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Comrades-in-Arms: Encouraging, Funding, and Housing Artsci

Artsci is “not only sexy, it’s seductive, it goes places where nobody has really gone before,” says Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica. “Artists are like scavengers working from trash to gold, foraging deep into science and technology.” The radical Austrian performance and media artist and critic Peter Weibel goes further. According to him, the age of artists working in partnership with scientists has passed. Rather, art is dependent on the input of science. In his words, “Today art is an offspring of science and technology,” an extraordinary statement and one worth pondering.

In 2008, reviewing the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which looked at the relation between science and design and covered bioengineered organisms, nanotechnology, and the powers of technology, the New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote perceptively, “The exhibition’s overarching theme, the ability to switch fluidly from the scale of the atom to the scale of entire cities, may sound the death knell for the tired technological divides of the last century. It should be required viewing for anyone who believes that our civilization is heading back toward the dark ages.”

At present these divides are still alive and kicking, and artists whose work deeply involves science and technology are affected by them. The movement we’ve been looking at, which seeks to fuse art, science, and technology, has lofty goals but marked difficulties in finding a market for its products. As we have seen, private galleries tend to shy away from showing works created by these artists. One path is simply to ignore the galleries, as many artists in the artsci world do.

But there are places that see this as the art movement of the twenty-first century and specialize in it—places such as Ars Electronica in Linz, Le Laboratoire in Paris, the Science Gallery in Dublin, the Wellcome Collection, Kinetica, The Arts Catalyst, and GV Art in London, and Weibel’s ZKM in Karlsruhe. So who are the magi who work behind the scenes to encourage this new art, find it, and showcase it?

In 1988, aware of the lack of contact between artists and scientists, the New York artist Cynthia Pannucci founded Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. ASCI provided a much-needed forum for discussion in the form of symposia and exhibitions but lacked a sponsor with clout. In England, the Wellcome Foundation plays a similar role—with ample funding.

The Wellcome Collection: Ken Arnold

The 1990s saw dramatic developments in biotechnology, such as in vitro fertilization, gene therapy, organ transplants, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (ƒMRI). As Ken Arnold, the Wellcome Collection’s head of public programs, puts it, “Artists could not afford not to be interested in these ideas of what it meant to be alive. They began to show a genuine interest in something they hadn’t thought of before.” One of the first artists to spot the new trend was Damien Hirst, in 1992, with his installation Pharmacy, made up of shelves of medicine bottles.

With Arnold at the helm, the Wellcome Foundation has become one of the most important showcases for science-influenced art, specifically biology-influenced art, in Britain.

Henry Solomon Wellcome’s life is a great American rags-to-riches story. Born in a log cabin in Wisconsin in August 1853, he was a brilliant inventor and businessman who was eventually made a Knight of the British Empire. This came about through his interest in medicine, which was always commercial. He was particularly struck by the poor way in which medicine was packaged. At the age of twenty-seven and by then a British citizen, working with Silas Burroughs, another American expat, Wellcome came up with the idea of using a capsule to dispense drugs in precisely measured quantities. The two formed Burroughs, Wellcome and Company, which soon became a giant in the pharmaceutical industry.

A philanthropist passionate about advancing medical research, Wellcome left a huge amount of money on his death in 1936, which was used to form the Wellcome Trust. This became the largest nongovernmental source of funding for scientific research in the UK. A portion was earmarked for a division called the Wellcome Centre for Medical Science, whose brief was to inform the public about advances in medicine. Laurence Smaje was the director. An affable, easygoing man with a carefully coiffed beard, Smaje kept a firm hand on the helm, guiding the division across the administrative hurdles at the Wellcome. With an MD and a PhD in physiology, he moved easily between the practical and research sides of the medical profession. He also had a keen interest in education.

In 1993, the Wellcome Trust sponsored a highly successful exhibition entitled Science for Life. The curator was Ken Arnold, who had arrived a year earlier. Tall, with an air of authority, a sharp dresser with a wry sense of humor, Arnold is the archetypal patrician American midwesterner. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge where he was particularly attracted to the “physical, visual, material aspects of science and how it interacts with society,” and also the history of science. With an interest in science but no great desire to become an expert in any one field, it seemed obvious that museums were the place for him. Having decided to become a curator, he did a PhD at Princeton University on the history of English museums before taking a post at the Wellcome. He was in the right place at the right time.

Science for Life included interactive exhibits, computers, microscopes, holograms, and a giant model of a cell as part of a depiction of the story of life. David Attenborough, the eminent naturalist, writer, and broadcaster, described it as “one of the most exciting and innovative exhibitions on science that you will find anywhere in this country.” Versions of Science for Life went on tour around Britain. But Smaje felt that something more was needed.

Working with the designers and artists who set up Science for Life, Smaje was struck by the parallels between art and science. He also realized how delicate it was to work with such people. “Creativity, that crucial element—you just have to let people do it. Just tell them what you want to achieve and then let them do it.” The answer, he decided, was to engage with the arts to put together a project that linked art and science.

