Sian Ede. Art & Science.

Cited by ART& SCIENCE, Siane Ede

Contemporary scientists often talk about 'beauty'and 'elegance'; artists hardly ever do. Scientists weave incredible stories, invent extraordinary hypotheses and ask difficult questions about the meaning of life. They have insights into the workings of our bodies and minds which challenge the way we construct our identities and selves. They create visual images, models and scenarios that are gruesome, baffling and beguiling. They say and do things that are ethically and politically challenging and shocking. Is science the new art?
Contrary to the claims of some in the science community, the public is better informed about contemporary science than it is about contemporary art. Scarcely a news bulletin passes which does not contain the words 'scientists have discovered that...' followed up with accessible explanations. All schoolchildren in the West (unless they live in Creationist Kansas) must compulsorily learn the basics of genetics, chemistry and physics. Our television and movie fictions glamorise medicine and forensic science; we relish and revere the slick clinical jargon of fftand Casualty and their crash crises, instant diagnoses and gorily authentic-looking body parts. Even small children can be knowledgeable about the appearance and function of a gerbil's kidneys and the gynaecology and obstetrics of cows, thanks to Animal Hospital and the prime-time viewing of vet documentaries. 'Nature' programmes attract huge viewing figures. General practitioners regularly encounter patients who come to the surgery with self-made diagnoses, full of technical information acquired from the Internet. Moreover, we subscribe to the purity and implicit justice of the scientific method, with its emphasis on the primacy of impartial evidence, which has become so much a part of the police detective and forensic science fiction and films we seem obsessed with. Logical argument and rational expression, together with a Gradgrindian respect for 'facts', are paramount in public and political discourse and the arts constituency itself must justify its existence through a semblance of order which involves the continual making of strategies, audits and statistical surveys, even to the extent of identifying rules and conditions which govern the nature of that hallowed term 'creativity'. And, while scientific ideas are intelligently aired every day, art is not explained or discussed on its own terms except as an end-of-the-news item where it is likely to be derided for its apparently infantile sensationalism or its knee-jerk irony, or vaguely revered for its decorativeness, or its hints at some kind of inaccessible sanctity. We are much more likely to be seriously persuaded, moved, worried or enchanted by science.
One of my objectives in this book is to show that in our clever, curious and materialist world 'art' is as vital to our existence as 'science'. Visualising, abstracting, imagining, inventing, pretending, storytelling, re-presenting and ceaselessly reinterpreting things are as important as indications of human achievement and communication as rational discourse and the presentation of empirical evidence. We may be afraid of the uncertainty and chaos that this implies, but we should be able to acknowledge our susceptibility to seeing things from a range of viewpoints and be confident in the value of such approaches. We have probably survived as a species as a consequence. Indeed, our brains easily and simultaneously incorporate many systems of knowledge. We possess the capacity to test out the evidence of our sensations and to make reasoned conjectures, but also to fantasise, guess and imagine. Real scientific progress could not happen without daydreaming: intellectual research and logical planning are essential for the making of art. We can take interest and pleasure in understanding how the brain processes the visual and emotional signals that present themselves to us in an artwork, in discovering the historical and cultural basis for its composition, and in actually experiencing the sensations it stimulates and letting them conjure up uniquely personal associations. Different though such approaches are, they don't have to be mutually exclusive and they add to the richness of knowledge and experience. And, at a time when scientific 'progress' is in the ascendant, its dis

coveries and pronouncements need to be placed in contexts where things can be seen quite differently, where ideas can be expressed with a poetic or abstract succinctness and always in a questioning and compassionate spirit.
If scientists don't always 'get it' when it comes to contemporary art, an increasing number of artists are beginning to 'get' science and there are many examples of excellent works which have been inspired by it. But while 'Sci-Art' sometimes seems to be all the rage, not all of it is interesting as art. Indeed, I do not believe that art can directly be 'about' science - lectures, books or discussions are more successful at presenting explanations or stimulating debate. If art is 'about' anything, it is a reflection of human experience in ' complexity and it emanates from an inventive individual with an unusual and sideways view on things, communicating with vigorous visual acuity and daring, its intellectual content, like that of poetry, conveyed through hints and ambiguities. Artists don't 'do' prettification, product or propaganda for the public understanding of science. But they can engage with it and create images which suggest alternative ways of seeing.
