Showing posts with label John Gribbin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Gribbin. Show all posts

Monday 25 June 2012

Ultramarine and ultraviolet: scientific theories and technological techniques in contemporary art

If one of your first thoughts when considering science is of a scruffy-headed physicist chalking equations on a blackboard - interactive whiteboards somehow being not quite the same - then it's easy to see how the subject might offer limited appeal to artists. So is it possible in our visually sophisticated society to create satisfying works of art that utilise elements of scientific thought processes, theories or techniques?

It's difficult to define what constitutes contemporary art, since the majority of people seemingly find it difficult to relate to installations, video art or ready-mades, never mind more traditional media. On the other hand, it can be argued that scientists might have a sense of aesthetic that differs profoundly from the mainstream. A well-known example of this was electro-magnetism pioneer James Clerk Maxwell's addition of a term to an equation in order to achieve an aesthetic balance, prior to him working out the actual meaning of the term.  Novelist and physicist Alan Lightman promotes the notion that scientists have a difference perspective on aesthetics, from the familiar consideration of particle symmetries to more abstruse mathematical harmonies. He describes Steven Weinberg's 1967 paper on the weak nuclear interaction in these terms: "to a physicist, (this) Langrangian…is a work of art." As someone of very limited mathematical ability like me it might as well be written in ancient cuneiform, but you can judge for yourself below:


But then aren't all aesthetic judgements subjective? One familiar chain of urban myths concerns art galleries who have suffered the embarrassment of finding their installations thrown out by over-zealous cleaners who were unaware the material was art. This leads to the interesting point that although much contemporary art is roundly ignored outside the cognoscenti, new technology and the social changes engendered by it, especially mobile communications and the World Wide Web, have been rapidly assimilated and rarely questioned. When it comes to the shock of the new, scientific ideas and the resulting technology appear much more comfortable than post-Second World War art. Or should that be qualified by the statement that if the technology is seen (albeit via persuasive advertising) as an improvement to everyday life, then it will be unquestioningly accepted, whereas art is ignored since it is rarely seen as serving a purpose?

At this point it might be good to consider two distinct approaches to how the two disciplines can be integrated:
  1. visual representations of and/or responses to science
  2. the use of scientific theories and methods to produce art
Approach 1:
In the Eighteenth Century Joseph Wright of Derby produced several atmospheric scenes of experiments, but the art history of the past century has made such clear-cut reportage unfashionable. The visual sophistication of our age would probably deem equivalent work today as both pedestrian and irrelevant to contemporary needs. After all, a straightforward painting of the Large Hadron Collider or a theorist lecturing in front of an equation-covered black board would hardly prove satisfying either from an aesthetic standpoint or as journalistic commentary. Changing technology has also eliminated the innate visual romanticism of peering through the eyepiece of a microscope or telescope; sitting at a computer screen is hardly inspiring material for the heirs to Wright of Derby.

Over the years I've attended several exhibitions that emphasised collaborations between both disciplines and have to confess I usually find the works have little depth beyond obvious, facile connections. Last year I saw a series of works reminiscent of my juvenilia (see the previous post). It consisted of a sequence of photographs of birds in flight, overlaid with the relevant motion equations. A slightly better result comes from the world of fashion, via collaboration between designer Helen Storey and her developmental biologist sister Kate. In the late 1990s they created a series of dresses elucidating the first thousand hours of human life, from fertilization through to recognizable human form.

One of my favourite examples is Yukinori Yanagi's World Flag Ant Farm, in which ants were introduced into a series of interconnected Perspex boxes containing national flags made of coloured sand. Once the human artist finished the initial setup, the wandering ants rearranged the pictorial elements as they used the sand to construct their colony. Yanagi stated his intention was to examine how much the animals rely on programmed instructions rather than free thought, but ironically the end result appeared far more expressive of individual freedom than the robot-like mentality considered essential for a hive mind.

Since 2005 Princeton University has been holding an irregular Art of Science competition, but again the resonance of the work varies enormously. Many entries are photographs of experiments or equipment, frequently at nano- to microscopic scales: good to look at but nothing that could not be faked by a skilled Photoshop user. However, a few submissions have proven to be the ultimate achievement of an aesthetic work integrated within an active experiment, including how computer memory degrades following power loss and a study of individual ants within a colony by painting unique patterns of dots on them. By and large though, most examples I have seen are woefully inadequate attempts to combine art and science.

