Dave's Update:

Integrating art in the science classroom

Even though our online exhibition, Gut Instincts, still is in the early planning stages, I have begun thinking about what comes next. How will people interact with the exhibition? What will the audience gain from viewing the works of art? How can I incorporate this exhibition into my classes?
 
The integration of the arts in science education is an idea that has been gaining traction in recent years. Indeed, proponents of this approach have altered the familiar acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) to include the arts, creating STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics). SciArt Center (http://www.sciartcenter.org) certainly is a great example of this convergence of the disciplines. Other programs, too, like the STEM to STEAM initiative at the Rhode Island School of Design (http://stemtosteam.org) and STE[+a]M Connect program at UC San Diego (http://steamconnect.org) are creating spaces where practitioners of the sciences and the arts can collaborate.
 
I’m a big fan of these programs. As The Bridge virtual residency program already has demonstrated to me, partnerships between artists and scientists allow each partner to see his or her own field in new ways. Thinking about one’s work from a new perspective enhances one’s creativity and almost certainly leads to the generation of new ideas. But how do collaborations between artists and scientists translate to the classroom? How can my students use our proposed online exhibition on the microbiome?
 
In the spring of 2016, I will be teaching BIO 202: Microbiology at Davidson College. At some point during the semester, we certainly will discuss the microbiome. As part of our discussions, I would like the students to read a primary research article related to the general theme of Gut Instincts, and then view our exhibition. I’m sure the combination of the science and the art will led to spirited discussions. Is that enough? Should I try to more intentionally link the science and the art? If so, how? Because we seem to be living in an age of assessment, should I assess the effectiveness of the exhibition on student learning? Again, if so, how?
 
These questions are a few of the ones I will be considering as we complete our residencies. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears!

Charissa's Update:

The Polysemies of Language, Science, and Art
 
I just read physicist-feminist Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (2010). Keller parses the rhetorical split between “nature” and “nurture,” in order to reveal that scientifically speaking they are not separate. Keller argues that scientists and science writers must use more precise wording to identify the “gene,” gene function, the complexities involved in phenotypic expression by way of lifelong human development.
 
The earliest distinction between the two terms goes back to the sixteenth century, when in 1581 British educator Richard Mulcaster claimed, “Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward.” (Keller, 17) Shakespeare made the more memorable discrepancy, when he had Prospero degrade Caliban in The Tempest (1623) by describing him as “a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture will never stick.” (Keller, 17)
 
To distinguish the difference between the two realms – nature and nurture – is not however a bifurcation, which is what Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and father of eugenics, did in his English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874). From this point forward, Keller shows, the “particulate gene” – the misunderstanding that the gene names a localizable particle in which “DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and protein makes us” – has held sway. (Keller, 79)
 
Keller is the master of analyzing the language of science. While laying bear the slippages in meaning that occur in the uses of one word, “gene,” she elucidates its complex workings to a lay audience – readers like me, an art and architectural historian. Keller makes complex systems elegant, accessible, and beautiful.
 
This is the task Dave Wessner and I face in curating the online exhibition Gut Instinct. How do we communicate in solid and sophisticated terms the workings of the microbiota (gut bacteria) and the microbiome (its DNA)? Polysemy – bearing many meanings and interpretations – is inevitable here.
 
The understanding of science comes to those who are not scientists by way of language and visualization – through words and art – both of which are subjective and labile. While a problem for geneticists, as Keller has shown, the polysemy of language, science… and art is the very stuff of aesthetics. Polysemy is at the heart of aesthetics, viz., the experience of collective reality. The surprise of art is how it teases out unforeseen polysemies: the way in which artists, when asked to interpret a scientific concept such as the microbiome, bring new metaphorical interpretations to what are considered to be objective facts. They bring new angles to the world of hard evidence. Let the polysemic ramble roll!

Dave's Update: 

The Complexity of Natural Systems

​As Charissa and I begin to plan Gut Instincts, our virtual exhibit which will be hosted by SciArt Center, I have been reviewing some of the existing literature about the gut microbiome and human health. Specifically, I have been interested in a question that I often ask my student. How do we know what we know? For this burgeoning field of research, the answer is complex.
 
In some cases, the link between our microbiota and our health is quite clear. As an example, let’s consider vaginal yeast infections. The usual culprit, Candida albicans, often is found in the vagina. Typically, though, it is present in small numbers and does not cause any signs or symptoms of disease. So what causes the population explosion associated with a yeast infection? Under typical conditions, other microbes present in the vagina control the growth of C. albicans. Certain resident bacteria produce acidic by-products, which lower the pH of the vagina. This low pH environment inhibits the growth of C. albicans. If the growth of these bacteria is inhibited, perhaps as a result of the person taking antibiotics for a bacterial infection, then the pH of the vagina may increase, making it more hospitable for the growth of C. albicans.
 
