DM HOYT (USA)
Scientist in Residency with Christiaan ZWANIKKEN
Biography
DM Hoyt (“Hoyt”) is a creative pragmatist with a methodical mind and a love for brainstorming. Hoyt is also a practicing mechanical and structural engineer who specializes in leveraging the high-performance properties of advanced composite materials to increase fuel efficiency of airplanes and to enable ever-larger wind turbines that increase the amount of renewable energy in the global energy mix.
For the past 20 years he has led a small team of engineers at the company he founded, NSE Composites, and has served as principal investigator and project manager on a wide range of applied R&D projects for customers in the aerospace and wind energy sectors. Hoyt has also devoted much of his career to aircraft structural certification and related safety initiatives through collaborative industry-regulatory working groups focused on ensuring structural reliability, and thus public safety, as airplanes transition from traditional aluminum construction to modern-day carbon fiber composite wings and fuselages.
Hoyt has collaborated with artists, architects, dancers, sculptors and other creatives on a range of projects including large-scale light and sound installations. Hoyt also once rode his motorcycle from his hometown of Seattle to the Darién Jungle in Panama to raise awareness for a rare genetic skin disease that runs in his family and to raise money for research to find its cure. Hoyt has traveled to over 40 countries and has lived in Amsterdam since 2018.
Why should art and science work together?
"Art and science exist at two ends of the same spectrum. I see the creative process and the scientific method inquiry as parallel approaches with not-so-different goals. Art and science both aim to describe, represent, explain, and reflect on various aspects of our reality.
To achieve the radical change needed to reach the SDGs, billions of people must be deeply moved by the principles and urgency behind them. They must perceive them as rooted in our survival. However, changing people’s perception is not the specialty of scientists. Research results and peer-reviewed papers only speak to a small part of the population. Artists, on the other hand, have the capacity to distill science down to powerful concepts that touch us in ways that data alone never will. By working together, they have the potential to reach a broader audience, magnify messages, and help everyone on the art-science spectrum gain a deeper understanding of the world around us.”
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