Soft matter physics in art: Engaging art students and enriching their practice

I will share my physicist experience teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) as their scientist-in-residence. The reciprocal influence of art and science is obvious when noticing the many relationships between scientific discoveries, new inventions, and art movements. Soft matter physics is of special interest, as it deals with materials, scales, properties, and “visuals” that are relevant to a broad range of artistic disciplines. Painters work with suspensions, emulsions, polymers, flows and drying processes. Fashion designers play with knitted patterns and wrinkling instabilities. Printmakers deal with capillary action and fluid transport in paper. Architects think about force networks, modular assemblies, or the links between collective behaviors and spatial boundaries. My course, which I have entitled “The Physics of Shapes, from nature to the hand”, introduces state-of-the-art concepts of soft matter physics from the perspective of pattern formation, both in nature and in human creations. With examples from my students' final projects, I will show how hands-on soft matter physics expend their art practices, an opportunity for more personal engagement in a public that is often “physics anxious”. I will also share my experience in an online setting giving lectures, kitchen home labs, and bringing together artists and researchers as an invited curator of SAIC’s Conversation on Art and Science speaker series.