The HOW of Science and Art

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: December 6, 2012
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Following on from my last post on the ‘why’ of collaborations between artists and scientists, here I’d like to look at the ‘how’. When scientists and artists don’t typically have professional reasons for mixing, what are the mechanisms that enable collaboration? Is it the sort of thing that happens at a dinner party, where a painter and a biologist unwittingly decide that a collaborative project would be a good idea? That certainly could be the case, but there are other ways in which these things happen.

What I describe below is by no means an exhaustive list, but is an indication of the ways in which collaborations between the two cultures can be born.

 

Artist in Residency Schemes

Some of the more outward-looking scientific research organisations realise that there is something to be gained from a scheme that brings artists through their doors. It could be couched as a box-ticking ‘outreach’ exercise, but it is also an opportunity to bring the science happening behind their doors alive to the wider public. This approach has been particularly embraced by the physics community, where studies of the interactions between subatomic particles — which have serious implications for science and cost a great deal of taxpayer money — nonetheless seem of little relevance to the man on the street. As physicist David Weinberg notes based on his collaboration with Josiah McElheny (below), “far more people saw [our collaboration] in one day in Madrid than have ever read my Astrophysical Journal articles.”

 

Scientific laboratory or artists studio? The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Indeed, CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs Boson Particle, has a Cultural Policy stating that in addition to inspiring great science, they also hope to inspire great art. Although cash-strapped, the Collide@CERN programme has formed partnerships with organisations, such as Ars Electronica and IRCAM, that have brought in well-regarded artists, such as sculptor Antony Gormley, photographer Andreas Gursky, and current artist-in-residence Julius von Bismarck, and they will soon be home to sound artist (and a personal favourite of yours truly) Bill Fontana.

Other organisations have taken up this idea, ranging from large national research institutes to individual university departments– including the SETI Institute, MIT, Kew Gardens, the Imperial College London Department of Mathematics, the University of Southampton Dept of Medicine and the UCL Environment Institute (to name but a few).

 

Artist/Scientist Pairing Schemes

I think of artist/scientist pairing schemes as something of a matchmaking exercise, in which a number of artists are invited into a research institute and paired with interested and willing scientists. Like any matchmaking process, it seems to me that this is something that can go either way: sometimes it will work out, but other times it may not.

An interesting example of an artist/scientist pairing scheme is the Earth*Science*Art project, in which 16 artists were paired with USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Centre scientists with interests spanning migratory bird patterns, the mapping of climate change impacts and natural hazards. In this case, the artists spent five months working with scientists. The degree of interaction was determined on a case-by-case basis by the pair involved. In situations such as these, undoubtedly some projects were more collaborative and others more ‘inspirational’, but an impressive and beautiful body of work was produced. And although it seems that this project was a one-off collaboration with a gallery that happens to share a building with the USGS, I would like to hope this might serve as evidence to support a repeat effort, or as inspiration for a neighbouring institution such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium perhaps?

 

Individual collaborations between artists and scientists

Unsurprisingly, collaboration between an individual artist and scientist generally starts with an introduction, a conversation, and an interest/openness from both parties to trying something a little different. Collaboration in these circumstances is often initiated by the artist who may have an idea and an interest, but who recognises that they would benefit from the help of a scientist in order to fully realise their vision.

Josiah McElheny, Island Universe (Small Scale Violence), 2008, Heights from floor highly specific, overall dimensions variable
Chrome plated aluminium, hand-blown and molded glass, electric lighting and rigging, Image: White Cube Gallery, London

A particularly interesting example of this type of collaboration is the Island Universe project by Josiah McElheny, which came from working with Ohio State University astrophysicist David Weinberg. Having been struck by the fact that the galactic Lobmeyr chandeliers in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House were designed in the same year the cosmic background radiation providing evidence for the Big Bang was discovered, McElheny saw the beginnings of a project but needed help getting started. He was introduced to the physicist Weinberg by the Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at OSU. A short conversation turned into a long lunch, and a project was born that became an enduring collaborative relationship.

