Deep Futures

Deep Futures Episode 4: Art - Sarah Schleuning

[Vaughn speaking]

Sarah Schleuning: We call him Mr. Vaughntastic. Like every kid his age, super obsessed with anything that is superheroes.

Sarah: Who’s your favorite superhero, Vaughn?

Vaughn: Uh, Spiderman.

Sarah: Spiderman, why?

Sarah: When he was born, he was like an old soul. but he was very quiet. And it took me a long time to appreciate what I think a lot of people were trying to tell me which was that he really just wasn't speaking.

Vaughn: Ummmm...

Sarah: He would say words and then they would disappear. And he wouldn't say that word. I remember one time I was traveling, and he said, “I love you”. And I was, you know, super emotional. And I don't think he said it again for three years.

Annalee Newitz: This is Sarah Schleuning, and her 7-year-old son, Vaughn. Vaughn has a neurological disability that makes it hard for him to form words using his facial muscles, even though he understands everything people are saying to him.

[Vaughn talking]

Sarah: Oh Creeper gets his own episodes?

Vaughn: No, my … !

Annalee: Communicating can be frustrating for Vaughn, because he’s thinking up big ideas, but can’t fully articulate them. It’s hard for Sarah, too.

Sarah: All of a sudden, we'll hit these moments where I'm like, “I have no idea what you're saying to me. I really do not know what you're asking for.” And he keeps telling me over and over and over again because to him, it's so clear. You feel like a total failure. It's really traumatizing.

Annalee: Raising Vaughn meant Sarah had to relearn what it means to communicate with another person. It was especially difficult for her because she’s a museum curator: using words and speech to express ideas is literally her job.

Sarah: I was dealing with this whole idea of difference. Even though I deal in the visual and the three dimensional, I deal with it by expressing it through words and what happens when the way you communicate with people is totally different? And this is, you know, a three year-old, so you can't work around that system. You just have to make it work for them. And I had to change.

Annalee: Sarah had to change, but she didn’t stop there. She wanted the world to change a little bit, too. So she created an exhibition of art inspired by neuroscience. Art that could communicate ideas—without using words. Kind of like Vaughn did when he was a toddler. She called it—Speechless.

Annalee: Thanks to Vaughn, Sarah is reimagining what the museum can be—and who it's for. I'm Annalee Newitz, and today on Deep Futures, we're talking about the future of art.

Annalee: Sarah works as a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, and a few years ago, she had an idea: to bring artists and scientists together for a weekend-long workshop she called The Convening.

Sarah: I want to pair designers and artists with people who are neuroscientists and specialists in all these different fields because I want to run a bootcamp of what is disability and neuroplasticity. And I want us all to learn together. And then I want them to go off and make a piece.

Annalee: The goal was to get artists to think differently about disability—to make the museum more accessible in a way that goes beyond wheelchair ramps. She spent about a year researching the guest list.

Sarah: We were fortunate to have some people from the Center for Brain Health at UT Dallas, one was a neuroscientist, one specialized in dementia, another with autism, others dealt with speech issues and food sensitivities. These were people who dealt with these all in a really different range, but were able to provide insight into how the mind works.

Annalee: The invited artists learned about what it actually feels like to be non-neurotypical, how the world sounds when you’re hearing-impaired, what it’s like to experience dementia. Their mission was to create art that doesn’t just tickle our senses, but invites us to rethink everything we know about having senses in the first place.

Annalee: To engage as many senses as possible, the artists made stuff you could touch, and lie on, and climb all over.

Visitor VO: “By the way, you can sit on stuff”

Visitor VO: “Oh my gosh, I love this.”

Annalee: They built furniture out of water. Giant globes that could talk. And sculptures that could hug you. You’re listening to some of them right now.

Annalee: Let me take you on a tour of the show’s highlights. In one room, artist Ini Archibong, wanted to challenge the way people experience sound and vision. So he designed a kind of cathedral that evokes synesthesia, a neurological condition where one sense becomes entangled with another.

Sarah: He had this idea of creating these hand blown glass capsules that pivot on these brass stands and they function as the knobs of a synthesizer that he custom built, and he created it all with what he calls pure sounds. So sounds that were not discordant, so it would be this very beautiful, harmonious sound. And as you turn these, the lights would shift within these capsules. And each one was changing some part of the sound.