In this example, the effects of our microbial partners on our health can be demonstrated very clearly and conclusively. We can show that C. albicans is the cause of a yeast infection. We can show that C. albicans grows better in alkaline conditions. We can show that bacteria normally create a slightly acidic environment that, in turn, regulates the growth of the yeast. The data are fairly clear.
 
What about more complex situations? To investigate the role of gut microbes on food utilization and weight gain, Dr. Jeff Gordon and his colleagues at Washington University at St. Louis took a reductionist approach. They began their experiments with germ-free, or gnotobiotic, mice. These mice have not been colonized by microbes and are raised under germ-free conditions to prevent their colonization. Researchers can colonize these animals with specific microbes under controlled conditions and determine the effects of the introduced microbes on the health of the animals.  
 
Gordon et al. showed that germ-free mice co-colonized with the bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron and the archaeon Methanobrevibacter smithii derived more energy from their diet than germ-free mice or mice colonized only with B. thetaiotaomicron. Based on these results, the researchers hypothesized that M. smithii increases the ability of mice to extract calories from the food that they eat. The implications for human health are significant. It might be possible to reduce obesity by decreasing the amount of M. smithii in a person’s GI tract. Conversely, M. smithii could be used in resource-poor regions to help people extract more calories from their limited food intake. This preliminary research led to another interesting observation. When comparing the microbes present in the GI tracts of lean people and people with anorexia, researchers observed significantly more Methanobrevibacter in people with anorexia. They hypothesized that this increase may reflect an adaptation by the body to maximize the usable calories in the face of a very low caloric diet.
 
This example, in which researchers compared the microbes present in two different groups of people, represents another approach to investigating the relationship between our microbiota and our health. In several studies, this approach has been used to examine the link between our microbiome and our behavior. Researchers, for example, have compared the microbiomes of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical children. Differences seem to exist. Moreover, in studies of mice that display some aspects of ASD, researchers have shown that oral administration of certain bacterial species to these mice alleviates some of the symptoms. Taken together, these studies provide very preliminary, yet compelling, evidence supporting the idea that the microbes in our gut can affect our behavior and cognitive functions.
 
These few examples provide just a glimpse into this developing field. To investigate the link between our microbiome and our health, researchers are using several different approaches, each of which provides us with different kinds of information. So let’s return to my opening question. How do we know what we know? When we are talking about the effects of our microbiome on our health, it’s complicated. In an earlier post, Charissa very eloquently wrote, “One understands the working function of any given system…in terms of a network of forces rather than looking to an element singly on its own.” This description applies perfectly to microbiome research. And it’s this complexity that I hope we can explore in our upcoming exhibition.

Charissa's Update:

Art and the Brain-Gut Axis: What is an Art of the Gut Microbiome?

Dave Wessner and I are inching our way toward curating an online exhibition on the gut microbiome called Gut Instinct. We face several exciting challenges. First, do we want to present the idea to artists for their free interpretation? Or would we rather very carefully choose artists and their works and leave nothing open to chance? Do we want freely created analyses and translations of the gut microbiome? Or do we want instructional and illustrative examples? Art occupies a different place in each answer.
 
In the recent show Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images in Dallas at Gray Matters Gallery, I gathered artists, presented the idea, and let them freely decode and decipher it into various media and forms. By and large it was a great success, which I blogged about here last week. While there was only one artist, who sadly in bad faith went forward with his piece admitting to have never understood the concept of chirality, the others did understand the idea, make great works of art, and expand the criteria by which we understand art-and-science visualization.
 
For our upcoming exhibition Gut Instinct, I hope to have a mixture of both, with more work being materializations of free interpretations, conversions, and transformations of the gut microbiome and only a few being works of art that forthrightly and literally illustrate the gut microbiome.
 
Curating is all about presenting art that exudes, embodies, and enlivens a thesis about art, society, or the world. Bearing this in mind, and perhaps most important of all, Wessner and I must articulate our thesis. Why are we so interested in gut microbiota and the gut microbiome?
 
There are many reasons for me. I am fascinated by the elegant functionalism and extreme diversity of life in our gut with respect to microbiota (the actual bacteria) and the microbiome (their DNA). Our complexity pales in comparison to its. Distilling this wonderful intricacy, Margaret J. McFall-Ngai explains, “plants and animals are a patina on the microbial world.” The microbiome helps our own DNA function properly. Their health and well-being is our health and well-being.

