Francesca Samsel - Vulnerability, making a new language, and pursuing the irrational

Francesca Samsel is crafting a new language for our world. That is, she crosses art, science, and visualization to open new ways of understanding and engaging with the natural world, not just visually but across the sensorial spectrum. She recognizes the inextricably social element to this, too, and her work raises our capacity to collaborate, and in the process, alters our sense of what scientific inquiry is and can (and perhaps needs to) be. Her work as her life are teachers we need for the world we are walking into.

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Francesca is a Research Scientist in the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin where she leads the Art-Sci-Vis (ASV) research group and maintains multi-institutional collaborations to identify and employ artistic principles and expertise to affect the scientific process and empower scientific inquiry. She resists the traditional pattern of relationship between the arts and the sciences that sees art as serving science. Rather, her philosophy is that art and science are mutual, free-flowing, and entangled.

Embodying her belief that analogies, metaphor and science are together needed to address our complex relationships with the natural world, Francesca maintains a wide network of collaborations that cross discipline, institution, and sensibility.

She received an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and a B.F.A. from the California College of Art.

What you won't find in a written biography of Francesca is the passion and exceedingly rare patience with which she speaks about the world and our lives. She seems to hold a long view of time and her life embodies the commitments and behaviors that open off from that perspective. To talk with Francesca is to have your sense of the possible expanded.

So, I wanted to have her on to talk about how one creates a life that resists categorization and about the visual, somatic, and social ways we can encounter the world that help us make more sense of it, individually, collectively, civilizationally.