Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 11, 1994 TAG: 9407060002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By KEN DAVIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PANDAPAS POND LENGTH: Medium
Their tools were artistic creations - everything from decorated wooden staffs to homemade scientific funnels - that would be used to capture methane bubbles stirred from sediments within the water.
To the curious observers, the scene was simply a matter of science.
To the participants, it was also a matter of art.
"I regard this meeting tonight as a great and new kind of meeting between science and art," said Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an internationally acclaimed artist who serves as artist-in-residence of the New York Sanitation Department. "The world needs more of these meetings."
Ukeles said that Monday's methane experiment, part of a four-day art conference known as the Mountain Lake Workshop, was more than just scientific. It was an experiment involving the effectiveness of using art to explain complicated scientific processes.
"It is imperative that we search for a common ground in knowing things through science and knowing things through art," she said.
This year's workshop is devoted to artistic projects related to anaerobic microbiology and landfill and community waste management issues.
Organizers said they hope it will lead to further cooperation between art and science, two disciplines many believe are unrelated.
"I hope this will be a beginning," said Greg Ferry, a professor from Virginia Tech's Anaerobe Lab who explained the scientific process of methane and microbiology to the workshop participants. "It's as important to science as it is to art."
The workshop participants obviously agreed, as they watched intently while Ferry took a plastic gasoline container with a missing bottom and demonstrated the procedure of collecting methane.
Speaking in the familiar tone of an experienced lecturer, Ferry used a wooden staff to disturb the sediments and release methane bubbles to the surface, explaining that microorganisms make methane from organic matter deposited in the sediments.
After a few minutes, Ferry opened a valve at the top of the container and held it beneath a cigarette lighter, releasing a long flame into the air and bringing a loud applause from the crowd.
"Now how about a round of applause for the microorganisms," he said.
The methane experiment was not the only success. From the reaction of the participants, enthusiastically trudging through the murky water, mixing art with science was a success as well.
"Scientists have the responsibility to express their findings to the general public," Ferry said. "It never entered my mind that art could be a way to bring science to the public until now."
| The `artistic creations' used as funnels included everything from gas cans with the bottoms cut out to futuristic-looking contraptions.|
|PLEASE SEE POND/2
by CNB