At the end of Ciaran Murphy-Royal’s Art + Science, he called for people to take part and respond with more art + science suggestions. The following is Vera Pinheiro’s inspired response.

Art and Science: two disciplines long seen as polarised entities. Subjectivity vs. objectivity. Emotion vs. reason. Abstract vs. rational. And yet, an artist could learn from a scientist how to develop a methodology, how to test hypotheses, how to interpret and draw valid conclusions from the outside world. Likewise, a scientist could learn from an artist how to develop arguments, how to understand, and to how change an other’s mind. Nevertheless, both are areas of exploration by excellence. Both enlarge our view about the world we live in. Art, by formulating new media, fostering new ways of communication. Science, by creating new ways of thinking, widening our imagination.

 

Below you will find some examples showing how these two apparently opposite worlds are better together. Art based in scientific models or theories, scientific works that can easily be appreciated by their pure aesthetics: the gap is, finally, being breached.

 

Frida Kahlo de Rivera & Pain

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was one of the most well-known modern Mexican painters. Due to an accident while she was still a teenager, Frida had to endure as many as thirty-five operations, bearing an iron handrail pierced through her abdomen and uterus throughout her life. She then decided to use her recovery process, isolation and pain experience to develop a completely new artistic current, using her body as model, painting her self-portrait as years passed by. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best”. Self-taught, Frida’s art can be inserted in the surrealism movement. Unique nevertheless, by imprinting her indigenous traditional Mexican roots while trying to explain what pain means to her as an artist and as a woman. In 2002, she was played by Salma Hayek in the movie “Frida”.

 

 

 

Man Ray & the Rayographs

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray (1890-1976) was an American modernist who spent most of his life in Paris. There, he had the opportunity to meet most of the art members and influents of the so called Age d’or (The Golden Age), such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp or Frances Picabia, to name a few. He used photograms, originally developed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, to create “rayographs” as he called them. Photograms are cameraless photographic prints. “To create is divine, to reproduce is human”. By placing identifiable objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material, he managed to obtain negative shadows once exposed to the light. The resulting series of swirling abstract shapes became an exponent of the new-born Dadaism and Surrealism movements.

Official site: http://www.manraytrust.com/

 

Salvador Dali, Psychology & Quantum Physics

Catalan surrealist painter, Dali (1904-1989) extensively explored symbolism in his work. He put on canvas complex concepts like “The persistence of Memory” or “The Sleep”. He was also fascinated by the birth of quantum mechanics and new optical techniques that appeared in the 20^th century. For instance, “The Melting Watches” painting refers to Einstein’s theory in which time is relative and not fixed. “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” re-portraits “The Persistence of Memory” in a fragmented and disintegrated state, summarising Dalí’s acknowledgment of the new science. “Homage to Rothko”, on the other hand, reveals the portrait of Abraham Lincoln or Gala (his wife) watching the Mediterranean Sea depending on how far away you are while looking at the painting. Like his inspiration source, the Latvian born-American Rothko, Dali painted shapes like squares and rectangles in vivid colours, thus creating an optical trap.

Official site: http://www.salvadordali.com/

 

Laura Ferguson & the Consciousness of the Body

Similar to Frida Kahlo, so too did Laura Ferguson invoke her unique experience in the form of Art. She has scoliosis, a deformity of the spine. “My body’s asymmetry creates the need for a subtle effort of balancing, in my physical relationship to gravity and space, as well as in my psychic sense of centeredness and wholeness”. The Visible Skeleton Series focus on “this heightened awareness”, while “transforming it into visual imagery” thanks to Dr. Andrew Litt and Phillip Berman at NYU Medical Center. “The more I understood and internalised the configurations of my unusual body, the more graceful and comfortable I felt in my skin and the more manageable my pain and disability have become”.

 

Image from and Official site: http://www.lauraferguson.net/the-artist/

 

 

 

 

Annie Cattrell & the Universal Understanding

Annie is a London-based sculptor. Her main subjects range from neuroscience or anatomy to… meteorology. Through different techniques and materials, she turns the invisible visible and the ethereal solid, offering a unique vision of what surrounds us. “I choose the familiar, for example a cloud, so whatever language you speak there is a kind of universal understanding. It is the transformation and freezing into three-dimensions of this iconographic subject matter that interests me: what happens when you contemplate something you think you know but shouldn’t really be seeing this way. This three-dimensional vantage point allows the viewer to examine the subtle shifts and rhythms which ceaselessly occur in the natural world and within the body.”

 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEhsCu-W_Uo

 

 

 

Susan Aldworth & the Brainscapes

Susan Aldworth took advantage of her experience as an Artist in Residence at the Royal London Hospital, between 2005 and 2006, to portrait the brain of thirty strangers. Each etching belongs to a patient who gave Susan permission to observe them during a brain scan. These images go beyond mere medical illustration. Looking at the etchings feels as if you were reaching some sort of consciousness.