Approach 2:
Originating with Hamlet's dictum to actors, it has been said that art's task is to hold a mirror up to nature. There have been concerted efforts by artists to deconstruct the world by adapting scientific knowledge, from the Impressionists attempt to understand how objects are modelled by light (consider Monet's haystacks and Rouen cathedral at different times of day and year), via the Pointillist's experiments to understand how the eye builds an image from minute elements, to the Futurists and Vorticists attempts to create apparent movement in a still image. Now that science shows us brave new worlds (apologies for mixing my Shakespeares) via electron microscopes, telescopes in numerous wavelengths, etc., what attempts have been made to illustrate this?

Luke Jerram is a colour-blind artist who has created glass sculptures of viruses at approximately one million times life size. What is so interesting apart from the novelty value of the subject matter is that unlike most representations in popular science books, the sculptures are transparent and therefore colourless. The works therefore immediately impart useful knowledge: viruses exist at a scale below the wavelengths of visible light and so cannot be the beautiful if  randomly-hued images we see in computer-generated illustrations. In fact, the only direct visualisation of viruses is produced by high resolution, transmission electron microscopy, the results being monochromatic, grainy and from the layman's point of view, distinctly samey. Jerram's works are not only a complex example of art meeting science, but in a tribute to their accuracy, have been used in medical texts and journals.

American artist Hunter Cole has created interesting works using techniques derived from her geneticist background, such as drawing in bioluminescent bacteria. At an even more experimental level, Brazilian Eduardo Kac has not just used life forms as media but has created novelty organisms as the artworks themselves, such as a fluorescing rabbit courtesy of a jellyfish protein gene; Doctor Frankenstein, come on down! Finally, at yet another step, Luke Jerram's 2007 Dream Director installation even made the viewer the subject of an experiment, although not exactly under laboratory conditions: visitors could stay in the gallery overnight, sleeping in pods which played themed sounds trigged by their own rapid eye movement.

If there is anything the recent history of science, especially cutting-edge physics, has taught us, it is that we need metaphors to visualise ideas that cannot be directly observed by our limited senses. But as astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin has frequently pointed out, linguistic metaphor is often inadequate to the task, causing the analogy to return upon itself. Thus without help from the visual arts, anyone who isn't a maths genius has little hope of understanding the more arcane aspects of post-classical physics. Both art and science challenge perceptions, but it is likely that the latter will increasingly need the former to elucidate novel facts and theories. So any artist seeking a purpose need look no further: here's to many a fruitful collaboration!

Tuesday 29 May 2012

How to be cyantific: connecting the laboratory to the artist's studio

Moving house - or more broadly speaking, hemispheres - last year was a good excuse for a spring clean on an epic scale. One of the items that didn't make the grade even as far as a charity shop was a framed painting I created several decades' ago, a clumsy attempt to describe scientific imagery in acrylics. In front of a false colour radar map of the surface of Venus was the head and neck of a raptor dinosaur above a bowler-hatted figure straight out of Rene Magritte. You can judge the work for yourself below; I seem to remember the bemusement of the framer but as I said at the time, it wasn't meant to be to everyone's taste...

But if my daub was rather wide of the mark, just how successful have attempts been to represent the theory and practice of science in the plastic, non-linear, arts such as painting and sculpture? Whereas musical and mathematical ability seem to readily connect and there has been some admirable science-influenced poetry, by comparison the visual arts are somewhat lacking. Much has been written about the Surrealist's use of psychoanalysis but as this discipline is frequently described as a pseudoscience I've decided to cut through the issue by ignoring it and concentrate on the 'hard' sciences instead.

Combining science and art - or failing to
One of the most difficult issues to resolve (especially for those who accept C.P. Snow's theory of 'two cultures') is that whilst most science books for a general readership describe a linear progression or definitive advancement to the history of science, art has no such obvious arrow of change. After all, a century has passed since the early non-realist movements (Cubism, les Fauves, etc.) but there are plenty of contemporary artists who avoid abstraction. Granted, they are unlikely to win any of the art world's top prizes, but the progression of science and its child technology over the past three or so centuries clearly differentiates the discipline from the arts, both the sequential schools of the West and the 'traditional' aesthetics of other cultures.

