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anhed-nia · 4 years

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BLOGTOBER 10/17/2020: SPOOKIES

What do we watch, when we watch movies? This question was sparked by my SOV experience with the very different, and differently interesting BLOODY MUSCLE BODYBUILDER FROM HELL and HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5. Within the Shot On Video category, one can find inventive homemade features that are driven entirely by blood, sweat, and the creators' feeling of personal satisfaction. The results are sometimes fascinating, in their total alienation from the conventions and techniques of mainstream filmmaking, and after all, one rarely sees anything whose primary motivation is passion, here in the late stages of capitalism. But, all this talk about what goes on behind the camera points to a discrepancy in how we consume different kinds of production. The typical mode of consumption is internal to the movie: What happens in it? Do you relate to the characters? Are you able to suspend your disbelief, to experience the story on a vicarious level? One hardly needs to come up with examples of films that invite this style of viewing. Alternatively, we can experience the movie as a record of a time and place in which real people defied conventions and sometimes broke laws in order to produce a work of art. SOV production is usually viewed through this lens, where the primary interest is not the illusory content, but the filmmakers' sheer determination to create. We find some overlap in movies like EVIL DEAD, which simultaneously presents a terrifying narrative, and evidence of what a truly driven team can create without the aid of a studio, or any real money to speak of. See also, Larry Cohen's New York City-based horror films, in which a compelling drama with great acting can exist side by side with phony but beautiful effects, and exciting stories of stolen footage that would be dangerous or impossible to attempt today. I'm thinking about these different modes of consumption now because I just watched SPOOKIES, a legitimately cursed-seeming film whose harrowing production history has superseded whatever people think about what it shows on the screen. The lovingly composed blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome includes a feature-length documentary that attempts to explain the making of the film--which is accompanied by its own feature length commentary track by documentarists Michael Gingold and Glen Baisley. The very existence of this artifact suggests a lot about the nature of this movie, in and of itself. The truth behind its existence is as funny as it is tragic.

I'm not going to do a whole breakdown of the tortured origins of SPOOKIES, which is much better told by the aforementioned documentary. To summarize: Once upon a time in the mid 1980s, filmmakers Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran and Frank Farel conspired to make a fun, flamboyant rubber monsterpiece called TWISTED SOULS. It was wild, ridiculous, and transparently fake-looking, but it was loved by its hard-working creators; as a viewer, that soulful sense of joy can rescue many a "bad" movie from its various foibles. Then, inevitably, sleazoid producer Michael Lee stepped in--a man who thought you could cut random frames out of the middle of scenes to improve a movie's pace--and ruined it with extreme prejudice. Carefully crafted special effects sequences were cut, relatively functional scenes were re-edited into oblivion, and the seeds of hatred were sown between the filmmakers and the producer. Ultimately, everyone who once cared for TWISTED SOULS was forced to abandon ship, and first time director Eugenie Joseph stepped in to help mutilate the picture beyond all recognition. Thus SPOOKIES was born, a mangled, unloved mutation that would curse many of its original parents to unemployability. For the audience, it is intriguingly insane, often insulting, and hard to tear your eyes off of--but in spite of whatever actually wound up on the screen, it's impossible to forget its horrifying origin story as it unspools.

As far as what's on the screen goes: A group of "friends", including a middle-aged businessman and his wife, a vinyl-clad punk rock bully and his moll, two new wave-y in-betweeners, and...a guy with a hand puppet are somehow all leaving the same party, and all ready to break into a vacant funeral home for their afterparty. Well, this happens after a 13 year old runaway inexplicably wanders in to a "birthday party" in there, that looks like it was thrown for him by Pennywise, and he has the nerve to act surprised when he is attacked by a severed head and a piratey-looking cat-man who straight up purrs and meows throughout the picture. Anyway, separately of that, which is unrelated to anything, the island of misfit friends finds a nearly unrecognizable "ouija board" in the old dark house. Actually this thing is kind of fun-looking, having been made by one of the fun-havers on the production before the day that fun died, and I wonder if anyone has considered trying to make a real board game out of it...but I digress. Naturally, the board unleashes evil forces, including a zombie uprising in the cemetery outside, a plague of Ghoulie-like ankle-biters, an evil asian spider-lady (accompanied by kyoto flutes), muck-men that fart prodigiously until they melt in a puddle of wine (?), and uh...I know I'm forgetting stuff. One of the reasons I'm forgetting is because of this whole side story about a tuxedo-wearing vampire in the basement (or somewhere?) who has entrapped a beautiful young bride by cursing her with immortality. That part is a little confusing, not only because it doesn't intersect with the rest of the movie, but because sometimes it seems contemporary--as the bride struggles to survive the zombie plague--and sometimes it seems like a flashback, as our heroes find what looks like the mummified corpse of the dracula guy, complete with his signet ring. So, I don't know what to tell you really. Those are just some of the things that happen in the movie.

