Santa Barbara High’s Visual Arts & Design Academy Debuts VADA Talks 

Art, design, and quantum computing mixed and mingled on Thursday evening, October 12, for the first installment of VADA Talks, a new, free lecture series presented by the Visual Arts & Design Academy of Santa Barbara High School. 

Sitting in a semicircle, an architect, an engineer, an artist, and a magazine editor — not the set-up to a joke — shed light on how art guides and inspires the work they do to a full house at Santa Barbara City College’s Fé Bland Forum. 

Although they had modest expectations for the event, nearly 300 people wanted to attend, said VADA director Daniel Barnett. He explained that the idea for VADA Talks came from realizing there was a vacuum of forums about art and design in town.

“There’s an appetite for this, a hunger for these conversations,” he said. “I know there’s this idea of ‘sleepy Santa Barbara,’ but there are some incredibly interesting people who live here.”

It was an interesting juxtaposition of speakers: Robin Donaldson, AlA architect and founding partner of ShubinDonaldson; Dr. Erik Lucero, lead engineer and site lead at Google’s Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara; and Forest Stearns, principal artist in residence at Google Quantum AI Santa Barbara, who has a few pieces of art floating around in outer space. 

The discussion was facilitated by Les Firestein, the founder and editor of The Riv, Montecito Journal’s architecture and design magazine. He guided the conversation around “living a creative and collaborative life in the age of advanced technology.”

“It was just one year ago The Riv featured Google AI on its cover,” Firestein said. “One month before Chat GPT was unleashed upon the world and now everyone, especially your kids, knows what artificial — or should we call it ‘supplemental’? — intelligence is.”

Firestein noted how, in today’s social and political climate, “science sometimes takes a backseat to feelings and beliefs.” But at the same time, the field has made some pretty cool discoveries, like last week’s news that NASA’s sample of the 4.5-billion-year-old Bennu asteroid came back to Earth containing carbon and water, the building blocks of life on our planet.

Firestein concluded with a question: “Do you think we’re in an optimistic place?” 

Lucero chuckled. “Well, I’m always very optimistic,” he replied. He said that as a scientist, one has to come from a place of realism, but seeing things “come to life,” and being able to build and think about a better future, gives him a genuine sense of optimism. 

“As others look and see these things as well, and see that there are real humans working on these projects — I hope that also gives people a sense of optimism.” 

Hundreds of students at Santa Barbara High School were able to attend the talk in the school’s theater earlier that morning, which was opened up not only to all VADA kids but any student who wanted to attend. But there was a whole cohort of students at the evening event as well. 

“I think, in a way, the speakers were more excited to speak to the kids,” Barnett said. “It’s inspiring to kids, who might think to themselves, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do with my life.’” 

VADA is meant to prepare students for work in a creative environment, Barnett said. To really excel in those environments, these days, “you need to be an artist, a designer, and a technician…. You have to have a variety of skills, so the talk was an example of where kids could go and thrive.”   

As the program’s newest community outreach initiative, the event included a reception to facilitate a dialogue around the different applications and intersections of art, design, and science. 

Opening up a space for people to gather and talk about art was the main driver behind starting the series, alongside publicizing efforts to build on the program, mainly the “Capital Campaign” to build a state-of-the-art facility on campus with an integrated Design Lab and Art Studio, which is currently under construction. 

“VADA is just awesome, for anyone on a creative path,” Barnett added. “We want people to know about these opportunities, so kids can get into a pipeline that fosters and promotes their creativity.” 

Although no date has been set for the next installment of the series, the success of the first event was encouraging enough for the organizers to start brainstorming some fresh ideas. Stay tuned. 

To learn more, visit vadatalks.org.