Wellcome’s first engagement with the arts entailed using theater to generate discussion. Smaje organized a workshop where geneticists informed dramatists about genetic disorders and genetic engineering. Then the Wellcome announced a competition for story lines, with entries judged by an advisory board of playwrights, geneticists, and educators. In 1995, the board commissioned a play by Nicola Baldwin entitled The Gift, about a family’s reaction to the news that one of their children has a lethal genetic disorder. Smaje insisted on the involvement of the advisory board to make sure that the “science was right and the drama compelling.” Whereas Science for Life targeted adults, Baldwin focused on children, too. Production companies toured schools, setting up post-performance workshops to generate further discussion, and versions were performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with professional geneticists engaging with audiences.

Theater and education were one way of spreading information and stirring up debate about advances in medicine. “Another way was pictorial art,” recalls Smaje. In 1994, the Wellcome Centre for Medical Sciences had moved into a spacious new building at 210 Euston Road, across the street from their former building at 183 Euston Road. Smaje had been pondering how to use the large space on the building’s ground floor and brainstormed with Terry Trickett whose company, Trickett Associates, was designing the building’s interior. Smaje had an epiphany. “Why not have an exhibition?”

It was at that moment that Smaje was approached by Matthew Holley, a researcher at the University of Bristol specializing in the inner ear, whose work was funded with a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Holley is that rare breed of scientist who is also an artist. As a boy, his mother had encouraged him to do enamel art. At Bristol he took evening classes in enamel art, studying under the enamelist Elizabeth Turrell.

“The sensory organ of the inner ear has a remarkable architecture and it is fun to explain how it fits together and senses the smallest vibrations with such astonishing sensitivity,” he explains. He put together lectures for the public and for art schools. Artists frequently asked why he was so adamant about the beauty of the inner ear, given that we can’t see it. He replied, “Because it works, [and] all things that work well in the natural world have an inherent beauty in the balance between form and function.” The question was how to show this.

All the buzzwords were there: form, beauty, balance. Holley’s idea was to combine real images, such as electron micrographs of the inner ear, with ceramics, paintings, enamels, and other objects, into an exhibition of art and science. The art objects would be inspired by Holley’s scientific images, sixteen of which were exhibited. One of the pieces he himself contributed was a ceramic design based on the cerebellum (the part of the brain at the back of the head that controls movement). Another was by an artist who created a design using enamel on copper, depicting a section through the cochlea (the section of the inner ear that looks like a snail shell, where sound is received). Ken Arnold curated the exhibition and Trickett designed a background of large scientific images on convex surfaces, with the artworks displayed at the front.

Look Hear: The Science and Art of the Ear opened in April 1995 and was the first exhibition of art and science at the Wellcome. Viewing the juxtaposition of scientific data, models of the ear, and videos alongside the artworks they had inspired, visitors were led on a journey along the road taken by sound into the hidden depths of the inner ear.

The show was enormously successful. One critic described it as “a genuinely innovative exhibition, and a fertile marriage between science and art.” Another commentator pronounced it “an extremely intelligent and eclectic show.” It went on to tour the country for two years. Rather than being a joint venture in which artists and scientists explore the invisible world, the stated aim of Look Hear was to inform the public about science. As Holley says, they had shown that “scientists can play an important part in going out into art colleges and talking to artists, enthusing them to deal with it [science] in their art.”

Flushed with success, Arnold, Smaje, and Trickett dreamed up a funding program for collaborations between artists and scientists: the Sci-Art program. “We began to wonder what would happen if we invited scientists and artists to work together, given a grant from us. Sci-Art was born,” recalls Smaje. The first call for submissions went out in 1996 with a deadline of February 1997. Two hundred and fifty high-quality submissions were received and twelve received funding.

Two of the chosen artists, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, used grass as a photographic medium onto which they projected images. The problem was that the images quickly faded. As a result of the call for proposals, they got in touch with plant scientists at Aberystwyth University, in Wales, who were investigating methods to preserve the greenness of grass. Up until then these scientists had ground up grass in order to study how its chemical composition changed over time. They had lost the ability to look at grass growing, to see its colors and textures, as artists do.

The artists and scientists met in Wales and decided to work together. Looking at Ackroyd and Harvey’s work, the scientists became aware of the range of tones in the images on the grass. They realized that there had to be a better way of analyzing how grass lost its greenness than by grinding it up, and that they should pay closer attention to the light around them in order to make a noninvasive analysis of grass. They called their collaboration Fixing the Ephemeral. The result was images on grass that lasted longer, on the one hand, and new imaging techniques for studying the cells in grass without grinding it up. “We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing now if it weren’t for [Ackroyd and Harvey],” says Helen Ougham, one of the scientists on the project.

