MaRS

Jenga: Demonstrating gravity

Quick: What are the seven innovations that revolutionized the world?

According to Jacob Zimmer’s grade school teacher, our society was revolutionized by Gutenberg’s press, Copernicus’ solar system, Newton’s physics, Darwin’s evolution, as well as the Industrial, Nuclear, and Information Revolutions.

It inspired Jacob Zimmer to create “Dedicated to the Revolutions,” an innovative show that engages the audience around these scientific revolutions that have altered the course of humanity… while remembering that science is fun (and funny). It opens tomorrow and plays until April 12th.

In the following interview, I ask Jacob about what the MaRS community of innovators can learn from his show.

One reason is that I think it will be a good night out.

And while it almost feels crass saying that, it is vital to Small Wooden Shoe that as we talk and think about big ideas and world changing events and the very real effects they have on our lives, we have good time with the audience.

Small Wooden Shoe Photo, courtesy David Hawe

Too often what keeps people away from both science and art is a feeling of dread at “not getting it” and feeling stupid. And often, really, that’s our (artists, scientists) fault. Because knowledge can seem more important if other people don’t get it, or if it’s highly specialized, so we consciously or unconsciously play into that perception.

I don’t find that very useful and Dedicated to the Revolutions is a proposal for another way of being. We don’t have to dumb anything down, we just need to be clear, curious and honest. Those things are contagious I think.

So, with white boards, skipping ropes, tin can phones and songs, we are looking at the meeting places between theory, technology and the every day. And how those meeting places effect our lives and the stories that we tell ourselves and others about our place in the world.

This seems, from what I know, not unlike what MaRS is all about – finding ways to connect technological change, scientific research and every day needs.

We’re using a list of seven scientific and technological revolutions (Gutenberg, Copernicus, Newton, Industrial, Darwin, Nuclear and Information) that were taught to me by a grade school history teacher as a frame for asking questions about the nature and effects of progress and change. Things that I think all fields should talk (with each other) about.

On a very basic level of wanting a conversation between disciplines of knowing and of making, I would love the MaRS community to come to the performance and feed back to us their thoughts on where we’ve been, where we’re going and where we are right now.

Small Wooden Shoe photo courtesy David Hawe

Art and science (and many other fields) share such basic values, and yet mostly they are separated. Starting in grade school, different ways of knowing, working and innovating are said to be in conflict, with the nerds, drama geeks and jocks all standing in different corners of the playgrounds (this is the best case, worst case is that someone is making someone else’s life hard.) I don’t know how to solve this all together, but I think making performances that try to break down some of that seperation can be part of it.

And my first attraction to MaRS was “collaboration and innovation” – so before the science and technology focus of this show, the first connection between the work I do and the MaRS communtiy is about shared values.

And so if we can talk about those, that would be a start.

What have you learned through this series of shows?

That feels like a question that I’ll be able to (and should) look better at in five years.
Maybe that’s what I’ve learned right now: It’s hard to approach big questions, but it is important and rewarding and takes a great deal of time and help. And can include singing songs with people and playing badminton and writing.

Small Wooden Shoe photo courtesy David Hawe

In addition, I’ve learned this: “All models are wrong, some models are useful.”

When we did the show at MaRS, part of the show involved us writing on the whiteboards in silence and inviting the audience to add something if they wanted.

One night, while one of the performers was writing about how Newton was, in some Einsteinian way, wrong about gravity – but that the three laws of motion got us to the moon.

A woman from the audience wrote, “All model are wrong, some models are useful” on the white board.

It has translated from a well timed quote to a repeated value for both how we make the show (trying to be a useful model) and a way to look at the list and idea of revolution altogether.I go back to that phrase often.

And then, of course, the questions might be: “What, when and for whom is a model useful?”

We are trying to make something useful for us and our audience in the moment of the show.
I’m pretty sure the woman came to the show because she worked at MaRS.

What makes something a revolution: the idea, the timing, the marketing…?

I think there is a change in perspective that happens, but that it happens not all at once.
They did all occur in times that, when we look back at, there was a lot of changes in many fields at once and they seem to happen every century. But that may just be the pedagogical trick of my teacher.

Many of them were “in the air” or seem like someone would have come up with them promptly. Which I think is interesting.

Looking back, we can point to inciting incidences or a major moments (always plural) – but that seems like something we do after the fact to make a clearer story. Scientific revolutions are a good story to tell to get people to be scientists, but they may not be what we’re thinking about day to day. Artists have our versions of those stories too.

Clay Shirky recently wrote very well around some of this and our current position in time and space.

MaRS is a community of people bringing innovation of all sorts to the masses. Could we one day be the next Revolutionaries? What’s your advice to us (as the expert who’s now studied our impact on our lives)?

Be okay with uncertainty. Take care of people. You’re probably not going to do it alone. Going slower might be a good idea. Thinking about other fields might help. Your children are going to have to live with it.