The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, a 2023 exhibition at the Block Museum of Art, urges visitors to remember the human meaning hidden within scientific discoveries. The installation marks the culmination of Robleto’s five-year engagement as Northwestern Engineering’s inaugural Artist-at-Large, where he explored conversations and collaborations with scientists and engineers around ethics and empathy in scientific fields.

This partnership between the Block Museum and the McCormick School of Engineering gave the artist an open “hall pass” to learn from, collaborate with, and question scientists, engineers, and experts from across the University.

For Robleto, artists and scientists share a common aspiration: to increase the sensitivity of their observations. Throughout the history of scientific invention, instruments like the cardiograph and telescope have extended the reach of perception from the tiniest stirrings of the human body to the farthest reaches of space. In his prints, sculptures, and video and sound installations, Robleto contemplates the emotional significance of these technologies, bringing us closer to the latent traces of life buried in the scientific record.

The exhibit, Robleto says, is inspired by Ann Druyan, a member of the 1972 team that placed a golden record on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts. Druyan’s job as creative director was to produce an audio portrait of the planet, adding sounds such as crickets chirping and wolves howling. In a radical step, she also included recordings of her own heartbeat and brain waves, wondering whether aliens could eventually read her mind if they came across one of the Voyager probes. In addition to history and facts about life on Earth, Druyan also “smuggled love on board the Voyager” thinking about her recent engagement to scientist Carl Sagan.

Photography by Jason Brown