Some people like this a lot, and have supported its ascendance to cult status, which is a huge relief when you know what everyone went through to make this movie, only to have it ripped away from them and used against them. I found SPOOKIES a little hard to take, for all the reasons that the cast and crew express in the documentary. It holds a certain amount of visual fascination, whatever you think of it; something of its original creativity remains evident in the movie's colorful, exaggerated look, and its steady parade of unconvincing but inventive creature effects. But then, you have to deal with the farting muck-men. What was once a scene of terror starring REGULAR muck-men, that sounded incredibly laborious to pull off, became a scene of confusing "comedy" when producer Michael Lee insisted that the creatures be accompanied by a barrage of scatalogical noises. Apparently this was Lee's dream come true, as a guy who insisted everyone pull his finger all the time, and who once tried to call the movie "BOWEL ERUPTOR". But, of all the deformations SPOOKIES endured, the fart sounds dealt a mortal injury to the filmmakers' feelings, and even without knowing that, it's hard to enjoy yourself while that's happening.

Actually, all the farts forced me to ask myself: Is this...a comedy? Like for real, as its main thing? As the movie slogged on, I had to decide that it wasn't, but I was distracted by the notion for around 40 minutes. I was only released from this nagging suspicion when the bride makes her long marathon run through throngs of slavering zombies who swarm her, grope her, and tear off her clothes, before she narrowly escapes to an even worse fate. The lengthy scene is strangely gripping, and sleazy for a movie that sometimes feels like low rent children's entertainment. Part of the sequence’s success lies in its simplicity; it is unburdened by the convoluted complications of the rest of the movie, whose esoteric parts never fall together, so it seems to take on a sustained, intensifying focus. The action itself is unnerving, as the delicate and frankly gorgeous Maria Pechuka is molested and stripped nearly-bare by her undead bachelors, running from one drooling mob to another as the horde nearly engulfs her time and again. Actually, it feels a lot like a certain genre of SOV production in which, for the right price, any old creepy nerd can pay a small crew-for-hire to tape a version of his private fantasy, whether it's women being consumed by slime, or women being consumed by quicksand, or...generally, women being consumed by something. I wish I could describe this form of production in more specific or official terms, because I genuinely think it's wonderful that people do this. Anyway, Pechuka's interminable zombie run feels a little like that, and a little like a grim italian gutmuncher, and a little like an actual nightmare. Perhaps it only stands out against its dubious surroundings, but I kind of love it--and I'm happy to love it, because apparently the late Ms. Pechuka truly loved making SPOOKIES, and wanted other people to love it, too.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable place where I land with this movie. On the one hand...I think it's bad. It's so incoherent, and so insists on its impoverished form of comedy, that it's hard to be as charmed by it as I am by plenty of FX-heavy, no-budget oddities. Perhaps the lingering odor of misery drowns out the sweet joy that the crew once felt in the early days of creation--which is still evident, somehow, in its zany special effects, created by the likes of Gabe Bartalos and other folks whose work you definitely already know and love. But I feel ambivalent, about all of this. On the one hand, I can be a snob, and shit on people for failing to make a movie that meets conventional standards of success. On the other hand, I can be a DIFFERENT kind of snob--a more voyeuristic or even sadistic one--and celebrate the painful failures that produced a movie that is most interesting for its tormented history and its amusing ineptitude. I'm not really sure where I would prefer to settle with SPOOKIES, and movies like it. (As if anything is really "like" SPOOKIES) With all that said, I was left with one soothing thought by castmember Anthony Valbiro in the documentary. At some point, he tells us how ROSEMARY'S BABY is his personal cinematic comfort food; he can put it on at night, after an exhausting day, and drift to sleep, enveloped in its warm, glowing aura. He then says that he hopes there are people out there for whom his movie serves that same purpose, that some of us can have our "milk and cookies moment" with SPOOKIES. Honestly, I choke up just thinking about that.

#blogtober #2020 #spookies #horror #supernatural #vampire #zombie #creature feature #old dark house #cursed film #thomas doran #frank farel #eugenie joseph #michael lee #vipco #twisted souls #brendan faulkner #maria pechuka

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warsofasoiaf · 4 years

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Your asoiaf and fandom opinions: 1) Most underrated character by the fandom? 2) Most overrated character by the fandom? 3) a character that gets too much criticism by the fandom? 4) a character that doesn’t get enough criticism by the fandom? 5) favourite kingdom to world build about?