The large, abstract sculptures that comprise the Island Universe project are scientifically accurate models of the Big Bang. As McElheny read articles on astrophysics, Weinberg wrote computer models that provided estimates of the positioning of lights representing galactic clusters, super-clusters and quasars in the sculptures. What resulted were stunning modernist, illuminated sculptures that accurately reflect different possibilities on the origin of the universe, depending on the amount of energy or matter present at the beginning of time.

 

Recipe for Success?

In a detailed account of the collaboration with McElheny, Weinberg writes that — based on his experience, at least — this type of art/science collaboration is improved if each party has sympathy for how the other works and if the two have aesthetic ideas that reinforce each other, rather than pull in opposite directions. Their result is project that elegantly interweaves the details of cosmology with ideas around modernism and design—and many public conversations, which have brought diverse audiences together to discuss the interplay between science and art (indeed it was attending an event with Weinberg and McElheny in 2008 that opened my eyes to the possibilities).

The appropriate foundation for an art/science collaboration seems to depend very much on the individual context: sometimes the scientists will need to be ‘encouraged’ to engage in this kind of outreach by a supportive organisation, and sometimes the artist’s or scientist’s passion for science communication (or expression) will drive forward a partnership. What is particularly promising for such projects is that we are in an era when science needs, more than ever, to communicate its findings in ways that reach across traditional disciplinary boundaries and artists are particularly receptive to the challenges of understanding and interpreting the insights that contemporary science is able to offer into our complex universe.

 

RSVP

Are you an artist worked with a scientist? Or a scientist who has collaborated with artists? How did your collaboration get started? Do feed back in the comments section!

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Why scientists should care about art

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: November 22, 2012
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Last week, I attended an environmental science conference with an evening reception that featured a short talk on art/science collaborations in the context of environmental science. The talk was followed by a musical performance – inspired by the fragility of peatbog environments – after which I overheard a scientist mutter “What was that? That better not have had research council funding.” He was not the only one; I heard similar sentiments expressed by several others as I walked to dinner.

On some level, I was disappointed by this response, but I wasn’t really surprised. Despite great progress amongst those who are ensconced in the world of science communication to the idea of collaborations between scientists and artists, this is something that many scientists still don’t “get”. Other researchers are openly hostile, and certainly think that scientific research organisations have no business funding this type of work.

To be fair, these are not necessarily the attitudes of people who are disinterested in art — I’d be willing to bet that a fair few of those who walked away from the performance muttering about scientific research council funding being wasted on the arts also have memberships at cultural institutions. That said, whilst being consumers of culture, few scientists really see themselves as having much of a role in its creation. In an increasingly competitive funding landscape, does it really make sense to spend research money on an art project? Does engaging with the arts mean that they are less serious as scientists?

Here, I’d like to make an argument that art is good for scientists, and that there are many reasons they shouldn’t be quite so afraid of letting artists loose in their laboratories.

Data monologue or dialogue? Data Soliloquies is an interesting book, produced by a former artist in residence at UCL, looking at environmental data in a cultural context.

Understanding the Cultural Context of your Research

Hot issues, such as climate change may not be subjects of contention within the scientific community, but it seems clear that the science is not being communicated in a way that has the necessary impact. Although art cannot directly communicate science or change minds, it can create a space for dialogue around difficult issues. Few scientists are likely to deeply consider the role of narrative in their work or the visual impact of their images, but for reaching society as a whole these are vitally important.

Artists are also likely to ask questions that scientists might never think to ask (because they are, well, thinking like scientists). A recent AHRC funding call (see, scientists there is some money in this!) posits that a sophisticated understanding of cultural values, rights, religions, and systems of belief is essential for understanding some of the complex legal, ethical and regulatory policy issues raised in several emerging areas of science and technology. Scientists aren’t trained in this (and that’s ok) — but it is important to engage with people who think about these issues in a different way.

Becoming a better communicator

In my view, art inspired by science isn’t necessarily about the communication of science—it is a response to science. In leaving the scientific arena where it is all to easy to use technical jargon, working with artists can make you rethink the way that you communicate your research. How can you convey the complexity of the problem, while also making it accessible?