The Sci-Art initiative succeeded so well that after two more rounds, Smaje decided that the Wellcome needed partners. He approached the Arts Council, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the British Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Scottish Arts Council. Finally, after some three years of bureaucracy, the Wellcome Trust took over. Trickett, who was on hand during all the critical developments, summed up the situation and confirmed the critical role played by Smaje:

[Sci-Art] was an idea whose time had come. But to launch it, it required first of all the genesis of an idea, a person to champion that idea, and an organization willing to back it with no sure knowledge of what might materialize. When I think about this combination of circumstances retrospectively, I am bound to reach the conclusion that, at the time, Wellcome was the only organization in the UK that would have been willing to take the plunge.

The building at 210 Euston Road closed in 2004, and the division moved back to 183 Euston Road. Arnold played a central role in transforming the massive ground-floor space there into a museum (the Wellcome Collection), a café, and bookstore, and rose from head of exhibits to head of public programs. The launch of the new venue was on June 21, 2007. Just before the doors opened, Clare Matterson, then head of policy at the Wellcome Trust, stood with Arnold. Both were rather apprehensive. She turned to him and asked, “Will they come?”

Indeed they did. Arnold expected maybe 100,000 visitors a year, but the number far exceeded that. In 2012 there were over 490,000, and summer 2012 saw the two-millionth visitor cross the threshold.

Today Arnold plays a pivotal role in promoting artsci, focusing on art associated with medicine. He looks for “artists grappling with big ideas, some of which hatched in a lab.” He is interested in bringing the arts and sciences together in the public arena. He wants to give scientists the opportunity “to look at things from a different perspective” and bring them together with artists eager to work with them, to create “a mutually shared excitement.” Over the years he has arrived at what he describes as a three-step approach to art and science in the public arena:

1.Science needing to find a more sympathetic public understanding by associating it with art; in this way the public will see it as less threatening.

2.Artists taking seriously the almost philosophical questions that science is throwing open in the worlds of biology and medicine.

3.A genuine, open-minded sharing of the intrigue of ideas, a new topic for artists who realize that art is more than being just about art.

The “types of artists who are interested in us are the types of artists interested in investigation,” he says. They are researchers. Similarly, “scientists interested in working with artists are also highly investigative.” For scientists it sometimes goes beyond interest. “The process of science, owing to [the need to get] grants, has to be fairly safe, which leads me to think that scientists willing to work with artists are interested in risk-taking.”

In the academic world, the predominant view has long been that those in the arts work at home, while scientists work in their offices and are expected to be present on site. Scientists are also expected to produce publications which have to do with science or other serious subjects—a brief that does not include art. Some scientists have reported to Arnold that collaborating with an artist has “ruined [their] career” by signaling that they were not serious scientists. As we have seen, Bell Labs permitted engineers to collaborate with artists in their own time, not the company’s, though they encouraged joint efforts once the projects seemed feasible and generated good publicity. In the case of David Weinberg, who collaborated with Josiah McElheny on An End to Modernity, which produced spectacular glass evocations of the universe, his colleagues commented that as his name had not appeared on the finished work, he had wasted his time. Scientists of Weinberg’s stature, of course, are free to involve themselves with artists, especially on projects directly related to science.

Arnold says that while very few scientists are interested in collaborating with artists, there are two categories that are more likely to: young scientists eager to venture into new territory and established scientists with permanent appointments. Both groups are free to be “unorthodox in career structure. So why not grapple with something that might be slightly bonkers?”

Collaborations, he comments, have dramatic ups and downs. “Collaboration is bloody difficult.” This applies, too, to exhibitions requiring collaboration among people from many different sectors, from art, science, and anthropology to the press and designers. Often when the staff at Wellcome are sitting around and discussing a show in retrospect, someone will say wryly, “Never, ever, ever again collaborate.” But of course they do.

Arnold mentions the “myth” that artists work alone and are interested in their own glory while scientists work as a group. In fact, scientists can be as egotistical as artists. It has always been the case that scientists publish in order to gain personal recognition, not merely to disseminate knowledge. There are many battles in science over who discovered something first, especially when there is the chance of winning a Nobel Prize. It is not surprising that clashes in a collaboration generally surface when only the artist’s name appears on the finished work, even though scientific input was essential during the process. If there were no science, there would be no work of art.

One of the roots of this attitude, Arnold says, is that artists consider themselves unique. They feel that scientific ideas are in the air—“scientific ideas are everyone’s ideas”—and that Einstein, for example, just happened to be there while Picasso, on the other hand, created his paintings from his own genius. “Artistic ideas are not accidental.” Such a simplistic view, of course, ignores Picasso’s predecessors, as close in time to him as Cézanne. There was much in the air, and Picasso was well aware of it. But this myth continues nonetheless.

In Arnold’s many experiences with collaborations, he has found that “halfway through, [both the artist and the scientist start to feel] that they had the main ideas and misunderstandings arise.” The artist begins to feel that the scientist offered a “gift of knowledge.”

