, the structures of the state that are that have propelled it. Think through the position of the most vulnerable from that, whether they be sea otters or somebody in prison, to think about the problems in this more complex way.
Rachel Nelson:And it's been such a challenge, but I also think that there are real moments where we did it. You know? And you mentioned Sine's work too. There's a moment too where Sine talks about being isn't always comfortable with the methodologies we use. But in this kind of relationships, we can actually talk to each other about that, as opposed to there's being the authoritative stance of the thing that can't be questioned.
Rachel Nelson:The science gets questioned both in the book and in the exhibition that it and the project that it drives from. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Are you used to that questioning of science?
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah. Yeah. You know, as as you were talking about that, the thing that I was going to first respond to was sort of this freedom, you know, that when as an artist, Ashley can say, I want to focus on this component, on this, because I think it's the most vulnerable and it's what really needs attention. Not that there's not a consequence to how you decide on what to do as an artist, but in science, we are so much more driven by what is motivating the work being dictated to us, you know, that we very rarely have this freedom to go down a path that we are completely dissociated from, like the funding for, you know, you get a grant to do this. It comes from this organization.
Ari Friedlaender:They have these principles. You're doing it under that umbrella. And rarely do we have this opportunity to to look at things in a completely objective way and say, what's the most important thing to focus on given the question we have and remove any bias or remove any, you know, sort of those strings to it. And I think that's some of the things that we learned in this were that it's okay to be biased, it's okay to have emotion, and it's okay to be moved by the things that you're learning to the point that you put your emotion into the findings and that you care about what they're saying. In the past, science has been put on a pedestal because it has been seen as independent verification of the truth and that you do not question the truth.
Ari Friedlaender:It's just it is what it is. There's no emotion attached to it. And in that sense, you're right. A fact is a fact, and science can be the truth. But the reason you do it or what you do afterwards and how you take that information and make the value of it, I think, is what we learn more about through the lens of art of how to take that information and make it much more valuable to the group of animals, to the ecosystem, to the to the people that are, you know, at the front line of where a lot of this and, know, in this case, a lot of the agricultural chemicals are getting in, where the wastewater is getting in from those communities that are the most vulnerable to those same kinds of of inputs.
Ari Friedlaender:And I love that that is something that we kind of have been unshackled to be able to do in this book, is to present our emotional connection to it as if we were artists, you know, putting together a case. And in this case, we're doing it with the samples we've collected and through the help and translating it with the artists and by being provoked to think about things in these sort of new and different ways. That, to me, is awesome.
Rachel Nelson:And I mean, I think that if we set more time with scientists admitting their biases and their feelings, I mean, of course, everything we do is informed by what we know, by how we know it, how we're using that knowledge already. And all of that comes from somewhere. Having that is just part of what it was. I mean, we tried really hard even how we present the information that you and your team have gathered, the data and stuff, to still show that it's human created responses to questions. You know?
Rachel Nelson:So we've done everything from, like, you know, painting it on the walls that are like, you know, how we've interpreted the kind of trying to visualize it in ways that reflect the fact that science itself is something that is also informed by the same structures and systems and funding models as you yourself just pointed out, that also led to the collapse and climate. So there's this, you know, interesting acceptance of all of it without being like super hitting the hammer on the head of the nail over and over and over again. Like, that's the only part of the conversation. But instead trying to think, well, okay, this is how it is. But how can that be the fact that we have feelings and we care about things, and that we're humans?
Rachel Nelson:Actually be something that can be, more powerful than being neutral. Right? No more powerful than being non biased is actually caring deeply. Right? And I think that that's part of what this project is about.
Rachel Nelson:It's about actually caring deeply and trying to figure out so from save the world to save almost everything is to try to figure out what it is we care about, why we care about it, is it serving us to care about it, and what else do we need to learn how to give our care to. Right? And it was really I think every project that I do and every collaborator that I work with, I learn entirely another mode of work or another you know, I learn everything. I learn how to work all over again, you know, and this project is something, made me do that. And I think that working with you and working with Logan Palin, he was one of the lead scientists and a postdoc on the project, or Natalia Bottero Tapasov, who's another costoc from Home Yale, a lead scientist, working with Alex Moore, who, of course, is our co curator and co editor on the book, who is brilliant, thinks across the arts and sciences so effortlessly.