Of course, it's usual to differentiate the character of scientists and artists about as far apart as any human behaviour can get, but like most stereotypical ideas it doesn't take much to prove them wildly inaccurate. Anyone aware of Einstein's views ("Imagination is more important than knowledge") or his last unsuccessful decades spent on a unification theory that ignored quantum mechanics will understand that scientists can have as imaginative and colourful personality as any artist. Indeed, the cutting edge of theoretical science, especially physics, may rely on insights and creativity as much as advanced mathematics, a far cry from the popular image of dull, plodding scientists who follow dry, repetitive processes.

Another aspect worth mentioning is that our species appears unique in the ability to create representations of the world that can be recognised as such by most if not all of our species. Despite Congo the chimpanzee gaining enough kudos in the 1950s for Picasso and Miro to buy his paintings, as well as more recent media interest in elephant art works, there is no evidence that under controlled experimental conditions non-human artists can produce obviously realistic images unaided. Then again, could it be that we are so biased in our recognition patterns that we do not identify what passes for realism in other species? Might it be possible that other animals interpret their work as representational when to us it resembles the energetic daubs of toddlers? (This suggests shades of Douglas Adams's dolphins, who considered themselves more intelligent than humans because rather than build cities and fight wars, all do is muck about in water having a good time...)

So where do we start? Firstly, what about unintentional, science-generated art? Over the past decade or so there has been a spate of large format, text-light, coffee table books consisting of images taken by space probes, telescopes and Earth resources satellites. A recent internet success consisted of time lapse photography of the Earth taken by crew aboard the International Space Station; clearly, no-one spent a hundred billion US dollars or so just to make a breath-taking video, but the by-products of the project are a clear example of how science can incidentally create aesthetic work. This isn't just a contemporary phenomenon either: the earliest examples I can think of are Leonardo da Vinci's dissection drawings; in addition to being possibly the most detailed such illustrations until today's non-invasive scanning techniques they are also beautiful works of art in themselves. But then Leonardo's intentions appear to have been to both investigate the natural world for the sheer sake of learning as well as improve his painting technique by knowledge of the underlying anatomy. I wonder if there are any contemporary artists who use MRI technology or similar as a technical aid for their draftsmanship?

At the other end of the spectrum (groan), mathematician Marcus du Sautoy's 2010 BBC TV series The Beauty of Diagrams was an interesting discourse on how certain images created for a scientific purpose have become mainstream visual symbols. From Vitruvian Man, da Vinci's analysis of ideal human proportions, to the double helix diagram of DNA (incidentally first drawn by Odile Crick, an artist married to a scientist), these works integrate the transmission of information with a beautiful aesthetic. The latter example is particularly interesting in that the attempt to illustrate complex, miniscule structures in an easily understandable format has since become a mainstay of science diagrams, shorthand that is frequently interpreted by the non-specialist as a much closer representation of reality than the schematic it really is.

Physicist and writer John Gribbin has often stated that the cutting edge science of the past century, especially physics, has had to resort to allegory to describe situations at scales far removed from human sensual experience. This implies that an essential method by which science can be conveyed is via the written metaphor and visual symbolism. As we delve further into new phenomena, science may increasingly rely on art to describe ideas that cannot for the foreseeable future be glimpsed at first hand. But ironically this could have a deleterious effect on public understanding if the model is too successful, for then it becomes difficult to supplant with a more accurate theory. An obvious example is the architecture of the atom, with the familiar if highly inaccurate classical model of electrons orbiting the nucleus like a miniature solar system prevalent long after the development of quantum electrodynamics.

You might ask how difficult would it be to describe probabilities and world paths in conventional art media, but Cubism was a style attempting to combine different viewpoints of a subject into one composition. If this appears too simplistic, then it may seem more convincing once you know that physicist Niels Bohr was inspired by Cubist theories during the development of the Complementarity Principle on the wave-particle duality. Cubism is of course only one of the more obvious visual tricks but even the most photo-realistic painting requires techniques to convert three dimensional reality (well four, if you want to include time), into two dimensions. How often do we consider this conversion process in itself, which relies on a series of visual formula to produce the desired result? It may not be science, but the production of most art isn't a haphazard or random series of actions.

It's easy to suggest that a fundamental difference between science and the plastic arts is that the former is ideally built of a combination of method and results whilst the latter is firmly biased towards the works alone. An exception can be seen in abstract expressionism, a.k.a. action painting: at art college we were taught that to practitioners of this school the moment of creation was at least as important as the final result. To this end, Jackson Pollock was filmed painting from as early as 1950, with numerous other artists of various movements following suit soon after. In general though, the art world runs on the rich individuals and corporations who buy the works, not the theories of critics.