Who is doing the rating, what are they rating, and what goes into a rating? For example, I think Brienne’s AFFC arc is underrated, plenty of folks find it a pointless excursion that goes nowhere, but I find that her journey contains excellent writing and good character moments (such as burying Nimble Dick Crabb, which I feel is an underrated scene), but does the character arc and the writing count as rating a character? Garlan Tyrell is an excellent warrior who basically flies under the radar, but when he is mentioned in a non-Purple Wedding context, it’s usually recognition that he’s a sleeper hit in waiting, so is that underrated? Is a low rating worse than being forgotten entirely, and does that answer change in regard to a series with such a density of characters as this one, where forgetting a character or two is simply inevitable?

This is probably the only question that’s ultra-easy. Jon Connington, who I find to be a dull character, a terrible human being, and whose pathetic melodrama completely fails to elicit the desired audience reaction in me. He is truly impressive because he took something that I was interested about, the Golden Company, and made it a tiresome slog that I almost wanted to skip so I wouldn’t have to listen to Jon hosting the world’s stupidest pity party.

This I’m not sure about, because I see a big difference between good criticism and bad criticism. For example, Oberyn is generally well-liked but he gets criticism that is pretty on point such as in the Obara example, so I think that’s fair, that’s not too much or too little because it’s focusing on the right things.

Barristan or Rhaenyra are probably the best examples, since most of the meta I read about them (especially Rhaenyra) seems more interested in excusing bad behavior than critical examination. However, this also runs into problems because of the criticism itself. Daenerys, for example, usually gets her torture of the wineseller’s daughters to force a confession glossed over, which is awful because it’s something worth discussing, but there’s a ton of bad Daenerys criticism that apparently got a bucketload of new stuff thanks to something the show did (I do not care enough about the show to look into the ending), so does that detract from it? If I had to pick something that I feel doesn’t get enough criticism though, it’s not a character but an event: the false peace conference where Daeron I was murdered, because that is, in no uncertain terms, a war crime with terrible implications, yet it’s not given the criticism and thought it deserves (including by Elio and Linda, which apparently was even worse in discarded drafts).

Personally, I’m not a fan of how little worldbuilding the kingdoms between the North and Dorne get. The North, the Iron Islands, and Dorne get a lot of great worldbuilding that really develops them as unique and coherent independent entities. The “Andal south” though, the kingdoms of the Riverlands, Vale, Stormlands, Westerlands, and the Reach only get slight snippets in comparison. The Tullys get a viking funeral, which is nice, but these kingdoms feel like they’re made to be one entity even before Aegon’s Conquest. I suppose if I had to pick one, I’d pick the Stormlands, but I would have really liked for these regions to be very distinct so I can see the culture clash.

Thanks for the questions, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#fandom #worldbuilding

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auburnflight · 5 years

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It was raining really hard the other day and it made me feel like I had to write a short thing for Tiger (actually it’s been raining a LOT here the last month or so)

The hardness of stone sunk its frigid fingers into her back through her clothes, but at least the relentless barrage of rain stopped for the moment. Tiger shook her head vigorously as she retreated under an overpass and stood against a wall, scattering a few drops uselessly onto the damp ground. She unleashed her breath as if resting from being chased, and even in the drenched air, it was cold enough that it formed a thin cloud for just a moment before dissipating. She growled inwardly at the thought of having to walk home in this heavy rain, even though she had thought to bring a jacket, and so for the most part the sensation of the water didn’t creep all the way to her skin. But where it did reach, on her hair and face and when it had splashed up onto her ankles as she trudged through an inevitable puddle, the water clung to her and stole the warmth away, leaving her gritting her teeth at the feeling. It soaked especially deep into the dense fur of her ears, and chilled her to the base of her skull. Even where she could stay dry, the moisture of the atmosphere made it seem colder than it already was – almost suffocatingly cold.

She hoped that she could wait it out under shelter for a few minutes, and determine whether it looked like it was going to pass. Logically, she knew nothing would happen to her – it was just water falling from the sky – but she recoiled from it regardless. In heavy rain like this, what had been solid ground could quickly turn to mud, and it would be far too easy to trip over your own feet at the weight of the wetness. Even in the city, where the ground was firm, the thick water formed rivers at the edges of the roads, and in a storm like this one, at just one careless step, it could sweep you off balance with surprising speed. Tiger would much rather stay on solid, dry ground. Sure, she was comfortable on all fours sometimes, but it didn’t have quite the same appeal when she was basically trying to keep herself from swimming. And she had already had enough slogging through mud and deep water to last her the rest of her life.

