Art in Science Museums

Towards a Post-Disciplinary Approach

Camilla Rossi-Linnemann, Giulia de Martini, Camilla Rossi-Linnemann, Giulia de Martini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138589520
• eBook ISBN: 9780429958366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Art in Science Museums brings together perspectives from different practitioners to reflect on the status and meaning of art programmes in science centres and museums around the world.

Presenting a balanced mix of theoretical perspectives, practitioners' reflections, and case-studies, this volume gives voice to a wide range of professionals, from traditional science centres and museums, and from institutions born with the very aim of merging art and science practices. Considering the role of art in the field of science engagement, the book questions whether the arts might help curators to convey complex messages, foster a more open and personal approach to scientific issues, become tools of inclusion, and allow for the production of totally new cultural products. The book also includes a rich collection of projects from all over the world, synthetically presenting cases that reveal very different approaches to the inclusion of art in science programmes.

Art in Science Museums should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage management, material culture, science communication and contemporary art. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals looking to promote more reflective social science engagement in their institutions.

1 Preface

Roger Malina

Cutting down the tree of knowledge: a primer on creating an evolving ecology of knowledge

I am both observer and experimenter in the territory covered in this book, on how the art-science movement of recent decades has worked within and symbiotically with the evolving concept of a science museum as well as the social embedding of science. The Leonardo publications, for whom I serve as Executive Editor, have now documented over 50 years the action of some 15,000 individuals whose work bridges the arts and sciences. I knew and worked with some of the key historical figures mentioned in these pages; Frank Oppenheimer, Richard Gregory, Gyorgy Kepes, Jasia Reichardt, Nicola Triscott among others. I have circulated in the innovative community of practice that has adapted classic ideas of a museum, with those of participatory hands on practices, maker and hacker communities, embedded within a broader social context.

The editors and authors of this volume are an active part of this community and their voices represent useful starting points for future conversations and evolutions.

A new breed of curators

As described in this book the new emerging practices challenge the existing definitions of “art” and “science” museums. At the time that John Dewey and colleagues developed their taxonomy of knowledge, the Dewey Decimal System, Paul Otlet designed his Mundaneum, essentially as a “museum of everything” (Wright, 2014).

Now a new breed of professionals has emerged in the museum world with initiatives such as FACT in Liverpool, the Science Gallery network, but also with artists determined to turn science museums into nodes in a world of ubiquitous learning. With this different framing, various ways of knowing can be confronted such as in the Copenhagen Medical Museum or the SymbioticA labs.

Simultaneously, a new breed of curators emerged to penetrate the art museums hostile to art and technology artists led by pioneers such as Barbara London at the NY MOMA and John Hanhardt at the Whitney.¹ In our Nica article we noted that the kinetic artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s were sometimes told that if they had to plug it in it couldn’t be art. Younger curators such as Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul helped change the attitude of some art museums, but ironically some science museums have been more receptive to the digital arts.

C. P. Snow was wrong or at least misinterpreted

Words matter, metaphors matter, taxonomies and ontologies matter. Unfortunately, the “two cultures” metaphor of C. P. Snow (1959) has mistakenly framed the arts and sciences as dichotomies, when in essence they are mutualist systems of thought. The conventional classification systems impose artificial boundaries that are rarely followed by the professionals described in this book.

The value of new ontologies and taxonomies, long known to our networks, is gaining larger recognition. In 2013, the US National Science Foundation funded the study “Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation: Enabling New Forms of Collaboration among Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design” (Malina et al., 2013). Many of the authors in this book contributed to this report where we emphasised the ecological metaphor of dynamic networked knowledge and continuously evolving taxonomies.

I believe we need to work with both art and science museums to contribute to the necessary changes in perspective that in part are being driven by the disruption of digital culture, as profound as the disruptions caused by the invention of writing or of print.

Cut down the tree; we need forests and ecologies of knowledge that can mutualise in the face of climate change and the other complex problems of our time that require bringing together different ways of knowing. As the sciences of complexity are uncovered, disciplinary and reductive scientific methods are often incapable of addressing problems that are intractably complex. Complexity Science introduces different notions of causality that lead to emerging phenomena. This book charts the beginning of what will be a multi-century process.

