Once or so a week---maybe more, maybe less, depending on her schedule---Janna Levin ventures from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she teaches astrophysics at Barnard and Columbia University, to Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood. Oftentimes, she first swings by her writing studio in Fort Greene, but usually she ends up at Pioneer Works, a renovated warehouse space near the industrial waterfront. There, she'll go to the third floor, where she works on her book about black holes or chats with Matthew Putman, a former Columbia professor and owner of Nanotronics Imaging, a startup developing atomic force microscopes.
This generally would be unremarkable---two scientists hanging out, discussing the multiverse or high resolution optics. Except Pioneer Works isn't a laboratory. It's an art gallery. Of a sort. The space, which a few years ago was a dilapidated iron works, is the work of Dustin Yellin, an artist best known for his transparent glass and resin sculptures. On any given day at Pioneer Works, you might a physicist talking with a photographer, who just passed a painter, who may have attended a lecture about neuroscience the night before.
This is how Brooklyn does incubators.
Yellin is friendly and busy. As the gatekeeper to the artistic compound, he’s often flitting around his cavernous studio with his art assistants or talking with visitors as they wander around Pioneer Works. When the warehouse now housing Pioneer Works hit the market not long ago, Yellin snatched it up, financing much of the $3.6 million price through the sale of his artwork. He gutted the place and created the airy gallery it is today. The three-story, 27,000-square-foot building has exposed brick walls and soaring ceilings topped by wood beams. The upper floors are sectioned into open studios where art residents spend four to six months on project. Putman and part of his Nanotronics team have had an office there since 2013, after he and Yellin met through mutual friends.
Out back, there's a large yard Yellin describes as a perpetual work-in-progress. “I want to add an observatory," he tells me. This is but one item on a long list of eventual additions, along with a recording studio, auditorium and printing shop. The non-profit is an experiment in multidisciplinary collaboration, straight out of the playbook of Buckminster Fuller’s (one of Yellin’s biggest influences). Exploring the place, you get the sense that Pioneer Works is Yellin’s masterpiece.
Late one afternoon in September, Putman is sitting with Mari Kussman, a fashion designer turned industrial designer. Kussman is finishing a plastic cover for Nanotronics’ newest microscope, the nSPEC 3D. “It’s sort of like a cocoon,” she explains, showing off a 3-D rendering of a plastic piece that will encase the atomic force microscope. “The shape is based on an L system.” I shoot her a blank look. “An L system...it’s the likelihood in an algorithm when a certain branch grows a certain way,” she says, glancing at Putman. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yep,” Putman replies. “When you see trees, how they're not perfectly symmetric, it’s that kind of algorithm. It kind of winds up looking a little bit like an alien car.”
Putman and Yellin approach Pioneer Works as one big teachable moment. The way they see it, any time you get an artist in a room with a scientist, they’re bound to learn something from each other. “You put everyone in a room and things happen naturally. There’s this constant exchange that we’re not forcing or prescribing---it just happens.” says Yellin. “A painter was here doing a residency and he teamed up with a geneticist doing a residency; they came up with an algorithm for printmaking just because they were having a conversation.”
Since 2013, Putman has spearheaded the organization’s science department. He’s co-organizing a series of talks with Levin called “scientific controversies.” The first (on October 28) will feature Levin, fellow physicist Max Tegmark and Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek discussing the possibility of the multiverse. Future talks will be equally as heady, pondering questions like, What is quantum reality? Does time exist? Will dying black holes explode in firewalls?
Putman runs his research business out of Pioneer Works and an office in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where logistics like sales and fulfillment happens. The new microscope is the company’s most advanced product yet. Putman expects the nSPEC 3D will allow great advancements in developing nanomaterials and regenerative medicine. He also expects it to be used by artists.
The scientist recalls introducing his microscopes to the artists at Pioneer Works. “I told them, ‘Anybody who would like to be trained to our system, it’s open to you; come in.'” Artist Bruno Levy took him up on the offer and soon was experimenting with it nearly every day. “I’d ask, how’s it going? And Bruno would say, ‘Oh it’s going well but I wish I had a screen that could capture video more quickly while still looking at other images,” Putman recalls. It was a good idea; allowing a microscope to capture moving images and stills could be handy. “It’s part of our product now,” he says. “This should've been an obvious thing to me, but it wasn't because we create our own boxes no matter how hard we try not to.”
This speaks to a broader point. The scientists at Pioneer Works could be working in well-funded university research lab---Putman did just that at Columbia for years. “We’ve just chosen a different environment that we think promotes creativity quicker,” he says. Universities tend to be siloed, even within departments, which is great for focus, but not for developing a varied set of interests. Putman, and even Levin, who remains reliant on the university research system, say the key to making bigger discoveries lies in cross-pollinating ideas. “I think certain things are hard to do outside of a university system,” says Levin. “I’m doing abstract research on black holes a billion light years away---there are no stocks that go up if my discovery is correct. I’m very tied to a climate that supports intellectual research for its own sake. It’s sometimes very hard to only be in this one track,” she adds. “Returning to a broader sense of scholarship or curiosity is much more natural---sometimes I need to step away and reflect and have a bigger picture.”
In many ways, Pioneer Works is the anti-university. Although the organization has its own educational programming, Yellin likes to frame it as the kind of place where people will come to learn and experiment without the constructs of a traditional education system. Right now they offer classes on sketching, solar power, the basics of neuroscience and a theremin master class. “Someday we’d like people to be able to get a Pioneer Works degree,” he says.
The idea that science informs art and art informs science wasn't born in Brooklyn. Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most obvious example of this multidisciplinary focus, but you can see it in things like the Rhode Island School of Design's big push toward something called STEAM (science, technology, engineering, math and art) education. It argues adding art and design to the traditional educational focus will bolster innovation. There’s also been a surge in self-described “multidisciplinary” co-working spaces that provide an opportunity to work alongside people of varied expertise. The New Museum’s recently-opened NEW INC is an incubator hoping to fuse the technology and art worlds; others, like Limewharf in London, have similar goals.
Compared to the technology tunnel vision of Silicon Valley, Pioneer Works seems like a commune. But it also reflects the differences between New York and Silicon Valley in a more general sense. You can walk down the street in New York and you’ll pass by 50 different people talking about 50 different things; it’s not all tech, all art or all science all the time. Still, Yellin isn’t shunning technologists or the place they come from. In fact, he thinks Pioneer Works is just the type of place they might like to invest in some day. “We just need the Larrys (Page and Ellison) to come over for a visit,” he says, only half jokingly. “Once people experience this, they see the vision and want to get involved.”