And what of art theory? Most of it isn't relevant here, but one of the fundamentals of composition is the harmony and rhythm generated by the use of mathematical ratios and sequences. The Golden section and Fibonacci series are frequently found in organic structures, so in a sense their use is a confirmation of that old adage that the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to nature. If that sounds trite, why not examine works by contemporary artists inspired by scientific theories or methodologies? That's coming in the next post...

Sunday 3 January 2010

What's in a label? How words shape reality

With the start of a new year it seems appropriate to look at how our perception of the universe is created via language - after all, there's no position in space identifying an orbital starting point. We grow up with a notion of reality that is largely defined by convenience and historical accidents embedded into our language and therefore our thought patterns (and vice versa). For at least the last six hundred years many societies have called our planet Earth, whilst of course Ocean would be more appropriate. Whilst this is just an obvious chauvinism for a land-based species, there are other terms that owe everything to history. We count in base ten, position zero longitude through the Greenwich Meridian and usually show the Earth from one perspective, despite there not being an arrow in our galaxy stating 'this way up' (but then had Ancient Egyptians' view prevailed, Australia and New Zealand would be in the Northern Hemisphere.)

So how far can go with constructs? Our calendar is an archaic, sub-optimal mish-mash, with the interpolation of July and August meaning the last four months of the year are inaccurately named seven through ten. The changeover from the Julian to Gregorian calendar varied from nation to nation, meaning well-known events such as the birth of George Washington and the Bolshevik Revolution have several dates depending on the country defining that piece of history. As for the majority of humans agreeing that we are now in AD 2010, thanks to a fifteen hundred year-old mistake by Dionysius Exiguus our current year should really be at least AD 2014, if we accept that an historical figure called Jesus of Nazareth was born during the lifetime of Herod the Great. It appears that even the fundamentals that guide us through life are subjective at the very least if not far from accurate in many cases.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argues that all scientific research is a product of the culture of the scientists engaged on those projects, so whilst we might argue that Galileo was the first scientist in a strictly modern use of the word, can there be a definitive boundary between the quasi-mystical thought processes of Copernicus and Kepler (and even Newton), and that of the modern exponents typified by Einstein and Hawking? Whilst we would like to believe in a notion of pure objectivity, scientists are just as subjective as everyone else and their theories are therefore built on assumptions directly related to history, both cultural and biological.

We use labels to comfort ourselves, even boost our egos, via unconscious assumptions that are gradually looking more ridiculous as we delve ever deeper into the mysteries of creation. For example, the past sixty-five million years has been a period frequently named 'the Age of Mammals'. Yet as Stephen Jay Gould was fond of pointing out, most of the world's biomass is microbial and we macroscopic life forms are comparative newcomers, restricted to a far reduced range of environments compared to bacteria, protists and other small-scale organisms.

Despite such sense-expanding tools as infra-red telescopes and electron microscopes, we still process sensory input and use primarily audio-visual output to define scientific theories and methodology. We are in thrall to the languages we use define our thoughts, both conversational language and mathematics. Although the lingua franca of science has varied over the centuries, all languages from Latin to English have one thing in common: they are used to tell us stories. At a basic level, the history of science is riddled with fables and apocrypha, from Newton being hit by an apple (and inventing the reflecting telescope) to Galileo dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, even Columbus believing the world was a sphere (he didn't - he thought it was pear-shaped!)

So if scientific history cannot be relied upon, what about the hypotheses and theories themselves? In the words of John Gribbin, we construct 'Just So' stories to create a comprehendible version of reality. Presumably this reliance on metaphor will only increase as our knowledge becomes further divorced from everyday experience but our technology fails to keep pace with confirming new theories; for example, it is far from likely that we will ever be able to directly view a superstring.

In addition, language doesn't just restrict our ideas: if a term has a scientific sense differing from vernacular meaning, problems frequently arise. A classic example would be quantum leap, which to most people means an enormous step forward but to physicists is an electron's miniscule change of energy level. However, even personal computer pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair used the term in its former meaning for his 1984 Quantum Leap microcomputer (at least I assume he did, although QL owners may disagree...)

Speaking of which, perhaps when we finally build (or machines build for us) computers capable of true artificial intelligence, new ways of exploring the universe not tied down to conventional linguistic-based thought patterns may arise. Then again, since we will be the parents of these machines, this may not be feasible. As one of Terry Pratchett's characters stated: "I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another where the best fruit is." But all things considered, we haven't done that badly so far.

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