What really gets me excited is the relationship between the brain and gut. The brain-gut axis is the information feedback loop between the gastrointestinal tract, the nervous system, and the microbiota living in the gut. The microbiota and their microbiome are connected to our mood. Disruption and disequilbrium in one area reciprocally affects the other. I would like to see a group of art works riffing on the brain-gut axis – thinking through the role of gut as the second brain and, by connection, the function of “gut instinct” as a mode of unconscious ratiocination.
 
The Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy seemed to be getting at some of this thinking a century ago. In the late 1920s, he described the creation-reception-perception of objects according to the instinctual in The New Vision:

“In every creative work there is a sphere in which a certain freedom is left to the intuition. The creative problem enters at the point where the freedom begins, where the visible function no longer determines, or at least not wholly determines, the form. In such cases an instinctive sureness of perception is required, and this is nothing more than the end result of complicated processes going on the subconscious, but in the last determined biologically.” (Moholy-Nagy, László, The New Vision (1938) (Mineola, NY: 1975) 62.)

Let us understand the word “biologically” here to connect to his interests also in the enteroceptive, the feelings “arising from the internal organs and viscera,” or what might succinctly translate into “gut instinct.” (Moholy-Nagy, 24.)​

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.

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:

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.

Dave Update:

The Unseen Beauty (and function) of Chiral Molecules

As Charissa notes, chirality, or the “handedness” of molecules, plays a major role in biology. Many molecules, from sugars to amino acids to odorants, are chiral molecules; they can exist as mirror images, known more formally by scientists as enantiomers or optical isomers. Take glucose, for instance. The chemical formula of glucose is C6H12O6. Enantiomers of glucose all share this formula, but differ structurally. The atoms in L-glucose and D-glucose are arranged differently, resulting in two molecules are mirror images of each other.
 
The concept of chirality comes up in the classroom quite frequently. Initially, it may be somewhat difficult for students of biology to see this structural difference. Using the hand example that Charissa mentioned, however, generally eliminates any confusion. Just like your right hand cannot be superimposed on your left hand, L-glucose cannot be superimposed on D-glucose. With that initial confusion resolved, students then typically move to another question. So what?
 
For living organisms, the function of enantiomers can differ dramatically. Naturally occurring glucose almost always is D-glucose. In fact, our cells cannot utilize L-glucose as an energy source. In the classroom, we can use this example to emphasize the specificity of enzymes, molecules that catalyze chemical reactions within our cells. When describing the specificity of enzymes, we often use the lock-and-key analogy. Enzymes interact with substrates in a very specific way, much like locks interact with keys. To use an analogy more related to chirality, however, let’s think about a pair of gloves. The glove designed for your right hand will not fit on your left hand. Similarly, L-glucose will not “fit” into the active site of an enzyme that has evolved to catalyze chemical reactions involving D-glucose.
 
The odorants mentioned by Charissa represent another fascinating example of the role enantiomers play in our daily lives. Let’s look at two examples. Spearmint and caraway plants both produce carvone (C10H14O). These plants, however, synthesize two different enantiomers of this compound. Evolution has resulted in two different biosynthetic pathways, which, in turn, produce molecules that are mirror images of each other. Moreover, the odor receptors in our olfactory system have evolved to differentiate between these molecules. As Charissa wrote, “One has the zing of mint, the other the earthiness of cumin.”  In a similar fashion, our odor receptors can distinguish enantiomers of limonene (C10H16). To us, D-limonene smells like oranges, whereas L-limonene smells like lemons.
 
As we can see from these few examples, the “handedness” of molecules matters. Perhaps an image showing D-glucose and L-glucose does not have the same visual allure as a photograph of Edith Sitwell’s hand holding a chiral shell, but both images matter. Both images allow us to think more intently about structure and function, and about the beauty of our everyday experiences. I am sure that visitors to Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images (Charissa's exhibit) will appreciate the artistry of the included works. I hope they also will leave the exhibition with an appreciation of the biological importance of asymmetrical symmetry.

Charissa's Update:
​
Chirality: Forms and Formalisms of Art-and-Science Hybrid

​The Scottish physicist Lancelot Law Whyte (1896-1972) published an article titled “Chirality” in the art-sci-tech journal Leonardo in 1975. Whyte included a photograph of the poet and literary critic Edith Sitwell holding a helical shell. The shell in Sitwell’s hand has a dextral chiral form, meaning it has a right-handed coiling shape. It was the Whyte family Christmas card from 1958.
           
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. They are defiant forms that, while mirroring each other, refuse to overlap symmetrically. 