A scientist who participated in the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart programme, was reflected on their experience in the report on that programme, saying “Through my PhD I learned to talk in a particular way, write in a particular way. Because of that I lost a piece of myself. Through working with [X] I found the way to become the real me, rather than this slightly objective scientist that I had become. I found my voice, which I had lost because of the scientific process.” 

Becoming a better researcher

Artists examine problems from different angles and engage with information in a different way from scientists.  Some might see this as a deficiency, and to be fair, you wouldn’t want to conduct science in an un-scientific way. However, I would argue that particularly in the area of scientific visualisation, there is a great deal to be gained for scientists who engage with artists.

Chiara Ambrosio, Lecturer in the History of Science at UCL, argues that art offers an opportunity for dialogue and a critique of science. When scientific data sometimes seems like a monologue, art can produce a dialogue. Artists may not – indeed, probably should not – directly challenge the way that science happens or is conducted, but they can raise questions about the purpose of the science and present different ways of looking at research outcomes. 

It’s fun

Clearly, engaging with artists is not something to be done if you don’t also think that it would be fun. Artists aren’t particularly interested being a part of a scientist’s ‘outreach’ box-ticking exercise, or in being relegated to a dusty corner of the lab from which to quietly observe the scientists going about their business. 

I am not so naïve that I believe that having an artist in the lab is something that all scientists should do, or even most. But I do think that more scientists should have an open mind to this approach, and be encouraged to engage with them in the right context. Far from being an impediment to scientific progress, it can be a way of making your science more relevant, more impactful, and hopefully a bit more fun. In my next post, I hope to highlight a few examples of how it happens in practice when artists actively work in labs alongside scientists.

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WeatherDataMusicSculpture

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: November 1, 2012
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Foremost in the minds of many of us this past week has been Hurricane Sandy, which has been battering the eastern coast of the United States and which, as I write this, is now on its way up through Canada. The power of storms has been a source (or should I say force?) of inspiration for artists, such as Turner (Morning after the Deluge) and John Martin, who saw it as an opportunity to explore the sublime. But moving beyond the epic, and ongoing, battle between man and nature, has the science of storms ever served as an artistic inspiration?

 

Hurricane Noel
Reed, wood, plastic, data
32”x32”x36”, 2010
3D Musical Score of the passing of Hurricane Noel through the Gulf of Maine, Nov 6-8, 2007 nathaliemiebach.com

Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach creates intricate and beautiful sculptures based on weather data which, in her hands, become elaborately decorated baskets swirling out of themselves, punctuated by bobbles, beads and bling. Surprisingly, these structures are actually 3D visualisations of weather data, with the axes of the sculpture representing different meteorological elements, such as air pressure or temperature. So weather data controls the form that the baskets take, and what might appear at first to be decorations or adornments are actually additional types of data, gathered either by Miebach herself with her home-made collection devices or from publicly available data sources such as NOAA.

 

In addition to the physical forms of the baskets, Miebach also translates the weather data into music (often this music is an intermediate process in achieving the final sculpture). In other words, she first translates the scientific data into music, and then translates the score into sculpture. Moreover, Miebach notes that our ears are more attuned to nuances in what we hear than our eyes are to nuances in what we see. What can we learn by listening to a storm? Miebach’s music is both stark and beautiful (ex- listen here to Hurricane Noel, played by the Axis Ensemble), and while I can’t interpret it in the same way as I can a scientific diagram, does that really matter? In fact, you could easily argue that it’s just that my ears aren’t (yet) as attuned to the data as my eyes (but for someone who’s blind, surely listening to data would make some sense?).

 

Nathalie Miebach, 2010, 3D Musical Score of the passing of Hurricane Noel through the Gulf of Maine, Nov 6-8, 2007
Image from the artist’s website

Part of what I love about Miebach’s work is that she approaches science in a very different way from those of us who are traditionally trained in these fields. Scientific data can be quite abstract, but for those who aren’t so good at abstract thinking and who learn by doing or touching, sculpture offers a way to make weather data tactile. For kinesthetic or ‘haptic learners’ this type of work offers an opportunity to make sense of data in a way that’s a bit more tangible—Miebach points out that we lose a sense of spatial sensibility when dealing with data on the flat plane of the computer screen—and her sculpture offers a counterpoint to that.

