but is it art?

We're very tickled today because the Mars Phoenix lander has "friended" us on Facebook, which makes us feel very special, even though Phoenix has over 2000 such close personal friends (including the Spousal Unit and several fellow science bloggers). I was a bit late to the party, but happy to finally be included in all the festivities -- no doubt with DJ Spock providing the groovy tunes. And now I feel like I really know my new friend, after reading this two-part interview with the Neural Gourmet. Apparently Phoenix even has a Twitter account, making this particular NASA excursion a bit of an experiment in interactive performance art.

But the subject of today's image-heavy post is about more traditional visual art, and how so many artists have found inspiration in the concepts of science -- and maybe even vice versa. Because why should Jessica Palmer over at Bioephemera have all the fun? For the all the fuss about C.P. Snow's infamous notion of "two cultures," art and science have a rich long history of feeding into each other, despite certain differences in what each deems most important. For instance, a scientist mostly cares that the science is correct, and if an image is also aesthetically beautiful, well, that's just a bonus. Many people refer to this sort of work as "scientific visualization." (If your name was Leonardo da Vinci, the boundary was a bit more blurred, but even Leonardo would, I think, distinguish between some of his engineering and anatomical sketches -- exquisitely rendered though they are -- with fully realized works like the Mona Lisa.)

The undisputed queen of scientific visualization today is MIT's Felice Frankel, whose stunning images of things like colonies of bacteria or the behavior of water molecules have graced many a cover of the leading scientific journals (Nature, Science, Physics Today, and so forth). She co-authored a book, Envisioning Science, with George Whitesides, which is well worth checking out if you're at all interested in science imagery. And you can read an extensive online interview with Frankel here.

Perhaps her most famous photograph is the one below, depicting a drop of ferrofluid on a glass slide atop a slip of yellow paper, under which are seven small circular magnets that affect the form of the drop. The shape of the fluid, the color contrasts, please our visual senses on a purely aesthetic level, while the underlying scientific concept remains uncompromised. That's a pretty tough thing to do, which explains why the image is the most reproduced of any of Frankel's work. In fact, she claims to be "sick of it." So naturally we have to reproduce it here, with apologies to Frankel for proliferating her artistic meme.:

Frankel's work is aesthetically pleasing, as well as scientifically accurate, but is it art? When she was profiled in the New York Times last summer, that question prompted quite a bit of debate. I pondered it heavily myself: what makes a science-inspired image truly "art"? Perhaps there is a debate, not so much because Frankel is blurring boundaries, but because she has raised the standard for scientific visualization to an unprecedented high level, making it much harder to tell the difference. Few others have even come close to the caliber of her work. University of Chicago physicist Sidney Nagel is known for his stunning photographs of liquid drops eerily in suspended in time, making him a notable exception:

Nagel's primary focus, however, is the science: he's an expert on the physics of fluids and granular materials, and his photography -- while both skillful and visually stunning -- serves the purpose of his work. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that; but is it, therefore, art? Frankel herself says no. "My stuff is about phenomena," she told the New York Times. "So I don't call it art. When it's art, it's more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image." During my own ponderings, I concluded something similar: visualization accurately renders the science, preferably in an arresting, artful manner; an artistic work transforms it to reflect the creative impulse of the artist. Both, however, can make you look at familiar phenomena in a strikingly new way. Some people were kinda bothered by Frankel's seeming dismissal of her work, but this implies a value judgment: that art is somehow more "pure" or important than visualization. I don't agree. Frankel is at the top of her field (scientific visualization), and we do her no disservice by recognizing what her work is... and what it isn't.

Not that scientists can't become highly accomplished artists, mind you. I just learned about Frank Malina, an aeronautical engineer, rocketry pioneer, and first director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, while reading M.G. Lord's excellent book, Astroturf: The Private Life of Rocket Science. After World War II, Malina fell victim to McCarthyism and wound up working for UNESCO in Paris. Always a bit of a polymath, with broad cultural interests, later in life, Malina ended up drawing upon his engineering expertise to become one of the early pioneers of kinetic art -- which really flummoxed the federal agents charged with keeping tabs on his supposedly subversive activities -- simply because he was interested in expanding "the limitations of paint."