Tiger leaned back and rested her head against the wall, closing her eyes and allowing herself to breathe and to just listen to the sound of the rain. Now that it didn’t feel as if she was about to drown in the intensity of the downpour, her frustration had had time to evaporate a little. Her breathing came more regularly, and she sighed quietly. She could hear the huge drops pounding on the bridge above, and the streams rushing past on the streets nearby. The sounds echoed through the empty air among the buildings around her and in the distance. The city seemed to amplify sounds like that. Even thunder could have a vastly different character to it in the harsh urban environment than in the more natural areas of her childhood. Thankfully, Tiger hadn’t heard any of that so far, though the rainstorm was deafening enough on its own.

She opened her eyes again; outside the line at the boundary of her shelter, the familiar scenery was blurred beyond recognition. The colors and symbols of signs blended into each other and were smeared by the wall of water into illegible smudges. Her safe spot under the overpass momentarily seemed like all that was left of the world. Anything she could hear that came from outside it – cars passing by persistently, perhaps sloshing footsteps – seemed to originate from nowhere in particular, or from all directions at once. She let her eyes go out of focus and stared aimlessly. As she clung to her jacket, she tried not to think about slowly losing the sensation in her fingers and the tips of her ears to the bitter, wet cold.

Tiger didn’t keep track of how long time had dragged on in her empty microcosm. No one else passed by now, and the rain fell incessantly. She growled to herself in resignation. The weather wasn’t clearing up, but she also wouldn’t get any warmer just sitting there without moving, and it would be hard to dry off at all with the air as waterlogged as it was. She really wasn’t looking forward to striking out in the storm again, but idling here and just letting herself go numb wasn’t necessarily preferable, even if it was marginally drier for the moment. She flattened her ears backward, steeling herself. Hoping that she would warm up eventually if she just kept walking, she ducked her head at the unrelenting downpour once again, trying to mentally distance herself from the unpleasant sensations and focus on nothing but moving forward.

It felt as if the rain would completely submerge her. The cold still seeped into her ears and her hair. The buffeting wind lashed around her and drove the rain against her face, and she clenched her jaw slightly in response. The water had soaked into her feet, accenting each step with the extra weight, and the rain continued to pound on her shoulders from above. At this point, she just wanted the familiar reassurance of home, to be somewhere she could dry off and rest and listen to the calming sound of the rain without being in it. For that, this time, she would have to walk through it.

#juni taisen #juuni taisen #my writing #kinda nervous since i haven't written fic in years #but I also find it really fun!#and relaxing haha

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ayatsurii-a · 6 years

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💖 hh,,,,

⚔ ⚔ —

Red marbles opened wide as Peko gasped, lunging out of her bed bathed in sweat. Strands of hair dangled over her shoulders as held her fist close to her chest as she breathed heavily. It was another nightmare, just a reminder of what had she done in those years before she arrived at the makeshift fortress.

The swordswoman quivered, grasping the ends of her rugged sheet as she tried to suppress her emotions. Even if it had been years, it only felt like hours from those memories that kept peeping up in her head. The screams, clashes with the Future Foundation, and her inevitable capture and execution via the Neo World Program.

❝ ... ... ... ❞

She pushed herself to her feet from her bed, wearing her pyjamas, a loose t-shirt with a #21 on her back, and black pyjama shorts. Pushing the rickety wooden door open as she walked down the base stairs, as the sounds of her bare feet hitting the concrete floor echoed. How the place felt so alive and energetic in the day, it felt like a ghost town trotting through it in the night.

However, she was completely unaware that a pair of eyes watched as she slogged through the darkness.

After slipping into the deserted kitchen, she yanked open the fridge and pulled out the jug of milk. Setting up a cup of steaming coffee as the coffee maker whirred and poured the drink into a large mug. She swiped the drink off the coffeemaker and marched out the front door.

Peko was basked in the moon's rays, as the crickets chirped over an empty battlefield that had seen many goofy and gory battles alike. It felt like she was just back at the city all those years ago. She choked, trying to hold herself from breaking out into tears of frustration. Every day they went through what changed the swordswoman forever, and they were fine with it.

Was this fate's punishment for actions she couldn't control? To be reminded forever of the misdeeds caused by her despair at the hands of that evil woman? Anger and distraught brewed inside of her, the mug in her hand trembling as if she could shatter it with ease.

Suddenly she felt it, a warm hand grasp her trembling fingers. Misty red marbles stared over to see a familiar face standing next to her. Jeremy, one of the friendliest yet frustrating people she had met.

There was a struggle to form anything coherent, just some verbal recognition for how she felt, but all she could do was hold his hand tight.

