There’s a question we ask everyone who walks through Crearte’s door, whether they’re a choreographer, a chemist, or somewhere in between: when did you first notice that art and science weren’t two different things? For our very first guest on Art-Sci Currents Season 2, the honest answer is that he never had to notice it, because for Todd Siler, it was never divided in the first place. Todd Siler has spent over fifty years making the case, in paint, steel, patents and print, that art and science are not two disciplines you bolt together. They are of the same process, ArtScience, that that is already inside every one of us, waiting to be recognized rather than taught. This idea runs through our entire conversation with Todd, and it’s the reason we want to honour his work from over half a century in our first interview this season.
Who Is Todd Siler
Todd Siler is a Denver- and New York–based artist, author, inventor and self-described “Cerebralist” — a term he borrows from 19th-century psychologist William James to describe artists who fuse the sensual and the intellectual into one visual language. In 1986, he became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art from MIT. His artworks are in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (20th Century Collection), MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, among other prominent collections.
For the past five decades his work has been represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City. He’s also the author of two books that shaped how a generation of educators and creatives thought about interdisciplinary thinking: Breaking the Mind Barrier (1990) and Think Like a Genius (1997). In 2011 he received the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts from the World Cultural Council, an honor reserved for artists whose work leaves a lasting mark on the world’s artistic legacy.
In 2025, fifty years after his initial attempts to fuse the two fields, Siler opened Metaphorming Time, a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Outdoor Arts’ Madden Gallery in Greenwood Village, Colorado, proof that the ArtScience process he started in his early twenties is still very much alive, evolving and inspiring.
The Substrate Was Always Art
We asked Todd where his art-science passion came from, and he corrected the premise of the question. It didn’t come from anywhere, he told us, it grew out of something. “Everything grew out of making art,” he said. Fine art was, in his words, the substrate. It was the ground everything else was built on. Biology, medicine, physics: all of it grew from a foundation that was already there.
His instinct that art and science are “so naturally entwined in you,” as he put it in our conversation, followed him to Bowdoin College, where he studied pre-med and Art History simultaneously, and then to Paris on an I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. It was there, wandering the Louvre’s Renaissance and Ancient Egyptian collections, that he had what he calls an epiphany: the polymaths of over five hundred years ago were already integrating fields fluidly, long before anyone had a word for “interdisciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary” or “integrative” thinking. Somewhere along the way, Siler told us, humanity got very good at dividing and compartmentalizing knowledge into specialties, and avoided or just forgot how to put it back together.
His response to that realization became a lifelong experiment and quest to reintegrate human knowledge: To continually innovate. With artworks, he would add layer upon layer of scientific information until the piece became more analytical. With scientific diagrams, he would subtract information until he reached the same pure visual forms an artist would reach for. “The art became a science and the science became an art,” he told us, and by the time he was in his early twenties, he had landed on the word that would define the rest of his career: ArtScience — one word — encompassing one creative process (with four key steps connected to the scientific method), producing countless manifestations of human creativity as well as ways of understanding the world.
Metaphorming: The Process Underneath the Process
If there’s a single concept that is central to Siler’s body of work, it’s Metaphorming, a term he coined in 1975 to describe the connection-making instinct, creativity & communication tool that artists, scientists, mathematicians and everyone uses in one form or another to convey and express what we’re thinking. He described it to us as information compressed into a single tool: every metaphor, analogy, symbol, story, and numbers humanity has ever used to connect one idea to another; it’s all folded into one all-purpose tool we’re all born with. Metaphorming isn’t a technique reserved for artists or scientists. It’s what happens, Siler explained, whenever someone connects something they know to something they don’t. In doing so, they often learn, discover and eventually invent or innovate things.
Todd and his team built an entire creativity and communication process around this ArtScience Process and Think Like a Genius Process (aka Metaphorming), which is now reportedly used by thousands of organizations worldwide, from Fortune 500 Companies doing strategic planning, ideation and product development to K-12 education and lifelong learning programs. kindergarten classrooms. A key component of the Metaphorming process is what he calls the “5-D Symbolic Modeling”: a hands-on construction exercise using nothing more than words, images, objects and motion (a fourth dimension) to create multi-dimensional Models (Metaphorms). He cites the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s insights into the nature of words that carry multiple dimensions of meanings–expanding the expressive power of Metaphorming.
Given a room full of strangers, such as engineers, accountants, artists, executives, the same basic materials and one focal question, Siler told us something remarkable happens: hierarchies flatten. Nobody in the room is “the creative one” or “the science one.” Everyone builds, and everyone discovers in the Metaphorms they make new meanings, ideas with possibilities that they can build on and act on together. He described running these ArtScience® Workshops & Think Like a Genius® Workshops (aka, Metaphorming) with groups as small as a handful of people and as large as four hundred; from Cherry Creek K-12 Schools to Fortune 500 Companies to venture capital-based, startup technology companies…and individuals, such as the professional chemist in Singapore who created a 5D Symbolic Model of his own creative process that moved a room of non-scientists to instant recognition and appreciation. “That’s my creative process, too” Siler recalled the workshop participants’ saying, “We just expressed our ideas in related, yet different, ways.”