For instance, he'd add actual depth (as opposed to illusory) by placing wire mesh or string over the surface of a painting. Then, while taking down the family Christmas tree in 1955, he thought it would a marvelous idea ("Zoinks!") to incorporate blinking Christmas lights into the wire mesh to add a sense of movement to his art. Per Lord:

"Soon Malina began 'painting' with electric motors. These drove wheels that were divided into colored sections. Images were formed through the overlap of colors and shapes and were in constant flux. The apex of Malina's technical innovations may be what he termed his Lumidyne system. It involved light projected onto and through Plexiglass screens to form fluid, soft-edged, ever-changing patterns. Malina's Lumidyne pieces often evoked astronomical phenomena. Not dependent on external illumination -- electricity drove their lights and motors -- the radiant compositions suggest swirls of gas and dust around distant stars."

Apparently, the European art world was a bit slow to appreciate Malina's artwork; he had equal numbers of fans and detractors, and the FBI, frankly, didn't get it at all. (I mean, if he wasn't encoding secret messages to his imaginary Commie cronies in his artwork, what could possibly be the point?) Here's a slightly grainy picture of his 1956 piece, "Point Counter Point":

Malina also founded Leonardo, a journal dedicated "to documenting work at the intersection of the arts, science and technology." I'm guessing he wasn't a big believer in that whole "Two Cultures" thing either. He makes a nice addition to my growing "collection" of artists inspired by science. And so does Lia Halloran, an LA-based artist whom I met over the weekend at a friendly gathering of scientists and artists in Pasadena (the spirit of Malina would have smiled upon the scene).  She's a big physics-fan, and it very much informs her art: she's figured out visually arresting ways to make the abstract and/or invisible apparent to the viewer. Her 2007 show at DCKT Contemporary gallery at Bowery and Spring Street in New York City was called The World is Bound with Secret Knots. The exhibit featured six figure paintings exploring the interaction of unseen physical forces of nature with human figures, like this one, entitled "Centripetal-Centrifugal":

For those in the NYC area -- or if you're planning on attending the SciBling meetup of SEED Science Bloggers and readers -- head on down to the DCKT gallery in Soho to take in Halloran's latest show, Dark Skate. (Those living elsewhere can view most of her work on her Website.) Yep, she's an avid skateboarder, and knows darn well that this involves a heck of a lot of physics. The new show features a series of photographs taken at night in various locations around Los Angeles where skaters (or "sk8ers" as the kids today call them) converge. She used light (how? I dunno, but I'll be sure to ask) to trace a line while Halloran skateboarded around the venues. The result: images that clearly show the trajectory of her movements over time -- evidence of past action, but with no trace of the figure that left the pattern. (Particle physicists can probably relate.) Here's one of those images, taken in nearby Griffith Park:

Long-time readers might recall my blogging about the work of Connecticut-based painter Nash Hyon in 2006, who works primarily with encaustics (wax-based paints). I'd seen her paintings included in an exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, and have been a fan ever since. As often happens in this Internet age, Hyon stumbled on my blog post several months later, and invited me to visit her studio in Connecticut, where I got to see the whole encaustics process in action. She still had my favorite painting: "Gadolinium." With the Spousal Unit's permission, we bought it, and it now graces our Los Angeles bedroom.

Hyon just put up her own Web site (and a blog!), which is well worth checking out. Because all her paintings are striking. One series is called ATCG, drawing on biology/genetics to explore what it means to be human. With her "Elements" series, she cherry-picks certain aspects from the scientific properties or history of an element in the periodic table and uses that as a basis for her painting. Sometimes the connection is fairly obvious, as with "Lithium" (#3), a soft alkali metal commonly found in mood-stabilizing drugs to treat, for example, bipolar disorder:

Sometimes the connection is less clear (or not entirely scientific in nature). For instance, thanks to Hyon, I discovered an element I didn't even know existed: "Tantalum" (#73), a rare, hard, blue-grey transition metal found in many electronic components (or at least used in their manufacture). The name derives from the Greek myth of Tantalus, whom the gods punished after death by having him stand knee-deep in water with tasty fruit above his head. If he bent to drink the water, it drained beyond his reach. If he reached up for the fruit, the branches moved out of his reach. (Those Greek gods were right bastards, weren't they?) Hence our verb "to tantalize." And here's how Hyon transformed those random bits of information:

Thanks to a few links from various Sciblings, a few months ago, I discovered the work of Glendon Mellow, a.k.a., "The Flying Trilobite." He's an artist/illustrator with a quirky sensibility (and a style that calls to mind Dave McKean, among others), based in Toronto, Ontario, with his wife and a hermit crab named Shiny. At least that's his bloggy bio sez. His pieces aren't just about trilobites, but the creatures are often incorporated into many of his paintings, such as this one, called "Life as a Trilobite":