Annalee: Visitors interact with these glass capsules arranged in a circle, almost like Stonehenge. And Stonehenge is a good reference point, because there’s a sense of ancient awe you get, as you touch lights and create both sound and … something else.

Sarah: And then there was a pool that was vibrating from somatics, so as the bass is playing, it's changing the shape of the water. So the water’s dancing and moving... and it was up on this kind of temple-like white structure and it was very beautiful.

Annalee: As we enter the next room, you can see the influence of a scientist who taught the artists about cochlear implants—devices that translate sound waves into digital signals and feed them directly to the nerves deep inside your ear. These brain implants give deaf people the ability to hear—but what they hear doesn’t sound exactly the same as what people with biological ears experience.

Sarah: She did these examples of when you have a cochlear implant, what sound is like, like broke it down in a totally different way of how they hear things versus we do.

Art Piece VO: “The Sun is finally shining”, “The Sun is finally shining”, “The Sun is finally shining”, “The Sun is finally shining…”

Sarah: But then it leads you to think, how do other people hear? you make an assumption that we all see things the same way.

Annalee: London-based sound designer Yuri Suzuki was fascinated by the idea that we all hear things differently. He created a room devoted to sound, and used his own learning disorder as inspiration for his piece.

Sarah: He made this big, like, eight foot tall black sphere. We had crowdsourced sounds from around the globe that just people could upload whatever sound they wanted. because he himself is dyslexic, it's partially how he experiences geography is through sound. it was this idea of trying to put yourself on the globe through sound only.

Annalee: There are several more exhibits to see, but we’ve come to the last room on our tour today. Here, Brooklyn artist Misha Kahn built a forest of silk sacs that inflated and deflated every few minutes. It almost looked like they were breathing. They were about 14 feet tall and painted in swirling colors—and they were stuffed with all kinds of weird objects, from undulating couches and inflatable yoga balls, to pink dental floss.

Sarah: It was so wild. There was a big yellow squishy button. And when you pushed the button, it started inflating these pieces. … we spaced them so sometimes you would be hugged between them. You could sit in them and they would push you off.

Annalee: Kahn was inspired by Dr. Temple Grandin, who was one of the first public figures to openly discuss her autism. She invented something she called The Squeeze Machine which can help people on the spectrum deal with anxiety—by hugging them.

Sarah: Part of the basis of that was wanting all the mechanics and physicality of a hug without the human contact. And what that would mean.

Annalee: Visitors loved these beautiful squeeze machines. Especially Sarah’s son Vaughn.

Sarah: My kids spent like two hours, they were like devastated to leave. Because who doesn't want to climb on a bunch of sculptures and hug them and be inflating and fall into them? There's one that's like a hot dog shape and so you would sit in it and it would sort of envelop you and to finally like, push you out and people just, you know, hysterical laughing. It was very joyous.

Child VO: [Laughs]

Visitor VO: Ow, Ooh, gotcha!

Annalee: The exhibition was a hit. It was featured on PBS NewsHour and was set to tour another museum, before the pandemic put everything on hold. Sarah thinks speechless caught people’s attention because it upended the rigid, hands-off vibe that usually comes with a visit to a museum.

Sarah: One big challenge with art is how you communicate with it. So a lot of museums function in a structure where you don't touch because we're about the preservation. Right? I mean we are also keepers. But I think that idea that things are not touchable or not engageable is very off putting for a lot of people, and there's just a lot of rules.

Annalee: Sarah’s not the only one who wants to see art become more interactive. In the last few years, huge crowds have flocked to Santa Fe to see an interactive art and storytelling experience called Meow Wolf. In its main exhibit, called The House of Eternal Return, visitors explore a transdimensional house, climbing into enchanted trees and playing music on glowing electronic mushrooms to solve the mystery of what happened to the family who lived there. There’s a similar feeling of immersion at City Museum in Saint Louis, where galleries are full of climbable rope webs, and fiberglass tunnels are connected by a series of slides—one of them is ten stories tall.

Annalee: But you don’t have to build a mirrored room or a mystery house to create interactive art. One of the most incredible art experiences I ever had was at a place called the Göreme Open Air Museum in Turkey. There are no buildings, and no glass display cases. It’s more like a public park—that just happens to be packed with hidden historical treasures. Visitors walk on dirt paths through a rocky ravine whose soaring walls are punctuated by shadowy, mysterious doorways. The only way to reach them is by climbing stairways that were cut into the rock by the people who tended this place hundreds of years ago.

