00:00:01Christine Frazier: Hello, this is Christine Frazier and today I'm interviewing Professor Lucy HG Solomon, for the California State University San Marcos University Library Oral History Program. Today is April 17th, 2025. This interview is taking place at the CSUSM campus. Professor HG Solomon, thank you for interviewing with me today.
00:00:24Lucy HG Solomon: Thank you for having me.
00:00:25Frazier: Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to teach at California State San Marcos and about your career?
00:00:33HG Solomon: Yes, for sure. I would love to share a little bit about my creative journey. I was part of an art collective called the League of Imaginary Scientists, and that was from 2006 until--really for about 15 years. So around the pandemic, we shifted, but this was an art collective created with collaborators in Los Angeles and had a very playful approach to incorporating scientific themes into interactive artworks. And we had some acclaim. We had the great opportunity of working with NASA to strangely do a study on Ireland--in Ireland, on an island that was in a narrative way, a sister or a twin to Mars. And the island is called Oileán Ruaidh. It means the Red Island in Gaelic. And so this was during the first push to get really the public excited about the Mars Rovers. And we did a reverse future, or a reverse NASA study where we examined the future of this island and asked the same questions that the rovers were asking on Mars. The rovers were asking questions like: was Mars anything like Earth four million years ago? And we were asking, is the earth going to look like Mars in the future? And so we took the same kinds of samples that the rovers were taking and asked the same kinds of questions. I say that as a preamble because it is that kind of work, this community based, environmentally-oriented, interdisciplinary work that drove me to come to Cal State San Marcos. The founding of CSUSM--what is notable because the size and the nature of the faculty, the size of the university, the nature of the faculty, led the campus to be stridently interdisciplinary. That kind of thinking across disciplines allowed me to work here. And I say, allowed me to work here because I had applied for other positions, and really I had to transform myself to become the graphic design teacher or the media arts teacher or an art professor. And I did work at other institutions. And here I could be unapologetically an interdisciplinary artist. So that's what brought me to Cal State San Marcos. And I'm surrounded by colleagues who work in this hybrid way, and sometimes their work is quite fascinating and really drew me to wanna be here. An example is my colleague, Professor Judit Hersko, who like me, really bridges the world of art and science. When I came here, she had--maybe not recently--but had gone to Antarctica as part of an NSF grant. There was another colleague who is now retired, Deborah Small, who is notable because of her work that happened very organically with tribal communities, where she found that she had a very important--really a critical and perhaps threatened plant on her property in Rainbow where she lives. And tribal members ended up coming to her property as a meet-gathering place to develop crafts based around this plant. They ended up collaborating on a book where she photographed native species. And that became a resource, really for that group. And I have that ethnobotany photo group, photo book somewhere in my library here. But I came to Cal State San Marcos totally excited about the faculty here. Really historically important faculty as well, like David Avalos, who has a background working on border art issues with the Border Art Collective and is a prominent Chicano artist who has recently retired, but is quite really a cool guy. In fact, I have some things of his, I have his hot chili pepper that came from somewhere, and there's a book over there that Trader, Survivor, Icon that has his work in it. Thank you for passing that. Yeah. So this is, this features David Avalos's work. This is an important piece that he made that has also exhibited in the Escondido Center for the Arts. So there was this rigor of artistic creation that was evident in the colleagues who were here and a total encouragement to think and work outside of traditional artistic boundaries.
00:06:22Frazier: That sounds wonderful. Could you explain your work on the Planet Mentorship Project?
