Artistic Expression of Original Research
AEOR is a program run by Jessica Maccaro through UC Riverside, and now through the University of Arizona that connects artists and scientists, facilitates communication across disciplines, and culminates in an exhibition where participants display art projects that express their scientific research. This serves to both explore interdisciplinarity and communicate both science and art to the general public in a novel way.
Fall 2024, University of Arizona
Artist Statement
Ethan Jahn is a musician, visual artist, programmer, performer, and astrophysicist. He is interested in exploring across boundaries of discipline: how visual arts, science, music, and people can interact to create a conversation that probes new realms. This is his second time as an artist for AEOR. In February 2024, he presented on digital collage as an artform rooted in the surrealist and dadaist tradition that intersects seamlessly with modern practices of science communication. This year, he co-lead a workshop with Laura Cecilio on music as a vehicle for embodied conversation, or how active listening and participation in collective audio improvisations can help build skills for contextualization and association-building in research methodologies and communication. The workshop culminated in a collaborative, improvised jam session inspired by topics discussed throughout other artist workshops. He is presenting a piece this exhibition called 'Macrostructures of the Microcosmos' which is both a science communication piece on Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (a phenomenon in cosmology) and a poetic exploration of the connection between our inner and outer worlds in the form of a zine.
Macrostructures of the Microcosmos Zine
Spring 2024, UC Riverside
Spring 2024 Exhibition Program
I served as an artist mentor for this program, focusing on digital collage through found media. My presentation discussed the surrealist roots of collage and how it explored new forms of expression in the first half of the last century.
Artist Statement
Ethan Jahn holds a PhD in computational astrophysics from UCR and has been a digital artist/graphic designer for over 10 years, specializing in collage using found media from public domain internet archives, as well as in creative visualization of data. Beyond creating digital collages that aim to use scientific concepts as metaphor for human experiences, Ethan produces music and performs in band called Death By Saguaro who explore themes of alien encounters through synthesizer-driven punk rock. He is currently a High Performance Computing Facilitator at the University of Arizona where he trains and supports researchers using HPC.