Annalee: At the top of the stairs, you squeeze into humble cave entrances, follow long, dark tunnels, and discover yourself inside vast, high-ceilinged cave rooms. By the light of dim lamps, you can see the walls and ceilings are covered in Byzantine paintings of angels and demons in shimmering golds and blues. Saints have halos that stream with psychedelic light. At that moment you realize the whole valley is full of churches, monasteries, and hermitages, mostly built by early Christians—nuns and monks—who first came here fifteen hundred years ago.

Annalee: You can touch and walk through the same places that the artists did—over a thousand years ago. The whole idea is to engage with the space, to imagine what it was like to live here and create such astounding beauty. And it appeals to everyone—kids, elders, locals, and tourists. People have picnics here, and spend the whole day hiking through a wonderland of nature and art.

Annalee: Could this movement become bigger, in hundreds of years? We asked Sarah to step into our time machine and imagine a museum of tomorrow.

Annalee: Sarah told us about a far future where interactive museums are simply portals to other places—maybe because they treat us to incredible virtual reality experiences, or because they provide actual teleportation.

Sarah: I would hope that a museum in the future would still be an access to something authentic. As things are evolving, that can be sounds, I mean, they don't have to be art in the traditional kind of it's a painting, it's a sculpture. Do you imagine that it's pieces of architecture? Do you imagine it's something that could transport you to the environment that it was actually in? Is it a series of portals that take you to other places, so you're actually going to the environment that it was made. Do you get to be in a situation where you see the artists themselves making it?

Annalee: I’d love to go through a portal to the caves at Göreme and come out in the year 800, when artists were painting the walls by firelight. Sarah had the same kind of idea. She imagined going down a slide and into ancient Greece.

Sarah: I don't know for some reason, I imagined slides. [Laughs] Just cause I love slides…. So that idea of being able to go look at sculptures, or pieces of the Parthenon, could speak more volumes than anything I could write in the label. I don’t know, I think it could be really interesting that you would be able to say, what I'm really interested in is I'd like to see a little Greek sculpture. And then I think I want to go into Impressionism. That idea that you could create your own path or adventure through an experience I think would be really exciting.

Annalee: Imagine teleporting to the pond where the impressionist artist Claude Monet painted his famous Water Lilies. You could feel the sunlight, smell the air, and hear the insects buzzing around his head. And maybe one day technology could even let us see the landscape as Monet saw it. What most people don’t know is that Monet was disabled when he created these famous paintings: he was losing his vision to cataracts. In this interactive exhibit of the future, you could choose to see the scene through the artist’s eyes.

Annalee: Any time we visit a museum, it’s a journey. But in hundreds of years, with the help of advanced technology, the journey would be literal. We’d have access to the experiences of the artists as they made their creations. And most importantly, we’d see that art comes from many different ways of perceiving the world.

Sarah: I would hope that museums would continue to be seen as places of possibility and to continue to push what art can be. We're all different people, we all connect and things resonate in really different ways. And art as a thing will continue to evolve and change, and so museums need to evolve and change with that.

Annalee: Thanks to Sarah Schleuning, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art. Learn more about the museum at DMA.org, where you can also buy the catalogue for Speechless.

Annalee: Next time on Deep Futures, I talk to an analytical chemist who helps me solve a 22nd century murder, and breaks down the difference between real-life forensics and what we see on TV:

Raychelle Burks: None of us are that good looking, I'll be honest with you. We don't have sunglasses that cool. And our footwear is much more functional and yet also comfortable. I'm more of like the action hero that's like, “I can make you a bar chart” [Laughs] Um, I don’t want to be in the street chasing people!

Annalee: You won't want to miss it. Subscribe to the podcast, and if you liked this episode, leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners find the show.

Annalee: Deep Futures is an original podcast made in partnership by Campside Media and Mailchimp. The show is hosted by me, Annalee Newitz. Our associate producer is Natalia Winkelman. Research help from Callie Hitchcock. Fact-checking by Aleah Papes. Sound design and mixing by Mark McAdam. And our Executive Producers are Maya Kroth and Matt Shaer. Beep-boop-boop-boop!