By Katherine Adams
When they were passing out the curiosity gene, Dr. Aisen Caro Chacin must have been at the very front of the line.
Chacin is the lead in UTMB’s Medical Prototyping Laboratory and assistant professor at the John Sealy School of Medicine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sculpture, a master’s degree in design and technology and a doctorate in human informatics. And she manages to apply all her skills to what she does both in the laboratory and out.
For Chacin, art is a kind of physical philosophy, a way to physically ask questions. Her work’s focus is about the relationship between humans and machines.
“Bioart is at the frontier of technology and biology,” she said. “Artwork can contribute to knowledge as much as any scientific inquiry, but its open definition allows for context to reframe the work itself. I’ve found that when I create a prototype for a device that doesn’t work out, I will save it as artwork. It’s not always a masterpiece that’s been conceptually thought through, but I tend to find beauty in the mistakes of the process.”
Chacin’s trajectory is certainly unusual.
“Artists have a hard time surviving, so I’ve been invited to speak at other universities to inspire other artists to venture out of the world of art into other disciplines or work environments to enrich their work and become more fearless about what is possible for them,” she said.
“My work in and out of the lab falls into biomedical engineering, performance art, bioart and device art, which is a movement that started in Japan with my Ph.D advisor, Hiroo Iwata, who is an artist, engineer, and one of the fathers of haptics,” she said. “My art informs my medical devices, and my devices inform my work. I try to not separate my interests as passion is my driving force for excelling in my work.”
Chacin added that some parts of her art were more difficult to integrate with her medical practice, such as making experimental music.
“But lately, I have been bringing science back into my performance art and then moving it back into my medical work,” she said.
Supporting a friend with art and science
Chacin’s love of art, infused with science and technology, was particularly evident in 2024 as she supported a friend suffering from ALS.
She used her experimental music to reinvigorate the life of her friend, Robert Pearson, an experimental pianist, after he was placed in hospice care.
“I made an emergency-use ventilator during the pandemic and soon after the AI boom, I started to think how this would affect our relationships to critical care machines now developing their own agency," she said. "This led me to explore this concept conceptually and philosophically through performance art as ‘Tethered: End-of-Life, an AI Opera.’”
Chacin asked Pearson to be the main character, as he was completely dependent on critical care, and he agreed, using his pupil on an eye-tracking pad.
“We used some of the poetry he’d written with his eyes, and I collaborated with artists Lena Ortega, Ben Siive, Emily Ayer and artist HC-(M)," she said. "We created a quadrophonic, 3D audio immersive environment by placing speakers around him, and asked him where he wanted to travel."
Pearson said he’d like to travel to a remote Greek island, so they created the sounds to allow him to imagine that he was there. One speaker had the sounds of waves crashing on the shore, another displayed Greek music in the distance, and the sound of seagulls were made to move around him from speaker to speaker simulating an immersive virtual reality, taking him from the hospice to the beach with sound.
“I brought my piano and played for him, and I will continue with that project, although Robert has passed away,” she said. “The project bifurcates, the opera continues, exploring the human-machine symbiotic relationship in critical care, and we are hoping to start a study about the effect of 3D-immersive audio virtual reality interventions for people in hospice care by measuring the change in levels of self-administered pain medication.”
Changing the environment of hospice care
She thinks of that opera as a way to keep her friend’s memory alive.
“It’s a way to investigate something strange, being kept alive by an electronic device, our dependency and co-evolution with machines” she continued. “There are questions about what life is, and I hope it’s inspiring to people who could change the environment of hospice care.
"We should question the media we give these patients, not just the chemicals," Chacin said. "As an artist, I believe media has a huge impact on our experience and well-being, and it is an opportunity to combine these methodologies in art and medicine.”
Chacin said her biggest impetus to translate more art into care is finding out how and why it’s possible to make a person either cry or smile with a song is a way to find out what strings of the soul are being touched.
“Immersing people into different realities as a mode of care, using sound, art, media and the modulation of frequencies and curtailing reality so that a person can experience something else is worth studying more,” she said. “Your body processes new information and takes you out of your current reality, which could be illness. As an artist, listening to music in different contexts can give you a different sensation. We know this is true, but we need to study it more.”
And she doesn’t consider her music to be “just” experimental.
“My work is experimental experimental,” she said. “Lately, my concerts incorporate the sonification of scientific experiments, my instruments are a piano and maybe a blender, the guitar, a synthesizer, a lab mixer, a leaf blower and a kettle. I will amplify the process DNA extraction on stage, making the work conceptual, sonically based and performative.
"I gave a concert in Montreal amplifying the sound of the curator using his CPAP machine," she said. "The textures of the sounds are strange, not perfectly melodic or however rhythmic, which does not necessarily make for glorious music. That’s why it’s experimental.”
Although it’s certainly easier to study efficacy within the bounds of scientific inquiry, Chacin said it’s much more of a challenge to study art because it’s completely subjective. Still, it’s possible to measure how much less medication patients might need because they’ve been taken out of their perceived environment of pain and the reminders of what’s happening to them.
“Then, we can take that information and go back into science,” she said. “The separation of art and science can be questioned, but curiosity, drive and a passion for understanding materiality—that is the domain of both. It's a case of the precursor of science, natural philosophy.”
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Photos courtesy of Dr. Aisen Chacin
Left: Patient Robert Pearson, who has since passed away, is immersed in the sights, sounds and sensations of a remote Greek island.
Right: Dr. Aisen Chacin's work explores the human-machine symbiotic relationship in critical care.
Listen to Robert Pearson’s music: https://robertpearson.bandcamp.com/
More about Chacin's work here: http://aisencaro.com/