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Art(a)Science

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Several positive reviews of this book made me buy this book. I regret having done so. The book is well prepared (paper, typesetting, printing, binding, index, colour figures, references, footnotes) as one can expect from a well known publisher like Springer. It is the content that is disappointing.

Having read the reviews, I thought the book was about science or technology in the arts. This would have implied some kind of science in the book. Instead I found a book about the way some contemporary artists think about their kind of art. From their point of view, producing colourful pictures in interactive environments is Art@Science. OK, there is much talk about philosophical matters. Descartes, Leibniz and Newton with their boring mechanistic view on one side and Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg with their "holistic" view on the other side. But this kind of "philosophy" is scarcely more than just name-dropping. For example, on page 12, the editors write:

"in 1950 Relativity and Quantum theories were developed by Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr [..] Today, the activity of the cosmic web is coming to be understood as the very essence of being, as one indivisible whole"

The names are correct, the year 1950 is simply wrong and the conclusions are vulgar. The depth of understanding of physics is well illustrated by another quotation from the introduction:

"Nam June Paik is often credited with the development of one of the first interactive works by putting a magnet on a television set, thus transforming the image on the screen through magnetic waves."

First some nit picking: such a magnet produces a field, not waves. When I was about 14, I also discovered the wonderful blue and yellow spots around my LEGO magnet on the screen. My parents did not like them and I got into serious trouble for doing some harm to our TV set. Nevertheless, Nam June Paik is referenced 7 times in the index for such groundbreaking discoveries. The index also has entries for Apple, Netscape, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Xerox and other helpful companies.

What about contributions from non-artists like Prusinkiewicz, Rossler and Mayer-Kress ? I liked Prusinkiewicz's 9 pages for its introductory approach. Rossler's 3.5 pages circle around Descartes being poisoned in Sweden and end with the remarkable sentences "This book is called Art-at-Science. It could also be called Science-at-Art." Is this irony ? Mayer-Kress mentions himself exploring sub-atomic particles, himself meeting Jean-Pierre Eckman as well as himself inventing the notion Global Brain.

Peter Weibel's chapter gave me an idea how such books come into existence. It is the Art of Cut&Paste. On page 173 he says:

"Still today (1980) in an interview [..]"

Obviously he still has his old articles in WordStar or TeX format and from time to time mixes them up into just another significant paper by Cut&Paste.

Before reading Art@Science we did not know there was such a thing like art and science collaboration; they seemed two completely divided areas. Especially for students in media art this book provides a good introduction of Ôthe who-is-who of art & science,Õ with great illustrations and a useful bibliography.

This book is not just another collection of essays on the relations between art and science. The approach of the editors (Sommerer & Mignonneau) introduces a real breakthrough that put an end to the dualistic, cartesian way of looking at this issue that have characterized so far most of the writtings about it.

In the introduction they write : "We suggest that art and science should no longer be considered separate and contrary disciplines, but instead complementary to each other, where patterns of mind (art) and patterns of matter (science) are reflections of one another that are dynamically interrelated throught the human consciousness, changing their states from mind to matter and vice versa, from matter to mind. We consider both of them part of a holistic, intinsically dynamic and self consistent universe."

On this basis, they have organized the book in 8 chapters. Five of them are dedicated to key contemporary researches and issues : Telecommunications, Scientific Visualization, Artificial Life, Artists as Researchers, Chaos and Complex Systems. Three relate to the "environment" and history of the art/science field : Public Spaces (where and how to exhibit the artworks, presentation of the experiences conducted at ICC, ZKM and The Exploratorium), Education of Art and Science and Art and Science in Historical and Cultural Context.

The essays of each of the contributors (artists, scientists, researchers, theoreticians or ... all at the same time in the same person) focus on an element of the puzzle but with the same holistic approach. It is to be put to the credits of the editors to have avoided artificial connections and to have gathered such a diverse and rich material from so many challenging people, among whom Philippe Queau, Donna Cox, Thomas Ray, Louis Bec, Machiko Kusahara, Michael Naimark, Peter Weibel, Otto Rossler, Toshiharu Itoh, Itsuo Sakane, Roy Ascott and the editors themselves.

The Art of Science by Oliver Grau

Just seconds before, exhibition visitors were outlining the contours of fish onto a touchscreen, now they are observing the lively bantering of the their creations projected into a fish pond. These little fish, nervously wiggling about, seem astoundingly three-dimensional. Inside the virtual space, these computer creatures are subject to programs operating according to the precepts of evolution. In order to acquire energy for life, they must eat or perish. True to the principle of the survival of the fittest, the strong are able to mate and pass on their genetic material. Today, the interactive installation A-Volve (1994) from Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau is already a classic that has been shown worldwide. A-Volve elevates the natural principle of evolution to art. Art made of digital images operating on a system of genetic algorithms that simulate selection, crossover and mutation. Unpredictable, irreplaceable, transitory and singular images are incidentally brought to "life".

