An ongoing series of videos by a Rhode Island School of Design professor is highlighting what a partnership between the arts and the sciences could mean for inquiry in both fields.
Dennis Hlynsky, an artist who works primarily with animation and video, produces time-lapse videos that observe different examples of wildlife, such as birds, ants or fish, in their day-to-day lives. The works track their movement with settings in Adobe After Effects, stamping their paths across the videos' backdrops in what often appears to be a literal swarm of the creatures.
"I'm not making a film," Hlynsky told Mashable. "I'm conducting an observation over time and these videotapes are pieces of that."
The ongoing project developed as an way for Hlynsky to continue making art while raising his son, but he soon discovered that it had a wide appeal and generated many different interpretations. This, Hlynsky believes, points to our unique ability to make sense of chaos.
His videos let the viewer separate the individual behavior of each creature from what appears to be a chaotic group. While a flock of birds might seem impossible to comprehend as anything but an unwieldy pack to the naked eye, when seen in one of the time lapses it can appear almost graceful. It seems it is this ability to observe phenomena at such an in-depth level — to see order emerge from such complexity — that has unexpectedly turned the videos into visual data as well as art and allowed them to hold cross-disciplinary significance.
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In an aesthetic sense the videos present myriad complexities and patterns that can be dissected or perhaps simply admired.
"The work exists in the imagination of the person who's looking at it because it's the human prerogative to create narratives out of things that are puzzling that you don't understand," Hlynsky said.
But the visualizations also raise many different questions — and provide a platform for research — about their subjects, according to Neal Overstrom, director of RISD's Nature Lab, which examines patterns and structure in nature. They may be able to help scientists answer questions like how certain creatures maintain a specific distance from one another, for example. It is queries like this that are often difficult to answer without being able to track the path of an individual creature — a hurdle that Hlynsky's videos could conceivably help clear.
"This is an example of artistic inquiry and scientific inquiry existing in the same medium," Overstrom told Mashable. "Art and science are complementary modes of inquiry — they help us understand the world."
Hlynsky seeks places where wildlife congregates at consistent times when choosing where he will film. Sometimes he's also inspired on the spur of the moment by something he observes in his day-to-day life such as by ants at a picnic.
The raw footage is captured on a Lumix GH2 — Hlynsky typically shoots for the same video on multiple days, a process which could take more than a month to complete. Once the footage is collected, he imports it into After Effects where he primarily uses effects to get the desired result. The final video renders for about an hour for every minute of footage.

Starlings at Sunset from Dennis Hlynsky on Vimeo.
This symbiotic relationship between the arts and the sciences is reflected in a movement being driven by RISD. STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is quickly gaining notoriety and national support, but the New England school is touting an initiative called STEM to STEAM. The movement seeks to encourage the integration of art and design into research, education and the workplace in addition to traditional STEM fields.
"It explores complex questions and yields more innovative and creative outcomes," Overstrom, who works to further the initiative, said.
STEM to STEAM presents artists and scientists more as partners than as professionals who have nothing to gain from each other. It is by working together that they can think about their work from different perspectives while perhaps also making it more accessible or relevant to broader audiences — a feat that Hlynsky's work appears to have achieved.
"It gives you a way where you can more reliably study [the subjects] and yet at the same time you can also appreciate the elegance of," Carol Strohecker, RISD's vice provost for academic affairs who oversees STEAM-type teaching at the school, said.
Hlynsky's work is hardly the only example of this partnership. Even major brands such as Apple, more technological by trade, tries to incorporate an artistic component into its products.
"I think that the artist can play a really critical role in serving as that person that takes care of the interstitial," Hlynsky said. "This work of mine has allowed me to become very interested in the place of art in the sciences."
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