This panel examines the intersection of visual art, film, science, and engineering in depicting space exploration and the environmental impact of extraction industries. Emphasizing the crucial collaboration between scientists, artists, and creative technologists, the discussion will address our understanding of the universe and humanity's role within it. Participants will explore pathways beyond the extraction economy and the climate crisis it has generated, examine the historical and future trajectories of energy infrastructure, and showcase cutting-edge technologies enabling artists to create artificial environments.

The conversation features David Delgado, Cultural Strategist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who will showcase some of the projects of the JPL Studio, including the Blended Worlds exhibition for Pacific Standard Time, and the role art plays in the scientific project; Katie Bouman, an Associate Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech and formerly a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope, which published the first picture of a black hole in April 2019, who will present her current work in computational imaging; and Brian R. Jacobson, Caltech’s Professor of Visual Culture, who will discuss the Huntington SoCal Edison photographs in the context of understanding the electric grid and the film industry’s place in it, as well as relationship to other industries, from oil and gas to Central Valley farming.

Katie Bouman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Caltech

Katie Bouman is a Rosenberg Scholar and Associate Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) and by courtesy in Electrical Engineering and Astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Her research focuses on computational imaging: designing systems that tightly integrate algorithm and sensor design, making it possible to observe phenomena previously difficult or impossible to measure with traditional approaches. Her working group at Caltech combines ideas from signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and physics to find and exploit hidden signals for both scientific discovery and technological innovation.

Prior to Caltech she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope, which published the first picture of a black hole in April of 2019. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017, a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 2011 and an S.M. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2013.

She is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, the Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award, the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, an Okawa Research Grant, Outstanding Recent Alumni Award for University of Michigan, a Caltech faculty teaching award, a finalist for the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, and a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize.

David Delgado, Cultural Strategist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 

David Delgado is a creative director, researcher, and curator who transforms scientific concepts into immersive installations. His work blends art and science to expand imagination and deepen our connection to the cosmos and one another. As a cultural strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he develops shared experiences that bring together the multidisciplinary & multicultural community of JPL as well as creates public works such as Blended Worlds, a collaboration with Getty PST: Art & Science Collide, exploring how tools of empathy and connectedness can expand the ways we relate to and care for the natural world.

For almost 20 years at JPL, David has shaped projects ranging from new mission proposals to public installations that inspire wonder. His career highlights include Visions of the Future, a NASA poster series imagining travel to real exoplanets; Orbit Pavilion, a sound sculpture that lets visitors hear NASA satellites passing overhead; and Metamorphosis, a mist-filled sculpture evoking the birth of a comet’s tail. David began at NASA leading Imagine Mars, a national initiative where students worked with NASA to design Mars habitats and express their solutions through the arts and humanities.

Brian R. Jacobson, Ph.D., Professor of Visual Culture, Caltech

Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is a historian of modern visual culture and media and their intersections with histories of science and technology. His research focuses on world making and the creation of artificial environments, from media architecture and visual representation to energy infrastructure, climate control, and terraforming.

He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015), a finalist for the Theater Library Association's Richard Wall Memorial Award. His edited volume, In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Film Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2021 issue of Representations. He is currently completing The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975.