In-reach as well as out-reach: redesigning science itself

My own career has been in astronomy, building and using space telescopes beginning in 1968 at MIT, and my last position was as Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Marseille Provence. During these 60 years I have participated in and witnessed a dramatic restructuring of astronomy as a discipline studying the universe beyond the earth’s atmosphere. The innocent move from photographic film to digital technologies has triggered unexpected epistemological consequences that are currently in their stone age.

Digital astronomy has enabled observations from orbiting observatories, opening up the whole electromagnetic spectrum, and now neutrino and gravitational astronomy are at work from the ground. In the words of Carlo Rovelli (2017), ‘Reality is not what it seems’. We now understand better that our human senses have often misled our ideas on the content and evolution of the universe, and a result biased much scientific research of the past. A number of science historians such as Peter Galison and Patrick McCray have been deepening many of these discussions.

I argue that one of the roles of artists today is making science “intimate”, i.e. translating things that our senses are blind to into a form that can be engaged by our senses. Inevitably the work of artists today will change the history of science in the future. Science museums that have championed these artists, sometimes as simple tools of science communication or “outreach”, have helped a process of “in-reach” where artists are changing science itself.

Many of the projects described in this book help make “science intimate” in a variety of sometimes provocative approaches as with SymbioticA. Bio-artists are engaged deeply in questioning and exploring the implications of genetic engineering and the new biological technologies including artificial life. These groups engage in art as a critical practice but go beyond critique to drive scientific ideas and methods in new directions. The EU funded “Trust me I am an Artist” project directed by artist Anna Dumitriu and ethicist Bobbie Farsides under the Waag Society’s leadership is one example that I have been involved in with Annick Bureaud and the French Association Leonardo.

In my past, I have also worked for a year as an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium, an experience which led me to understand that the scientists’ obsession with “outreach” was myopic. Science needed to synergise more deeply with people’s interests, and our museums meet the non-scientists’ desire to “in-reach” and redirect science in new directions. Helga Nowotny (2003), former president of the European Research Council, called for a ‘socially robust science’. Her implication was that today’s science, far from the endless frontier helping us win the peace as Vannevar Bush (1945) argued, had become socially ‘fragile’. Scientific priorities were usually set within a narrow community of experts, framed by the funding objectives of governments, corporate interests and political expediency.

A different perspective is provided by G. Rattray Taylor (1953), who notes that moral attitudes on sex in the middle and upper classes have swung back and forth, correlated also with periods of “patrism” and “matrism”, but more importantly in the context of this book, with periods of intellectual exploration, such as the Renaissance, outside existing taxonomies of knowledge. It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the events described in the book occurred during the political and sexual turmoil of 1960s, whether it be Jasiah Reichardt’s seminal exhibit Cybernetics Serendipity, Frank Oppenheimer’s founding of the Exploratorium, E.A.T. and numerous other events described in this book from Japan to the Balkans to Latin America.

As detailed in this book, the curators and artists struggling to incorporate the work of the emerging “art, science, technology” professionals in science museums is exciting and difficult. Large institutions, such as science museums, inevitably reflect the world view of their funders and because of their size respond slowly to external societal changes. Coupled with the disruptions being triggered by a “digital culture” as argued above, the very systems that are used to determine the content and activity of museums are shifting and curators and artists find themselves to be risk takers pioneering new ontologies and taxonomies. The act of curating then becomes one of the mechanisms for redesigning science itself.

The emergence of big data and artificial intelligence has also influenced the scientific method as digital technologies that have enabled us to better understand how our senses have biased the scientific method itself. Digital cameras provoked the “virtual observatory” movement allowing astronomers to study hundreds of millions of objects at many wavelengths simultaneously. Artificial intelligence algorithms are now used to find patterns in data, unbiased by the patterns humans usually seek, such as symmetry or other human sensory (or intellectual) morphological lenses. These algorithms cannot describe how they made the discovery, or what other hypotheses they used, which is something that is usually required in the scientific method. Yet supercomputers are now used to “simulate” the universe, or global climate change, and this matching of a simulation with the data becomes a form of hypothesis making and testing. Needless to say, 18th- and 19th-century science would not have recognised these methods. As described in this book, information artists and data artists have invaded the territory of data collection, coming up with techniques that had not been imagined by the scientists.