 

As Miebach puts it, she is working to challenge the ‘vocabularies’ that are used in art and science. In some ways this isn’t such a new idea—the Aristotelian notion of the Music of the Spheres assigns ratios to the movements of the planets in the same way that there are proportional relationships between pleasing musical notes. The idea was that closer, ‘slow moving’ spheres produced lower tones, while those further away moved faster and produced higher ones. The result of this celestial motion would be beautiful harmony. In a similar way, Miebach proposes, there is a way of listening to data, or touching it, that isn’t actually any stranger than looking at it on a page or computer monitor.

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Fantastic voyage: The strange journey of a graphite pencil

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: October 18, 2012
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I have a fond memory of my mineralogy class in university: it was a lab session in which we were studying metamorphic minerals and were presented with boxes of samples to identify. My eyes gravitated towards a darkish silvery lump that was so soft its residue rubbed off on your fingers. Taking the specimen, I started sketching with it in the margins of my notebook since I didn’t need to look up the characteristics of this particular mineral in order to identify it—I knew it was graphite.

 

Graphite sample (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons and USGS)

Graphite is the topic of a new exhibition at GV Art, a London art gallery that specialisesin work sitting at the art/science interface. The Graphite proposition is a powerful one since the graphite is an indispensable tool for almost any working artist, and is also an incredibly interesting material in its own right. Made entirely of sheets of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms, the weak bonds between the sheets allow the layers of carbon to slip by each other when you press a pencil to paper, leaving a mark. It is also this property that makes graphite an incredibly good industrial lubricant and electrical conductor.

 

The exhibition explores the visual aspects of graphite—scientific, artistic, and those falling somewhere in between—and there are a range of interesting works in the exhibition, from thin sections under a microscope to a fun interactive pencil sculpture and some delicately executed drawings. However, I would like to focus on the work by Anais Tondeur, which I found particularly interesting and moving, as it engaged with graphite poetically and intelligently as an artistic medium, while also actively exploring its nature as a geologic material.

 

Through an installation of drawings, maps, and a real quasi-anatomical-geological specimen, Tondeur tells an interesting story: early last century, a young French girl swallowed a pencil and survived to tell the tale. Ultimately, she—and the pencil—travelled to London, where doctors removed the writing implement in 1914. Tondeur simultaneously imagines, unravels, and explores the story of how the girl first came upon the pencil and the strange journey that they undertook together.

 

Anaïs Tondeur, I.55 from the series: Graphite Geologic Veins, graphite on arches paper, 6 x 16 cm, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist & GV Art, London.

Working with geoscientists, Tondeur takes this story as a launch point for exploring the nature of graphite, tracing Carboniferous coal-bearing seams to an area of contact metamorphism at the entrance of a mine containing graphite (graphite is often formed by contact of coal seems with hot fluids or magma). Part historical research, part geologic exploration, and all tied together by an imaginary (but not entirely imaginary) narrative, the artist presents this story with some delicate graphite drawings, a map of the girl’s and the pencil’s journeys, and the pencil itself, which is on loan from St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.

 

I find this piece of work deeply appealing, as it elegantly connects the geologic history of southern France to an unlikely human narrative. While I may be seeing what I want to see in this work, I feel that there are echoes of the great land artists Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Working both in the landscape, as well as the studio, Long and Smithson imbue a certain narrative on the land through their conceptual studio-based works; and so too it is with this work by Anais Tondeur.

 

Despite my interest in art that engages with science, I find that sci-art can often be mediocre, didactic, too… concrete… and not always terribly sophisticated. I was therefore happy to find that this work in Graphite really touched me: Tondeur explores graphite from an unexpected angle, imbuing an unsuspecting scientific specimen with a narrative all its own. Here we can see the real beauty of what art can contribute to science; in coming at science from a tangent, she makes us think a bit differently about the world around us.

