Not many people can switch seamlessly between talking about the effects of centuries-old artwork and the way new forms of art use science to integrate themselves into the natural world. But Shawn Brixey can. And he can make you understand what he means, no matter the extent of your scientific knowledge.

Brixey is the co-founder of the Center for Digital and Experimental Media, commonly referred to as DXArts, a program at the University of Washington. He works every day to prove that art and science are not mutually exclusive — they are, indeed, inextricably intertwined in our psyche.

The journey to this position, one that challenges many beliefs about what is art and how it can be created, started at an early age for Brixey. His parents were television producers for the Grand Ole Opry; his mother was trained as a symphony cellist and his father as a Broadway actor.

This environment used new technology to capture people’s dreams and broadcast them to a wide audience, a process the 6-year-old Brixey equated with teleportation.

“My parents were very afraid that my siblings and I would have this dubious distinction of being wealthy, insulated by technology and somewhat distant from our bodies and nature,” Brixey explained.

To make sure this did not happen, his parents had the family live on a farm in the rural Midwest.

Brixey points out that this experience helped shape him in many ways, some unexpected.

“People still ask me why I never go on vacation much and I think it’s because of the work ethic from the farm,” Brixey said. “You leave for two weeks and all hell breaks loose. Nature’s taking back over and what it took you two years to do, it’s taken nature two weeks to undo.”

This is evident in his work too, according to colleagues. “The thing that immediately struck me about Shawn was his attention to detail; he won’t let you get away with skipping through anything,” said Jared Friend, who initially worked with Brixey in a year-long course on experimental video in DXArts and is now a member of the DXArts technical staff.

This upbringing helps explain Brixey’s unique take on the world and how it can and should be shaped.

“I was raised, I would say, in somewhat an extinct breed of extremely liberal Christian upbringing which is where art, science, music, philosophy, all of those were designed to challenge the mind of God,” Brixey said. “Doing so was the highest form of worship.”

These ideas can be seen in much of Brixey’s artwork. Instead of representing things in the world, many of them attempt to alter how people experience the world. Take, for example, the piece “Altamira.” It uses radio waves recorded from Pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radiation often in the form of radio waves) to create the patterns you see when you close your eyes. This is not artwork on your wall, but art in your body.

The combination of art and science did not come until Brixey had a breakthrough during art school at the Kansas City Art Institute.

“Even when I was 5 or 6 years old I could draw like I was in college. By the time I was in high school I could draw like I’d been training in the academy,” Brixey recounted.

He said his ability to draw was a gift of good hand-eye coordination.

“At that age you don’t know how to draw, you know how to draw from here,” Brixey said, pointing at his eyes. “But you don’t know how to draw from here,” he continued while gesturing at his heart.

When he entered art school his ability to render objects on paper put him ahead of his class and almost got him into trouble. Brixey explained how the teachers would take the 10 or 12 students they didn’t know what to do with — the “mavericks” — pile them into a bus and drop them off with a box of art supplies in a western Kansas wheat field.

Students were dropped off 10 miles apart and left with instructions. Painters were told to create the perfect line. Sculptors were told to create a perfect moment. Brixey was “really cock-sure.”

Knowing it would be hours before he was retrieved, he fell asleep in the sun.

“Half an hour before they came back, I woke up and had a panic attack — I thought I was going to die,” Brixey said. “That I would be shipped off to West Virginia and would work in a gas station and live in a cardboard box. It was horrible.”

On impulse he began to dig a hole. He then proceeded to cut the top of the multiple gallon jug he’d been given, cut a piece of wheat down the middle to make a floating raft, magnetized a darning needle, laid that on the surface of the raft and made a compass.

“This is not a very big deal; you learn it in Cub Scouts,” Brixey pointed out. “However, you have to put it in context.”

He had managed to create a perfect line — one that “circumnavigated the globe with unerring accuracy.” Not only that, because a magnetic field never is, but is always becoming, he had created a perfect moment.

“They just stood there completely and utterly stupefied,” Brixey said. “And of course I’m sweating because I know I’m not a genius; I just did this on impulse.” The desire to understand that impulse and what it had created led Brixey in a whole new direction. Eventually it pushed him toward MIT, where he studied hard science while being allowed to create art.

Brixey explains his work as the difference between simulation and emulation. Simulation is a copy of a thing, the painting of an apple instead of the apple itself. Emulation is the creation of an actual apple using non-traditional techniques.

“I was trained to draw and paint and shifted to science,” Brixey said. “Even in drawing, you don’t want the drawing, you want the apple [you are drawing]. You don’t want the imitation. We’ve always had to settle for the picture. It’s not the thing itself.”

The program he created is pioneering that difference: “Emulation is indistinguishable from the thing itself, but is made by any other means,” he said.

Brixey pointed out that, though we aren’t there yet, it is possible to imagine a place in the future when buildings will not be built with blueprints, lumber and contractors, but by smart seeds that are “taught to organize nature that allows it not only to change form, but to actually change after its become something and have full access to the computational structures which are driving it.”

Another field that greatly interests Brixey is telematics. The goal of the field, according to Brixey, is “for humans to develop an intimate awareness of systems that are greater than us and smaller than us.”

While normal artwork disappears under a microscope, Brixey poses a different possibility. “What would you have if you had a work of art that you could take to its smallest structure and the work of art is always there?”

Another project Brixey is involved in is the creation of Center for New Cinema (CNC), which is slated to premier in 2008. He explained CNC as a film festival “like SIFF [Seattle International Film Festival], but unlike it, CNC will be a film festival that will present radically different filmmaking forums and in formats that are atypical.” Not only will the works of art be unlike those seen before, the modes of distribution will be varied; from typical theaters to distribution over cell phones and iPhones.

From a life on the farm to time spent in labs, Brixey has maintained his belief in art and its power over people. He speaks eloquently of art today and how it is often unmoving, but points out that when placed in front of paintings by the masters, people often cry.

“They speak to you across hundreds of years,” Brixey said. He believes that creativity and art are linked to the very nature of what it means to be human. He recounted an experiment measuring differing reactions to a real piece of art (made by human hands) and computer generated approximations. “The brain does something under the influence of the real one that it doesn’t do with the others. The people can’t articulate that the painting is different, they may not even consciously know, but part of them does.”