Artist-Scientist Festival Residency

What it is. A four-year NSF-funded residency program (Award #1612719, $938,000, 2016–2020) pairing artists with scientists for several months of structured collaboration, producing festival-scale public-engagement work at major US music and arts festivals. The PI institution was Pratt Institute, with Mark Rosin as Principal Investigator. The producing partner was Guerilla Science LLC.

The problem behind it. Public-engagement science by 2016 had a reach problem and a depth problem at the same time. Festival programming reaches large audiences but tends to be entertainment-shaped. Lecture-shaped programming has depth but reaches the already-converted. The residency asked whether artist-scientist pairs, given real time and structured technical support, could land at festivals with material that was both substantive and embodied. The NSF grant funded both the program and the evaluation research that came out of it.

Our role. Over the 2017–2018 cycle Romie Kind was the residency director and the event producer for Guerilla Science: directing the residency cohort across its two Pratt years and producing the festival programming it shipped, while holding a concurrent Visiting Assistant Professor appointment at Pratt’s Math and Science Department. The work was mentoring fifteen artist-scientist pairs through technical, project-management, and presentation work and producing their festival-floor productions on the ground. Mark Rosin led the academic and grant-administration side as PI.

The events produced. The festival and installation work from this Guerilla Science period has its own pages: Oregon Eclipse 2017, FIGMENT, and the Burning Man installations Flavor Feast (2017) and the Intergalactic Travel Bureau (2018).