Graphite is on view at GV Art 5 October – 8 December 2012. The full story of this fantastical graphite pencil can be found in the Graphite exhibition catalogue.

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Planetary Artistry

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: October 4, 2012
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Water-lain sediments– slightly rounded clasts within a sandy matrix
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

For me, the highlight of this past week’s science news was the images beamed back from the Curiosity rover, providing conclusive geologic evidence that water flowed on Mars. Of course, this wasn’t exactly a surprise; for decades, planetary scientists have suggested the dendritic channel networks visible in spacecraft imagery couldn’t have been made by anything else. The evidence has been mounting as well, as various clay minerals and iron oxides have been identified through hyperspectral imagery. Nonetheless, I suspect that the image of definitely water-lain sediments made the heart of more than one geologist skip a beat. Ground truth.

 

You could argue that the scientific exploration of the extra-terrestrial is, at least in a part, a search for meaning: to position us within a larger cosmology. But our fascination with, and connection to, what we see in the night sky comes not just through science, but also through art. So it should come as no surprise that scientific images of planetary surfaces have provided inspiration to a range of artists from Galileo – whose first sketches of the moon through a telescope are truly beautiful – to Barbara Hepworth – whose interpretations of the lunar surface are far less literal.

 

Here are a few artists who have touched on them in their practices for various different ways….

 

Kiki Smith, Tidal 1998 Photogravure, page: 9 11/16 x 9 11/16″ (24.6 cm); unfolded: 19 1/4 x 126 1/4″ (48.9 x 320.7 cm). Publisher and printer: LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York. Edition: 39. Mary Ellen Meehan Fund. © 2012 Kiki Smith, DIGITAL IMAGE © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence

Kiki Smith explores the physical relationship between humans and the moon in a beautiful fold-out series of prints, of the lunar surface.  With 13 prints of the moon, taken through the Columbia University telescope by the artist, “Tidal” (1998) reflects on effect of the moon’s tides on the female body as well as the surface of the earth.

 

Moon Surface (Surveyor 1), Vija Celmins, Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 14 x 18 1/2″ (35.6 x 47 cm). Gift of Edward R. Broida. © 2012 Vija Celmins
DIGITAL IMAGE © 2012, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence

A far more remote vision of the Moon is presented by Vija Celmins, who beautifully captures the mystery of the lunar surface in her graphite works on paper. Working from photographs, often cut from magazines, Celmins blurs the line between photography and drawing by creating beautifully layered and assembled images. A less innovative artist might feel sheepish working from photographs, but Celmins does not shy away from her source material. By openly acknowledging that her near-photorealistic work could only be based upon remotely-taken photos of the moon, she actually distances us from the source material – only a select few of us will ever directly experience another world in this way. In this image from the MOMA collection, we seem to hover above the surface of the moon at a slightly oblique angle, snapping photos in order to piece together a very foreign place in our minds.

 

Nancy Graves I. Part of Sabine D Region, Southwest Mare
Tranquilitatis, 1972, Lithograph on Arches Cover white paper
(c) Carl Solway Gallery

Removing us even further from reality is Nancy Graves, who tackled notions of mapmaking and abstraction in a series of lithographs based upon geologic maps of the moon. Containing none of the features that we expect of maps (i.e. a legend for one!), these images comprise amorphous regions of brightly coloured specks. Without prior knowledge of their content, they are abstract. Trained as a geologist myself (and one who has indeed spent time fascinated by maps of lunar geology), my mind instantly interprets the visual cues, identifying craters and fault lines. However, without that context, what remains? Geologic maps made from space have a weirdly abstract quality—they are our best guess at the rock units at the surface, based on features visible in spacecraft imagery. Very reasonable guesses, but lacking the ground truth of astronauts or rovers, such as Curiosity, that can say ‘these are water-lain sediments.’