00:06:29HG Solomon: Yes, definitely. So as a faculty member at Cal State San Marcos, we balance a research and creative activities trajectory where we get to make art and write about the things that we care about. And, we do--of course, we're professors, we teach, and we also think about how we contribute to the campus community and the community at large. So one of the ways that I have found a way to be involved in the global community and to engage students in thinking about how they relate to the planet is a project that was conceived across different areas of the university. The arts: that's me. And then Juliana Goodlaw-Morris is, she is a former Peace Corps volunteer who really has worked across her professional career thinking about the use of resources. And she heads our sustainability efforts on campus. So she has become a close collaborator when I think about the impact of students' education and also their art on the environment and how to connect those more closely. Then the third person who started this project, and I'll talk about the project in a second, but it's Ariel Stevenson, and she is somebody who is thinking about inclusive excellence. That's her role on campus. And she brought to Juliana and me discussions around inclusive sustainability, how to engage the wider, the broader student body in environmental issues, environmental issues that really touch students in their homes, in their, uh, communities. And yet maybe they haven't studied environmental issues or they haven't developed the tools to really grapple with how they might become involved in the environmental issues across the planet. So we started this program. We started a program called the Planet Mentorship Project, and I am a professor in the arts. My specialty is data visualization. And when I started teaching data visualization, it was not that commonly understood. Now it's so obvious. I think actually COVID really made people alert to graphing in dynamic ways because they wanted to understand complex data sets quickly, and the literacy around data visualization across the world suddenly exploded. I work with students to create data visualizations around their lived experiences with daunting environmental issues and the data sets that are related to those. So in the Planet Mentorship Project, we pair mentorship, art making, and community building. And it's--we have some fun together. I'll show you a couple projects too or I'll talk about a couple projects. This is one student, Aidelen Montoya, who she made a data visualization that looks at the future of sea rises across the globe, but specifically relevant to the Philippines. And as a Filipinx student, she also examined her own ties to the Philippines and started to use beading, which is a traditional Filipino practice, and decided that she would bead these future maps. So this map of 2050 notably has much of the Philippines underwater, and this was an entry point for her to connect more with the place where her mother immigrated from, as well as explore environmental issues. So that's really the goal. Another, another work by Aidelen, I just have a couple of hers here--she looked at redlining in San Diego and made this dynamic embroidered map that really makes an inverse of the redlined areas and invited students who visited the exhibition at the Data Stacks on campus to look at where they're from and to see was this one of the areas that was excluded to someone who looks like me, or in this case, not me, but a student of color and their family. So that project has existed for about--we're in our third year and we are continuing it looking each year for a new cohort of students whom we hope to engage in arts in a dynamic way, and at the same time celebrate their own developing interests in nurturing the planet and examining the very critical issues around environmental injustice and the nuances of how that might have impacted their own family life. Some students live adjacent to factories and only in their critical inquiry really understand the embedded structural challenges that have developed, that have caused hardship and health issues within their families. So it's great. I mean, that's not great. That's problematic, but it is really rewarding to have students get excited about environmental causes which have traditionally not been causes that communities of color have been able to take over. There are often--environmental studies has been an area of study that has been dominated by white students and white scholars. And so you see this intersectional approach also shifting. Who gets to be an environmentalist? Everyone is an environmentalist. We're all affected by pollution.
00:13:31Frazier: For professors or educators that would like to have students do these types of projects, what are some tips or issues that you think they should know about?
00:13:45HG Solomon: And by? So by types of projects, you mean co-curricular, extracurricular?
00:13:50Frazier: Yeah. Kind of interdisciplinary, getting students to critically examine their own environment and creating, you know--
00:13:56HG Solomon: This project, the Planet Mentorship Project is a real commitment, and one thing that we do is we pay students. We have a--it's a grant, it's a scholarship-based project where students--and any student can participate--all students on campus are welcome. We usually have the amount of student applicants whom we accept. So it's kind of worked out perfectly. I don't wanna say that the only way to get students involved is to pay them, but it's really rewarding to have students have their own research and creative work acknowledged through a grant. And it may be the first time that they feel that they're acknowledged as an artist and a scholar. At the end of the program, we have a panel, the students discuss their work. We have an art exhibition at the Data Stacks, which is an exhibition space in Kellogg Library.
00:14:57Frazier: Okay. Very cool. And I know, moving on a little bit, that you've also worked with Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute. Could you explain your work there for us?
