Céline Boisserie-Lacroix, Aurore Young, Caroline Delétoille, Shelly Rosenblum

Art+Science Collaborations: Conversation 1

This conversation between Céline Boisserie-Lacroix, Caroline Delétoille, Aurore Young, and Shelly Rosenblum took place throughout October-November 2024 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Céline Boisserie-Lacroix: I’m a philosopher, specializing in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My work focuses on emotions. My PhD thesis was specifi-cally about the relationship between emotions and rationality. Additionally, I’m interested in the connections and gaps between contemporary arts and sciences.

Aurore Young: I’m a PhD student in quantum physics at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris. My thesis is about quantum simulations, trying to understand why some atoms interact like they do. So that’s what I do, mainly in my lab time and a bit of theoretical things in my free time. I met Caroline during my math-ematics studies before going to an engineering school and working in program-ming for the video game industry. Ultimately, I wanted to return to fundamental sciences, and that’s what motivated the next phase of my career.

Caroline Delétoille: I’m a visual artist. My work focuses on memory, the traces it leaves, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. I work a lot with painting, using different mediums. For this project, I have turned more towards instal-lation to create an immersive atmosphere, which we want to be a true sensory experience.

Shelly Rosenblum: I’m the curator of academic programs at the Belkin, a contem-porary art gallery here at the University of British Columbia. My own circuitous path took me through a PhD in English literature. I have a longstanding interest in thinking about US print and visual cultures, specifically changes in technologies of seeing in the 19th century.

I’m really interested in the terms that you each use that come from your own disciplines. When you bring them together, they seem like the same lexicon, but maybe they index very different things, and I wonder if that’s something you address in your work together. For example, some of the words that I’ve heard today in our conversations, such as surface and depth, the way we think about past, history, or memory, or more obvious terms, such as uncertainty or entanglement. I’m really curious about the question of communication among all of you. Do the same terms that you use index the same things or different things?

Caroline Delétoille: We have had so many discussions about the term “analogy” itself. For Celine and for me, and even for a broader audience, it just means “com-parison” in a broad sense. But for physicists, it has a much stricter definition. This led to some heated discussions about which direction to take. In fact, even the definition of our subject became a point of friction.

Céline Boisserie-Lacroix: I approach the question of memory and emotions, as well as terms related to the idea of experience, from my philosophical perspec-tive. As Caroline just mentioned, the question of analogy was at the heart of our