❝ ... ... ... ❞

Even if this was some metaphorical punishment, the people here were more than kind enough to hold her like a family member. Maybe even without her young master, without her classmates and stalked by her past, she belonged here.

#⚔ NOW THIS IS A STORY ALL ABOUT HOW ... ⚔ 「 ic 」#⚔ ... AND THAT’S HOW BABIES ARE BORN! ⚔ 「 answered 」#sootsouls #( PHEW. )#( NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL OVEREXTENDING IT. )#( but i hope you like it! )

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creativesage · 7 years

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(via SciArt Featured Articles - SciArt Magazine)

February 2017 ON TOPIC: Art As a Means to Scientific Discovery The Work of Harvey Seifter and the Art of Science Learning

By Joe Ferguson, Contributor

Every science student dreams of becoming a great scientist. During a tedious chemistry lecture, our wandering minds fill with visions of amazing discoveries, great inventions, solutions to humanity’s ills. The fantasy follows an inevitable chain of events—peer recognition, public fame, and then, of course, the Nobel. Time passes, however,and our academic pursuits seem at odds with these lofty fantasies. Instead of filled with epiphanies and breakthroughs, we find our college years mired in late nights of caffeine- fueled memorization and days of liturgical laboratory procedures. Professional life fares no better.

After the gauntlet that is graduate school, we scramble furiously toward gainful employment. We are confronted with fewer options than we anticipated—the long slog to institutional tenure, or the soul–deadening trudge of commercial science. Discovery and innovation become like childhood promises of Santa or the Easter Bunny. The promise of a stimulating, scholarly life grows distant, as our minds slip slowly into the muck of professionalism. The formula for this intellectual swamp is a familiar one: mix an uneventful high–school career with above average SAT scores. Transfer to appropriately–sized undergraduate program, and heat until thoroughly dissolved. Filter the reaction mixture and evaluate results with the GRE or MCAT. Add two to four years of professional expectation catalyst and heat vigorously. Crystallize with 50 hours a week of academic or commercial work until product is set and rigid.

The crux of the problem lies in a central tenet of science education methodology: equip students with base knowledge, and out of this they will grow ideas to confront and solve future quandaries. Students toil for years with a carrot–stick approach, earning high marks for memorizing tomes of information, and becoming unthinkingly proficient with technical lab work.

Professional scientific work requires vast amounts of knowledge and skill, but the belief that innovation will miraculously arise out of an academic career of memorization and reproduction is flawed. Creativity is a cognitive skill that, like any other skill, requires development, enhancement, and maintenance. Survey classes in the humanities fail to promote creativity because assessment methods are still based on memorization, and creativity–based classes don’t work because they are aimed at artistic—not scientific—outcomes. What is needed is an approach that provokes the creative urge in science students and scientists.

The hero of one such approach is Harvey Seifter, founder of the Art of Science Learning. His organization is funded by two National Science Foundation grants, and is built on more than 15 years of work. He firmly believes the same skills, processes, and behaviors involved in the arts are critical to science, and that using the arts to practice those skills has positive benefits for both learners and STEM practitioners. His organization provides “extraordinarily hands–on, sleeves–rolled–up experiences” that bring together people from remarkably different perspectives and backgrounds—scientists, academics, corporate leaders, and policy makers—who share an interest in the learning that happens at the intersection of art and science, and the impact that learning has on innovation. This seemingly disparate group of individuals works in incubators that use arts–based learning and processes to confront STEM–based civic concerns such as water resources, urban nutrition, and transportation alternatives.

The work of the Art of Science Learning spans the breadth of education and reaches deeply into professional life. To better understand this unique approach, we interviewed Mr. Seifter.

Joe Ferguson: What inspired you to research the use of arts–based learning in the sciences?

Harvey Seifter: My work started in 1997, when, as Executive Director of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, I developed ways to use the orchestra’s conductor–less process of high performance ensemble teamwork as a learning resource for universities and corporate leaders. Over the next decade—in partnership with Americans for the Arts—I helped establish arts–based learning as a defined and recognized field of educational practice. These experiences convinced me of the hunger for new resources to foster creativity, collaboration, innovation, and engaged learning across society, and gave me a grow- ing awareness of the potential of the arts to advance vital learning objectives in many domains. During these years, I brought arts–based learning to a number of science and technology companies and STEM learning centers. These experiences taught me the vital importance of strengthening the creative and innovative capacities of America’s STEM workforce.

JF: Was there much evidence to support the use of arts– based learning in science education?

HS: At that time, there was very little evidence of a cause–and–effect relationship between arts–based learning and creativity, collaboration, cognition, innovation, or academic performance. That was a huge problem and by far the greatest barrier to widespread adoption of arts–based learning as an educational strategy.

