Learning from the Cornell Box

Abstract

The Cornell Box serves as a visual emblem of the divide between arts and sciences first articulated by C.P. Snow over 40 years ago. To historians of American art, "Cornell Box" refers to the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell; in the world of computer graphics the Cornell Box is the evaluative environment in which the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics refined its radiosity rendering algorithms. Considering both boxes with reference to the perceptual thought of James J. Gibson allows us to generate a site for collaboration at the intersection of light and art for designers and computer scientists devoted to the development of new digital media.

Snow's Gap

Although Art Center College of Design and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are located no more than 5 miles apart in Pasadena, California, the institutions have over the years developed highly specialized academic cultures. A few students take advantage of the opportunity to cross-register for classes, but otherwise we share no infrastructure; we lack even a common academic calendar. Recently, however, the presidents of both institutions established an initiative to build a new relationship that would include project-based collaboration. Rather than inaugurating the process with a large investment or a new interdisciplinary study center, the schools have chosen to begin by researching existing relationships that have formed between students and faculty at the two institutions. Despite the obstacles, students from our schools have met and conducted informal collaborative projects. In one example, an input device for a Caltech doctoral student's gesture-based 3D drawing program was developed using the silicone casting techniques of one of our graduate design students. We hope to take what we learn from our research and build new institutional structures that will foster this sort of give and take.

In the summer of 2000 we began our first joint effort, and the experience was illuminating. Caltech and Art Center applied jointly for a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to fund post-graduate fellowships in entrepreneurship that would team students from our institutions. Some of our counterparts at Caltech, however, thought of design as something to be applied near the end of the product development process: there was lots of talk of "form factors." At Art Center, we have been trying to move away from the sort of understanding that reduces design to a thin veneer of "look and feel." Conversely, I have spoken with Caltech researchers who resent being treated by their collaborative partners as lacking in creativity and useful only when harnessed for their programming skills. I am getting tired of quoting C.P. Snow, but it is clear to me that his 40-year-old thesis is still valid. Artistic and scientific communities still fail to communicate adequately, and this lack of communication is reinforced by educational structures. "Closing the gap between our cultures," Snow wrote, "is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense, as well as the most practical" [1]. But I also firmly believe that this "clashing point," as Snow puts it, offers "creative chances" [2] to spark the development of new ways of thinking and seeing.

Besides developing new institutional structures to address this gap, I propose a complementary academic practice. A discipline devoted to navigating the gap between art and science would be of value if it helps us better understand the creative processes embedded in artistic and scientific artifacts and shows us the way to better science and design. As a means of outlining the way in which this practice could be pursued, let us consider the Cornell Box. Mention "Cornell Box" to art aficionados and they are likely to conjure up an image of Untitled (Medici Prince) (Fig. 1) or another of the shadow boxes of American artist Joseph Cornell. To computer-graphics researchers, on the other hand, "Cornell Box" refers to the evaluative environment in which the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics developed its radiosity rendering algorithms (Figs 2 and 3).

Fig. 1.

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Medici Prince), construction, 43.8 X 27.6 X 11.4 cm, ca. 1942-1952. Cornell's...