The New Modernists
Engineers and technology exert a growing – and controversial – influence over the cultural landscape.
Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art
By Arthur I. Miller
W.W. Norton Co. 2014, 244 pages
In 2006, artist Aaron Koblin issued an online challenge: Using Google software, draw a picture of a sheep, to be submitted through the Amazon web service Mechanical Turk, which would track and record the movement of the drawing. Within 40 days, 10,000 drawings flooded in, helping form the crowdsourced artwork The Sheep Market. Visitors can still can view the entire collection of sheep (http://www.thesheepmarket.com) and click on individual images to observe how each drawing was made.
Welcome to the new world of artsci, where artists employ scientific and technological tools as the medium of their work, or are the scientists and engineers themselves, working at the edges of their fields. Such borderline workers include avant-garde musicians creating “hyperinstruments” at MIT’s Media Lab; the Russian artists Domnitch and Gelfand, who produce environments “combining light, physics, chemistry, mysticism, and art”; and Koblin, the creative director of Google’s data arts team. Trained in computer science and media arts, and armed with the technological clout of his employer, Koblin serves as a powerful example of the emerging field of technical art. His best known works are visual representations of massive data, like Flight Patterns, which displays the path of every aircraft flying over the continental United States during a single 24-hour period in 2008. While Koblin’s work has aesthetic value, he often sounds more like an engineer than an artist when discussing how time-based interfaces of data enable us “to ask new questions, to toggle on and off parameters, reading the data differently.”
Miller weaves these artists’ portraits through his discussion of the different movements, as well as issues, of artsci. Early chapters review a modern history of art-science explorations, including those of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Rauschenberg, and musician John Cage. Picasso was fascinated by the beauty of the human x-ray. Kandinsky pursued color abstractions at the same time Cubists’ black-on-white canvases were depicting movements of electromagnetism.
Of particular interest to Miller are the “collisions” of art and science: The marriage of the two has always excited interest, yet it has never been a smooth union. Scientists may undercut the value of aesthetics or consider artists’ work irrelevant, but artists can be equally dismissive of scientists and engineers. Miller was stunned by the intensity of reaction when moderating a 2011 London show subtitled “Merging Art and Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement.” Responding to his pronouncement that science-influenced art sits “at the forefront of a whole new culture,” a panel of artists challenged Miller’s terminology, noting that “science-influenced art” implies a hierarchy of disciplines, with science taking the lead. One panelist declared that science is used by artists “like paint in a can,” without true depth of impact. Yet another declared that scientists “think less creatively than artists because of the restrictions on their work imposed by the need to apply for grants.”
Rather than dismay Miller, such strenuous resistance energizes Colliding Worlds, motivating him to investigate the reasoning behind it. As an MIT-trained physicist who has written about black stars, Carl Jung, and the cross-disciplinary inquiries of Einstein and Picasso, he offers fascinating perspectives – and additional questions. How do we compare the creations of Mozart and Beethoven to “Crystal Sounds of a Synchrotron,” a 2012 winner at the annual Ars Electronica sound art competition? Is artsci largely rejected by the art world because, as Koblin and others contend, it resists marketable commodification, being readily reproducible? These are just a few of the considerations the author raises, though he is clearly awed by artsci’s potential. “Art, science, and technology as we know them today will disappear,” Miller proclaims, “fused into a third culture.” Whether or not they agree, Prism readers will find
Colliding Worlds both thought-provoking and informative. After all, as Ars Electronica’s artistic director Gerfried Stocker notes, artsci is “not only sexy, it’s seductive; it goes places where nobody has really gone before.”
Review by Robin Tatu
Robin Tatu is Prism’s senior editorial consultant.