Dave & Charissa: Week 5

The Many Links between Art and Science:
Rethinking Representation, Visualization, and Function

Dave's Update:

It’s funny how differently people can answer a seemingly simple question. Take, for example, this question: How can art and science be linked? This week, as Charissa and I have been considering our online exhibition loosely focused on this question, I was made aware of two wildly different examples of the links between our disciplines. In both cases, a link between art and science clearly exists. That’s probably the extent of the similarities between these two examples. And neither of them reflects the goals we have for our collaboration.
 
In the first example, the art consists of living organisms. This summer, the American Society for Microbiology (www.asm.org) held their first “agar art” contest. The instructions were simple – “create a work of art using microbes as the paint and agar as the canvas.” For the non-microbiologists out there, perhaps a few words of explanation are necessary. Agar is a gelatinous substance derived from seaweed that was first used by Robert Koch and his assistants in the late 1800s as a medium on which to grow bacteria and fungi. By adding nutrients to the agar, a semi-solid growth medium could be made. Because different microbes have different nutritional needs, different agar formulations have been developed to support the growth of myriad bacterial and fungal species. Moreover, different microbes often “look” different on various types of media. When grown on eosin methylene blue agar, for example, the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli appears metallic green. Serratia marcescens, in contrast, appears red when grown on various media. Some bacteria, like Vibrio harveyi, are naturally bioluminescent, while other bacteria have been genetically engineered to produce various fluorescent colors. The result? Creative microbiologists can plate various microbes on different growth media, producing living works of art.
 
The results of the ASM contest were amazing. The winners, microbiologist Mehmet Berkmen and artist Maria Penil, used various bacteria to “paint” a picture of neurons.

​Melanie Sullivan used several agar plates and several bacterial species to recreate Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

In this example of the link between art and science, living biological material is the medium used by the artists. In the second example of the intersection between art and science that crossed my desk, DNA is used to identify, or tag, more traditional works of art. On 12 October 2015, the Global Center of Innovation for i2M Standards at the State University of New York at Albany launched an initiative to label new works of art with unique DNA labels in an effort to prevent forgeries. Once a defined DNA code is added to a work of art, the developers argue, the piece easily could be scanned to determine its authenticity. Details about the proposal are available here: http://www.albany.edu/news/63269.php. Obviously, this example presents a very different link between art and science. In this case, the artist or collector uses science as a tool. The artistic process isn’t affected by science. Science in no way influences the creative process. But the two disciplines still are intricately linked.
 
Charissa and I are interested in exploring yet another example of the link between art and science. For both of us, the excitement of this fellowship arises from the meaningful conversations that can occur between the scientist and the artist and how these conversations can influence our work. By engaging in a thoughtful dialogue, we can learn from each other. Each of us can think more broadly about our own discipline. Each of us can grow by considering our own work from a different perspective. In her accompanying post, Charissa describes the exhibition on chirality that she is curating in Dallas. This exhibition surely will influence how scientists view art and how artists view science. We hope that the online exhibition we curate through this residency has the same result, both for us and for others.

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Charissa's Update:

From Dave’s blog entry about art-science exhibition initiatives, we are reminded that science can reinforce the many modes of representation within art. Simply put, art can be pictorial in several different manners. The agar art contest sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology reveals new modes of painting, for example, created by the use of living materials – various grades of agar and their ability to catalyze color, light, and texture. The example by Mehmet Berkmen and artist Maria Penil shows a representation or image of neurons.
 
Also at work here is an idea of representation as durational and in-process. The art object is never static, but changes over time like life itself. It mimics the processes of biological development. It looks like and acts like a neuron. We might say that biological agar art is morphogenetic: it is unfolding and morphing through time. And, from this perspective, representation becomes chronological – unfolding in time.
 
The exhibition Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images at Gray Matters Gallery in Dallas, Texas similarly shows the many ways, means, and embodiments of art – within and beyond representational forms. Curated by software artist (and, for the record, my husband) Trent Straughan and I, the show opened this weekend and drew a wonderful crowd of artists and scientists. 

The show is an experiment of sorts, as evidenced by the versatile array of work. I asked artists to make or show extant art based on the concept of “chirality” (see blog 2). The word “chirality” comes from the Greek word kheir, meaning, “hand.” Human hands and feet are chiral: regardless of how you orient them, they resist superimposition. While I had some sense of what might emerge, I was completely surprised by many of the pieces. Overall, the show brings home two fundamental revelations about art-and-science endeavors, one concerning visualization and the other how function and utility might be rethought by way of art-and-science hybrids.
 
With respect to visualization, each artist “visualized” chirality in a unique and imaginative way, popularizing the scientific concept while not sacrificing any of the inherent abstraction or disinterestedness of art. The results expand the concept of visualization beyond microscopes and big data, opening it up to the many-headed realm of multi-media art. Science can be “visualized” by way of customary modes of picture-making, such as painted digital prints and drawing, as well as video, software, and conceptual art! Visualization is thus not only a matter of the eyes and seeing, but the full sensual array of the body in movement.
 
With respect to function, we learn from this experiment that the popularization of science through art does not have to mean the dumbing-down, simplification, or brute instrumentalization of art. Art does not have to “service” science in simplistic ways that diminishes its complexity; and scientists identify new pathways of visualization from the imaginations of artists.
 