00:15:11HG Solomon: Yes, yes. So around the time that my, that the Art Collective, the League of Imaginary Scientists started to stop doing the kind of crazy art installations we were making around science, like the one that I described of the Inverse Mars Study. I started working with a Brazilian media artist and scholar, Cesar Baio, who is based at Uni Camp, a university in Brazil. It's the state university of Campinas. And we, we started to collaborate sometimes in person. I had a Fulbright to go to Campinas in Brazil as well as a few other places, but I spent a significant amount of time in 2022 there. We began working together in 2018, and we worked also between these disciplines of art and science while integrating technology. So our first artwork actually garnered us a pretty cool prize, the Lumen Prize in Artificial Intelligence. And this is a prize for the arts, for digital art. But this particular sub award, this award was for excellence in critically examining artificial intelligence. And that is what we started to do. We started to make artworks that use scientific principles often through collaborating in labs and with research scientists to make a statement about what technology serves. What the purpose is, how it intersects with society and nature. And that sounds all pretty crazy and complex, and I'll try to say it in a couple different ways. So we also make art that is often living. So we'll make a living sculpture rather than seeing just a piece of wood, it might be a wooden structure that incorporates living plants. And from those plants we receive live signals. Those signals become part of the art project. Our--so Cesar Baio and myself, we have the collective's name is Cesar and Lois, and one of our goals is to question the trajectory of technology, including artificial intelligence. And one example of that is thinking critically about the basis of technology, the basis of AI as a neurocentric or human rewards-based system. So a lot of--most AI systems, all programs, all AIs require data sets. And most of those databases come from--these are training databases and they come from human language models. They also--and those aspire to replicate human logic. Other rewards based training models, reinforce behavior that is very also human. Humans, when we get food, we feel rewarded. When we do certain things, we are also motivated by this internal reward. Hopefully that's not our only motivation. AIs are currently being developed in these ways. So Cesar and I started looking in it from an artist's perspective. So we're not AI specialists, but we incorporate artificial intelligence programming into our sculptures. We started thinking, what if nature were the blueprint for technology? And we started looking first at very simple systems, microbiological systems. We used one organism that we really got turned onto by a biology professor here at CSUSM, Dr. Betsy Read. She gave us a sample of slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. That is a really cool, fast growing yellow organism. It started a whole fashion craze for me where I only wore yellow for a long time 'cause I fell in love with this organism. And I worked with teams of students here at Cal State San Marcos, and we made art installations where Physarum polycephalum would make decisions and we would base our own computer system on that organism. And the big question was, you know, what kind of logic does this organism have? The organism is kind of interesting. It's not unlike some other kinds of networking organisms like, like fungi, although it's not a fungi. It was misclassified as fungi for a long time by scientists and then unclassified. But Physarum polycephalum or slime mold, which you can see out in the world in gardens. It's a networking organism that shares its resources across all of the nodes of its network. And as artists, we went into labs, we had artistic residencies and labs in different countries and different places. And we were able to grow and study this organism and ask, well, what if our own technologies shared resources the way that Physarum polycephalum does this? Um, this kind of wooden structure behind me was a basis for growing Physarum polycephalum. And this is actually a dried, you can't see it anymore 'cause it's all dried up. But that is where we groove the organism across a map of Palo Alto to show would Palo Alto and East Palo Alto--kind of the wealthiest and the poorest neighborhoods in California and maybe even the whole country. We were curious would Physarum polycephalum organize those cities the same way that humans do? And what we found in our experiments is that Physarum polycephalum will redistribute wealth across its whole network. So we started using, in a way, the microorganism as a tool for data visualization and recalibrating our understanding of how could we logically change how we think about resource distribution, how societies are formulated.
00:22:32Frazier: And what was the student response to discovering these things?