Rachel Nelson:I'm much more, as I think everyone probably tell, by listening to me talk, I'm like a tried and true humanist. By disciplinary training, it's pretty clear, right, from the kinds of ways I talk and think about disposability and vulnerabilities. But, you know, we've worked with people who are able to move so nimbly, I think, across these different field formations and ideas.
Ari Friedlaender:Absolutely. And I think you mentioned something in there that's really important that that I think we've communicated to the the doers, you know, at at this level is that it's it's okay to have this emotion. You're literally putting your emotion into what you do. And as a scientist, you don't benefit from doing that in some of the traditional practises. Coming out of here with a sense of doing that, putting your emotion and putting what you believe in into the work that you're doing is incredibly important.
Ari Friedlaender:And it should represent what you represent. I think artists have always been much more true to themselves and true to the things that they believe in than scientists have. And I think you in that community set a really good example for how we should be doing our science and how we should be thinking about and acting on the things that we think are important, not just presenting facts and figures. Rachel, now that the exhibition is up and we've completed the catalog and the book for it, do you see a specific audience that you think can benefit from this exhibition? Or how would you describe the audience that you think is most interested in what we've done here?
Rachel Nelson:Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, think that we always thought that we were working towards the artist science space. Right? That we wanting something that artists would look like that people interested in art could look at, and people that were interested in science.
Rachel Nelson:And we tried to make something that was as beautiful and, like, as sensorial. So, like, even when you pick up the book I mean, the book is lovely, and it's like a an object. Right? So it was something that was about that met people and that desire for the aesthetics. But actually, think that as we've moved along, I've been surprised at how large of an audience there actually is for it.
Rachel Nelson:So as part of the exhibition, you know, we have undergraduate classes at UC Santa Cruz come to that exhibitions here as part of their coursework. We're a university museum. Right? So and what we've seen is there have been classes in psychology. There's been classes of PDB studies.
Rachel Nelson:There's been classes in environmental studies, in ocean sciences, in art. They like, we we've hit we had I think just in October and November alone, we had 39 classes, undergraduate classes from UC Santa Cruz come as part of their coursework. Because it's clear to me that we've managed to touch on things across disciplines and a kind of interdisciplinary thinking that we talk a lot about. The word interdisciplinary I mean, we're at UC Santa Cruz, which is one of the universities that really has claimed that as the model. The what it means and actually how to do it is something that it's been a lot more and maybe it's better to say multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary.
Rachel Nelson:Right? But it's been a lot harder. But I think that because we tried so much to to incorporate that into the ethos of the project, what it means is that many people can see themselves in the work that we've done. So we have, like, a general public audience that often really loves whales. And then we also have the classes that are trying to figure out, you know, how to talk or communicate different thing things.
Rachel Nelson:Right? Like, how is this an example? Actually, Ari and I keep being asked to give these talks about how this is an example of of communication, or how this is an example of something. There's always a fill in the blank. Like, how could you use do this if you wanted to do something different entirely?
Rachel Nelson:And so I've been really surprised by how broad, I think, the people see themselves in this work and see the kind of possibilities of it. I do know that we tried Ari really hard to think about how this could be a model of working together and across. And I hope that other people can read the book and see the different ways, as in fact, these little traces of ideas for how to get together without having everybody having to fake the same things. There were massive disagreements during this. I mean, very kind.
Rachel Nelson:These were the nicest people ever, you know, but we were, creating this exhibition and then the working group at the same time that, you know, the encampments against the occupation and attacks in Palestine were happening. And when the police were coming out to campus breaking up the encampments, not everybody feels the same about that, right, about the things that were happening. And yet you see us continuing to find ways to communicate with each other, to work across questions, to struggle to say, might not all agree on one everything, but we all agree that we do not want to see any more species die. Right? Unnatural deaths.
Rachel Nelson:No more. No more human cause deaths. Not for other humans and not for any other species. And so I think that what people what I hope and this is a very long answer. I'm sorry.
Rachel Nelson:But what I hope is that it will appeal to many many people who are looking for that. There's a lot of depth in the exhibition. There's a lot of depth that hovers around the camp at the catalog. There's a lot of bad stuff. The model of working together is where the kind of hope and the care and the possibility lies.
Rachel Nelson:We don't suggest that if people stop consuming x that the sub problems will be solved. We don't even suggest that if, we no longer use flame retardants, the problem would be solved. And we all know that if we stop using flame retardants, the oceans would be in much better shape and so would we. But Hayek and K is such an outstanding, right, or at these places that have really prone to wildfires. But instead, we suggest that regardless of what choices we're making about the products we're using and things like that, it's what we really need to do is figure out different ways to be and work together and think together.