Collaboration works best, he says, “if both parties are clear from the beginning” as to their contributions, aims, and what the finished product should be. The “power of collaboration,” as Arnold has come to understand it, “is that people come together for a short period of time—it’s the misunderstandings that stir the interest—and then they go back to their other worlds.” He is, however, concerned about “people who serially do this and can’t figure out which world they are in.”

“The Wellcome sits oddly in all of this,” he adds. “In the permanent site there are works of art done in collaboration with scientists in by-and-large temporary exhibitions. But we don’t showcase this material and some people are disappointed. These exhibits don’t include Sci-Art. They have science, they have art, but no Sci-Art—very infrequently, art that has been inspired by science.”

Today we are bombarded with information from across the Web, through email, texts, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Says Arnold, “In two clicks we can go from anything to anything, from a physics department to an art class. Everything is available everywhere. What is the role of the museum in the digital world? Anyone with a mobile phone can look at hundreds of things and get not much out of it. The luxury of museums is that they offer you the possibility of only a few choice things.” Museums are oases in the vast and often barren landscape of information.

The future is now: Ars Electronica and Gerfried Stocker

Dressed from head to toe in black, long black hair swept back into a ponytail, Gerfried Stocker is an immensely personable and knowledgeable advocate of media art—“the art of my generation,” he calls it. Trained in technology, he has worked on the borders of interactive art, robotics, and telecommunications all his life. He has been the artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz since 1995, and since 1996 codirector with Christine Schöpf of the annual Ars Electronica festivals.

Stocker prefers the term “media art” as “a catchall for digital art, etc.” After all, as he points out, the term “fine art” is just as general. Media art “encompasses everything not yet settled, not yet found.” He has no use for categorization, preferring the old approach of “blurring distinctions, a stunning idea. The purpose of art is like science—to investigate, to find out what is behind borders.” He is committed to widening collaborations between artists, scientists, and technologists and helped initiate the artist-in-residency program Collide@CERN, a partnership between Ars Electronica and CERN.

He feels strongly that the “role of art is not just to communicate.” Nevertheless, he is in favor of the trend among artists toward using science to produce images that go beyond scientific visualizations, showing that they are capable of a deeper understanding of the subject matter of science. An example is the brain as depicted in ƒMRI. Artists can take these images and turn them into something beautiful, perhaps enabling scientists to see something deeper in them.

Stocker’s approach to establishment art galleries and the art market is to avoid friction. You wouldn’t expect music or literature in the Louvre. Similarly, establishment galleries sell a specific form of art. While fine art is shown in galleries, artsci and media art feature at places like Ars Electronica, Documenta, and ZKM, which offer prizes and scholarships. “Artists can make a living through festivals,” says Stocker.

More and more artists are producing media art and sometimes their work is even bought by galleries and sold to collectors. But this can cause the established art scene to lose the ability to define art, resulting in anxiety, especially when gallery owners see the results of “art and science collaborations reaching people,” because it’s so new and so appealing. Another reason for friction with the art world lies “in the nature of science-media art, which employs interaction technologies and visual technologies, [making it] much more practical, much more available, much closer to the people, giving them the notion that they can understand it; and so it becomes a much more descriptive sort of art.”

One problem with exhibitions of media art, says Stocker, is that viewers see devices that look like computers. This is just surface; it doesn’t offer insights into the work itself. More people know how to use art museums than media art exhibitions. “We put our hands behind our backs because it looks cool and walk around.” But merely looking at a painting, at the surface, doesn’t provide an intimate understanding of it. Rather, the painting ought to inform us about “how one should think differently.” This requires a sophistication, gained from familiarity with art.

Nevertheless, things have changed since the mid-nineties, when “no one from art history was interested in the archives at Ars Electronica.” Artists that visit nowadays consider themselves “in between [and are] eager to call themselves researchers, and many scientists are eager to do art.” In the future there will be no more pure art and pure science, says Stocker. He speculates on a “new aesthetics of the future” emerging, particularly from data visualization. He is all for blurring of borders. He is encouraged to see that interdisciplinarity “has improved drastically over the last twenty years” and mentions that teamwork is ever more necessary in scientific research, often using networks of members in different locations.

Today’s children are growing up in a technological world, rather than learning about computers as adults. They are “hybrids” who will operate easily in a world where there is “no more pure art and pure science.”

ZKM: Peter Weibel

Stocker’s predecessor as artistic director of Ars Electronica was Peter Weibel, the prolific media and performance artist. In 1988 he founded the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, as a parallel but larger institution with more facilities. It was still in the planning stage when it was hit by a wave of hostility driven by skepticism toward technology that seemed to challenge the conventional way that art is categorized.

