Science Meets Art

John Potts, Nigel Helyer

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9789814968164
• eBook ISBN: 9781000595499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book explores collaboration between artists and scientists and examines the ways in which scientific data and research findings can be communicated, translated and transformed using the techniques of contemporary art and information technology. Contemporary art forms—including installation, sculpture, painting, computer-based art, Internet art and interactive electronic artworks—are able to provide new and creative outlets, with expanded audiences, for scientific research.

The book, which features 75 illustrations of works created as a result of art–science collaboration between scientists and artists, is important in the field because it presents a thorough account of the collaboration through the eyes of a leading creative practitioner and a leading cultural theorist. It contains a wide range of in-detail examples of successful collaborative works that illustrate the breadth and depth of contemporary interdisciplinary creative-research approaches.

Chapter 1 A Brief History of Science/Art

Humans have expressed themselves through art for many millennia, judging by Palaeolithic cave paintings and rock art, and other ancient artefacts. Science, however, is a much more recent form of expression. Historians of science generally date the advent of modern science to the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. Also known as the ‘scientific revolution’, this period in sixteenth century Europe built on scientific developments—including empiricism and scientific method—to break with both ancient knowledge and religious belief, most dramatically in the model of the cosmos. The Catholic church had adopted the geocentric model developed in ancient Greece by Aristotle and Ptolemy as religious orthodoxy; the scientific revolution proposed the alternative heliocentric model, articulated in the theory of Copernicus and supported by the empirical observations of Galileo. The church attempted to suppress the heliocentric model, even placing Galileo under house arrest and forbidding him to publicly support Copernicus, but the scientific revolution was under way; the ancient conviction that the Earth was the centre of the Universe was in the process of being displaced.

Modern science represented an intellectual breakthrough in the observation and analysis of the natural world. Earlier versions of science had prospered in the ancient world: astronomy emerged in Babylonia by 2,000 BCE; mathematics flowered in ancient India; China devised numerous technological inventions including the abacus, the compass, the clock, and printing. In ancient Greece, natural philosophy—as practised most famously by the philosopher Aristotle—entailed the classification of natural phenomena, based on detailed observation. But ancient science lacked the technique of experiment as a necessity to prove a scientific hypothesis; as a result, the observation of the natural world often proceeded on the basis of unproven principles—such as the geocentric model of the cosmos—later discredited by modern science.

Another factor impeding ancient science was its cohabitation with religion and magic. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, astronomy was conducted by priests—and the practice of astronomy was held to be inseparable from astrology, which developed at the same time as the study of the stars and heavenly bodies. Likewise, the pursuit of physics and chemistry in the ancient world was often conducted within the occult practice of alchemy—a form of magic focused on the transformation of material substances.

The centrality of magical belief in scientific endeavour proved remarkably persistent. Astrology was studied as a subject at the first European universities in the twelfth century, and was not fully discredited as a discipline of science until the seventeenth century, when it was removed from university curricula. Alchemy remained a fascinating pursuit for scientists throughout the medieval period and even into the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In part, this fascination can be explained by the complex and intricate system of alchemic knowledge, which formed a quasi-scientific ordering of components; another appeal of alchemy was its promise to unlock the mysteries of nature. Even Isaac Newton—hailed by many historians of science as the greatest scientist who ever lived and a hero to the philosophers of the Enlightenment— maintained his pursuit of the secrets of alchemy until the end of his life, although he kept the practices of alchemy and science separate.

Renaissance Art–Science

The Renaissance beginning in the fourteenth century is widely celebrated for the great artistic achievements of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and many other painters, sculptors, and architects; but of equal significance is the ‘scientific Renaissance’ which began in this historical period. The intensively creative activity and spirit of inquiry of the Renaissance also generated the idea of the polymath or ‘Renaissance man’: an individual versed in a range of disciplinary pursuits combining the arts and sciences—personified in the figure of Leonardo.

The scientific Renaissance was based—like its artistic equivalent—on an engagement with ancient works and texts, including those of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The roots of the scientific revolution are found in the medieval period, or the Islamic Golden Age. Arabic scholars preserved the texts of Aristotle and other classical authorities at a time when they had largely disappeared in Europe. A school of Arab rationalists from the tenth century engaged with these texts, making commentaries on Aristotle and Plato; when these texts—and the commentary—became available in Europe in the twelfth century, they were extremely influential on scholars based at the European universities and in monasteries.

Some of the Arab commentary on the ancient Greek authorities included a questioning of ancient convictions and principles; this sceptical approach fed into the new method of inquiry based on observation, as practised in the thirteenth century by the Franciscan friar and philosopher, Roger Bacon. Bacon built his findings not on a priori principles or ancient beliefs, but on experiment and empirical observation, in a way anticipating the scientific method. Developments in empirical science at this time also benefitted from the adoption of Arabic numerals (replacing the cumbersome system of Roman numerals), which made calculation much easier.

The notebooks of the artist Leonardo da Vinci are also held as evidence of Renaissance scientific inquiry. Leonardo was an inventor and engineer—with an enormous range of interests— as well as an artist. His inquiry into natural phenomena was based on meticulous observation, as apparent in his anatomical drawings. This included sketches of the vascular system and extraordinary research into the function of the heart, even casting intricate wax models. One legacy of Leonardo’s anatomical drawing is that many university departments of Anatomy still retain an artist-in-residence on their staff.

