image: Adele Henderson

Adele Henderson
Accidental tourism
and the persistence of maps
Mark Percy
The planetarium of the 21st century
as an immersive visualization environment
Will Kinney
Inside a map of the universe

The Science & Art Cabaret is an ongoing collaborative program between Hallwalls, the University at Buffalo, and the Buffalo Museum of Science begun in October 2009. While its permanent home is the 9th Ward at Babeville, sporadic cabarets (such as this one) are hosted off-site a locations that have included the Buffalo Museum of Science and the Hauptman-Woodward Institute.

The cabaret attempts to bring forth intellectual and creative ideas centered around given themes, in a mash-up of ideas concocted to investigate the connections between these distinct fields of investigation.

As Hallwalls' curator John Massier explains:
"I often refer to the cabaret as Casual Learning Wednesdays and we've stuck fairly true to that tradition. While we always enter into each themed cabaret with confidence in the general idea and the invited participants, we can never determine how it will all play out. In beautifully organic/artistic/scientific fashion, we have found our diverse presenters to often overlap in curious ways, calling back to each others' ideas, and confirming what we always suspected when we began this ongoing program—there is…um…a force that binds us all. Or two forces, perhaps, each elemental and integral to the fields of science and art: Critical Thinking and Imagination. If we manage to successfully pureé these forces, we've served up a smoothie of ideas not offered anywhere else in town. And that critical, imaginative, interrogative smoothie remains free of charge. With a cash bar! I think it's safe to say that both artists and scientists are exploratory creatures, investigating and re-imagining our world (and all other possible worlds). Sometimes it's not about answers, but about lots and lots of questions. The end of each cabaret, for me, always has a nice lingering effect, not because anything has necessarily been figured out, but because we've filled the air with the whiff of speculation and dreams."