00:22:36HG Solomon: We had students who participated, so Kodi Gerritsen was a student of mine at the time. She came to Stanford University with Cesar and me, and we presented this project together. There were three other students who worked on that project. And I started what's called the Data Lab, which is the Data and Transdisciplinary Art Laboratory. And each semester I have about four students who work on art projects that bridge art and science. This is kind of unusual in the arts, but I was inspired and encouraged by my scientist colleagues. And this goes back to CSUSM being a model for interdisciplinary exploration. When Betsy Reed gave me that sample of Physarum polycephalum, she also said, come into the biology lab and experiment and try to figure out how to grow this in an artistic context. This is so fun. And she also allowed--that's actually very expensive. That's a huge resource. I was able to use that lab bench. And the bio tech at the time really helped me, helped keep alive the organism.
00:23:50Frazier: True.
00:23:51HG Solomon: And it was so cool. So, and we did things. We asked questions that maybe the scientists hadn't been asking, like, how do I grow this on a map? How do I grow this on the surface of a book? We started to grow Physarum polycephalum over pages of a book to question in, in many cases, we use Descartes--books about that, questions about humanities, really what Descartes would term as man's control over nature. So we looked at these traditional tenets of Western civilization and what are considered the kind of great models of thinking and Western thought, and started to challenge those with layers of logic on top of those. So we had a computer system that we set up that took photographs of a book as the organism grew across it. And as the organism grew across the book, then the text started to change. So first it would say, only man is the king and queen of nature, only men. We used this, a quote from Cicero, only man can reverse the flow of rivers. And as--that's a paraphrase--
00:25:11Frazier: Yeah.
00:25:12HG Solomon: --and as the organism grew across, it would say something very unintelligible. But what was really cool, actually, we had the computer system tweet out the--back when Twitter was a thing instead of, before it evolved--the organism would tweet updated text from the book, devolving this text. And at that time when, when we did this, this was in 2019, we worked with another professor in literature here on campus, Professor Sandra Doller and Professor Doller, she brought her literature students in her critical analysis team, and they workshopped the text that the organism has--had published within Twitter. And they really looked at it as a poem or a body of language. It was really fun. And we filmed that and we have a video of those students' analysis of the living microorganisms. So that's cool. That is a very long background--
00:26:24Frazier: Yeah.
00:26:25HG Solomon: --to say that Cesar and Lois, uh, Cesar Biao and I, we, we were working with art and science, and when you asked about our work with the Salk Institute, we had had this body of work already. And so we had been--I guess, tried--we had had some chops proven within this arena of questioning this barrier between art and science that has been erected gradually over years, but maybe is being dismantled quite often at CSUSM And we were invited to and offered a commission to create a work with a biologist, a plant biologist--a plant microbiologist, Dr. Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute. Dr. Joanne Chory is known for her great scientific breakthrough, which now I think was maybe two decades ago, which was the discovery of a kind of plant hormone. It's not really a hormone, but it's called alchine. Am I saying that right, now? I won't say what it is, a secret thing. Yeah. And she discovered this, something like a hormone that plants release, and specifically the Arabidopsis plant, which is kind of known as a common weed, but in biology labs, it's used quite often to study and--to study hybrids, to create hybrids very quickly. They're, they're great lab rats for plant microbiologists. She, she stu--her discovery of this plant hormone was so cool, because what happens, I think it's, is it oxen? Uh, I'll, I'll find out and get back to you.
00:28:26Frazier: Yeah.
