Artists, Scientists Collaborate on Visions of Future

We must learn to create on the same scale as we can destroy.

--High-tech artist Kit Galloway

It’s a frenetic morning at the offices of International Synergy Institute on Melrose Avenue. The cool elegance of the setting betrays the intensity beneath. Simple steel-gray sofas. A two-foot gold Buddha lit from behind by sunlight. An IBM PC glowing incandescently.

Andra Akers, founder and director of International Synergy, or IS, hung up the phone and described the first hour of her morning without taking a breath. “The Disney studios called about a lecture series we’re setting up. An architect came in asking about building playgrounds that reflect new cultural values. A systems theorist called to invite us to an international conference on evolution in Italy. And a woman who writes about post-feminist issues called to say her new book on ‘partnership societies’ will be out next spring.”

Akers, a tall, striking blonde, talks passionately about the recently launched International Synergy Institute, a not-for-profit institute whose aim is to “build bridges between the intellectual, scientific, artistic and business communities.”

The company’s official statement of purpose reads: “Imagination can form the basis . . . for responsible action in the information age. IS encourages a merging of the abstract conceptual realms of scientists with the dynamic, expressive forms of artists.”

One visiting scholar described it this way: “IS is like a summit--where opposite values can come together.”

Akers explained further: “The 1980s represent the sacred union of opposites, a marriage of the artistic vision with the scientific journey--and the new technology is the midwife.”

Born in Texas, the daughter of an undersecretary of the Air Force and U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, Akers moved to New York City as a young woman to join the theater.

Broadway, Movie Career

Her success on Broadway led to a string of film appearances, most recently in “Desert Hearts” and “Just Between Friends.” After moving to the West Coast, Akers became a founding member of the classical repertory company of the Mark Taper Forum.

Several years later, she said, her curiosity was piqued by reading widely in the field of science. “The contrast between the miracles reported daily by investigators of the natural world and the monochrome quality of the theater troubled me deeply.”

Akers said she did not imagine then creating a haven for “intellectual break-dancers,” as she calls them--people who can translate between disciplines and spin radical new ideas.

But a year and a half ago, Akers set up shop on Melrose with a small group of privately funded creative thinkers. (The institute name, synergy, refers to the action of two or more people working to achieve an effect that each cannot achieve alone.)

Since January, 1985, they have brought artists and scientists together with local film makers in a series of lecture events and informal gatherings. “These gatherings lead naturally to networking, which in turn leads to people exchanging dreams and developing innovative projects,” Akers said.

The result, according to observers: IS has become a magnet for vanguard artists, scientists and metaphysicians passing through town.

In the light, spacious living room of a Spanish-style West Hollywood abode, eminent thinkers and doers gathered. They were invited by International Synergy for an afternoon salon with UC Santa Cruz mathematician Ralph Abraham, who spoke on topics ranging from esoteric math to Indian music to ancient mysticism.

The crowd included visual music artists, parapsychology researchers, Chinese software specialists, brain biologists, satellite sales representatives, rock video entrepreneurs and anti-apartheid activists.

Abraham, who has published a dozen books on mathematics, recently helped develop the field of nonlinear dynamics, a new kind of mathematics that studies chaotic or non-regular change. He also recently designed software to teach high school mathematics visually, rather than symbolically.

In collaboration with International Synergy, he recently built his newest invention, known as MIMI (Mathematically Illuminated Musical Instrument), a sophisticated visual music machine.

In his talk, Abraham echoed a theme that was touched on repeatedly by members of the IS network. There is something special, even crucial, about the times in which we live, they say. “Our world is at an evolutionary turning point, facing what may be a watershed event.”

The reasons for the turning point are many. Abraham pointed to unprecedented crises in global resources coupled with science-fiction-like technology breakthroughs in every field.

Developing Ideas

He and other like-minded members of the international network share a basic belief: “The future is in our hands.” A family of ideas, they say, is being developed by a wide range of people to meet the needs of a world in crisis.

“Today,” Abraham said, “each decision we make or refuse to make sets a vector--a one-way street--toward the future. We want to create the future, not necessarily according to our own design but according to some better design that we can help pattern.”

Unlike prophets of doom who may outnumber them, Abraham and Akers believe that the tools are now available to hone the future they envision, “a future that serves the evolution of humanity.”

