CONNY AERTS

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What are your views on the importance of the humanities? How do you communicate to students who aren’t in STEM the importance of astronomy?

CONNY AERTS

Everybody is interested in the Universe, so communicating about it is easy, no matter the background of the audience. These pictures of planets, comets, stars, galaxies, etc., trigger so much imagination that one gets the attention and interest immediately. The beauty of our Cosmos moves all.

Asteroseismology is the study of starquakes. Just as geophysicists use earthquakes to study what is inside our own planet, we use starquakes to learn what is going on inside stars. Why is this important? Because we want to know how stars and their planets get born, live their life, and die. This happens over billions of years so we cannot “wait” to see it happening. Starquakes allow us to age the stars and do the research on a human lifetime. We had and will have soon space missions dedicated to hunt for exoplanets and study starquakes, and so we made a major step ahead in our research field.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

When did you realize you wanted to study stars?

AERTS

At age 10, although astronaut was my top aim at that stage. We need space missions to study starquakes, so I am constantly bridging the science community and the engineers of space agencies to define how to build those and get the maximum out of them while operating in space. Astronomy can only be done at international level so I work about half of the time abroad. This is a very appealing aspect of my profession: one gets to meet and needs to work with people from very different culture, age (read: experience), language, etc. So as I say often: we also have to do sociology together with the astronomy to get things done.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Which writers/teachers/friends supported you on your path to becoming an astronomer?

AERTS

My class mates at university. Within my family I kept my plan to become an astronomer secret, in order not to endanger it. The only reason why I was allowed to study mathematics at undergraduate level wat so become a teacher. When I started a PhD, I had my own money to reveal the plan I had in mind since secondary school.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What works do you recommend to your students? How do you What do you hope your students take away from your classes? What advice do you give them?

AERTS

Do what you like most, but above all: study where your interest lies. Curiosity should be the driver of study choices, nothing else. Admittedly, we can afford such an attitude because in our faculty of science, all students have a job prior to a diploma if they want to. We cannot serve the employment market as there are far too few STEM-ers. This will only increase in our technology-driven society. We need many more students in science & technology for our societal challenges and companies.

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Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

It's about, can you handle the complexity of these things and, with American Indians, it's overwhelming, for the American public, this terrible tragedy and seeing Indians as part of the 21st century. Seeing Indians who are engineers or contemporary artists at Biennales is hard for people becaue they're always thinking about (not always, but) many of the kind of people who go to our museum. They're coming from a place of guilt and also not knowing how to process things. And so to always see Indians as of the past, which is sort of what happens. We're only Indian as much as we're like our ancestors, is something the museum has always been trying to challenge. And, you know, it's difficult. This is not a good time for complexity and nuance. We're trying to flip the script from the idea of just tragedy, this terrible past, to say, American Indians are part of the 21st century doing all kinds of interesting things. And the connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep, and it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the opressor. It's much more complicated than that.

–PAUL CHAAT SMITH · ASSOCIATE CURATOR
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I actually assumed in graduate school that I would become a teacher and I've taught in a number of different universities, but it was working with art objects and seeing them in museums like the Metropolitan Museum or The Frick that made me want to go into museum work and ultimately become a curator. So when I was finishing my dissertation and had to think about a career, I applied to a lot of teaching jobs and there was one job that year in America in my specialized field, which was European sculpture, and I was very lucky. But a professional career is a bit of luck as well as predisposition, so I knew I wanted to work in museums, and I was lucky enough when
I was able to find my way here.

–IAN WARDROPPER · DIRECTOR
THE FRICK COLLECTION
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think there are certainly social aspects to this because, you know, whether painting a landscape or doing a conceptual piece or large sculpture, I think artists, who are all involved in this creative process, I always say they are almost like bellwethers. They pick up on trends, pick up on anxieties, pick up on things in the world almost before the rest of us do. And artists get up, eat their cornflakes, go to work. They really do. And it's this creative process, which as Chuck Close once debunked and said, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and work." It's not always inspiration, but another great quote of his is that he always, anytime he sees a lot of painting like going to a museum, he's always astonished by the transcendent moment when you realize that this is just colored dirt and pigment laid on the surface with what's arguably just a stick. There's such a metaphysical moment when these images are created on a surface. In three dimension, if you're talking about something that has reference in the natural world. In three dimension on a flat surface, it's kind of a head-scratcher to start. So great art has a transcendent moment.

–ALICIA LONGWELL · CHIEF CURATOR
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is. I think it's very helpful to know history. I don't believe that history can teach for the future, but history can give us another dimension, can make us wiser with more abilities to judge our present. Sometimes we think that we invented everything, but this is not true. The history of human thinking is very important, is very useful for us to know different thinking of other people. At the end of the day, multicultural civilization is also very helpful today. I know, for myself, for example, I concentrate on antiquity, but sometimes I work on other civilizations. Some months ago I organized an exhibition on a very famous Chinese emperor – Qianlong (1711-99). And through this opportunity, I studied a little about Chinese culture, and I found very exciting things. And I can compare these things with our Western civilization. All this is very fruitful because we open our eyes, and we are not going on only one track. There are different approaches in life and different interpretations of the world and of societies.

–DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS · DIRECTOR
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

The whole thing is to get them to feel like no matter where their background is from, the difficulty they have in their personal lives, the isolation that they feel in relationship to that, that within the art community they are embraced, they are welcomed. All they have to do is just keep getting better at it, but the community is there. I think that something we're all looking for is where we belong.

–ERIC FISCHL
ARTIST
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

When I first started acting, I came to Los Angeles for a one week job. I was with my dad and we went to a production of a play called Fences. And James Earl Jones was the star. And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small town New Mexico. I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African American man in Pittsburg and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at thirteen, fourteen years old about a world that I really knew nothing about. Not even from school, even, but certainly not this feeling empathy for this specific man and wife, and she was peeling potatoes on a rocking chair and monologing ire at his character. And it was so moving. I did think, even back then I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.

–NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER, MAGICIAN & SINGER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator. Gropius said the artist is an exalted craftsman. “In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art, but proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination." And Steve Sondheim said, "Art is craft, not inspiration." And Rilke mistrusted any artist's knowing participation in his own creative process.

–TONY WALTON
ART & THEATER DIRECTOR · COSTUME DESIGNER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process