BEHIND THE WILL is a video series that gives viewers an inside look into what drives our faculty’s research, teaching, and creativity at Michigan State University’s College of Arts & Letters.

MSU Professor Adam Brown is an internationally recognized, conceptually driven artist whose work incorporates art and science hybrids that include robotics, molecular chemistry, and emerging technologies that take the form of installation, interactive objects, video, performance, and photography.

Brown’s creative research has been informed by a background in Intermedia, a philosophy that provides a framework for breaking down and combining different models of thought and bringing together disparate disciplines, leading to the establishment of new forms of research and creative activity.

Brown’s recent creative undertaking, Origins of Life: Experiment #1, is a working scientific experiment (using simulated lightning, heat, and primordial gases) that is placed in an art context. This installation is intended to express a shared communal experience of science as a cultural, sensory, sensual and aesthetic experience, breaking down perceptions and stereotypes of how science works and what art is through a dialectic transformation of seeming opposites.

The project is in collaboration with Robert Root-Bernstein, a MacArthur Fellow Scientist and Physiology Professor at MSU, and Maxine Davis, an Atmospheric Chemistry Professor at MSU.