ZKM bulldozed over these issues, becoming “a role model for art, technology, and science,” says Weibel. Its principal interest is in media art, covering visual media, sound art, interaction art, electronic art, and whatever else is new in the twenty-first century. It houses a media library, a museum with archives for collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, laboratories, and exhibition spaces, and offers stipends for study. In short, “the ZKM is a performative museum, [a] digital Bauhaus,” like the famous hothouse institution established in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by the architect Walter Gropius, with the aim of unifying art and technology and being an incubator for young talent. In 2012, ZKM won the Grand Prix of the International Council of Museums in the sound installation category, competing against institutions such as the MIT Media Lab.

While the MIT Media Lab manufactures products, says Weibel, ZKM manufactures ideas. He paraphrases the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous title “Machinery, Materials, and Men,” transforming it into “Media, Data, and Man.” This, he says, is the essence of ZKM.

Process and product at Le Laboratoire: David Edwards

From outside, Le Laboratoire looks like a boutique, but as soon as you step inside it’s apparent that it is not. Paris’s answer to the MIT Media Lab, it is spacious, with three floors of glass-walled rooms, laboratories, and a comfortable lecture space with movable partition walls. It would meet the sound artist Sam Auinger’s standards of proper climate and sound qualities, ensuring that speaker and audience have the best possible aesthetic experience.

When I visited in August 2011, seventy high school and university students from around the world were participating in a project on water: how to mine it, transport it, and utilize it. All were astute, well-spoken, and enthusiastic. The impressive “graduation” ceremony showcased design technology. Teams of four to seven students gave four-minute presentations on their projects using four to eight PowerPoint slides. Their suggestions ranged from mesh nets to extract water from fog to purification bags that would dissolve in water and could be used as soap, thus avoiding plastic waste products. Their assignment included seeking investment capital, and in this too they seemed to have made inroads. Thus their projects covered science, technology, business, and media art.

“Since the beginning of time artists have been interested in the frontiers of knowledge, the imagination,” says David Edwards. Edwards is an entrepreneur of the intellect. He divides his time between Harvard, where he is a professor, and Paris, where he established Le Laboratoire in 2007. Located behind the Louvre, Le Laboratoire showcases work combining art, science, and technology in both its formative and finished stages.

Trim and energetic, sporting horn-rimmed glasses, designer stubble, and dark wavy hair, wearing loafers but no socks, Edwards fits neatly into the elegant intellectual world of Paris. He thinks carefully, closing his eyes, peppering his speech with words like “riffing” and “skill set.” An accomplished scientist, he is also a writer and inventor. With great seriousness, he tells me that “Le Laboratoire is based on an educational program like the Bauhaus.”

Edwards is passionate about the “wonderful naivete” he sees in young people, for whom “all is possible,” and aims to nurture it at Le Laboratoire, where there is “no distinction between art, science, and technology.” He also wants to bring their talent to bear in finding ways to solve society’s problems, such as climate change and the widening gap between rich and poor.

He is well aware of the social and educational constraints that force artists and scientists apart, following the old adage that science is the search for truth while art is merely frivolous. Rather, he believes that the creative process is the key to the frontiers of knowledge. Edwards defines this as “a kind of experimentation, where the catalyst for change, for movement, for innovation, is a fusion of those creative processes we conventionally think of as ‘art’ and as ‘science.’ This fused process, what I call ‘artscience,’ is the basis of a new kind of culture”—the very culture he has created Le Laboratoire to house.

“As time has gone on,” he continues, “getting to these frontiers [of knowledge] has become more and more difficult; providing that access, just seeing what is possible, is what interests me.”

Edwards has observed that there is often “too much institutionalization of creativity, which leads to experts and dogma,” something he does his best to avoid at Le Laboratoire. “One of the challenges we both have right now is being able to articulate what is going on,” he says. “We shouldn’t be too careful about it because it’s a revolution.” I entirely agree. Writing about the new art movement, one has to be forceful in confronting its critics and naysayers.

Edwards passionately believes that the “process of artscience needs to be better integrated into our cultural institutions. [The] process of artscience creation, even more than the works that result, is critically relevant to culture today.” To achieve this, he invites the public into Le Laboratoire to observe the process of creativity, as it appears in works in progress in a functioning laboratory. This is diametrically opposite to the objects people see in museums, presented “as outcome, as product, dug up, carved down, highly edited, that follow a mysterious process of creative thought and engagement.” At Le Laboratoire, the process of thought and engagement is clearly manifest.

Edwards is also an inventor, responsible for products like Le Whif and Le Whaf, both of which are on sale in Le Laboratoire’s shop. Le Whif is a method of breathing in food rather than eating it. Using aerosol science, Edwards has created a nasal spray which sprays tiny particles of chocolate—the perfect way to enjoy chocolate without gaining weight. Le Whaf is a tastefully designed flask into which you pour a cocktail. Tilting the flask at forty-five degrees sets off a mechanism that vaporizes the liquid into a billowy cloud, heavier than air, which can then be poured into a glass and sucked through a straw. The user enjoys the taste of the cocktail but imbibes none of the calories or the alcohol. Wired magazine wrote of Le Whaf, “Instantly geeks up any cocktail party. Works with soups and sauces, too.”

