Only need one paragraph!

Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world by Ariane Koek

Luc Lalande Jun 26, 2017 · 6 min read

The following post is a copy/paste of an article by Ariane Koek that

deeply in9uenced my thinking of true art-science collaboration.

. . .

Original Source:

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Cern%3a+where+art+a

nd+science+collide/24678

By Ariane Koek.

Published online: 04 October 2011

Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world

Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Split Second House”, shown at the Venice Architecture

Biennale in 2010, took physics as its jumping-oK point

It is one of the fashionable arts movements of the moment. It is also

one of the most troubled because the aesthetic is unsubtle and still

evolving. With the seemingly giddy rise of the wonders of science in

our culture, epitomised by the boyish Brit physicist Brian Cox’s

blockbuster TV series, “Wonders of the Universe” on the BBC,

arts/science (sometimes called “sciart”) is gaining ascendancy in the

21st century as a movement of inXuence and power.

Almost every week, across the world, exhibitions are opening that are

billed as arts/science to cash in on this emerging trend, which is also

driven by new funding possibilities from science in the current arts

cash crisis.

But we are in the middle of a crisis of another kind — a reduction in

the wonder of creativity itself, and the question of who controls it and

how. Creativity, and where it comes from, is one of the last great

human frontiers, and one over which we have little control, cash crisis

or no cash crisis.

But there is a battle to do just that, and reduce creativity to a

systematic formula in our function-obsessed, input-output,

application-driven world. Artists are being driven to become

scienti]c, from the moment they ]ll in a funding application

predicting their ]nal production.

Let me explain. I work in arts/science myself. So, you could argue,

who I am to talk? After all, I have created an artists’ residency

programme at Cern, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory

and home to the large hadron collider. But it has at its heart the

wonder of the creative process. It is not a residency which is process-

driven or de]ned by an outcome; nor does it demand communication

about or homage to the science.

I have deliberately set it up to be a laboratory of the imagination,

where freeplay can happen. The science and the place are

springboards of the imagination for the artists, not the destination,

reason, mission or simulacra of production. When they apply,

prospective artists may be asked to imagine a project they would like

to carry out, but we fully expect that to change completely once they

come to Cern — and who knows what will happen then? That’s part

of the process.

This goes against the trends that can be seen in the arts/science

aesthetic which has emerged from the 20th century, which contains,

in my view, three very dangerous strands.

First, art as a communicator of science, where the artist represents the

science to the outside world. This is, essentially, art as a publicity and

communications tool, and can happen consciously or unconsciously

when the artist becomes subsumed in the science. This is becoming

critical in the current cash crisis, when artists are seeking new ways of

funding their work and science promises new purse-strings.

Second, science as a means of production, where scienti]c methods,

experimentation and technologies become the channel through

which art is processed and made, subjugating the imagination to

reductive processes.

Third, science as art — for example, when a snapshot of a cell is

admired as beautiful or a chemists’ laboratory is found in an art

gallery. Both instantly become art, “daringly” crossing the threshold

of the arts/science boundary, but in reality saying nothing more than

that. It is an intervention that leads nowhere.

But there is a fourth, more invisible, strand, where the arts and

science are in Xuid interchange — just as they were in the time of

Leonardo da Vinci, when he moved easily between the two. Here, the

disciplines are honoured for their similarities as well as their essential

dicerences.

Let me explain this fourth and more subtle strand in full. Arts and

science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be

human in this world. Both are driven by curiosity, discovery, the

aspiration for knowledge of the world or oneself, and perhaps, as the

conceptual artist Goshka Macuga said on her recent visit to Cern, a

desire for world domination. She was half joking.

But they express themselves in dicerent ways: the arts through the

body and mind, often driven by the exploration of the ego,

contradictions and the sheer messiness of life; science through

equations, directed, collaborative research and experimentation that

works in a progressive, linear fashion.

As Dr Michael Doser, the experimental physicist on Cern’s cultural

board for the arts, says: “What I ]nd wonderful about working with

artists is that they are just as fascinated by side routes and diversions

as they are by the direction in which they are going. This is what

makes artistic work really dicerent from scienti]c work.”

These oscillations between sameness and dicerences form what I call

the fourth aesthetic — the Leonardo way. Honour the dicerences and

then amazing work, true arts/science work, happens. One example is

Olafur Eliasson’s Your Split Second House, shown at the Venice

Architecture Biennale in 2010, which took physics as its jumping-oc

point.

This installation of twirling water-sprays momentarily separated the

drops of water under strobe lights. It is a piece about perception, and

was inspired by thinking about how long it takes an astronaut to get

out of a black hole. The answer is about a day. But to people who are

not in the hole, the astronaut takes forever.

Or take the work of Mariko Mori, which is driven by engaging with

opposites and the oscillations between the two: reality and fantasy,

seriousness and humour, human and machine, technology and

nature, science and religion. This is shown very clearly by Wave UFO,

which is simultaneously an architectural piece, a scienti]c experiment

in which the visitor’s brain waves become the work of art in a space-

age pod, and a temple to meditation.

The piece is fuelled as much by science and technology as it is by

Buddhism and an investigation of religion. Critically, Eliasson and

Mori are not so enthralled by the wonders of science that their work

loses its wonder and integrity.

For nine months, I tracked a very con]dent young Swiss artist and

astrophysicist working together on a residency. For four months, they

were equally enthralled by each other. But then there was a turning

point. The artist said to me: “The science is so amazing that I have to

prove that I understand it and that I too have a brain.”

From that moment, I knew he was lost. The work he did at the end of

the residency was at best a communications piece trying to explain

what quantum ]elds were. Now, a year later, he has rediscovered his

playfulness by regaining his distance from the all-intoxicating wonder

of particle physics, and is starting to create great work again.

I will leave you with two quotes, one from an artist and one from a

scientist, in order to practise what I preach: mutual respect, equal

exchange and dicerence.

Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the

mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle

of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no

longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are

dimmed.”

Keith Tyson: “If you attempt to marry and equate art with science,

then you fail. If you allow what is not similar about art and science,

and their dicerent methods and processes, to co-exist and thrive, then

a real art/science collaboration and aesthetic will emerge. But at the

end of the day, art and science are united by one logic and one

impulse — both are attempts to understand what it is to be human

and the world around us.”

That’s why I call Collide@Cern, the programme I have created, Cern’s

latest great experiment, colliding elements even more elusive than

the Higgs boson: namely, human creativity and the imagination. It

was founded to honour the creative process, and to keep science and

the arts in an equal balance of wonder — and apart, too. Let’s just

have spaces for this to happen, and let the magic and the mystery —

those chance operations the great John Cage talked about — occur.

The writer is a Clore Fellow and is head of international arts

development and the arts programme at Cern. She created Cern’s arts

policy and its main strategy, the Collide@Cern Artists’ Residency

programme.

Submissions by artists working in the digital domain to win a funded

residency in the Collide@Cern programme are open until 31 October.

For more information, see www.cern.ch/arts/collide. A submission

form can be found online at http://collide.aec.at

Some rights reserved

Science Sciart Art

About Help Legal