Artists aren't always so obvious with their nods to scientific inspiration, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. New York City artist Adam Cvijanovic made a splash a couple of years ago with his gigantic, room-sized multi-paneled mural, "Love Poem, 10 Minutes After the End of Gravity," showing a section of Los Angeles in the process of breaking up and floating away. "Love Poem," by his own admission, is certainly not a treatise on the force of gravity, nor is it 100% scientifically accurate. That was never the point. But he did successfully imagine a fanciful scenario of what might happen if, indeed, gravity suddenly disappeared (barring all the other apocalyptic stuff that would most likely have to accompany such a disastrous event)

I've known Cvijanovic for over a decade (he was married to one of my closest friends until recently, and he painted a gorgeous mural for my living room when I was still based in Washington DC -- and yes, I still miss it, thanks for the painful reminder). I  have always been impressed with the degree of research and deep thought he puts into even the smallest element of a painting -- all artists do, to be sure, but folks like me rarely get an inside peek into that creative process, unless we know the artist personally. For instance, when he was working on a project that mimicked medieval illuminated manuscripts, he experimented for weeks at making his own parchment for ultimate verisimilitude.

Lately, he's been specializing in these giant installations of murals painted on Tyvek, so it works just like wallpaper: easily applied, and then removed. He just had a show this spring at Bellwether Gallery in New York called Colossal Spectacle: one giant installation inspired by D.W. Griffith's failed celluloid epic Intolerance, depicting the court of Babylonian king Belshazzar. This big climactic scene is what apparently bankrupted Griffith before his film could be completed. Cvijanovic is fascinated by this sort of hubris: spectacular display followed by a crash and inevitable decay. He's also keen on popular culture: I dimly recall a series of sketches he did of the James Bond (Connery era) movie Thunderball, just for fun: he'd pause the movie and give himself however long the DVD player gave him to sketch the outlines of the scene, and fill in the blanks from there. Just like scientists, artists can take their inspiration from any number of unlikely sources.

I bring the pop culture thing up because we all shared an inordinate fondness for Dogs Playing Poker, a campy series of oil paintings commissioned in 1903 to advertise cigars. Those darn dogs have become a significant cultural reference point, despite being of questionable artistic merit. For instance, in The Thomas Crown Affair, a stolen Monet turns out to be a fake, painted over a canvas of one of the Dogs Playing Poker series. Sure, it's funny, and more people are likely to recognize one of those paintings than your average Monet -- but is it art?

Probably not, or maybe we need to expand our definition still further to incorporate this particular subgroup of commercial art, which has other merits beyond the purely aesthetic. The Spousal Unit alerted me to an hilarious series of print ads for the Toyota Prius -- not official ones, some advertising dude just created them to plump up his portfolio -- recently featured on the blog Sociological Images (part of Contexts magazine). I think they're actually pretty brilliant, depicting folks engaged in all kinds of despicable behavior next to the car, with the tagline, "At least s/he drives a Prius." This one is my favorite, called "The Body Dump":

I think this series might be the next "Dogs Playing Poker." It's just the sort of thing I need to grace my office walls. I might not know anything about art, y'all, but I dang sure know what I like. Feel free to leave a comment, with links, to tell me about a science-inspired artist that you like. I need to add to my collection....

Comments

[Jeff]

Three artists that come to mind are Rosamond Purcell, Arthur Ganson, and Ned Kahn. Purcell's striking photographs capture items in decay. She is strongly interested in natural forms and collaborated several times with Stephen Jay Gould. Arthur Ganson is an artist-in-residence at MIT and builds machines that elaborately do nothing. Ned Kahn was an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium and builds sculptures that explore chaotic processes.

I recently saw Olaf Eliasson's show at the San Francisco MOMA and his work is often inspired by ideas in math and optics.

[Chimera]

Have, by random coincidence, just discovered your truly wonderful, fascinating and packed blog! I loved some of the images - the skate boarder, the droplet photography, ..the hysterical Prius mock ad and I enjoy the way you batter ideas around. The aesthetic versus the pragmatic and practical. I've noticed it more with refernce to desing. When one becomes disabled good design becomes essential and one notices more and more when something is both gorgeous and pleasing as well as useful. Most design in this field is ugly, consescending.
I am not wanting to fill up your comment area but just to say i am thrilled to have found such an intelligent and exciting blog. If OK with you i will link you on mine in the hopes that some of your searing brainpower may by osmosis filter through!
Best
Tanvir (Chimera)
www.holeyvision.blogspot.com

[jongleur]

But is it art? A question as old as art itself, and not made any easier by the likes of Marcel Duchamp taking the p*ss. Nowadays the answer appears to be ' It's Art, as long as it sells' c.f. Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin (do you have similar mountebanks in the US?). Scientific imagery can be quite as transfixingly and transcendentally beautiful as any equation, and is perhaps more generally accessible. But is it Art? Does it matter? Never mind (as Bertrand Russell's nurse is said to have said.)