 

 

Official site: http://www.susanaldworth.com/gallery.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

Helen Pyron, Nature & Brains

Soon after her First Class Honours Bachelor in Biology in Sydney, Helen decided to enrol in a second Bachelor, this time of Visual Arts. She now exhibits everywhere in the world. Only last year, she worked in a group exhibition called Nature Reserves (GV art, London), where the artist tried to examine how humans understand the natural environment; she exhibited Brain: The mind as Matter (Manchester Museum Of Science And Industry), focusing on what have we been doing to brains in the name of science, medicine or culture; and she installed a video projection (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts) of a heart perfusion performance done by artists in Slovenia, Dublin and Sydney in the last two years.

 

 

Image from Official site: http://www.helenpynor.com/works.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Carnie & the Art with the brain in mind

Andrew is both an artist and an academic. He currently teaches Graphic Arts at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, England. He studied chemistry and painting during College, zoology and psychology at the University, before graduating in Fine Art. While developing his work, he interacts with scientists from different fields. His work is often time-based in nature, mostly based in slides or video projections. For example, Magic Forest is a dream-like journey through a vast sea of developing neurons. This work was based on the Spanish anatomist and Nobel Prize Santiago Ramon y Cajal as well as on the contemporary work of Dr Richard Wingate of the Medical Research Centre for developmental Neurobiology, at Kings College, London.

Image from Official site: http://scienceandart–andrew-carnie.blogspot.com/

 

Suzanne Anker

Suzanne is a visual artist and a theorist. As an artist, she uses a large variety of mediums, from digital sculptures to installing large-scale photography or plants grown by LED lights. As an academic, she published several articles in both Science and Art related magazines and wrote Visual Culture and Bioscience as well as The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, together with the sociologist Dorothy Nelkin. She also hosted twenty episodes of the internet radio program Bio Blurb show, made in collaboration with MoMA. In NYC, she chairs the SVA’s Fine Arts Department since 2005, where she promotes the mix between traditional and experimental media through the Nature and Technology BioArt Lab initiative.

Image from and Official site: http://www.suzanneanker.com/

 

Rona Pondick

Rona is a New-York based sculptor. She uses a wide variety of materials and is not afraid of trying new technologies in her creative process. Like the 3-D printing she uses to create objects that are built up from thin layer of plastic. Rona’s work is exhibited internationally; she also lectures in several universities and institutions from the USA, Europe and Israel.

 

Image from Official site: www.ronapondick.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marc Quinn

Marc explores the relationship between art and science via sculpture, painting and drawings. Quinn’s work uses a broad range of materials, both traditional and unconventional. One of his main interests is to understand how the human body can perceive beauty. In 1991 he realized Self, a cast of the artist’s head made from eight pints of his own frozen blood. He also questions genetic evolution as well as issues of life and death or identity.

 

Image from and Official site: http://www.marcquinn.com/

 

 

 

 

Allen Institute for Brain Science & the Brain Map

Scientists from Seattle AIBS just published on April 2^nd 2014 the first comprehensive map of a mammalian brain. To do so, the researchers used a green fluorescent virus engineered to label particular regions of 1,700 living mouse brains. The resulting map shows how 71 million brain cells (or neurons) connect through multiple brain areas.

 

Image from: trove.com

 

 

Churchill College explores the relationship between Creativity and Science

Part of the University of Cambridge, the Churchill College is charged with advancing Science and Technology in partnership with the Arts. This amazing initiative is based on Einstein’s claim that “Science and Art are branches of the same tree”. For the Churchillians “Neither would exist without the other.” Professor Wally Gilbert is a good example. Physicist, biochemist, molecular biologist pioneer and Nobel laureate became an artist. “I started doing the photography as an Art form when I became personally pleased with the images I could make”.

 

 

Image from: http://www.pinterest.com/churchillcol/art-science

Official site: http://artsciencechurchill.tumblr.com/

Online magazine: http://issuu.com/churchillcollege/docs/artsciencev2

 

 

The ArtScience Interfaculty

@ The Hague, Netherlands

The Royal Conservatoire and The Royal Academy for Fine Arts in The Hague, The Netherlands created the ArtScience Interfaculty, an “interdisciplinary bachelor and master programme that fosters curiosity driven research as approach for the making of art”.  ArtScience focus on widening the boundaries of the existing fields of music, visual arts, media art, humanities and the natural sciences. Unique in its genre, ArtScience stimulates students to question about new forms of art and new presentation methods, while reflecting upon the actual artistic, scientific, technological, social and political environment.

Official site: http://www.interfaculty.nl/

 

ArtScience Labs

ArtScience Labs (ASL) is an international network originally launched by 3 small creative labs between USA, France and UK. Founded by David Edwards, ASL promotes “cultural experiments at frontiers of science with leading artists, designers, engineers, scientists and students [who] produce works of art and design that are exhibited in educational, cultural, and commercial galleries”.  In Paris, Le Laboratoire allows the major French cultural institutions to meet up with the major technology and research institutions of Cambridge, through The Lab Cambridge. ASL is also a close partner of Harvard University, The Walt Disney Company, and other international educational and commercial organisations. Being “fully sustained by products and programs of ASL Inspired organisations”, ASL not only provides “a new platform for innovation education that complements classical teaching in high school and university settings internationally”, as it promotes the breakthrough of art and design ideas informed by concepts at the frontiers of science.

 

Image from: http://www.lelaboratoire.org/en/archives/archives-10-pic1.php

Official site: http://www.artsciencelabs.org/