“It’s a race against time,” Abraham said, “but a dramatic marriage of high-speed computers, the arts and the sciences is taking place just under our noses.

“The offspring of this unprecedented union is redirecting creative thinking in every field--and increasing our powers to solve pressing problems,” he said.

Back at International Synergy, staff members David Dunn and Allyn Brodsky were completing the third issue of the company’s journal. “It serves as a forum for interdisciplinary explorations in arts and sciences,” Brodsky said. (The journal is available by subscription to the public.)

Under the auspices of Pacific Shift, Akers’ separate for-profit company at the same location, producer/director Mimi Gramatky was finalizing the development of a home-video series. “Abacus,” which she wrote, is a fantasy-adventure that teaches math to children.

Gramatky doubles as a marketing strategist, business planner, fund finder and consultant to scientists looking for applications of their work.

“What’s really exciting about working here,” Gramatky said, “is the flexibility and freedom to do what you want to do. The business is structured without hierarchies or titles. Each of us has a strong personality and a different contribution to make, so we do different things at different times. We don’t have to be pigeonholed.”

Brodsky, a philosopher and former comic-book writer, agreed. “Sometimes I edit the journal, sometimes I write television scripts and sometimes I answer the phones.”

Dunn, Brodsky and Akers also are developing a script for “Echoes From the Future,” a proposed two-hour TV special that attempts to explain the impact of leading-edge science and art on the culture as a whole.

Her ultimate dream, Akers said, is to build a community of inventive thinkers “who can project alternative futures, portray alternative models for human beings, and weave new patterns of consciousness into the culture.

New Synthesis Emerging

“Because of our continuing exposure to these ideas,” she said, “a deep new synthesis is emerging. We are asking what an international creative cultural exchange would look like. We are trying to invent a new mythology about what it means to be human in today’s world.”

The topic under discussion on a recent afternoon was where to find “the artists who think like scientists and the scientists who think like artists.”

“For many years, the notion that artists and scientists inhabit two distinct worlds has been the law of the land,” said Dunn, an experimental composer and interdisciplinary researcher. “Today, that may be changing.

“Many scientists have realized the impossibility of observing isolated phenomena, resulting in the dissolution of rigid boundaries between disciplines. Some of them, like Ralph Abraham, now look to computer graphics, artists and composers to make their findings experiential.”

Some artists, on the other hand, have looked to the world of science for new subject matter or for new media.

At one institute event held at the American Film Institute, a young French Canadian inventor showed a movie of this sort of breakthrough. Phillipe Bergeron said he had spent three years in a basement with two co-workers to develop a kind of “digital biology”--the first computer-generated actor that can express human-like emotion. The result, Tony, a barroom piano player, resembled a friendly, high-tech Frankenstein.

Artists Using Science

Los Angeles high-tech artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, a husband-and-wife team who strung “electronic cafes” across town in 1984, also tie science to art in their work. Their huge, interactive telecommunications “sculpture,” called “Hole in Space,” involved hooking up life-sized video screens in Century City and New York City via satellite. People who passed by the screens in both cities were able to communicate with others 3,000 miles away.

Galloway and Rabinowitz recently showed a filmed version of the event to an IS audience. As “Hole in Space” observers realized that their own locations in space had become irrelevant and that they could play in the new “electronic space,” they yelled and waved at each other, roaring with laughter.

Galloway said he believes these technologies have vast political implications. “These technologies could end the pervasive sense of isolation and open the flow of communication between cultures.”

According to Gene Youngblood, communications philosopher at California Institute of the Arts and frequent visitor at the IS offices, the ultimate communications revolution is about relationships between people, not technologies.

“We need to take control of the context of our lives,” he said. “It’s in the context that we find the meaning. And we can take control only by forming independent electronic communities of people who share a language and learn to understand each other.”

Global Trends

Youngblood’s idea was echoed by futurist/historian William Irwin Thompson, author of “Pacific Shift,” a book about global trends (and the company’s namesake), when he spoke to an IS audience. “In these groups,” he noted, “scattered across the world, we see the bare beginnings of a new world: the collapse of matter (in science), the collapse of representation (in art), and the emergence of a radically different economy (of information).”

Thompson pointed out that these events are happening at the same time--”and they’re not being orchestrated by anyone.”

He said, “The synchrony of these parallel events is the event we can’t see. That’s what would be called ‘the news.’ That’s what’s creating the context, the emergence of planetization.”