Edwards organizes many public events and private visits and sees a role for Le Laboratoire in instigating interactions between artists and scientists. When scientists visit Le Laboratoire, he says, they behave “like little kids, they become excited.” When they talk to artists, “artists sometimes ask questions that scientists are not used to hearing, especially high-level scientists.” There is, however, a downside to collaborations, he says. Artists are sometimes just not attuned to working on a complex theme that they know little about apart from what they have learned from a scientist. The resulting artwork can be mediocre. Some of his exhibitions have had unenthusiastic receptions. Nevertheless, he says, generally both scientists and artists come away with something, however indirect, from such interactions.

Dublin’s Science Gallery: Michael John Gorman

“Science Gallery is a platform for scientists, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs—a meeting place,” says Michael John Gorman.

In 2007, the venerable Trinity College, Dublin, decided to open a science gallery to showcase and exhibit science, and invited Michael John Gorman to be the founding director. He has made Science Gallery into a powerhouse in the world of art, science, and technology.

Science Gallery is located on the edge of the campus, on a busy street near the inner city, which gives it an additional edge. When Gorman signed up, the building had already been designed. Thinking of the seventeenth-century coffeehouses which buzzed with ideas, he persuaded Trinity College to add a café as a meeting place for discussion. The café also houses a small bookshop with an intriguing collection. Science Gallery itself is a small space, though large enough for in-depth displays grouped close together. “The exhibitions are not really exhibitions but projects,” Gorman explains.

With a background in philosophy and physics from Oxford, Gorman “got the art-science bug” while studying for his PhD in history at the European University Institute in Florence and decided to focus on curatorial matters. Slender and boyish, he speaks enthusiastically about the present state of Science Gallery and his plans for the future. “For me the exciting thing is that there is the opportunity to do something different here,” he says. What he has in mind is a place totally unlike many science centers, which are meant for children and “infanticize science.” Science Gallery, conversely, is linked with a university and can engage with researchers and bring them into the gallery to make contact with artists and designers, thereby “bringing [both artists and scientists] out of their comfort zone.” Gorman envisions a situation where the “public can come into contact with them and be provoked and stimulated by ideas about emerging research that are not dumbed down for kids.”

One of Science Gallery’s financial supporters is the Wellcome Trust. “Wellcome likes a bit of competition,” Gorman says with a twinkle. The concept of Science Gallery also struck a chord with engineers working at Google, which encourages its staff to devote 20 percent of their time to non-core work. Google went on to provide one million dollars in seed money for the gallery and is a creative participant.

While museums traditionally focus on the finished artwork, Gorman decided instead to home in on new ideas, filtering them to separate out those ripe for exhibition. He puts out periodic calls for new ideas and also created an additional source, the Leonardo Group. This is made up of some fifty artists, scientists, designers, and entrepreneurs who feed ideas into the gallery as well as coming up with big themes. The members change at least every two years, and so far this arrangement has resulted in eighteen exhibitions that have attracted some 800,000 visitors. This method, says Gorman, helps the gallery focus on creative projects while filtering out the “huge amount of bad stuff out there, providing also an environment for creativity.”

Gorman had barely launched Science Gallery when an idea occurred to him. “Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a network of galleries associated with universities around the world?” This would be a way to circulate exhibitions that started in Dublin, so that each exhibition need not be a one-off. The idea rapidly grew. Gorman now envisages Leonardo Groups in every city, constantly locating fresh concepts, with each Science Gallery acting as a “platform,” a jumping-off point for creative ideas. His strategic view of his Science Gallery empire is that of a network, with each gallery learning from the others, and launching exhibitions which would move between them: a dynamic system with feedback loops.

He plans to launch one spinoff Science Gallery at Guy’s Campus, part of King’s College London, in 2015 with Daniel Glaser as director. By 2020 he envisages eight galleries in total. He is already in conversation with interested parties in Bangalore, Moscow, Singapore, and New York.

A major advantage is that the experience and machinery has already been tried and tested in Dublin. Gorman’s farsightedness has resulted in collaborations of Science Gallery with the Wellcome Trust, Design Interactions at the RCA, Le Laboratoire, Microsoft, and Google, among others.

Gorman is aware that few commercial art galleries in London embrace artworks based on science and technology. But that is irrelevant. “We don’t sell work, but we do connect interested buyers with artists,” he says. “In a weird kind of way,” he continues, “some of this artsci stuff is tipping into the mainstream. For many years it was experimental and rarefied. Now all of a sudden people—for example, entrepreneurs—want to know about artsci. It feels like we’re not pushing uphill anymore.” He points to outlets such as Leonardo magazine, which focuses on art, science, and technology, and to The Arts Catalyst, which provides aid in seeking funds, and CERN, as well as major exhibitors such as the Wellcome, Ars Electronica, and Le Laboratoire. “It’s popular, it’s sexy. Some people who have been out in the wilderness for years are now getting traction. It’s a new cultural area that people feel they have to connect with.”