[ac]

Check out Julian Voss-Andreae- I especially like his heme sculpture.

[Sean Carroll]

While we're making suggestions: Jonathan Feldschuh is an artist inspired by science, and his website includes a series on the Large Hadron Collider!

http://www.jonathanfeldschuh.com/

[Alexziller]

very interesting post!

BTW, I find quite "artistic" (or at least "just beautiful") also some recent pics of LHC:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

regards, Alex

[N. Peter Armitage]

I like Tony Smith's [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Smith_(sculptor) ] series of sculptures inspired by the Fermi surfaces of metals.

There is of course "Fermi" (look down the page)
http://www.southcoastmetro.com/visual_arts.html
It is housed just down the road from you Jennifer in Costa Mesa.

But my favorite is "For Dolores/Flowers for the Dead/Flores para los muertos" in Dallas. It's inspiration is the Fermi surface of indium.
http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/index.cfm?FuseAction=Object&ObjectID=159
I never understood Smith's name for it, but the sculpture is a gobsmackingly perfect redition of the plot from Russian version of Abrikosov's book on metals. Smith - not being a physicist - motivated his work from the fact that he liked the shapes. I also like the shapes.

[N. Peter Armitage]

I should mention that "Fermi" is inspired by the Fermi surface of copper.

[Parabellum]

"but is it art?"

If you have to ask the answer is always no.

[Glendon Mellow]

Many thanks for being included in such great company, Jennifer! I need to update my links and keep an eye on some of these stunning artists. Lia Halloran's is gorgeous.

I can't speak for other artists engaged in work based on the sciences, but for myself, I am intrigued by trying to create decipherable visual metaphors in the tradition of Renaissance and Symbolist painters using information from biology, to do so.

This is a personal bias, but much of the post-modernist movement is naval-gazing, paintings about the process of making paintings. That's fine, but to me it seems a shame people would leave behind the tradition of depicting still-life as metaphor. Dali's Corpus Hypercubus comes to mind as a particularly excellent example of blending science into artistic traditions.

[Larry Ayers]

A very illuminating and intriguing overview, Jennifer, with many links I need to explore.

A good 19th-Century example of such art is the work of Ernst Haeckel in his collection Arforms In Nature. Haeckel has been taken to task for his flawed views on ontogeny and phylogeny, but he drew marvellous scenes of various life-forms. The details aren't always exact (he tended to arrange tentacles and such in a stylized Art-Deco-ish manner) but many of the plates are visually stunning. You can see them here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

One of my favorites is #8, the Discomedusae. Note that Wikimedia offers high-resolution files of each plate which print out well and are suitable for framing.

[Stephanie Chasteen]

Pardon this long comment, but I love this subject and have a lot to say! I was lucky enough to be employed for a few years as a staff scientist at the Exploratorium -- the "Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception" in San Francisco. The Exploratorium had a profound effect on me, in part because of the interweaving of art and science, as implied by its tagline. The museum employed both senior artists and senior scientists and they worked closely together on projects, to ensure that exhibits and other museum creations were both scientifically accurate, and beautiful. One of the senior artists at the Exploratorium once asked the museum scientists, “Could you tell me why you value art and the artists here?” Here’s what I told her: The artists at the Exploratorium tickle my brain. The art exhibits at the Exploratorium, as well as the conversations with artists, have had a tangible effect upon my creativity. My mind was humming in my first months here as I was exposed to new representations of things that I had a tendency to think of in an abstract way. I can’t say that being around artists has taught me to *create* things with an aesthetic appeal, but it certainly has opened my vision to seeing things in a new way and to consider aesthetics as an aim in itself. The art at the Exploratorium also opens me up to wonder. It is easy to get lost in the seriousness of science. When I walked in and saw a new installation, where lighted lightbulbs seem to chase each other with illumination, my mind went a little fizzy and I just stood there and appreciated it. It also reminded me of many things that I know about — neuronal networks, electronic circuitry, persistence of vision. I appreciated it on an aesthetic ground, and it also represented many things in science for me. This is excerpted from a slightly longerw post I wrote on this subject: http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/why-art/

Here's a post I wrote (http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/seeing-the-unseen/) about Ned Kahn's work (an artist in residence at the Exploratorium, as mentioned above), which focuses in large part on making the invisible visible -- seeing the effects of wind, the movement of air, or water, for example. I had the great fortune to see Ned Kahn speak once, and was struck by his quiet vision -- his predilection for seeing aesthetic possibility in the invisible dynamics of the natural world. His creations definitely tickled my brain.

