We invited Neal Jahren and his students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to respond to Dave Douglas & Bill Morrison’s production of Spark of Being. The class is Science and Culture in America. The Frankenstein myth, where technological innovation creates unintended consequences that then must be addressed by decision makers and society, apparently resonated with some of the material they are discussing in the class. They are interested in how ideas they have discussed in classroom applies to Spark of Being.
Some of the questions students will address include:
- In what ways does human and social creativity contribute to the risks presented in the Frankenstein myth?
- How can creativity contribute to resolving or minimizing those risks?
- What specific features of the film and what in the music compositions brought the themes in the performance home for you?
- How did the two mediums strengthen the theme?
- What was left up to the imagination?
- What was missing?
- What did you discover?
Feel free to comment on this post and answer along with the students too!
I was gratified to see that the scientific imagery used in the film had a visually compelling quality. It went beyond a fetishishtic use of the material, beyond signalling how important this subject must be because it is about science, and actually helped to draw audience members in. The compelling visual quality made the story compelling to me personally, and that in turn established the human stakes of the underlying conceptual and scientific issues.
All of the musicians were fantastic, but my favorite was Adam Benjamin on the keyboards. The otherworldly sound that he was making from the electric piano combined with his off-kilter rhythms and harmonies made the music distinctively well suited to the imagery of the film.
I noticed the language in the program notes that described the “fair use” doctrine for appropriated material turning on questions of whether a work is “teanformative” or “derivative.” In biology, we use the word “transformation” to denote the process of introducing foreign DNA into a bacterium, and we talk of derivation in developmental biology, for example, saying that facial structures are derived from neural crest cells. To me, it speaks of how important language is as we try to negotiate through the issues involved in knowledge, power and social change.
Finally, I was intrigued by the twist in the story whereby the creature assumed the identity of the creator. For me, it was a reminder that our technology comes to reflect the choices that we make in its creation and deployment, and also a call for us to take responsibility for the impact that our science and technology has on ourselves, our society, and the environment. I think that artwork has a unique ability to raise issues like this with the subtlety and complexity to make a productive statement about these issues.