 

Martian Canals as depicted by Percival Lowell (1914)

Returning to Mars, I thought that no post on planetary artistry could be complete without a nod to Percival Lowell, who was not an artist (technically speaking), but a scientist with a very vivid imagination. Looking through an early Twentieth Century telescope at the (now named) Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, he drew what he thought he saw. To him, these were scientific observations. However, his hypothesis that the dark lines he saw across the surface of Mars were canals representing the desperate efforts of an advanced (and thirsty) civilisation to tap the polar ice caps ultimately proved a greater contribution to science fiction writers than to science. Nonetheless, today Lowell’s work has a cultural resonance that is hard to ignore, particularly as we are grappling with the implications of climate change for our own world… In moving between science and art, Lowell’s drawings highlight the ways in which both our art and our science are reflections of ourselves more than anything else.

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On Scientific Imagery, Art, and Science

By Johanna Kieniewicz
Posted: September 27, 2012
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Welcome to At the Interface. Here, we will explore the exciting edge between Art and Science—examining the space where science and visual culture meet and establishing how, and on what terms, these seemingly disparate fields can mix and interact through the collaborations of those working at the interface.

I would like to start on what some might consider a provocative note: scientific imagery in itself is not art. This might seem a surprising statement from somebody writing an art and science blog, but I say this as a means of introducing you to the world of art inspired by science. Or as some would call it, Sci-Art. I believe that science is beautiful (even when it may not be aesthetically pleasing), and that it has the capacity to produce stunning imagery that can hold its own in own in any gallery. But is this art?

Colour micrograph of Bacillus subtilis, Wellcome Image Awards finalist 2012, © Wellcome Images

This photomicrograph of Bacillus subtillus, a bacterium found in soil, has vivid, rich colours, and swirling abstract patterns that bring to mind painterly abstraction. However, it is a research image of a scientific subject matter, captured by a scientist through the practice of science. It is, in other words, an image with a scientific purpose. So I find it strange to see a gallery of stunning research images titled the ‘Art of Science’, as if it were a surprise that science could generate beautiful imagery. Science should not be afraid to be beautiful, and it should unapologetically claim as its own aesthetically pleasing images generated through the practice of science.

So, without tackling the age-old question of what is art?, how might we define an art of science that is not ‘merely’ one of beautiful illustrations? I would argue that while art may use the methods of science, use science as an initial starting point or inspiration, or comment on science itself, the intention and result of ‘scientifically-inspired art’ (let’s just stick to Sci-Art from now on) is something different.

The difference is not necessarily in the subject matter or the conception. Science is a part of our culture every bit as much as politics, nature, and all the other things on which artists comment, and so it too can serve as a source of material inspiration. In recent years, this Sci-Art movement has gained momentum as artists and scientists start to see the benefits of working collaboratively.

At first overlooked by the art world (and still very much a subculture within the field of art), scientific themes are beginning to be embraced by a range of high profile artists, such as Olafur Eliasson, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn, amongst others. Another cadre of artists actually work side-by-side with scientists in laboratories, making everything from art out of biofilms to etchings out of their own brainscans.

Birth of a Thought (Etching), 2007 © Susan Aldworth

Artists working in the field of science have a freedom to play, to subvert science and interrogate it in ways that practicing scientists cannot without questions being raised about their integrity or, indeed, their capacity as scientists. Unlike science, art is not about proving or disproving the hypothesis. This is not to say that scientists cannot do art in parallel with science, but I would emphasise that when scientists make art (whether in a professional sense or just-for-fun) the intention is different: it’s to make a piece of art.

Science and art both have an intentionality in how they are conceived and carried out. At its best, science produces objective documents about the world, whereas art—again, at its best— expresses/alters our subjective experience of the world. These boundaries establish the domains of science and art with respect to one another; however, it’s not all black and white because there remains a point—or, if you prefer, an interface—where these two domains meet and where some particularly powerful works are able to cross from one domain to other.

The Blue Marble, 1972 © NASA

And one example especially comes to mind (though undoubtedly there are many more): the iconic shot of the Earth from space taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts. This image—part document and part research image—did something that most artworks can’t even claim to do: it fundamentally changed the way that humanity saw itself.

And in the opposite direction, art has discovered things that science only now starting to explain (see examples in Proust was a Neuroscientist). But that’s for another day.

On the topic of whether scientific imagery can be art, these are just my own thoughts, but I’d be interested in hearing what you think!

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