IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2008 - 6

Amperes
Current Affairs from Around the World

Entertainment
and Encouragement
Hollywood movies and efforts overseas help uplift engineering

Humanizing
Engineering

and to host a filmmaker reception and
award ceremony that was attended by
Sundance top brass.

Sundance and science meld

Tinkering with an Idea

Sleep Dealer director Rivera was one of
the participants in the "On Invention"
panel, which proved to be as provocative as his prize-winning film. Fellow
directors Paul Schneider and Amy Redford as well as actor Alan Alda, science
journalist and moderator Ira Flatow,
Disney Imagineering chief scientist

PHOTO COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES

Wait a minute-science? You may not
have heard, but science is now a regular
player in the Sundance scene-from
films, to panels, to private "name-on-thelist-only" receptions. Sundance 2008 featured a number of films with science and
technology themes, including the
US$20,000 Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation prizewinner
Sleep Dealer. Writer/director Alex Rivera's film
depicts a dystopian future
in which neural-node technology and robotics have
taken on a key role in the
American workplace.
The Sloan Foundation
awards its prize to a feature film that focuses on
science or technology as
a theme or depicts a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. Under
the guidance of program director
Doron Weber, the Foundation also
partnered with Sundance to present
the panel discussion "On Invention"
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2008.925761

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

Benedict Schwegler, and scientific
author Evan Schwartz joined Rivera on
the panel. The Sundance catalogue
promised that the "assembly of scientists and filmmakers would tinker with
the idea of what it means to have an
inventive mind." The tinkering that

SUMMER 2008

followed explored the premise that science and the arts are not of separate
worlds but in actuality intersect and
resemble each other quite strikingly. In
addition, the inhabitants of each realm
can benefit from the approaches and
experiences of the other.
From the process of "percolating"
that precedes the "Eureka!" moment
that both the artist and scientist experience, to the marketplace gatekeepers
waiting at the end of the creative
process, the experiences of the film
artist and inventive scientist are
remarkably similar. Filmmaker Paul
Schneider described a background that
included art school and a preoccupation with "making things." Various
panelists described an underlying
appetite or perhaps even a type of
addiction to the creative process that
takes over in either discipline. Both
fields, it was noted, involve a playing
field of collaboration and thievery.
Actor Alan Alda described the
improv technique of
"inviting in the variables" and being open to
the possibilities as the
My Name Is
Earl's Jason
essence of invention and
Lee was just
discovery. Alda, also
one of the
known as the host of the
many stars
that made the
PBS series Scientific
trip to Park
American Frontiers, has
City, Utah, for
taken his theories and
the Sundance
Film Festival
put some of them into
in January.
practice at the University
of Southern California
Viterbi School of Engineering, Los Angeles.
Offering to help students sharpen their
communication skills, Alda engaged
them in theatrical improv games. The
students pitched their ideas before and
after engaging in the games and had
remarkable improvement as a result of
the techniques.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2008