As I set out to see how we might develop the proof we needed, I quickly learned two things—this would be a very difficult task to accomplish, and the artists, educators, and businesses we were working with at the time lacked the necessary expertise, resources, or focus. I concluded that the solution might lie in an engagement with science—a field where fundamental respect for the value of evidence is at its core. I believed that bringing arts–based learning to STEM settings would focus our work in a domain where we’d already learned we could have impact, and collaborating with scientists could help address our need for expertise.

In 2007, I led an arts–based learning symposium at the National Science Foundation, convened by their Informal Science Education program and in collaboration with art/ scientist Todd Siler and choreographer Liz Lerman. This project—which marked the start of my 10–year collaboration with the NSF—led me to a new strategy: we would develop a systematic and effective way to integrate arts– based learning into STEM learning and practice, apply what we developed to STEM learning challenges, and carefully measure the outcomes.

JF: Do traditional forms of education depress creative thinking?

HS: A striking pattern emerged from our research related to the creative thinking of high school STEM learners. For 12 of the 16 creative thinking skill variables we mea- sured on a pre/post basis, students who experienced the arts–based approach STEM innovation training had significantly better outcomes than students who experienced the traditional approach. The differences—many of which were quite large—were found across a wide range of skills related to divergent, convergent, and critical thinking. Three skills showed no difference between treatment and control, and one showed marginally better outcomes within the control groups.

Looking closely at the data, we noticed that in seven of the skills, the difference resulted from improved performance of the students experiencing arts–based learning, while the students experiencing traditional approaches to STEM learning showed no change. In five of the skills, however, there were no differences between pre– and post–test measures for the treatment group, but the students who were in the control group scored significantly lower on the post–test compared to the pre–test.

These results strongly suggest that traditional STEM pedagogy may depress some aspects of adolescent creative thinking, and that even a modest amount of arts–based learning may help overcome this negative outcome.

JF: What exactly is arts–based learning, and why is it important in 21st century science education?

HS: Arts–based learning is the instrumental use of artistic skills, processes, and experiences as educational tools to foster learning in non–artistic disciplines and domains. With the increasing ubiquity of computational power, massive knowledge bases, and the growing sophistication of machine intelligence, the already well–established role played by creativity, collaboration, communication, and innovation in the 21st century STEM workforce will only grow more important. Although the absorption of discipline–specific bodies of knowledge will remain central to the STEM enterprise, creativity, collaboration, and communication will emerge as the foundational elements of successful STEM learning, and innovation will continue to be—along with knowledge creation—one of the prime value–generators of STEM practice. Our studies demonstrate that arts–based learning can improve outcomes in each of these domains.

JF: And this has business applications as well?

HS: Yes, companies use arts–based learning to foster creative thinking, promote the development of new leadership models, and strengthen employee skills in critical areas such as collaboration, conflict resolution, change management, presentation/public performance, and intercultural communication. More than 400 of the Fortune 500 organizations have used arts–based learning. The range of art forms they use and the ways they use them are remarkable, from industrial manufacturers who hire poets and sculptors to encourage employees to engage and express their creativity through their work, to boards of directors that study the inner workings of jazz ensembles to improve their own high performance teamwork. Some law firms retain theater artists as coaches to strengthen courtroom presentational skills. There are even technology companies that work with suminigashi—Japanese water painting—to better understand innovation in chaotic and complex environments.

JF: How can arts–based learning address the disconnect between innovation skills and skill levels in employees— i.e. the Innovation Gap?

HS: In 2016, we published research findings providing—for the first time—clear evidence of a strong causal relationship between arts–based learning and improved creativity skills and innovation outcomes in adolescents, as well as between arts–based learning and increased collaborative behavior in adults. These are precisely the impacts needed to close the Innovation Gap.

We found that high school groups using arts–based learning showed a large number of statistically significant increases in creative and critical thinking skills from pre– to post–test, while control groups showed no such increases. We were able to demonstrate that arts–based learning led to stronger STEM innovation outcomes in adolescents. Expert panelists rated the STEM innovations created by the high school teams using arts–based learning significantly higher in terms of insight, clarity, problem solving, and impact than those of the high school control teams. The effects were strikingly large, with the arts– based teams outperforming the control teams by as much as two points on a five–point scale.

The benefits of arts–based learning are not limited to adolescents. We found that STEM professionals using arts–based learning showed significant increases in sharing leadership, emotionally intelligent behavior, empathic listening, mutual respect, trust, active following, and transparency. Control groups only showed an increase in emotionally intelligent behavior, and in that behavior, the arts–based groups outperformed the control groups by a statistically significant margin.