00:28:27HG Solomon: Her discovery of this thing, this chemical that gets released, occurs when we didn't know that much about how plant cycles are triggered. And what happens is that the Arabidopsis plant, it's very first exposure, it's first day of light, is so important. And if it gets sunlight, then it grows in a certain way. And if it's in the shade, it grows in a different way for the rest of its life. So if it's in sunlight, it doesn't need to compete with a lot of other plants. So it will not grow long roots, but if it is in the shade, it will grow longer roots. And what that means for other plants and for that particular plant, is that it retains more carbon. Because it's embedding more of its metabolic results in the earth and putting that carbon down. And so she was hybridizing Arabidopsis in order to make vast agricultural crops like tobacco have longer roots and help kind of shift this climate change. What stuck with Cesar and me in her study were the themes of, of course the globe and climate, but also time. How cool is it that one day in a plant's life is so important? In some ways that's true with humans. Of course, what happens to us as babies has an impact. But imagine if it was like whatever happened in that twenty four hours of your life, the very first day is a blueprint for forever. So we started to think about timescales and what is time for Arabidopsis? What is time for microbiological organisms for Physarum polycephalum? For a tree that lives for a thousand years? Like the sequoias? What are these different scales of time? And how can we think about time differently as humans? And if we did, what would it do for our decision making? Like if we could think across a thousand-year span? And then we started to think about, I was reading--this was during the pandemic when we had this assignment, so of course we were thinking about time. And even the project got interrupted for a year because everything was shut down, including the Salk Institute for a period of time, or at least to artists. So we were thinking about time, we were having time slowed down and sped up in the strange way that the pandemic infected our lives. And we were also thinking about the deep planetary time. There's an author, a Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector, who had, during the pandemic especially, become quite popular in the US 'cause she was newly translated, even though she's a classically known, and really thought of as a modernist artist and writer--not artist, but literature contributor in Brazil, Clarice Lispector, amazing challenging author, but really interesting. And I started reading her during the pandemic, her work. And she has one book called The Passion According to G.H. That book is really experimental. And in it, she has some framing of a woman's experience as really dipping into her own framing of prehistoric time. And how she, at some point, the sculptor who is a main character in this book, has an existential moment where she crushes a cockroach and she doesn't--her own feelings of self evolve and she cannot really distinguish herself from the cockroach. And so she's talking about, you know, what is our, my own prehistoric memory? Do I have any memory with this? Do I, what do I share with this cockroach? And so we were also thinking about that. Like, what is time according to the planet?
00:33:02Frazier: Yeah.
00:33:03HG Solomon: Prehistoric time? Are the bacteria that we evolved from, do we have, what kind of memories do we have associated with that? Do we have that? How long can our thinking be? And we were thinking about technology because technology is fast, and if we know anything about what, how we use AI in technology, it's usually to cut a corner to get something immediately.
00:33:29Frazier: Yeah.
00:33:30HG Solomon: And one of the worst culprits of this is Amazon. So, I like to use Amazon as an example, because of its famous same day delivery. When it, when the system, the AI system is shooting the data through its code to decide who gets to have same day delivery, what is considered are profits and also convenience. What is not considered is the long questions, the long logic. The long sense of time, like what is the impact on the planet?
00:34:11Frazier: Yeah.
00:34:12HG Solomon: Or on people and populations and culture and communities, when we start to economize our daily interactions and that gets spurred on by these technological tools. And we think of them as tools, but we don't always question the values that they're suddenly implanting. So that's what we started thinking about with Joanne Chory.
00:34:35Frazier: Yes.
00:34:36HG Solomon: With Dr. Chory. Not necessarily with her--with her, we really focused on Arabidopsis and the plant, and we started growing it ourselves. And during the pandemic, I worked with the Data Lab, and we grew and recorded the, the growth of Arabidopsis. We also started collecting plants all over Escondido, where I lived mostly around the specific property where I was living, which was very natural. And, along with the help of my daughter, who was six at the time, we collected many specimens and dried them and used those as part of the artwork. So I have, I have behind me one of the models that we made for thinking about time. So this circle that you see is the history of Earth starting with the Big Bang. And that became one of the models for allochronic cycles, which was a series of clocks that we made. I'll say clocks, but they're not quite clocks, but they were--there are, it's a series of discs that we designed and one was the cosmos. We thought the longest clock was the cosmos' time and for of the cosmos we embedded all of those specimens into holes, into little discs around the clock, around the disc. And then we had an earth cycle, and we had an Arabidopsis cycle, of course. And we had also a Covid cycle that went very quickly because the virus replicates. And for each of these cycles, we really studied all of these different ways of thinking about time, including viral time, and how fast growing and evolving viruses are. Which viruses, apart from infecting individuals and species are really cool, how they can replicate. So thinking about that kind of time, against the backdrop of cosmic time, those are huge leaps. So we really had fun during that whole year thinking about time. And then we made this model of clocks that I'll share an image of that, that is actually behind you we have some of the discs. I could pull one over.