As for art, science, and technology moving together, it’s “already happened, but word is not completely out yet,” says Gorman.

There is a need, he says, for flexible-minded people who can dive into situations, cross disciplines, and feel comfortable swimming in these waters, “like amphibians.” He mentions several such cases. One is game design, another animation. A specific early example was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in 1958 by the US government for the development of new technologies for the military. These weapons systems demanded highly interdisciplinary input, and the spinoffs have had great impact on the civilian sector, most notably in communications, as well as providing funds for research at laboratories such as the MIT Media Lab. In the 1960s, DARPA instigated a program of research into techniques of deception, involving teams of scientists, technologists, artists, and psychologists. In 2013, Gorman held an exhibition at Science Gallery on this, entitled Illusion: Nothing Is as It Seems, a fascinating topic.

Kinetica, a museum in the grand tradition:
Dianne Harris and Tony Langford

“The distance between idea and invention has shrunk massively, and now it seems anything is possible, one just needs to think about it. For artists working in these realms, it is a golden era,” says Dianne Harris.

Dianne Harris and Tony Langford founded Kinetica Museum, focusing on kinetic and electronic art, in 2006. Harris had worked in electronic art, robotics, photography, and the film industry, including special effects, while Langford worked for several years on regulatory aspects of electronic communications. Then he began to find himself more interested in communications that reach out and move people, so he did an MA in interactive art and became an artist.

In 2003, Harris opened a small gallery, the Luminaries Gallery, in West London to show works by herself and others, including Langford, which they describe as technology-influenced art that tries “to tap into unseen forces.” The title of one of the shows at the Luminaries Gallery was Frequency. Human beings are receptive to one specific frequency band, but there are other frequencies which dogs and cats can sense. One wonders what their worlds might be like. Langford’s work featured a deep-sea fish that can “see” electronic pulses, while Harris’s showed a wave form turning in three-dimensional space.

When Luminaries closed in 2004, Harris and Langford decided to team up and find a way to continue to show the same sort of work. What they wanted to do was to set up a gallery where cosmic questions would be discussed through works that “tap into the unseen, into space-time, that push the frontiers of art.” It took a year or two to find funding. Finally, in 2006, the Arts, Humanities and Research Council gave them a grant of £250,000. Thus Kinetica Museum was born. From 2006 to 2007 it had a home in Spitalfields. For a while its shows were scattered around different venues in London, and it now has a permanent home at London Fields.

Harris and Langford planned Kinetica Museum to be part of what they see as the massive resurgence of technological art. They see it following in the grand tradition that began in the UK with Cybernetic Serendipity, the groundbreaking show that Jasia Reichardt curated at the ICA in 1968. As Harris points out, the members of the great art movements of the twentieth century—the Futurists, the Constructivists, the Bauhaus—considered that technology should affect art as much as it does everyday life, and used their art to express this belief. In homage to all this, the Kinetica Art Fair of 2010 was partly curated by Jasia Reichardt, and was dedicated to the masters of kinetic art, such as Bruce Lacey with his radio-controlled robots which would kiss you if you lingered too long in front of them, and Edward Ihnatowicz, creator of SAM, the Sound Activated Mobile. Since 2009, the annual Kinetica Art Fair, held at Ambika P3, a massive basement space near Baker Street, London, has been a milestone event in the world of art, science, and technology.

The artists at Kinetica are well versed in technology and science. Tired of telling engineers what she wanted, Harris says, she learned technology and programming. “But some artists just want to be called artists, rather than sci-artists, which categorizes them,” she adds. In her view, artists think “in a more metaphysical way” than scientists. What artists and scientists have in common, says Langford, is “a quest for knowledge.” The two describe scientists as dogmatic, and less creative than artists, “less metaphysical.” Their view on collaborations is straightforward. Real collaborations should be acknowledged on the work, they say. But the name of a paid technician, no matter how great his contribution, “doesn’t necessarily belong on the work.”

The two are eager to articulate the qualities that set Kinetica apart:

Firstly the work is experiential and performative, the works have a vitality or life force that can touch and engage with people on many different levels. Artists that exhibit at the Kinetica Art Fair can be generically termed “transdisciplinary performative users of knowledge,” first described by the French theorist [Jean-François] Lyotard where artists are “users,” as he calls them, who extract knowledge from science (on the nature of the universe) and through their own artistic process and appropriation, re-present and often simplify concepts with challenging results and new meanings.

In other words, they expect that scientists can learn from the way artists represent (or re-present) scientific concepts, in that both artists and scientists are intent on exploring the nature of the universe. From the viewpoint of the spectator, what sets the works at Kinetica apart is that they are kinetic—they move—they are beautifully made, and they are also often radical, subversive, funny, or just plain crazy.

