Early morning, 5:30am, cup of strong PG Tips in hand I step outside Middlebrook D and snap a picture of the landscape, writ-large, with my i-phone. The moon full, or almost full, up above the marine layer covering the pacific, pushing against the green-gold hills. But enough of that -- I start reading an interview between the nature artist Alfio Bonanno and John Grande (JG) for my project on the natural and synthetic in chemistry, underlining and jotting marginalia as I read: traces in the landscape, artifice, nostalgia, estrangement.

The art of doing nothing   On arriving at Djerassi, I welcomed leaving productivity behind. I’d worked hard to jettison my usual obligations: teaching medical students, supervising residents, seeing patients and hardest of all to throw off, the editing tasks I normally do on a daily basis for our academy’s medical journal. So I was much reassured that I needed, while I was here for a delicious, unencumbered month, to do nothing.  

I'm having trouble fathoming that a whole year has gone by since the launch and first edition of Scientific Delirium Madness (SDM#1), the month-long artist/scientist residency hosted by the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in partnership with Leonardo/ISAST. Nevertheless, here we are!  I am thrilled to report that SDM#2 is indeed starting off with a bang -- and the excitement will continue, if the myriad all-over-the-map conversations among the participants during dinner last night are an indication of the energy and ideas we can expect to hear about over the coming weeks.

Ethnography is the field that turned my interest towards games in academia. As a lifelong veteran of MMORPGs, the concept of being a participant-researcher in this space was something I could really appreciate. One of the tenets of ethnography, as stated by Paul Dourish in Ways of Knowing in HCI, is that “ethnography directs our attention towards the importance of participation not just as a natural and unavoidable consequence of going somewhere, but as the fundamental point.”