There is much in contemporary science that can stimulate art's flexible, intuitive and visceral response to the world and in this book four important aspects become evident. The first of these concerns new scientific explanations for the structures and processes of the human mind and body and the subsequent implications for revisions in what we think of as 'human nature'. Secondly, there are science's startling new technologies; thirdly, its ethical controversies. And, fourthly, I believe it is important to examine how far the pendulum is swinging away from the cultural and linguistic relativism that has for almost a century predominated in the theoretical discourse underpinning approaches to the arts and humanities, and how far it is moving towards a universalist belief system and approach, as promoted by the new sciences, especially those concerned with the evolution of the mind.
'The single human voice telling its own story can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness,' writes the novelist and critic David Lodge. Scientists may be to able to explain how the brain works in terms of mapping the cortex or understanding synaptic connection-making or the function of neurotransmitters, but they cannot convey how experience feels the way it does to us as individuals. Nevertheless, current endeavours to understand the actual matter of mind and consciousness increasingly show it to be depersonalised. How far can we claim to possess a unique sense of self, of individuality, or identity, if so many of our mental processes are innate or automatic? Over the coming years we will be able, mechanically and electronically, to extend the capabilities of our brains as well as our bodies. Imaginative leaps forward will require artists to engage with and invent new paradigms for the body/mind continuum.
Scientific images of human cells or brain scans in artworks were remarkable the first time they were used. Helen Chadwick's squelchy internal organs intertwined with flowers, fur or hair, her human embryos set like jewels, presented images which demanded radical questions about the nature of self, of 'beauty' and 'femininity'. Marc Quinn's 2001 Genomic Portrait of Nobel Prizewinning geneticist Sir John Sulston features colonies grown from bacterial cells from his subject's sperm containing segments of his DNA - he is his DNA - but you can't make this witty gesture twice, or a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, where this portrait can be found, would soon become dreary. X-rays, brain scans, the double helix have become commonplace icons in advertising and popular journalism - artists need to be more inventive. And claims from the science community that their swirling, colour-clashing representations of cells or chaotic systems are aesthetically rich seem to miss the artistic point. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has called science images 'loci for modes of thought' and for artists the 'thought' will relate to the quest for multiple ways of interpreting what it feels like to be human rather than the search for a harmonious picture or an indication of absolute meaning.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, art became increasingly associated with political protest but, as the world has become more disparate and a

pparently more liberalised, its defiant gestures have seemed increasingly frivolous. Recently, however, there has been a reinvigoration. In the influential international German art show Documenta 2002, curated by the American-Nigerian artist/curator Okwui Enwezor, all 116 artists uncompromisingly addressed the theme Globalization with 'a mighty denunciation of violence, poverty and social dissolution', as The Art Newspaper reported. It remains to be seen how successfully provocative artists can be when their impact is so closely tethered to the art market. But science is bedevilled by market forces too and it would be no bad thing if artists were to engage with those scientists who are themselves extremely concerned about ethical issues - when genetic research rushes ahead, for example, or about the power of vested interests in choosing where research funds are prioritised, or about the ways in which new discoveries are increasingly being patented for profit. Such collaboration may present a particular challenge to artists who don't want to make work that is simply 'issue-based' and to scientists who may be afraid that important arguments might be devalued by lightweight irony. But in the best work such doubts can be resolved, and particularly with a view to our deep concerns about our imperilled environment and with questions of ownership and the global economy, they must increasingly be.
And lastly there are the philosophical differences. We know from out experience of the science labs and the art rooms of our secondary schools how the theoretical and practical stances of art and science contrast. We are also familiar with the delineating distinctions set forth by scientist and novelist C. P. Snow in his provocative 1959 essay The Two Cultures, and of the irritable response by Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis. Their radically conflicting approaches largely still hold true, although in retrospect we can also see how they reflect the snobberies of the time: science the product of naively over-optimistic qunn-ho rhaps. literature the legacy of the morally superior - and rich. (A stereotypical class divide may still linger: art - mysteriously omniscient and fashionably louche; science - boffinish and unsubtly earnest.)
