Cool Planet

Sara Kaufman

By Sara Kaufman,
Clean Air-Cool Planet Intern

I used to know what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wanted to be a scientist or a musician.  My father named these personas Alberta Einsteinia and Betty Goodwoman.  Since my elementary school days of gravity wells and aching cheeks, I have moved into a foggier realm of fantasy.   When I grow up I want to be creative and useful.  I want to be Sara Kaufman, a Sciartist.

A few years ago my mentor and friend, master potter Kit Cornell, endearingly observed that my art projects were always slightly impossible.  In that moment she had managed to fuse Alberta and Betty and identify one of the elusive connections between art and science I’ve always been drawn to: that they live on the edge of our reality and continually prove the impossible possible – grab what is just out of reach – and thrive in the realm of the impossible offering solutions to problems that are inconceivable in our limited reality.  The catch is that the best of these far out ideas and expansions of human knowledge and capability are, by nature, out of bounds.

So how do you connect weirdo brilliant crazy ideas with society (hopefully for its betterment)?  How can I grow up to be creative and useful?  It’s a hard question to think about.

Recently, I got a jolt of inspiration from an unlikely source.  Reading Clean Air – Cool Planet’s An Energy Future Transformed: The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) – R&D Pathways to a Low-Carbon Future proved the feasibility of my aspirations to realize abstract ideas, like creatively synthesizing art and science in some useful project.

I always thought of Clean Air – Cool Planet as a place where the gifted and selfless joined their powers in a continual effort to save the world.  When I got the internship I measured myself for some sidekick Spandex and a cape.  Oh boy! I get to help save the world by bravely battling climate change.  I get to be useful!  Little did I know that on top of working for “the good guys” (though work gloves would be a more likely costume than Spandex) I would get to be one of the first to read a handbook on how to make creative scientific disruption concrete and useful.

ARPA-E is specifically designed to work with revolutionary ideas. This newly funded national program will handle transformational research and development in energy.  The scientific applications are clear, but what I found most exciting were the artistic implications.  Many times, art is the only possible response to an impossible situation. My mother’s hero, Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, once commented, “When I feel trapped, I ask myself, what would an artist do?”  With creative initiatives, this politician proved that artistic action can save a city.  During his term, Bogotá’s water usage dropped by 40% and the murder rate fell by 70%.  To be useful and effective, Mockus decided he needed to think like an artist.  Art can break through a stalemate, transform perspectives and create something new.

Transformational R&D is a “… disruptive breakthrough technology that will displace current ways of doing things….”  How could I not think art when I read that?  With a surge of excitement I nearly toppled my scalding cup of coffee and fell off my teetering stool.

It is easy to think of science as useful because it can be applied through technology.  If science and art both exist in the seemingly impossible, why isn’t art appreciated as an equally practical and useful field?  What technology can art offer?  This is where I get fuzzy.  Well, I’m fuzzy on all of this.  That’s why I can write this blog, and that’s why I don’t know exactly what I will do when I grow up, but the careful language of the science-driven ARPA-E report is undeniably artistic, and that gets me closer to figuring it out.

So I’m excited.  I’m really excited about ARPA-E. This is a program that fosters revolutionary non-linear creativity and provides a formula to inject these disruptive and transformative ideas into society.  CA-CP, those superheroes with canvas gloves, made helping to get ARPA-E established one of their priorities – and the Agency is now my personal hero.  When I grow up, I want to be just like ARPA-E: creative and useful.

This entry was posted on July 23, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Research and Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Transformational R&D