JF: One of the things that strikes me as unique in your approach is an emphasis on evidence. Why is that so important?

HS: I created the Art of Science Learning in 2008 to explore—in a systematic way—the impact of the arts on STEM learning, practice, and workforce development. During the years I served as founding director of Americans for the Arts’ Creativity Connection (2004–2008), I became increasingly aware of a disconnect. There were clearly many ways in which the arts were being—and could be—used to spark creativity in STEM education, public engagement with science, and the development of an innovative and collaborative 21st century STEM workforce.

But STEM educators, policymakers, and business leaders—particularly those responsible for organizational development—wanted evidence to support claims of impact and value before investing time and money in arts–based learning. At best, many considered the novel approach to STEM learning that we advocated as an untested and counterintuitive form of pedagogy—some simply dismissed the concept of arts–based learning as a scheme to promote and fund arts education with little relevance to the STEM enterprise. In 2004, I was given the unique opportunity to co–edit—along with my late colleague, Ted Buswick—a special edition of the Journal of Business Strategy entirely devoted to arts–based learning for business. From this prestigious platform, we confidently planned to publish all the great studies we were sure existed that would provide our skeptical audiences with proof of impact. We spent a year looking, and came up with very little! In fact, the only real evidence we were able to publish was a well done—though narrow–gauged—experimental study funded by the NSF in the early 1990s about the impact of dance, theater, and music on the communication skills of engineering students at Cooper Union. It had gathered dust on the shelf for more than a decade.

Up until that experience, I had simply assumed—based on my own observations and experiences as an artist and educator—that evidence of the many benefits of arts–based learning must exist, and that all we needed to do as a field was to make sure that decision–makers were aware of it. From that day forward, I realized that the impact of arts–based learning was, for the most part, unproven, and indeed, unknown.

JF: What did you need to quantify the positive impact of arts–based learning on the sciences?

HS: A missing element was a set of tools and resources that would translate the theoretical concepts of arts– based learning into practical forms for implementation. These key issues were the subject of literally hundreds of hours of conversation with friends and colleagues at Creativity Connection—in particular, with Gary Steuer, CEO of the Arts and Business Council and subsequently VP for Private Sector Initiatives at Americans for the Arts, who played a pioneering role in developing and supporting programmatic initiatives to foster the emerging field of arts–based learning; at the Learning Worlds Institute—a New York City–based innovation think tank headed by John Reaves and Liz Dreyer, where I served as Senior Fellow in Residence; and, increasingly, with the Informal Science Education Program—ISE, now Advancing Informal STEM Learning—of the National Science Foundation.

These discussions led me to recognize the importance of bringing together artists, scientists, researchers, and policymakers to help identify strategies and opportunities to connect the dots. Beyond playing a purely convening role, I began to sense that the Art of Science Learning could create opportunities to aggregate the very best arts–based learning practices that my colleagues and I had perfected over the previous 15 years, develop tools and re- sources to implement them in a range of STEM learning and practice environments, and use the implementation to study the impact of the arts on the creativity, collaboration, and innovation of STEM learners and professionals.

JF: What were some of the unique challenges for developing these tools with arts–based learning?

HS: Creativity and creative thinking are very broad and in some ways elusive concepts—there was and is no single generally accepted definition for either. We decided to work within the subset of definitions that could be most readily applied to creativity as it manifests itself within innovation processes. That gave us a useful point of departure and led us to focus on a set of creative thinking skills that corresponded to the creative process schematic model we had developed a couple of years earlier for our front end of innovation work. This model looks at creativity as a set of two waves of divergent/convergent thought.

The performance of each step is driven by a set of skills that can be measured—the number, range, and originality of ideas generated in the divergent phases and the choices and thought processes used to make them in the convergent phases—giving us rich and nuanced data. An additional benefit of this approach is that the small grain size of the information generated gave us realistic ways of measuring impacts in real world STEM learning and innovation settings. JF: Your “Activities Test” is an example of one of your quantitative instruments?

HS: Yes, our review of the literature led us to Runco and Basadur’s 1993 article on “Assessing Ideational and Evaluative Skills and Creative Styles and Attitudes,” which suggested the possibility of a novel approach by developing our schematic into a short activity test. Over the past several years, we’ve continued the development of what’s becoming an increasingly sophisticated tool that can tell us a great deal about the evolution of creative thinking over time. Participants are given an innovation challenge and 15 minutes to perform a guided thought experiment. The test can be given on a pre–basis as an innovation warm–up and then a day, week, or month later—with a different challenge—as an innovation wrap-up.

JF: Beyond testing, you developed a curriculum around your ideas.