00:37:15Frazier: Sure.
00:37:16HG Solomon: Okay. I'll try not to knock anything over.
00:37:19Frazier: Yeah.
00:37:21HG Solomon: Okay. You should have had this ready to go. I'll get the cosmos one. Okay. Let's see this up. Okay. I'll just show this one.
00:37:39Frazier: Yeah.
00:37:42HG Solomon: There's several discs, but I'll just show this cosmos one, because with the cosmos one, you can really see when it rotates that it has these powdered specimens inside of them. And they start--it's kind of cool, I think, how it like moves. And, so each one of these lights up and is powered, but it's also controlled by an AI. So it's controlled by a program that we wrote that takes into account, it's monitoring all of these different discs. So imagine the cosmos: it's spinning, but you barely notice it. Covid is spinning and it's, it's moving quite rapidly. This all exhibited at the La Jolla Historical Society. And then the following year, actually during the same exhibition, was it the same exhibition? It was, we made another version of it because it toured China and it—
00:38:42Frazier: Oh, wow.
00:38:43HG Solomon: --it was cool because at the time we had two Chinese students who were in instrumental to the development of the project on the Data Lab, Ji Young, and that's her first name, and also, Lee who's Ziwei Lee, and he goes by Lee and Ji Young is now, she's a PhD student at the University of Dallas, at the University of Texas in Dallas. And she also got her master's at USC during the pandemic. So this project was really formative for students and the students, especially those two students because of their background in, I think, you know, design coming from China, but also design that integrates planets in some ways. Ji Young had done some work across designing with different kinds of calendars for one of my, one of the class projects. Anyway, they really informed the project. Kodi Gerrittsen also worked on the project, and she now runs the Makerspace on campus. So she, she was, Kodi was instrumental in developing the Data Stacks as well. And so no, all three of the them were, because the Data Stacks opened the year after the pandemic, we, it was ready to open in March of the pandemic year, and then we sus--it was up, but the official opening happened a year later, almost, I think.
00:40:32Frazier: Yeah. And, as you work on these projects, I think it's evident that you're comfortable and you have a lot of experience working with AI. As the university kind of transitions to using more AI, are there any insights or things that we need to think about as we kind of go into this new age?
00:40:57HG Solomon: Definitely, yes. Thanks for asking that question. So that project, allochronic cycles, allochronic is a word that means when geological epochs are out of sync or when something's out of sync with its geological epoch. And we started to think that, wow, allochronic, that's what we humans are, we're out of sync with our geology and the Earth. And so is AI. AI is making advanced decisions that is having an impact on the planet. So one of the things that the AIL and allochronic cycles did is there were all of these spinning discs, and the AI represented as a screen. So we always have a visual representation of this program that is graphically moving across the screen. So you have--and in this case, the AI is a replica of the cycles. So you can see these discs spinning, but at the same time, what it's doing is it's looking at the current carbon emissions on the planet, which you can get in real time. So if the AI is collecting that for the day and each day projects out--
00:42:07Frazier: Wow.
00:42:07HG Solomon: --when the Earth will no longer be habitable if the current carbon emissions are maintained.
00:42:14Frazier: Yeah.
00:42:15HG Solomon: And so then each day of the clock is the future of--is the day of the clock is like the next hundred to three hundred years.
00:42:28Frazier: Yeah.