And here is some gorgeous light painting from the PIE (Playful Invention and Exploration) at the Exploratorium: http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/the-pie-idea-library/

And some amazing dynamic "sculptures" made with ferrofluid and strong magnets in a project called "Ebb, Protrude, Flow". You must check these videos out, they're quite stunning, I was completely enraptured with them: http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/ferrofluid/

[Mike B.]

Is it wrong for me to say Gunther von Hagen? Despite whatever human rights violations may have gone on I think the work is interesting. The only thing that really bugs me about it is that years ago I heard about a museum in France that housed similarly preserved corpses made by a long dead French biologist and ghoul, who was even accused of digging up his wife for his "art" projects. I can no longer remember his name but I can't find anything about him on web searches. So, maybe von Hagen bought the corpses of dead Chinese political prisoners, used this "plastination" process that may have been stolen from a dead French biologist, or learned during his time in the SS, and maybe he is involved in some sort of conspiracy involving German war criminals hiding out in South America to erase all information about the French dude from the internet, but you can't deny the work is striking. I do think the LHC is a pretty interesting structure as well. It's largest parts look like pieces of a deathray from a modern Bond film. Plus I've always thought the little lign drawings of particle paths in accelerator collisions were intrinsically beautiful. The way the particles decay in little spiral patterns would have Da Vinci swooning that the Golden Ratio was SO fundamental to nature. But I do think the most obvious, but most intriguing forms of science inspired art are the works of science fiction writers (creative writing is an art too). I've written a poem called "The Speaker" which was inspired by the inherent magic involved in collapsing wave functions through observation. Although I do believe that although most artists are their own worst critics, a poet's his own biggest fan, I'll go ahead and post it:

The Speaker

A hush fell over the rabble
His subtle and soft twitches won them
The shake and the shudder of muscles
And then veins
And then molecules
And then atoms
Down to the quarks and gluey gluons
Crescendo-ed and ebbed to the hum
Of the warm gamma vibration
In that perfect un-stillness every tiny action
Leading to something as huge as a finger pointing
Played out like chess moves
The crowd started playing
Sending off some glorious ordered chaos collisions
Like bowling pins
In their hive core as observers
They fingered him like an organ
"Huwooo," he wheezed
And then all at once they stopped
Stopped the little vibrations of quarks and gluey gluons
And then atoms
And then molecules
And then veins
All the way up to muscles
All just stopped

[Jennifer Ouellette]

The French dude to whom you refer is Fragonard. And I am a huge fan of his work. :) Look in my archives for a post entitled "Exquisite Corpses" for a detailed account of his work.... I think I re-posted it in late September/early October of 2007....

[Mike B.]

"Fragonard", noted. どもうありがとうございます。(thank you very much) That was driving me crazy. I did forget to mention one of my favourite pieces of sci-fi, the Urantia Book (wikipedia.org/urantia). The fact of the book is that it's based on science that has subsequently been proven wrong, from a psychological case study that probably never happened. The irony is too thick to cut with a chainsaw and on top of that, it's written with such expansive, beauracratic dialouge that by the end of a couple pages the reader is left completely numb, thoughtless and dumbstruck. The real irony is in the fact that through it's thought erasing properties the book actually achieves a first step to enlightenment that it's alleged truths are advertised to provide. After reading a few pages your left so bereft of thought that meditation, or even astral projection, don't seem all that difficult. The sad thing is that some people actually believe in it despite it's incorrect ideas about planetary origin and blatant support of eugenics.

[Paul Murray]

Wouldn't it come in the same category as displaying "found objects" in a gallery? If some driftwood on a plinth can be art ...

For that matter, what about bonsai? What about when a painter uses the way that semi-transparent paint (vermillion green?) over the top of another paint produces a different shade? Does that suddenly count as not art because it involves scientific properties of the media? If so, we can chuck out pretty much any so-called "art" that is an exploration of the media.

Maybe there's a couple of definitions of art in operation. Is art "holding up a mirror to nature"? Is it "communication"? Is it simply the tickling of our aesthetic sense?

Feh. They've been arguing that one back and forth for millennia, and it isn't going to get settled any time soon.

I like pretty pictures. And knowing that it's something real, that reveals something about the physical world make it even better. I might not know much about art, but I know what I like.