A role for science museums in contributing to redesigning science

In an 1895 article, Arrhenius argued that variations in trace constituents – namely carbon dioxide – of the atmosphere could greatly influence the heat budget of the Earth (Arrhenius, 1897). He underestimated the rate of production of CO₂ and overestimated the impact on global temperature, but in all the fundamental aspects of the modelling he has been proved right. Yet perhaps it is no accident that these results have taken a century and a half to convince certain heads of state in our contemporary world. Perhaps the way science museums were developed over the past centuries, particularly after science was restructured after World War I, are part of the problem. To be somewhat provocative: what would have happened if, beginning in 1895, science museums had taken on explaining that the accelerating use of carbon-based fuels would have catastrophic consequences. Artists of the time could have translated the scientific data, on a molecule that our senses cannot detect, into a form that could be experienced. The literature on embodied knowledge reinforces these ideas.

Science museums, with the science academies and other scientific institutions including artists, could perhaps have helped convince governments that their policies could mitigate global warming, so that it would not endanger the sustainability of the societal model that was being developed. Different artists using smart textiles have pioneered this idea with smart textiles that change colour depending on the level of certain chemicals that our senses cannot detect directly, but 100 years too late. More recently artist Dawn Faelnar has been working on an “Earth-Suit” that allows the wearer to sense the weather on other planets than the earth. Could this artwork contribute to art or science or both? At the very least artists might contribute to developing terminologies to describe atmospheric phenomena on other planets that do not occur on Earth.

Concluding thoughts

The very nature of the work of the authors of this book is un-disciplinary and the idea of an “art-science” museum would be a contradiction in terms. We need to find ways to cut down the tree of knowledge and replace it with an evolving network of knowledge. Unfortunately, our institutions are mostly structured in static ‘tree’ structures, as are disciplines in universities. Disciplines are important tools for certain kinds of problems, but we should beware of mistaking the tool for the purpose. The path might be hazy, yet the only way to proceed is with a spirit of curiosity and experimentation, which this book encourages from the first page to the last.

Note

1Isabel Sena has recently synthesised the history of these pioneering new kinds of curators in her online course “Curating in Art, Science & Technology: Potentials and Pitfalls” (July 2018).

Bibliography

Arrhenius, S. & Holden, E.S. (1897) On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 9(54), 14–24.

Bush, V. (1945) Science the Endless Frontier, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

Malina, R.F., Strohecker, C., LaFayette, C. & on behalf of SEAD network contributors. (2013) Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation Enabling New Forms of Collaboration Among Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design, National Science Foundation [Online]. Available at: https://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/report-and-meta-analysis/ (Accessed 03 July 2018).

Nowotny, H. (2003) Democratising Expertise and Socially Robust Knowledge, Science and Public Policy, 30(3), 151–156.

Rattray Taylor, G. (1953) Sex in History, London: Thames and Hudson.

Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, New York: Riverhead Books.

Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, A. (2014) Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 Introduction

Camilla Rossi-Linnemann and Giulia de Martini

We indeed live in a world of fierce contradictions and clashing opposites.

Science research and technological developments have reached unprecedented levels of refinement, opening up extraordinary as well as intimidating scenarios.

Western democracy has incubated the seeds of equality and independent thought, growing at the same time the healthy branches of relativism and those of a post-truth society where facts seem to succumb to emotions and personal beliefs. In today’s global...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Preface
• 2 Introduction
• 3 Premise
• 4 Art as a narrative tool: seeing the unseen
• 5 Art for science education and enquiry: patterns of thinking
• 6 Art, inclusion, controversy and imagination: from facts to values
• 7 (open) Conclusions: the post-disciplinary museum
• Index