HS: The curriculum was comprehensive in that it was designed to cover the entire innovation journey. We approached innovation as much more than problem solving, starting with the most basic questions and continuing all the way to market. The curriculum uses arts–based learning to teach key skills related to each step in the process.

JF: You implemented your curriculum with incubators. Tell us about that process.

HS: We formed the Incubators for Innovation with Balboa Cultural Partnership in San Diego, Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and EcoTarium in Worcester. We chose STEM–based civic challenges for each incubator—water resources in San Diego, urban nutrition in Chicago, and transportation alternatives in Worcester. We then recruited 305 STEM professionals, formal and informal educators, artists, business leaders, researchers, policymakers, and students to serve as Art of Science Learning Fellows in year–long cross–disciplinary learning communities to create and develop innovations in response to the challenges.

The Fellows experienced more than 60 workshops that used the arts to help them explore challenges; identify problems and opportunities for innovation; generate, transform, and communicate creative ideas; collaborate on cross–disciplinary teams; and co–create their solutions with external partners.

For example, Metaphorming—a collaborative symbolic modeling process created and led by Dr. Todd Siler, our ArtScientist in Residence—gave Fellows the opportunity to embody, enrich, and communicate their aspirations as they launched their innovation journeys, and to envision their next steps after completion of the program. Open– ended jazz improvisation helped Fellows learn new observational techniques and practice suspending their disbeief. Surrealist visual and spoken word techniques helped stimulate the flow of intuitive insights in their ideation. Laban–based movement work helped them learn to feel numbers and bring openness to their search for productive convergence around shared insights. Clay sculpture as a medium was used for modeling their ideas and assessing how well they stood up to assessment criteria. Fellows were also introduced to a great deal of domain- specific STEM expertise and content, along with in- novation tools and processes drawn from the Product Development Management Association Body of Knowledge and Lean Start–Up methodologies.

After four months of front end work, the Fellows chose the problems and solutions they wanted to work on and formed themselves into 28 cross–disciplinary teams. Over the next eight months, as the teams developed their concepts into innovations, we supported them with ongoing innovation training. They spent time with string quartets to observe successful collaborative behaviors in multi–leader environments, practiced user–centric iterative design thinking in community workshops, and worked with a theater–based technique called Rehearsing Ideas to accelerate their prototyping cycles. We also provided teams with mentors, ongoing access to experts, community partnerships, periodic input to external advisory panels, and modest budgets. Twenty–two of the 28 teams succeeded in developing innovations and bringing their working prototypes to market. Readers can find more information about these projects on our website--www.artofsciencelearning.org.

JF: One of the projects that caught my eye was Kate’s Place. Tell us about that.

HS: The San Diego Incubator’s innovation challenge was water—a critical issue for San Diego, the state of California, and many other communities and regions around the globe. A group of Fellows came together around the idea of developing a water–wise model house and garden to serve as a community innovation center. They named their project Kate’s Place in honor of Kate Sessions, an early 20th century conservationist. Kate’s Place had what I like to call a Jack–and–the–Beanstalk/Go–To–Market model. They decided to build a working prototype for the San Diego County Fair, in the hope that in addition to being seen by thousands of people, it might generate development money by winning First Prize. They won six prizes!

JF: What are your goals for the future?

HS: Here are four big ones—using the hundreds of hours of arts–based innovation workshops we’ve created during the past several years as a point of departure, we plan to develop scalable arts–based innovation resources—tools, process modules, etc.

We also hope to implement these new resources in the widest possible range of settings to generate real world impact on STEM innovation, learning, and engagement. This, in turn, will begin to transform ways in which America’s formal and informal education systems, policy makers, and the broader culture understand and leverage the power of art/science integration.

We plan to develop generalizable data about the effects of arts–based learning on the motivation, focus, deep processing, and engagement of adolescent STEM learners. We also plan to look at the comparative effects of a range of arts–based interventions on creative thinking skills; collaborative, empathic, and emotionally intelligent behaviors; and innovation outcomes of adult STEM professionals.

Lastly, we want to begin exploring ways to leverage the power of arts–based learning and art/science integration on the social dimensions of community innovation and learning.

The work described in this interview was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning program (NSF grant DRL-122411, Integrating Informal S TE M and Arts–Based L earning to Foster Innovation). The grant supported the development of a new curriculum using the arts to teach innovation processes to adolescent and adult learners; implementation of the curriculum in three year-long arts-based Incubators for STE M Innovation; experimental research studying the impact of arts-based learning on creative thinking skills, collaborative behaviors and innovation outcomes; a traveling interactive exhibition; and a wide range of engagement programs for professional audiences and the general public.

[Entire article — click on the title link to read it at Sci-Art, and to view all of the images.]

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