​Chirality is most frequently used in the sciences to describe the “handedness” of molecules, their organization in space as mirror images that cannot be superimposed on one another. 

Like our hands, these molecular compounds are symmetrical mirror images of each other but if layered one atop the other, their relationship becomes asymmetrical.
 
Edibles, smells, and drugs provide examples of chirality. Take sugar, for example. We need sugar in our diet, but if we were to eat a mirror image of sugar, the same atoms arranged in the left-hand form, then we would go hungry. Food chemists have used this logic to develop zero-calorie artificial sweeteners. They sweeten your tea, but provide no nutrition or calories. Spearmint and the spice caraway are chiral molecules. One has the zing of mint, the other the earthiness of cumin. Certain drugs are chiral. Ibuprofen is a well-known chiral pain reliever, but in its non-superimposable mirror image it is deadly. One form may be helpful the other may be inactive or even toxic (http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/rjf/fischer/background.php.).

​Chirality, simply put, is inspiring. I am fascinated by its possibility now in art and in the history of science within art: its potential as a new mode of form and formalism in contemporary art and the lively overlapping in Whyte’s article from forty years ago. It is intriguing to me that Whyte published a scientific essay in Leonardo, a journal with a large readership of artists, using a photograph of a shell in the hand of Edith Sitwell, a member of the mid-century London literati. In bringing these elements together – the scientific form of chirality, the photograph of Sitwell’s hand, and the art-sci-tech audience of Leonardo – Whyte forged new conceptual territory for all disciplines involved.

Whyte was part of a group of scientists, including Conrad Waddington, Joseph Needham, Joseph Woodger, J.D. Bernal, Dorothy Wrinch, Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, et. al. in 1930s England who came together for assorted causes, scientific and political in nature. They gathered in various collective formations – The Theoretical Biology Club, Biotheoretical Gathering, The Tots and Quots – to advance a third-way for biology beyond the mechanism/vitalism debate and to forge an anti-fascist front against the rise of the Third Reich. Another one of their shared investments was the popularization of science: bringing science to a mass audience through accessible prose, tantalizing pictures, and modern art. Members of this group interacted with artists and architects of the London Bauhaus, a brief incarnation of the German design school in the middle of the 1930s in England which included Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, among others.
           
In spring 2016 I will be doing archival research to tease out an “aesthetics of holism” in the London Bauhaus: how these scientists’ ideas about theoretical biology, politics, and art gelled alongside the integrated art-sci-tech design philosophies of members of the Bauhaus in mid-1930s England. For now, I am doing my own part in bringing these ideas to contemporary art in the twenty first century.
 
I am curating an exhibition, Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images, which opens October 24 at Gray Matters Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Artists Ellen Levy, Jeff Gibbons, Luke Harnden, Trent Straughan, Alan and Michael Fleming, and Steve Oscherwitz will be showing two-, three-, and four-dimensional work in this show. There will be instantiations of chirality in digital painting, interactive digital art, drawing, robotic art, and sculpture. This exhibition plays out the unique agency of chiral forms – their asymmetrical symmetry, how they look alike and act differently, and their ability to spin light out into space (or optical activity) – when introduced to the realm of art. Invoking “agency” in terms of the dynamics of chiral form, the exhibition sets in relief new models of form-making, individuation, and social action.
 
My goal in curating Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images is to refresh the formal language of art by introducing the concept of chirality. I hope to inject a mutational and living sense of form and formalism to the art world – that art is a matter of becoming and passing on rather than being and permanence.

Dave's Update:
Why should the sciences and humanities converse? 

Why should the sciences and humanities converse? Since I began co-teaching an interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS at Davidson College with a colleague from the English Department, I’ve been asked that question more than once. The answer requires some background.
 
My collaboration with Dr. Ann Fox, professor of English at Davidson College, began when she was co-curating an exhibition entitled Re/Formations: Disability, Women, and Sculpture. One of the featured artists was Nancy Fried, a survivor of breast cancer, who created a series of sculptures of her post-mastectomy body. When this exhibition opened, I was teaching an undergraduate genetics course, in which the students and I explored the molecular biology of breast cancer. We investigated the identification of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and examined the biochemical pathways in which the associated proteins were involved. We took a very reductionist look at breast cancer.
 
As part of this unit, I had the students visit the exhibition. After talking with Ann about the sculptures, they saw breast cancer from a very different perspective. Breast cancer was no longer just genes and mutations and biochemical pathways. All of a sudden, there was a human side to the molecular details. This holistic view deepened their understanding and appreciation of the topic. This holistic view, I believe, helped them think critically not just about breast cancer, but also about other topics that we discussed in class.
 
