In this second of two-themed issues of ISR on art and science collaborations, I and my coeditor Siân Ede seek to deepen the conversation that we hope the first volume began. We argued in that earlier issue that it was time to stop considering intersections of art and science as ‘good’ by definition, and to examine and evaluate critically if and why we should value them.
One criterion – often perhaps the main one – is whether they produce high-quality art. That is of course always a somewhat subjective judgement and must remain so. But there seems little virtue in awarding science and art collaborations bonus points simply because they grapple with hard scientific concepts. They have to make their case on their merits.
Merit does not come from simply doing a good job of explaining the science. But there will always be a grey area where exploration and inspiration shade into explication, and art that informs and tells stories will have a place – as it does in the sung theatrical performances of the Minerva Scientifica project described in the previous volume by Patricia Fara. One desideratum could be that integrating science into art will help to weave it into the rest of culture, rather than leaving it as an exotic beast barely glimpsed and slightly feared by many people. Why shouldn’t art be ‘about’ science any less than it is ‘about’ philosophy, society, pain and love?
But if criticism and evaluation can never be an exact science, one might hope at least to sharpen the language with which the work is communicated. Critical discourse in the arts can be as jargon-bound as it is in science, and for that reason every bit as forbidding to outsiders. Some of this is, in any discipline, an inevitable consequence of specialization. But some is habit – and occasionally, bad habit. Any attempt to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries incurs an obligation to seek for plain language as far as possible. In both science and art, it is in struggling to find a straightforward way of expressing what one seeks to convey that one discovers how well (or not) one understands what that is.
The three topics discussed in this volume further illustrate the diversity of potential motivations and outcomes. Sarah Wilkes and Mark Miodownik are materials scientists at the London-based Institute of Making, where they seek to bring cutting-edge techniques for crafting materials within the scope of artists, designers, craftworkers and indeed anyone who feels they have something to create from them. In some ways this helps to perpetuate a very old tradition: artists have always been early adopters of new technologies, although the barriers become higher as methodologies and instrumentation become more technical and harder to physically access. At the same time, the Institute’s researchers aim to bring an aesthetic dimension to a scientific and engineering discipline that has been traditionally dominated by utilitarian considerations. Finding the right language for that is central to the objective. Wilkes and Miodownik describe three projects in which materials were developed and explored according to design criteria that required consideration of the way people respond to them: to create a tactile emotional vocabulary, for instance, or to find materials for prosthetic limbs that recognize the cultural and political factors governing the social acceptance of such devices. This work demands interdisciplinary cooperation between individuals with very different expectations, constraints and modes of exposition, including materials engineers, psychologists, social scientists and designers.
Bergit Arends’ description of a collaboration between a photographic artist and a botanist in documenting ecological change in a Scottish woodland is more meditative, seeking points of connection as well as contrasts of intention in the historical documentation of the landscape through photography. The questions that the project raises, in particular about the function and value of visual archives, and have a broader significance. Images taken for aesthetic reasons can contain useful information for research, and vice versa. Can archival material ever be mere data, free from the context, and indeed the physical space, in which it was collected? From records of glacier retreat to those of space exploration, imagery arouses engagement and stimulates reflection at the same time as it supplies information.
There is often an implicit assumption in science and art collaborations that the scientific element of the work will be in some sense celebrated, even if not as crudely as by mere prettification. But as ‘bioartists’ Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr point out, art has, and must have, other functions. In particular, it should challenge and provoke, ask awkward questions, disturb preconceptions. Art that engages with science – in this case, with the biological and biomedical sciences – can counteract the hype that sometimes surrounds the introduction of new technologies and interrogate the agendas behind them. In contrast to the common aim of scientifically inspired art to dazzle and amaze audiences, Catts and Zurr describe an “aesthetic of disappointment”, in which the artwork reveals how compromised the reality of a technology might be in comparison with the promise. What gives these works their power is that they are conceived and created by the use of the technologies themselves, such as tissue engineering: the artists are not delivering some judgment from on high but have wrestled with the methodologies in the laboratory. This contribution is unashamedly polemical, and we do not anticipate that everyone will agree with its perspective (some reviewers did not). But art is of course not about finding a polite consensus.
We suspect these three profiles exemplify the futility of seeking to make broad generalizations about the purposes, procedures and value of interactions between science and art. One goal of interdisciplinarity, and certainly of these two issues of the journal, is to provoke questions as well as providing information about current projects. Readers should feel free to challenge or disagree, and we hope this will be the start of some vigorous debate, starting from a recognition that art/science collaboration isn’t simply a Good Thing. The proof is in the doing, and in the strength of the discussion and argumentation that the doing motivates. We look forward to more doing, and more argument.
Notes on contributors
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and author. He worked previously as an editor and contributor at Nature for over 20 years. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology. He is the author of many popular books on science, including works on the nature of water, pattern formation in the natural world, colour in art, the science of social and political philosophy, the cognition of music and physics in Nazi Germany. He has written widely on the interactions between art and science, and has delivered lectures to scientific and general audiences at venues ranging from the Victoria and Albert Museum to the NASA Ames Research Center, London’s National Theatre and the London School of Economics. Philip has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times and New Statesman. He is a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, and also a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and the Italian science magazine Sapere. He has broadcast on many occasions on radio and TV, and is a presenter of ‘Science Stories’ on BBC Radio 4.