The nearly incessant rise of the computer as graphic medium is responsible for an innovation of this "nature." Since the end of the 1980's new interfaces have been engendering possibilities for submersion into virtual spaces that at this point even offer visitors the opportunity to interact in free form arenas. For the time being, the best overview of this renaissance of interaction between art and science is furnished by the collection Art@Science, edited by Sommerer and Mignonneau. Art@Science provides a multifaceted view of the trailblazers of computer technology. Whether artist, scientist, historian or the director of one the new museums for media art, aptly selected international experts present their views on an advanced level but remain nonetheless generally understandable as they lead us through the extremely complex topics covered in this well organized volume. In recent years a new type of artist has appeared on the scene. This new breed is active in the main centers of research and part of an internationally well-connected polyglot scene that has access to current and state of the art materials. These artists participate, with aesthetic methods and objectives, directly in the further development of the computer medium. In pursuit of special effects and realistic virtual illusions, art and science are approaching one another on the most advanced levels of technology The kind of artist who is both artist and scientist is now returning. The slogan-like warning against a split into "two cultures," preached by Charles P. Snow forty years ago, is rapidly dissolving away and the well-worn separation of art and technology is dispossessed once again. The playful dimension of art brings to technology often times produces stunning results and insights in experimental interaction with the new media. Alongside of artists like Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, whose works are also introduced in the volume, the editors themselves have produced pioneering work in this field in their institutes and provide, perhaps, the best example of this new species of artist.

How was the graphical simulation of life technically possible? Three scientists, who have produced decisive work in this field, provide introductions into their research: Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Demetri Terzopoulos, and Thomas Ray. The growing processes of plants simulated by the computer graphic scientist Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz have, in the meantime, become famous. Demetri Terzopoulos constructed a bio-mechanical software model of a fish, with a realistically animated body, muscles and a "brain". Finally, the biologist Thomas Ray, who worked in the jungles of Costa Rica for years, developed the first computer generated ecological system, the evolutionary model "Tierra". If one follows Ray's vision, then the connection between art and evolution will catch up with the beauty of organic life and surpass it, soon generating unknown, filigree forms. This could very well be, but for now the technical introduction of this kind provide an antidote against the so widely spread hype surrounding digital and graphic media.

From time to time the book drifts clearly into the realm of evolutionary ideology, when the arithmetical illusion of life is repeatedly equated with natural life. Nonetheless, technological advances with interaction, interface design and evolution are indisputable paving the way for an evolving artistic aesthetic and new possibilities of perception. Although in the persons of Machiko Kusahara and Erkki Huhtamo, two of the most prominent media historians present their views, it becomes clear that art and the sciences to this very day hardly been able to develop methods to pursue the amalgamation of questions surrounding the consequences that the computer has for art and to give mutual attention to questions of reception, material or even questions raised by the art work functioning as memory storage. The task of closing these gaps remains in the realm of art history. As the classic graphic-science, the methods and means of historical comparison that this discipline offers need to be drawn more conspicuously into this discussion than hitherto has been the case.

Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau (Ed.): Art@Science, Springer, Vienna/New York 1998.

Art @ Science is a collection of articles by artists and scientists who -some of them long before multimedia and the Internet made it fashionable- have worked in the interface between the "two cultures". [...] The collection, which includes essays by such luminaries in the field of techno-art as Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, aims to help overcome the deep art-science fracture which has resulted in two mutually uncomprehending and sometimes hostile cultures. These have traditionally been caricatured along the subjective/objective axis of emotion/reason, the spiritual versus the material- in the case of art struggling, anti-industrialist (post) Romanticism, and in the case of science a well-funded Faustianism.

This cultural bridge-building is attempted either through learning the skills of the "other" or through collaborative projects between artists and scientists/engineers (for example as Donna Cox points out in her essay on IMAX film, through large-scale computer graphics animation). She notes that this kind of collaborative work is not totally innovative: "teams of artists and scientists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries produced classic advances in botany and anatomy; their published works are milestones in the history of science." [...]

Citing the case of the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt, the editors point out that new and progressive institutes still receive little support from the educational system -they are often forced to operate as private schools that have to seek their own funding. The editors note the importance of such institutes being integrated into and supported by the broad educational sector.

Springer have spent a lot of money producing a thought-provoking collection on good paper with high-quality illustrations.

This book is an important milestone in cross-disciplinary publishing and anyone interested in the current trends of art and science research collaborations will benefit from it greatly.