Increasingly, we are faced with complex problems that require complex solutions. Whether it is climate change, poverty, or human rights issues, we need to view today’s most pressing problems from multiple perspectives. I’m not sure exactly what Charissa and I will discuss during our residency, but I do know that our conversations will help me give my students a broader picture of science. In turn, they will be better able to address the problems of today and tomorrow.
 
So why should the sciences and humanities converse? We can’t afford not to.

Charissa's Update:
On Holism: Critical Thinking in Biology, Art, and Architecture
​
​My interlocutor microbiologist Dave Wessner uses the word “holistic” in his blog entry. The word comes up when Wessner refers to his collaboration with Dr. Ann Fox, professor of English and co-curator of the 2009 exhibition Re/Formations: Disability, Women, and Sculpture at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries. The holistic approach – that disease is at once part and whole, reducible in the lab and fully lived in the art gallery – sets in relief connections otherwise unseen.
 
I am fascinated by Wessner’s invocation of critical thinking here as a product of the holistic approach. Before getting to this, allow me to share a little bit about my work and the role of holism and the holistic strategy therein.
 
The word “holistic” guides my overarching approach within the history of biology in art and architecture, in that my work is holistic: it bridges science and the humanities. I am an art and architectural historian, theorist and critic working on the relationship between biology and art, looking in particular to the role of biological systems, cybernetics, and the interface between life and the machine within modern and contemporary art and architecture.
 
My next two books, Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (Jan. 2016) and the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Sept. 2016), coëdited with the media artist Meredith Tromble, are holistic in that they develop infrastructure for greater discourse between the fields of biology, genetics, neuroscience, contemporary art and architecture, and the history of art and architecture. These books build on my first book Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), which recasts contemporary conceptual art in terms of technology, the cyborg, cybernetics, and General Systems Theory. Holism is also at the core of my next research project focusing on the interaction between a group of artists, architects, designers, embryologists, evolutionary biologists, and theoretical biologists in 1930s England.
 
I am part of a vibrant community of artists, architects, and historians working on the role past and present of biology within art and architecture. One of our banner heads is “complexism,” a fantastic neologism and idea invented by artist and colleague Philip Galanter at Texas A&M, College Station. In sum, complexism names the application of complex systems to disciplines of the humanities. My work is, by and large, an exercise of complexism. It replaces linear causality with emergent causality. I look to the role played by science and technology in the realm of art and architecture over the last century. I like how complexism does not completely dismiss teleology, but opens a way to replace the progressive, straight-lined sense of the term with an organismic and biologistic take. One understands the working function of any given system, whether scientific or artistic, in terms of a network of forces rather than looking to an element singly on its own.
 
Our shared conundrum within this community has been the question of criticality. How does complexism, viz. holism, rethink criticality for the humanities? This is a large and daunting query, which I continue to work through. But I think Wessner’s citation of critical thinking by way of art-and-science practices starts to pave the way. We see that critical thinking for his students came through the empathy demanded by artistic representation of scientific subject matter. Art makes science a matter of facts and empathy, hard evidence and what the Austrian theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy called “happy intuition”.
 
So, science gleans feelings of empathy for life from art. What does art gain from science? Many things, only two of which I will name here.
 
First, science recalibrates the diverse fields of art – from art history to contemporary computational art. It opens new territory for the inspiration of artistic creation and historical interpretation. There is new art to make; there are new histories to write! Second, science offers a new mode of utility to art. By no means do I wish to reduce art to blunt utility, much less utilitarianism. As an historian and theorist I do not shy away from the possibility that art my have a function in the world. Function is our key word in this final instance. Organismic functionalism introduces to the realm of art new modes of utility – both reducible and irreducible in nature. Whether or not this constitutes a mode of critical thinking remains to be seen. 

As a professor of Biology at Davidson College, I teach introductory biology and courses on genetics, microbiology, and HIV/AIDS. My research interests include reovirus pathogenesis and uses of new media in the classroom. I am also is a member of the American Society for Microbiology Committee for K-12 Outreach. I recently co-authored Microbiology, a textbook for undergraduate biology majors, and co-authored Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action. I also co-curated Re/Presenting HIV/AIDS, an exhibition that featured artistic works related to HIV. Prior to joining the faculty at Davidson, I conducted research at the Navy Medical Center and National Zoo in Washington, DC. I earned my PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University and his BA in Biology from Franklin and Marshall College.

As an Associate Professor of Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, I am the author of Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (IB Taurus, 2016), and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Routledge, 2016). I am currently on sabbatical for the 2015-2016 academic year while I complete two books and lay the groundwork for my fourth.