Art and science collaborations can lead to some of the most insightful, creative, and beautiful reflections on the human experience. Faherty strives to let creativity lead her scientific career as much as she lets logic direct it. As such she has engaged in numerous projects involving artists, writers, and musicians that seek to shed a unique outlook on the world we live in. Listed below are several projects or collaborations of note.
For three years running Faherty has collaborated with David Bernard , Music Director of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and the Massapequa Philharmonic, on orchestra performances that have an Astronomical theme. Bernard is known for his innovative “Inside Out” orchestra performances where the audience sits among the performers. As an added benefit to the experience, Bernard chose musical pieces which tied to an Astronomy theme. In the first year, Faherty and Bernard collaborated on Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé Suite #2 as well as Brahms’ Second Symphony. Faherty and Bernard spent hours together listening to the pieces, discussing the Astronomical connection and deciding upon content to share and visuals to show during the performance. In year 2 and 3 of their collaboration, Faherty and Bernard created an immersive program around Holst’s Planets. In these productions, Faherty would introduce each planet before the orchestra would perform and then provide curated visual content. Reception of these performances has been extremely positive and Faherty and Bernard plan on continuing the collaboration.
In August 2017 Faherty participated in the LIGO Art of Science project which brings together 6 pairs of NYC scientists and artists for a 6-month collaboration to create works that explore the exchange between two seemingly disparate disciplines. Faherty was paired with writer and creator Janani Balasubramanian. Their common love for the Liu Cixin science fiction trilogy “The Three Body Problem” was the start of a long and fruitful collaboration. Through the 6 month LIGO collaboration, Faherty and Balasubramanian collaborated on a card game that used unusual properties of brown dwarfs as the theme. Their work was displayed at an exhibition in Littlefields in Brooklyn in February of 2018.
Balasubramanian has since become a full member of the BDNYC research group and holds the title of Artist in Residency for the team. Upcoming projects include a novel where one of the lead characters is a brown dwarf, a VR experience utilizing opensource created visuals, AI created poetry, and an immersive audience participation project.
In 2018 Faherty and multimedia designer Kate Freer collaborated on an art installation at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. The project was a part of the 2018 ACCESS Space Exploration festival which is an annual project that fosters collaborations between artist and scientist pairs to create a unique, collaborative and more accessible view of scientific research to museum-goers. Freer’s expertise in projection work was a natural fit to Faherty’s extensive experience in visualizing astronomical data. As part of their collaboration, Faherty and Freer brought back to life the New York Hall of Science’s planetarium space. They created a visual tour of the nearby Milky Way structure and complimented it with an augmented reality experience.
In 2020 Faherty collaborated with multidisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya on her public art series celebrating women and science. After several conversations Phingbodhipakkiya came up with a design inspired by brown dwarf research. The mural was drawn and painted on a medical center building in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The local community was invited to come out and help paint the piece. The mural can be seen at 650 Fulton St. Brooklyn, NY 11217.
The description for the mural is: A Cluster of Enigmas is a vibrant AR-enabled mural pairing a mysterious class of cosmological entities with the luminous, diverse women of New York City. The mural’s scientific underpinnings are drawn from the research of Dr. Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Faherty studies brown dwarfs, a substellar object about the size of Jupiter, but up to 75 times more massive. Too small to be considered stars, brown dwarfs still get hot enough to fuse elements like deuterium and, if you could see them, they would appear in two main classes of red(L) and blue(T). The redder brown dwarfs are covered in exotic clouds of corundum and silicates and the bluer to magenta brown dwarfs are dominated by methane gas but also have salt and water ice clouds. Though a ubiquitous part of stellar and planetary systems, their hybrid properties and complex atmospheres make them tricky research subjects, earning them the nickname “misfits of the Galaxy”.
