Title : Colliding Worlds
Author : Arthur I. Miller
Pages : 352
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Price : $ 13.57
ISBN : 978-0-393-08336-1
The artist Marta de Menezes modified Butterflies. Menezes creates 'designer butterflies': Not through genetic engineering, but by interfering with the normal development of the wing, inducing the development of a new pattern never seen before in nature. These wings are an example of something simultaneously natural, but resulting from human intervention. The artistic intervention leaves the butterfly genes unchanged. But the new patterns are something that never existed before in nature, and that rapidly disappear from nature not to be seen again. These artworks literally live and die. They are an example of something that is simultaneously art and life.
This is an example of sciart: art inspired or influenced by science. The author Arthur I. Miller coins this term and try to describe it in his book 'Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art'. The growing realm of 'sciart' merges art, science, and technology. Beginning his exploration in the early twentieth-century artistic engagements with X-rays and radio waves, Miller goes on to map a wide-ranging contemporary field of practice that encompasses computer-based art, robotics, data visualization, and biotechnology. At the same time, this well-illustrated text is refreshingly short on academic theory, instead surveying the vast landscape of artsci.
Many of the pieces Miller presents illuminate science in some way, at least for nonscientific audiences. The cover image depicts “Island Universe,” a set of five silver spheres by Josiah McElheny, each with protruding rods that hold small glass disks meant to represent galaxies. The piece illuminates the fact that the universe is expanding and that there might be more than one. But mostly it’s just pretty. On the other hand, many of the works don’t have much to say about science. For the literally illuminating “Light, only Light,” Jun Takita created a three-dimensional sculpture of his brain based on an MRI scan and covered it with glowing moss.
Several people in the book argue that art and science are one, sharing the mission of making the invisible visible, a view Miller to which appears sympathetic. Art does a similar thing [to science]: it proposes a model through which we can look at the world around us. But this is meaningless. History, mathematics and stand-up comedy also propose models through which we can look at the world. Art and science starkly differ in the types of models they employ, a central issue that Miller does not sufficiently interrogate. Unbelievably, on the supposed convergence of artistic and scientific approaches to the world, the scientific method is not mentioned once.
It’s telling that those who blur the distinction between art and science are predominantly artists. The scientists consistently tell Miller that their collaborations with artists are interesting but scientifically unhelpful. Not only does Miller fail to precisely parse science from art, he also conflates science and technology, using the terms interchangeably. Most of the book is, in fact, about art and technology, not art and science. Anyone who has watched a mechanical mobile or played a video game understands that art and technology are natural bedfellows. The possible symbiosis of art and science is a more startling proposition.
Courtesy: http://www.washingtonpost.com , http://books.wwnorton.com
https://www.kirkusreviews.com , http://www.motherjones.com
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