Ari Friedlaender:Yeah, yeah. Ditto, of course, Rachel. Everything you say is exactly what I wish I could articulate. When I start teaching Life in the Sea, which is an undergraduate non science class that I teach a couple times a year, One of the first things I say is, in this audience, we're going to have people from accounting, from law, from biomedicine, from engineering, from literature, from arts, from history, from science. And the thing that is going to bring us all together is this common interest in the sea, and we're going to learn about that.
Ari Friedlaender:But all of these disciplines have an opportunity and an avenue to participate in conservation or knowledge or benefiting the oceans. If you can figure out and be a little bit creative about being a policymaker, being a writer about the sea, engineering things that help us in the ocean systems. So if you start I feel like when we start a conversation like that, giving everybody a commonality or a common interest, regardless of where you're coming from, it sets up for a really positive and probably more proactive and interactive kind of conversation with a lot of people. And I think that's kind of what I got out of our initial coming together as well with this with this group of folks having these common interests and having these things that we all believed in and that the difference of perspective and opinion is really what would creates the spice for some of the discussions and for some of the exhibition. Yeah, I don't know that there is an audience in here that wouldn't benefit from this in some way as long as they have the opportunity and the guidance maybe in some cases to help move them through it and read through this.
Rachel Nelson:Which is to say, you know, the other thing that, we don't say anywhere in the book, and we haven't said anywhere, but we do have learning guides and things like that that were created alongside the exhibition that, can be used actually as supplemental material. So we should think more about how we're talking about that. Because Alex and Mira and Luling, who Luling and Mira are both graduate researchers on the project, created some amazing exhibition learning guides that are super, super interesting. There's a very deep web presence for this project to show. So, Ari, I know that you're leaving in two days to go to Antarctica.
Rachel Nelson:Do you wanna tell us a little bit about the research you're doing there?
Ari Friedlaender:Absolutely. I'm excited that I'll be heading south next week as part of my lab's long term research program that we have in the Antarctic to better understand the impacts of climate change on marine mammals in the Antarctic, sort of a place that is very much directly impacted by the things that happen and that people do around the planet, not even in the Antarctic, but everywhere else on the planet. And I think of this as kind of a bit of a ground zero for us to measure some of the impacts that humans have on our planet, on animals that are living in the most extreme environment on the planet, but are at this knife edge where small changes to their ecosystem, into their habitats can have these really disturbing effects on those animals. And we think of them as being massive and not vulnerable to anything, but they really are fragile. And I wish it's a place that I could bring everybody and that people could experience.
Ari Friedlaender:And I think of it as one of the places where an artist's experience there could really change a lot of people's ways of thinking and understanding and empathizing with animals and with climate change and with nature. And so I certainly see an opportunity for us to do a similar kind of book and exhibition and work where scientists and artists and writers and people come together focusing energy on a place that is being impacted very, very directly by human activities. And I think there's a lot of challenge that goes along with it because of the distance and the sort of disconnect to it. But I think that challenge is something that would be a really good thing for us to tackle and how we go from something that's very immediate from threats that, you know, chemicals and, you know, getting caught in fishing gear and the things that are very directly relatable from this current exhibition. How do we move to things that are a little bit more abstract in some ways to people?
Ari Friedlaender:And so I think that's a challenge for us moving forward and one that I am excited that we can do together.
Rachel Nelson:Yes. I have to say that one of the things that has come out of this project, we are continuing at the Institute of Arts and Sciences to offer art and science residencies, particularly to contemporary artists to come in, and, our image also acts as kind of a, helps coordinate not only work artists to work with his lab, but to work with other scientists in different areas. So kind of works as a matchmaker when people are looking for try to develop projects and need information, we can often figure out how to get them that kind of information and access. And also to get scientists really to listen to artists, which is a whole another, I think, line of something that we think is incredibly important. It's really important that people are listening to each other, and all information isn't just going one way.
Ari Friedlaender:I just have to prepare the Antarctic for artists. You know? I need to sit down with all the animals. The ice there say, like, this this is what's coming. It's, it's gonna be a little different, but, they're here for good.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. Weather and the Whale, which is edited by Rachel Nelson, Alexandra Moore, and Ari Friedlander, is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.