Leonardo’s notebook sketches of possible inventions have fascinated later generations, as many appear to represent mechanical devices only realised in the twentieth century. These inventions include: a flying machine or helicopter, adding machine, solar power, armoured vehicle or tank, and parachute.

Because of his visionary abilities in fusing arts and sciences, Leonardo has become the model of all later arts–science polymaths (Figure 1.1). The scholarly journal Leonardo, founded in 1968, covering ‘the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts and music,’ is named in his honour.

Figure 1.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Sketch of Vascular System.

The other major Renaissance figure in the development of science was Francis Bacon, a philosopher often credited with developing the scientific method. Although not a practising scientist, Bacon wrote on the importance of experiment, observation, and inductive reasoning. His method entailed the arrival at scientific conclusions only after the accumulation of sufficient empirical facts. Bacon’s scientific method was outlined in his 1620 book Novum Organum, or ‘new instrument’, a new tool for discovering the truth through observation and experiment.

But Bacon is best known for his utopian work New Atlantis, published in 1627. This extraordinary speculative book anticipated later science fiction in founding its utopia on futuristic scientific and technological achievement. Bacon’s utopia, located on an island in the Pacific, is built around a college of advanced learning, a precursor to the modern research university specialising in applied science. The inventions produced by this college include: sound-synthesisers, artificial lights, synthetic perfumes, and powerful high-speed engines; New Atlantis also features robots, submarines, telephones, flying machines, and a form of genetic engineering.

The staggering imagination displayed by Bacon in New Atlantis—describing many inventions perfected centuries later— produced an early work of art–science fusion. In this utopian book, Bacon displayed the powers of prediction enabled by a firm base in scientific method. The inventions detailed in New Atlantis are described as the outcomes of applied science. Science fiction, and other creative works speculating on the application of science in technological invention, later followed Bacon’s lead in imagining the impact of science on society.

Enlightenment Science

Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica was considered at the time of its publication in 1687 to be a great achievement in science; it was also believed to be the foundation for the Enlightenment in Europe. The Principia codified the scientific method in establishing—through empirical observation and experiment—the laws of motion and gravity. By providing a theory of universal gravitation, Newton opened up future scientific inquiry into forces both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial; this included support for Copernicus’ cosmological model, through the idea that planets—including the Earth—are held in place by gravity in orbit around the sun.

Voltaire and the other philosophers in the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment revered Newton as the great man of the age, whose empirical approach and rationalist method could be applied to all aspects of society. The Enlightenment thinkers upheld reason as the ‘enlightening’ force that would create better, fairer, and more just societies—and Newton’s scientific method was the perfect formulation of reason. The triumph of reason and science also had implications for religious belief and magical belief such as alchemy, since scientific method held that a theory must be supported by empirical facts. The principle of ‘falsifiability’, as defined by the twentieth century philosopher Karl Popper, meant that empirical findings can disprove a theory. That is, a scientific theory can no longer be accepted once it fails a test or experiment.

Advances in science by the eighteenth century produced a number of results, including the slow demise of alchemy as an ‘occult science’. Breakthroughs in chemistry—from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries—established modern chemistry on an empirical base, consigning alchemy to an esoteric, underground existence. Yet magic and mysticism never entirely disappeared, despite the best efforts of the Enlightenment disciples of Reason. They survived the Enlightenment and enjoyed various resurgences: in the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century; in the late nineteenth century Victorian age of Spiritualism and Theosophy; in the various forms of New Age mysticism popular in Western societies from the 1960s; in the techno-mystic Extropians and Transhumanists of the late twentieth century; and in twenty-first century neo-paganism, often aligned with the environmentalist movement. Indeed, artists and writers have remained fascinated with the intersection of science and mysticism in the popular imagination, manifest as a ‘technological sublime’ or magical aura suffusing new technologies.

Romantic Art–Science

The Romantic period—from the end of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century—was in part a reaction against the veneration of reason in the Enlightenment. In place of reason and science, the Romantics elevated imagination and emotion. Whereas Isaac Newton was a hero to Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, that same scientist was a cosmic villain for the Romantic poet and artist William Blake: Blake’s 1795 portrait of Newton depicted a secular demigod, sectoring and disenchanting the world with his calculations and instruments. Blake’s depiction of Newton was based on his earlier work The Ancient of Days, 1794, showing a demigod using instruments to measure and control the world (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794.

Blake detested Enlightenment rationalism, which for him conspired to deaden imagination and spiritual vitality. Romantic poets and painters, including William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich, emphasised the natural ‘sublime’, fearing that science and industrialisation had alienated humanity from its natural environment. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, published in 1818, is the classic Romantic novel, and the first major science fiction work; it issues a moral warning against the ambitions of the ‘Modern Prometheus’: reason and science.

The Romantics bequeathed a binary opposition between art and science—reason/science/technology versus intuition/art/ nature—that did little to enc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 A Brief History of Science/Art
• Chapter 2 Artists Working with Science
• Chapter 3 Environmental Science Meets Art
• Chapter 4 Culturescape: Environment, Science, and Art at Bundanon
• Chapter 5 Heavy Metal: Painting and Chemistry
• Chapter 6 Genemusik
• Chapter 7 Waterworks
• Chapter 8 Insects
• Chapter 9 Sounds of Science
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index