The rift goes deeper, however, and derives from radical differences in two epistemological traditions concerned with the nature of knowledge itself. On one hand is the view that there is an jmjalicii reality out there waiting to be discovered, independent of the observer's mental state, as very many scientists maintain. On the other hand is the idea that reality is all or at least partly a construction of the human mind, phenomenologically and linguistically determined and therefore unfixed, and whether we are aware of it or not, viewed in accordance with the prevailing values and beliefs of particular times and places. How far can we say that objects possess an intrinsic meaning beyond that derived from the way we utilise them or have beliefs about them? Is knowledge dispassionate and absolute, or forever ambiguously dependent on the slippery meanings we give to words? The postmodernist writer Roland Barthes encapsulates this in a piece of literary criticism: 'the systems of meaning...take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.'
In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal published a paper in the American cultural studies journal Social Text. Called Transgressing the Boundaries:Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', it presented a thesis which questioned the concept of an external world with properties independent of human life and thought. Sokal went on to assert that physical 'reality' was essentially a social and linguistic construct. For evidence he drew on the notions of indeterminacy and relativity in quantum theory, and to give his arguments intellectual gravitas he cited postmodernist critics such as Derrida, lrigaray and Lyotard. And then, as soon as his thesis came out in print, he confessed. The paper was a hoax, produced to demonstrate that postmodernist, socially constructed analyses of science were based on ignorance, prejudice and hilariously muddled thinking. Peppered with scientific errors, the paper had been accepted without question because it supported the prevailing political and cultural orthodoxy of the journal and its constituency. It was difficult for even the most rigorous

cultural theorist to come up with a defence that had any clear credibility in the science world. For, to some extent, Sokal and many in science and beyond felt justified in expressing a weariness for the obfuscation, self-reference and self-reverence evident in the worst excesses of postmodernist discourse, which, while apparently refusing to make absolute judgements, often unquestioningly accepts an underlying political agenda, with its origins in questionably outdated theories influenced by Freud, Marx and Foucault. 'Prime numbers would be there regardless of whether we had evolved sufficiently to recognise them,' says mathematician Marcus du Sautoy in a recent book (which reflects a Platonist view typical of many mathematicians). 'One can imagine a different chemistry or biology on the other side of the universe, but prime numbers will remain prime whichever galaxy you are counting in.'
While many in the arts and humanities can see that this is the case, they are suspicious of any constituency that claims to be wholly right in finding the route to Truth and particularly can't agree to assess all human behaviour, perceptions and products outside any political and cultural context. We must always assert the right to ask who makes the judgement and why. The evolutionary psychologists' view is that human nature is universally the same because it has evolved everywhere by natural selection and is driven overwhelmingly by imperatives to survive and breed. Few in the arts and humanities would disagree that human behaviours, products and artefacts reflect or express certain fundamental drives, but our interpretation of them has to be multilayered, not regarded simply as the consequence of life on the prehistoric Savannah or of universal 'rules' governing perception and cognition, or those related to notions of symmetry and asymmetry. We can never know how someone in twelfth-century Italy or Tang Dynasty China would read the works of Picasso. The plays of Shakespeare with their stories of divided kingdoms, family conflicts and forbidden love are understood all over the world, but every time they are played they are reinterpreted in different contexts by different audiences. Who decides which science to apply to determine whether Hamlet is mad or the only one sane? A Navaho sand-painting ritual for a sick child is a mystery - we literally cannot read the signs nor subscribe to the belief, let alone the science, that she can be made better this way. Are we then to dismiss this cultural practice? This is shaky political ground and what appears to be dogged cultural relativism can infuriate scientists. Unfortunately, their own track record isn't too persuasive. Who can say what is 'natural' behaviour for women at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when many scientific experts got it so wrong at the beginning of the twentieth? Even when we greatly respect their methodologies, it is always important to take cultural context into account.