00:42:29HG Solomon: Every day is the Earth's future. And at a certain point in the day, everything stops. And that's when the AI shuts down the clock and says, you know, at this point, the allochronic has happened. Like nothing is in sync. The carbon emissions have made life on Earth no longer possible. As we know it, life on earth as we know it. So that was kind of a challenging--a challenge to AI as well. Even though AI is given this task, it's a predictive task, the question is, really can we make a technology that does take into account the needs of the planet? Our next big project, well, we've had a quite a few projects since then, but we had a commission in the northern forest of Finland. And this was just this past year, we went to the Boreal Forest at the border between Finland and Russia and the North. And we were embedded at a research station, the Oulanka Research Station. And working with scientists who are so dedicated. And I always think of scientists as dedicated. Anyone who is doing research, longitudinal research is doing the same thing for thirty years. That takes so much focus. And most of these scientists, they're coming back--they were for many, many decades coming back to the cold, to the permafrost.
00:44:02Frazier: Yeah.
00:44:04HG Solomon: Looking, looking--the Boreal Forest actually wasn't permafrost, but in the winter months, looking at their sensors and getting their readings. Now this research station is year long, and they have longitudinal studies and they upkeep these data sets. So one of our goals was to think about how can we use these data sets that are asking questions about temperature and individual species and soil responses to climate change? How can we incorporate that into an AI? And we started to get our own signals. We had started doing this when we worked with a mushroom colony. We, we started getting signals from fungi for another project where we attempted communication with fungi, and that exhibited in Brazil.
00:44:54Frazier: Yeah.
00:44:55HG Solomon: And this project was creating, using the forest itself, the whole--imagine if the boreal forest, the network of forest were the model for the AI. Instead of a human neural network being the model for computer machine, computer processing or machine thinking, what if it's the forest? And the question for that project was really, does a forest make good decisions? Does it make better decisions than humans? Can humans make decisions like a forest? So I, I think for me, my role, as an artist is what many of the artists do here in this department. We look at an issue, we examine it critically, and then we offer other avenues for society. And it's--the artwork is meant as a question mark. It's meant as fodder for thinking and hopefully will propel new directions.
00:46:09Frazier: It's very compelling. It's kind of, looking at AI, I think in a very unique way, a new perspective. I think many in education and elsewhere, it's just like a simple tool that people use and I think a few people even know, like the impact of AI, you know, on the environment. So this is really, really cool. As an educator, how have you used AI in your art classes?
00:46:37HG Solomon: That's a great question. I have had individual students who use AI to generate projects. And part of my own requirement is that they contextualize and discuss what that means, what is the, the use of the tool. I am looking at and trying to develop a new curricular focus on AI and data visualization, where along with Cesar Baio and his wife in Brazil--is an AI specialist--named Livia Rubeck. And I am hoping to develop a curricular module with them that examines data sets and methods for mitigating bias in AI by eliminating bias in data sets. So it's a, that is Livia's expertise is examining and identifying bias in AI. Examples of that could be simply that, a whole gender is discluded.
00:47:58Frazier: Yeah.
00:47:59HG Solomon: So then the results and our understanding of the AI or the decisions aren't going to be as accurate and certainly won't be representative. So I'm curious, I'm not sure how that will play out in the classroom, but that is something I'm currently embarking on, and that I expect will be a year-long study with ideally implementation in the spring.
00:48:29Frazier: Okay.
00:48:31HG Solomon: So check back.
00:48:34Frazier: Definitely.
00:48:35HG Solomon: In a hundred years. I'll give you the next--no.
00:48:39Frazier: Yeah. And considering that you are, working in the Art Department, are there any faculty that you'd like to review as being, you know, formative in your journey or impacting your work?
00:48:57HG Solomon: Definitely. I think there are--there is the, my particular colleague, David Avalos, who was a resistant mentor of mine. I dragged him into taking on that role--
00:49:14Frazier: That is funny.
00:49:14HG Solomon: --and then he became an obstinate mentor, a willing mentor. So he's somebody who really--like I mentioned at the very beginning of this interview, David Avalos is a Chicano artist, very important in the history of border art in Southern California, who has brought--married critical thinking, teaching, and art making within his practice. As a colleague, he really, you know, he knows how to ask the hard questions. And that's sometimes what we have to do.