GV Art: Robert Devcic

In 2000, Robert Devcic saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London entitled Spectacular Bodies, a survey of anatomical art since the Renaissance, which examined and depicted the whole human body, inside and out. “It was not just aesthetically beautiful, there was a lot of knowledge behind it and in it,” he recalls. Five years later, having learned the curatorial trade by selling at art fairs, Devcic set up his first exhibition in London, in a row of three houses he owned. The show featured nine artists, though none of the works was directly to do with art and science. Four thousand people visited over five days and the show was a sellout.

Devcic discovered that he “likes to be involved in artists’ lives” and was already assembling the artists whose work is now central to GV Art. He was particularly interested in artists whose work could “generate discussion.” Thus art and science became Devcic’s world.

In September 2008 he opened the doors of GV Art in central London, near Baker Street, devoted to showcasing art influenced by science, particularly biology. As a gallery owner, Devcic is way ahead of his time. In the current climate, he is taking a huge risk. He dedicates immense energy and enthusiasm to this effort. The gallery also provides a congenial space for discussion.

Devcic’s interest in science began when he was a boy in Australia. Initially he was fascinated by fossils and rocks, then moved on to plants and animals, while also taking a variety of courses, including beekeeping. After moving to London in 1986, he took photography courses and worked on magazines, as well as collecting art and regularly going to art galleries. When he found an artist interesting, he recorded the name in a notebook. Devcic is a fastidious collector of names and facts in numerous notebooks.

Devcic has chosen to specialise in biology-based art—for the moment, at least—because “people want to know more about it,” in that biology is more immediately relevant to our lives than, for example, physics. Often, he has found, the “public feel out of their depth” at artsci exhibits. “GV Art tries to change this by displaying objects capable of standing on their own as art,” without an explanatory text other than the title. “People gravitate to them—there’s a magical quality about them.” Recently Devcic has begun expanding the gallery’s brief. In 2013 he put on an exhibition of sound art, still rare in the UK. While small, GV Art commands a loyal following. It is the only private gallery in the UK that showcases artsci.

The Arts Catalyst: Nicola Triscott

Artists producing work on the borderline between art, science, and technology are well outside the mainstream, which means it is frequently difficult to find funding and support. In 1993 Nicola Triscott founded The Arts Catalyst to help solve this problem, and also to make the work of such artists better known and to seek out new talent.

Triscott has a clear strategy for the new art movement. Having started out in the performing arts, in the early 1980s she traveled widely in Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe and South Africa. There she regularly found herself in meetings with groups of artists, listening to tales of their struggles “to understand and assimilate the rapid changes occurring in their countries,” particularly the changes in science and technology. She returned to the UK in the early 1990s and decided to follow this up. She pondered the developments in biotechnology and the implications of climate change. “Perhaps,” she thought, “a way could be found to commission artworks that explored these rapid changes.”

She was well aware that art and science was not a burgeoning field. “When I began talking about art and science, people thought I meant art and technology, computers.” The Wellcome Trust’s initiatives in this area were only just beginning. She was, however, impressed by the magazine Leonardo.

Triscott got to work. By the time she launched The Arts Catalyst in 1993, she had rounded up funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Arts Council, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Committee on Public Understanding of Science. There was, she recalls, “lots of goodwill and enthusiasm for the start-up.” There were also criticisms. People questioned whether The Arts Catalyst’s brief was rather narrow, in supporting art and science. “Narrow?” she replied. “Just about everything in the world relates to science.” It was becoming clear that part of The Arts Catalyst’s mission would have to be “to open people’s eyes, [to show them] that science is not barren, it touches everybody.”

Initially she had planned to pursue her work in artsci for a couple of years and then move on. “But I realized that the whole momentum gathered behind it had built up so much. Even today there is not enough transdisciplinary research. We’ve just scratched the surface.” She and her colleagues spend much time “finding artists by in-depth curatorial research,” traveling the world in search of artists and scientists whose work they deem worth funding. They get to know them and encourage them to develop their ideas further, in the hopes that a project will emerge.

Triscott is cautious regarding how an artwork should be credited. She prefers to leave this to galleries, who generally do not mention the commissioning organization or the collaborators, leaving only the artist’s name on the piece. She is, however, willing to give “credit where credit is due.”

She feels that specialization is necessary. Yet the broader outlook, the “extraordinary breakthroughs,” can only emerge from groups of specialists supplemented by “nonspecialist interactions.” The “really brilliant scientists are broadly based in science as well as being highly cultured,” she goes on. She sees one aim of the artsci movement as being to eradicate the highly specialized cultures that riddle science.

“Everywhere is a hotbed of art-science now.”

These organizations and others like them play an enormously important role by providing funding and a framework for a vital support system, making it possible for artists and scientists to work together, research, experiment, and create works of all types and colors. At the moment, they form an alternative subculture. As they become better known, they will bring the new avant-garde into the mainstream.