For there are fashions in thought and even in science. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out in the 1970s, scientific discovery moves forward through radical change or 'paradigm shifts'. New discoveries that fundamentally challenge and then go on to replace existing theories can sometimes stimulate a complete revision of ideas for the way we regard our existence. Outstanding examples are Galileo's endorsement of the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa, and Darwin's heretical Origin of Species, which demonstrated that human beings weie not privileged through; creation by an omnipotent God but had evolved through random biological accidents. It is particularly Interesting mat tnese significant breakthroughs occurred Fn politically heated contexts - Galileo in post-Reformation Europe, Darwin at a time of increasing materialism and religious doubt.
Such questions challenge the legacy of the traditional Enlightenment belief in impartiality, justice and freedom from superstition or political subversion. They also cast doubt on the primacy of the 'scientific method', as defined by the philosopher Karl Popper in the 1950s. The scientific method aims to prove a hypothesis through a series of empirical tests to distinguish its 'falsifiability' (rather than its verifiability). And it is a precious commodity because it offers an agreed and impartial methodology for pursuing an understanding of phenomena or behaviour, providing evidence wh

ich can be open to public scrutiny and rationally assessed, even where it can never be definitively agreed on. Scientists are expected to play by the rules which are there to ensure an almost superhuman objectivity. Can this ever be possible? No, claims the philosopher Paul Feyerabend: 'all methodologies have their limitations and the only "rule" that survives is "anything goes".'
Surely, in order to form a rounded view of any phenomena, we need to take into account both perspectives - the rational, well-evidenced hypotheses of science along with an awareness of the social and political contexts iri which such hypotheses are framed, tested and reported. Both extremes can accommodate the idea that our view of things doesn't stay fixed forever. 'Nature' may be ultimately constrained by the parameters set by the four forces of physics but this still allows for a great deal of flexibility, as the history of evolution demonstrates.
As an anthropologist, Steven Mithen traces the way in which the human mind has evolved in an ongoing active engagement with the natural environment, developing technical, natural history, social and linguistic intelligences which continually interact, questing, imagining and suggesting new constructs to explain and predict structure and behaviour. As an art historian, the Leonardo da Vinci scholar Jvlartin Kemp proposes that we all possess to some degree a 'structural intuition' in which we make internal models of the world that are both innate and 'ceaselessly reconfigured...to resonate with external systems'. I would add that we also have a capacity to socialise and use language to discuss and remake definitions to suit an evolving view of our environment, a 'social and linguistic intuition' equivalent. Moreover, new neuroscientific research indicates that our encounters with the world shape the very architecture of our brains in a two-way process. The brain-cells which form our individual experience, our memories, our selves, and, collectively, our cultures, develop or die according to the ways they respond - or not - to outside stimuli. In turn, we predicate our view of the world according to the experience we have acquired. Perhaps artists are especially agile in thinking flexibly but so too are many scientists working at the boundaries of their practice. We have insights into reality, we continually reshape them, putting oppositions together, arguing, reconciling on different systems.of knowledge simultaneously - art and science, science and art. Not the same, never likely to form any kind of universal epistemology, but equally important modes of enquiry.
How do we interpret and reinterpret the world - through quantum mechanics or through post-structuralist theory? Both are pretty incomprehensible; both are profound forms of knowledge. How do we learn to look at pattern - through an fMRl scan of the brain or through gazing at Vija Celmins' detailed pencil-dot skyscapes? Which is more ingenious - the Mir Space Station or the cranky Utopia of Emilia and Ilya Kabakov's installation, The Palace of Projects? Which is more encoded - the sequencing of a piece of human DNA or Velasquez's Les Meninas, as explained in Foucault's famous 1966 essay? Which is more frightening - the idea of rogue self-replicating nanotechnology machines which feed on organic materials and spread like pollen, or the Chapman Brothers' holocaust reconstruction Hell? Which is sillier - a psychology survey to find the fundamental rules governing sexual attraction entirely based on questionnaires filled in by university students, or Turner Prize winner Martin Creed's Lights Going off and on in an Empty Room? The world and our view of it comprises multiple perspectives. Where would evolution be without flexibility?