Re-Creating Building the Sun for Energy Purposes: Fractal Reactors
Siler’s fascination with connection-making eventually pointed him toward one of the biggest open questions in physics: nuclear fusion. While at MIT, he became captivated by the idea that nature had already solved the problem of generating stellar energy a trillion times over, in the form of “irregular-shaped, statistically self-similar, fractal-like stars” themselves. His response was to propose the Fractal Reactor, an alternative concept for plasma fusion based on and derived from the geometry of stellar systems, which contrasts the approaches nuclear physicists were using at the time. He was invited several times to present his concept at symposia for nuclear fusion researchers meeting in Washington, D.C., and this ArtScience project continues to explore nature’s own architecture as the best available blueprint for human invention.
That same instinct, to look at what nature already built then recreate it deliberately, led to one of the most fruitful collaborations of his career: a decade-long partnership with Geoffrey Ozin, one of the founding pioneer figures of Nanochemistry. When Professor Ozin first saw Siler’s concept papers on the Fractal Reactor, he inspired told Siler by noting that the concept could be built with nanomaterials. That single observation was one of many creative catalysts that shortly followed—launching what became ArtNano Innovations, a joint effort using Siler’s visualization process to help represent and communicate foundational concepts in nanoscience. That early work has since fed into the broader field’s understanding of how to build from the atomic scale up–following a bold challenge first posed by the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman in 1959.
Metaphorming TIME: Fifty Years Later, Still in Motion
Half a century after that first epiphany in the Louvre, Todd Siler’s most recent solo exhibition brought the same questions back to the canvas at a monumental scale. Metaphorming TIME, which opened at the Museum of Outdoor Arts’ Madden Gallery in October 2025, centers on the evolution of “Ascension.” The artwork is a 15-by-60- foot painted collage originally commissioned by The John Madden Company for the lobby of Palazzo Verdi Building, interpreting, in Siler’s words, how human beings evolved out of the molecules of primal elements depicted dynamically in the painting. The exhibition’s tagline, “The Past Is Always Present in The Future,” captures what curators and colleagues describe as Siler’s signature move: turning nanoparticles, cosmology and the neuroscience of consciousness into subjects as worthy of a canvas as any landscape or portrait.
His painting, titled The History of Conflict Resolution, now installed in the West Atrium of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, takes a similarly ambitious swing at a human question through purely visual means, tracing how conflict escalates into chaos and how it can cycle back toward dialogue. The museum’s Institute for Science & Policy now uses this Metaphorm as a literal meeting point—and safe place—for people working through divisive, real-world disputes and challenges. If any more were needed, this is proof that Siler’s belief in art as a functional tool for human understanding isn’t simply theoretical or purely metaphorical.
Why We Started Here
Todd Siler’s entire body of work is, in a sense, the thesis statement for everything The Crearte Foundation exists to do. Art and science aren’t two rooms we’re trying to build a hallway between. They’re one room that got divided by accident, and the work in front of all of us, artists and scientists and foundations alike, is remembering how to walk through this corridor or room without noticing the wall was ever there.
That’s what “Always in MOTION” means to us. Not movement as a metaphor, but movement as the literal, physical, active truth of how creative thinking and innovation actually work.
Explore More of Todd Siler’s Work
Current & Recent Exhibitions
- Metaphorming Time — exhibition brochure, Museum of Outdoor Arts (2025)
- Denver Gazette: “Todd Siler’s Neuroimpressionism Exhibited at Madden Museum”
- Denver Post: “Todd Siler’s Paintings Start with Science and End in Swirling Fields of Colors”
- DMNS Catalyst: “War, Peace and Communication” on The History of Conflict Resolution
Books
Recognition
- Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts — World Cultural Council
- Siler’s theory of art and consciousness — Closer to Truth
Gallery & Studio
Metaphorming & ArtScience Method
- Art of Science Learning — Metaphorming
- “ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration to Create a Sustainable Future” — Leonardo/MIT Press Journals
Selected Academic Papers
- Siler, T. (2012). “Neuro-Impressions: Interpreting the Nature of Human Creativity” — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
- Siler, T. (2015). “Neuroart: Picturing the Neuroscience of Intentional Actions in Art and Science” — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
- Ozin, G. & Siler, T. (2018). “Catalyst: New Materials Discovery — Machine-Enhanced Human Creativity” — Chem, 4(6)
- Ozin, G. & Siler, T. (2025). “Is the Future of Chemistry Human and/or Machine Creativity?” — Matter, 8(7)
Further Reading