Here are the pieces from the show with explanations:

Alan and Michael Fleming, Who's Bad? single-channel video, 10:44 minutes looped, 2012 (Courtesy of Cydonia Gallery)

This is a still photo of the video Who's Bad? by the Brooklyn-based artists, Alan and Michael Fleming. They are chiral identical twins, meaning their DNA shows that they are identical but one is left-handed while the other is right-handed. For just about their entire life, they thought they were fraternal twins. Then, about two years ago, DNA test results showed that they have virtually identical genetic information. The video riffs on Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video from 1987. While genetically identical, their epigenetics proffered different manifestation of DNA. Not only are they different in their handedness, one brother is a dancer and the other a painter. In keeping with this bit of difference within absolute sameness, one brother follows the other’s lead here.

Alan and Michael Fleming, Prop 1/Prop 2, c-print, 12.5" x 18.25", 2009 (Courtesy of Cydonia Gallery)

Alan and Michael Fleming, Psychic Color Calendars, two calendars and ink, 24" x 12", 2011 (Courtesy of Cydonia Gallery)

​In Prop 1/Prop 2 we see a combination of dance, conceptual art, and minimalist sculpture – altogether making a work of performance art documented in a photograph. The Flemings perform slow, deliberative poses that mimic the rectilinear shapes of 1960s minimalist sculpture. Psychic Color Calendars is a conceptual piece based on telepathy. While living separately, one in New York the other in Chicago, the brothers wanted to test their telepathic skills, each coloring a square daily to see if their minds were in sync. The experiment shows they are not telepathic, with only the 4th and 20th of January syncing up color-wise.

Trent Straughan, Eyes in the Back of Your Head, interactive software installation, two cameras, projector, and computer, 2015

Trent Straughan is a frontend software developer by day and an artist by life. His degree in graphic design has served him well! Eyes in the Back of Your Head is a work without an object; it is experiential and uses technology to exteriorize the senses and putative mind. Viewers stand at a specifically designated place centered between two cameras, while looking up at their projection on the wall. They see a live feed of their front, then back, then front, and then back again – indefinitely ad infinitum. The piece plays out the scientific concept of chirality as a live perceptual event facilitated by technologies of computation, surveillance, and projection. I draw connections between Straughan’s piece and Bruce Nauman’s Live Taped Video Corridor Piece (1970), Dan Graham’s time delay rooms from the 1970s, and Les Levine’s television sculpture from the late 1960s.

Jeff Gibbons, Beeper, 50 pounds of aging Appalachian clay, bucket, pillow case, unfired clay potato, 17” x 12” x 12”, 2015

Gibbons’ Beeper takes on chirality by way of conceptual art – that is, through the language of fiction. The potato sitting atop a closed bucket is ersatz: it is made from clay, a mound of which sits inside. It is the mirror image – a chiral form – of an actual potato, about which Gibbons writes in a novel based on a character that is his mirror image living in a mirror world. Resonating with the work of Arthur C. Clarke and P.K. Dick, Gibbons brings chirality to the language of fiction writing and materializes ideas from his book. Another exciting idea for me here is the way in which chirality becomes adjacent to Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum – all by way of Gibbons’ inventive touch.

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Ellen Levy, Migrations 20/20, series of three, mixed media, acrylic, gel, digital print, 60” x 40”, 2015

​Ellen Levy is an artist engaged in neuroscientific research. She makes experiential mixed-media installations and writes about complex systems. These images combine analog and digital processes in the creation of swirling alter-worlds where the landscape becomes ocular and in automotive motion. They are experiential in that, according to Levy, “these works call for the viewer to perform mental rotations.” We see highway infrastructure shooting through the anatomical structures of the eye. In her own words, “the freeway interchange is visually mimicked in these works by the superimposition of retinal circuitry over it, including the crossover of visual signals at the chiasma.” I think here once again of the writing of Arthur C. Clarke, in particular the tubular megastructure in outerspace that is at the center of the novel Rama, which further connects us to the “alien megastructure 1400 light-years away” that was in the news last week.

​Luke Harnden, Dark Eyes, mirror, wood, fabric, 23"x17" 2015

​Luke Harnden’s Dark Eyes is equal parts painting, sculpture, and experience. It hangs on the wall like a painting, must be interacted with like a sculpture, and offers a singular experience for each person. Harnden has wrapped nylon interfacing material used in quotidian sewing around a mirror to create a subtle moiré effect. Upon approaching the mirror, one sees black dots at the center of one’s eyes. The piece creates a vertigo of cognitive consciousness and is the great grandchild of the sci-art perceptually based work of Op Art and New Tendencies artists form the 1960s.

Steven J. Oscherwitz, Untitled Drawing, rolled pitt graphite on handmade twinrocker paper, 22” X 30”, 2010

Steven J. Oscherwitz’s untitled drawing looks like two worlds mirrored while also overlapping. What I really love about Oscherwitz’s drawing is that it was not intended to be an example of chirality. He is adamant that his research in genetics and physics is not consciously present in any of his drawings. But scientific concepts seem to be there unconsciously as this drawing looks like a representation of chirality as well as the physics-based concept of “complementarity,” which is the idea that objects have complementary properties which cannot be measured accurately at the same time. While complementarity is not chirality, it is, like Baudrillard’s simulacrum, semantically connected in that it is a scientific idea about difference within similarity. It is also a term that showed up in one of the many e-mails Oscherwitz and I exchanged leading up to Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images.

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