00:49:57Frazier: Yeah.
00:50:02HG Solomon: With one another, we have to ask, how is what you're making--is what you are making, doing what you wanted to do in the world? And how do you adjust or work harder even? And so I have enjoyed my conversations with him as a model for thinking about my art practice. He has worked in an art collective and did so very thoughtfully with the Border Art Collective. That experience has been really important to how he thinks about the arts. And it has validated many of us in the department in our own work that is collaborative. Oftentimes when you go to different areas of the arts, perhaps the single master artist is celebrated. And we are, many of us in this department say, I'm thinking about the Cognate Collective, which is Misael Diaz's Collective. Professor Misael Diaz with, lecturer Amy Sanchez, who's also on campus. They create work together and sometimes they teach together. And that kind of collaborative making and thinking is pretty formative. It can generate something bigger than the individual's vision. And so David has supported that. I would also say that colleagues in the--and I should say too, that, Misael as a new colleague during the pandemic--I think just before the pandemic he joined our department--has also carried on that tradition of working within a collective, in a really exciting way.
00:52:19Frazier: So thinking just in practice, how do you like forge relationships with other departments? Like how do you network as a faculty. If other people you know, on campus wanted to create an interdisciplinary project?
00:52:37HG Solomon: I think it sometimes it's about asking a question that's interesting across disciplines. So you Judit Hersko has done so. She started working with--she's an art professor here who worked with she physics professors. And the physics professors, I always think of them as the other artists because they're asking these big questions that maybe are unanswerable and maybe it's the quest that becomes very engaging. As opposed to always having the practical answer.
00:53:14Frazier: Yep.
00:53:18HG Solomon: But I have found that the scientists across campus are very open to collaboration, and that's so cool. We have some new scientists who are in the microbiology and biological sciences, like Dr. Carlos Luna Lopez and Dr. Erika Díaz-Almeyda, among many others who are just kind of intrepid explorers. And so they're looking at the world--
00:53:50Frazier: Yeah.
00:53:52HG Solomon: --through their own interdisciplinary lens already. So to tap into similar questions, to ask questions together from different angles, then just those initial discussions of questioning builds a framework for questioning together, and ideally bringing in students and having something bigger happen because you have input and expertise from different areas.
00:54:16Frazier: Okay. Well, thank you for letting me interview you today. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
00:54:24HG Solomon: Yeah. Yes, I would say that the--that trajectory of art and science, there are other avenues that happen and it's, there aren't only--there isn't only one method for collaborating. And I think another, so Judit Hersko has done that. Kristine Diekman, who also retired, she did that. I mentioned that Deborah Small was a collaborator across botany and indigenous practices and photography. So we--I think there's all of these different ways of thinking and working together. And that--I think if I had one, just to tie this whole long statement back to our very, your very first question about what brought me to CSUSM and that I had recalled, it was really the interdisciplinarity of the school. That is what persists. That ability to work across disciplines. I really hope, I think it's been the hope of all faculty who work here because it allows for a lot of freedom. When you are not, I wanna--maybe shackled is too strong a word--but siloed also another strong word, but when you don't have those restrictions, there are many more possibilities. So I really hope that our students feel that we have the--and that the community feels that. We have a lot of majors that are designed for cross-disciplinary explorations. So we have--the new Data Science major takes an art class--
00:56:15Frazier: Oh wow.
00:56:16HG Solomon: --the environmental studies, the environmental studies students, those majors can take several different art classes that focus on art and science. The liberal studies students who are going to be the future educators--
00:56:28Frazier: Yeah.
00:56:29HG Solomon: --do get a grounding in the arts, which is so important for K-12 teaching. So I just, I'm excited to be in a place where exploration is key.
00:56:41Frazier: Very cool. Well, it was wonderful talking to you today. I appreciate our time together and thank you for contributing to the oral history project.
00:56:53HG Solomon: Thank you. I hope it's an all right contribution. Thanks for having me.
00:57:02Frazier: Yeah. Definitely.