The comparison between the Mjr Space Station and the Kabakovs' installation The Palace of Projects is an interesting one. The small and self-contained unit designed to be suspended in space may be regarded straightforwardly as a piece of brilliant engineering produced for serious and practicable scientific investigation. The Kabakovs' artwork is a winding snail-shape installation containing sixty-five Heath Robinsonian projects, in homage to improvisation created by fictional Soviet citizens and presented in the form of models with quasi-serious explanatory texts, like science proposals or engineering blueprints. By donning a pair of angel's wings, goes one proposal, one might behave better;

by imagining a system to diminish the earth's gravitational field we could inhabit the air above us and enjoy more space. Each of the Kabakovs' projects addresses three basic questions .- how to make the world better, how to make yourself better and how to stimulate-creativity - and each presents bizarre solutions. They emanate from the experience of having to survive, practically and emotionally, within a drab and often dangerous Soviet regime. The artwork is both funny and tragic and becomes a parable for our brief struggle on Earth and our desire to understand it and improve our lot. Mir and The Palace of Projects derive from the same kind of inventiveness and even the same kind of impetus, and if we have seen the one we will think differently of the other and then also of our lives and what they mean.
Throught in this introduction I have listed four aspects in which art can engage with science^ in the book itself I do not examine them in neat categories under these headings, because while science tries to understand the world through identifying patterns and grouping them to form taxonomic categories, art deliberately does'not. Good artwork is always more than the sum of its parts and operates like poetry, making suggestions, hinting at associations, teasing emotionally, challenging intellectually and expecting the viewer to play a part in making new meanings from it. I think of Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter in its dimly lit room at Tate Modern - fragments of stuff swaying on suspended piano wire grouped in a square and casting shadows around a single light bulb. I know the bits and pieces are the remains of a collection of arbitrary domestic clutter piled into a garden shed and then blown up by the Army, and that the title of the work provokes the viewer to consider indeterminate astrophysical states - the explosion/implosion of Big Bang or black hole, matter and anti-matter, particle and wave, time and space. I find it gorgeous, funny, worrying, wry, outrageous, clever and moving but I will never, be able to explain it once and for all.
So the vast range of the subject matter in this book - contemporary art and science - has presented me with a mapping challenge: how to forge a clear route through the territory without over-prescribing a new set of categorical approaches. In general I have pursued my own curiosities and made my own links in the hope that readers will use them as starting points for their own enquiries, connections and sometimes, too, contradictions. In some sections, mostly in the first half of the book, I provide introductions to some aspects of contemporary science. In others, mostly in the second half, I look at ways in which contemporary art can be understood differently if one is informed by some scientific knowledge, and I also examine works in which artists have deliberately engaged with science.
In the first section, I address 'The Problem with Beauty', which I take as a route to explore some of the essential differences in the cultural attitudes of the constituencies of science and art. I go at a somewhat rapid gallop through a history of science's quest for a unified vision of the world (Chapter 1, 'Everything is Connected in Life'), against which can be compared a breakdown in art's world-view (Chapter 2, 'Disconnections and Asymmetries'). I posit my own thesis which relates to the fact that while science aims as far as possible to be dispassionate and nbjertive. art is always related to the way weexgerience life, especially to the reluctant realisation that each of us is mortal.
The next section, 'Evolutionary Perspectives', takes readers back in time and in its three chapters - Chapter 3, 'From the Future to the Past'; Chapter 4, 'New Mythologies'; and Chapter 5, 'Universal Studios' - 1 turn to scientists' views on the evolution of the human mind and explore the validity of some of the more interesting ideas concerned with discovering universal characteristics in human behaviour, going on to investigate some scientific hypotheses (not all of them sensible) for why art is made and what makes it appealing.
In the next section, 'Mind and Body, Body and Mind', I look at ways in which artists are making new work to reflect contemporary constructs, images and technologies concerned with the nature of consciousness and of biomedical research. The title of the first of these - Chapter 6, 'Sculpted by the World' - is taken from an observation by the

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