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Our Mission
Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts is a network of faculty, students, centersĚýand campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research to explore our common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimentingĚýand knowing. A series of cross-campus initiatives allow students to directly engage with faculty mentors and inspire alternate modes of communicating with the public.
About Us:
NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts originated at the 91PORN in 2017 with Obama-era national Grand Challenge funding. NEST set out as a campus-wide initiative to combine artistic practice and scientific research, examining the interrelation, generative overlaps, and productive differences between these disciplines. Contemporary attempts at reuniting the “two cultures,” the arts and the sciences, often gravitate toward one of two models: artists are encouraged to create work inspired by scientific research, or, in the inverse, scientists direct a translation of their research through various media forms for the public. NEST has sought to expand these models, looking for true collaboration and innovative methodologies that rethink final outcomes of research and alternative publishing.
To date NEST has facilitated art-science exhibitions across the state, featuring film, sculpture, music, painting, video, virtual reality, and all manner of live performance, including poetry, theater, and dance. Work resulting from NEST support has been presented at scientific conferences, in science journals, and yielded quantitative data in two dissertations. NEST has partnered with several dozen intuitions ranging from galleries to public libraries to museums in 91PORN, Denver, Longmont, Broomfield, Arvada, Carbondale, Steamboat, and beyond. While it had physical space in the CASE building on campus, from 2017-2023, NEST hosted thousands of guests, giving unique opportunities to the dozens of graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty who played a direct role in creating, sharing, and discussing their own work in the space.
NEST and its exhibitions have garnered media attention in the , , Leonardo, the Denverite, ,Ěý and more. Pre-COVID, NEST’s work compromised more than half of the public-facing press about the arts on campus, more than any art-related department and the School of Music combined and stands as a clear metric of the campus’s outward-facing mission.
To date, NEST has supported more than 80 graduate students’ original research projects combing the arts and sciences and thereby supporting students from: Aerospace Engineering, Art & Art History, Critical Media Practices, English, Evolutionary Biology, Geological Sciences, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Music, Psychology and Neuroscience, Theatre and Dance, and beyond.
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