Julian Voss-Andreae
Interview by Pamela Segura, SciArt Intern
PS: You began your career as a painter and eventually moved on to study philosophy, mathematics and physics. Your graduate research focused on quantum physics. By 2004, you graduated with a degree in sculpture in the United States. How did you come to see these disciplines as related?
JVA: I am really interested in observing the world around me. When I took up painting, I quickly gravitated towards painting observationally. I tried my best to paint the way things looked; to be 'all eye' without judging what I saw or intellectually scrutinizing it, basically like a Zen exercise. I tried to be 'unbiased' but the paintings had a tendency to express something beyond the object or person I had painted. I would paint a portrait of a friend or myself, for example, and after that I would look at the result and often be astonished how the images had the potential to offer new insights into that person. Insights I did not have before and didn't plan on putting into the painting. Those new elements did not feel accidental, they felt extraordinarily coherent, even though they didn’t come about in a conscious way.
Getting into science seemed pretty natural to me since I have this passion for exploring the world. But creativity is more hidden in science, and it needs an extraordinary amount of hard work to get to a point where creativity can freely flow. Just as I was getting closer to this point, in my graduate work in experimental physics, I felt that I wanted to focus on a broader perspective and I left science for art.
I have been approaching my work in sculpture very much like a physicist approaches an experiment: I have a certain vision and I do research and whatever it takes to make this vision happen. This involves working with scientists or other folks I meet on the internet, or working with companies, to get it done. I usually develop some computer code myself, typically on the interface between existing software and the file requirements of industry, such as: laser cutting shops, 3d printers or foundries.
One difference between the fields is how you feel about errors and accidents: In science they tend to be seen as undesirable and are often not mentioned in the final result (even though they do often play a significant role) and in art we learn to embrace and even encourage them as a key source of creative progress. In science your thinking becomes very structured by the constant ongoing need to present everything as a logical succession. Oftentimes scientists find themselves to ‘reverse engineer’ the logic of their inspiration when they document their research and I find that this need for ‘always making sense’ is exhausting and often detrimental to creativity.
In my own outlook and approach, art and science are very closely related. I feel a similar type of satisfaction when I experience an elegant math proof, a great engineering solution, a physics law of nature, or an artwork that feels profoundly meaningful.
Interview by Pamela Segura, SciArt Intern
PS: You began your career as a painter and eventually moved on to study philosophy, mathematics and physics. Your graduate research focused on quantum physics. By 2004, you graduated with a degree in sculpture in the United States. How did you come to see these disciplines as related?
JVA: I am really interested in observing the world around me. When I took up painting, I quickly gravitated towards painting observationally. I tried my best to paint the way things looked; to be 'all eye' without judging what I saw or intellectually scrutinizing it, basically like a Zen exercise. I tried to be 'unbiased' but the paintings had a tendency to express something beyond the object or person I had painted. I would paint a portrait of a friend or myself, for example, and after that I would look at the result and often be astonished how the images had the potential to offer new insights into that person. Insights I did not have before and didn't plan on putting into the painting. Those new elements did not feel accidental, they felt extraordinarily coherent, even though they didn’t come about in a conscious way.
Getting into science seemed pretty natural to me since I have this passion for exploring the world. But creativity is more hidden in science, and it needs an extraordinary amount of hard work to get to a point where creativity can freely flow. Just as I was getting closer to this point, in my graduate work in experimental physics, I felt that I wanted to focus on a broader perspective and I left science for art.
I have been approaching my work in sculpture very much like a physicist approaches an experiment: I have a certain vision and I do research and whatever it takes to make this vision happen. This involves working with scientists or other folks I meet on the internet, or working with companies, to get it done. I usually develop some computer code myself, typically on the interface between existing software and the file requirements of industry, such as: laser cutting shops, 3d printers or foundries.
One difference between the fields is how you feel about errors and accidents: In science they tend to be seen as undesirable and are often not mentioned in the final result (even though they do often play a significant role) and in art we learn to embrace and even encourage them as a key source of creative progress. In science your thinking becomes very structured by the constant ongoing need to present everything as a logical succession. Oftentimes scientists find themselves to ‘reverse engineer’ the logic of their inspiration when they document their research and I find that this need for ‘always making sense’ is exhausting and often detrimental to creativity.
In my own outlook and approach, art and science are very closely related. I feel a similar type of satisfaction when I experience an elegant math proof, a great engineering solution, a physics law of nature, or an artwork that feels profoundly meaningful.
Spannungsfeld, 2014, Stainless steel and granite, 10' x 70' x 6' (3 x 21 x 2 m), Location: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN).
Image courtesy the artist.
PS: Your protein sculptures provide for your viewers an interpretation of biochemical processes that is at once poetic and objective. This is quite pronounced in Angel of the West and the sculptures of the villin protein in the "Villin" project. How did you come about expanding forms as microscopic as the villin protein and human antibody?
JVA: I was always interested in the very small things. My mother tells me that as a kid I would often sit in the sandbox, looking at individual grains of sand for hours on end. I just love the idea of zooming in into the world with my inner eye, for example zooming in into the marvel that is our body. Being alive in this material body is such a profoundly exciting experience and I love trying to grasp a facet of that miraculous dance of matter and enlarge an aspect of that world into the world of our immediate experience. Our ability to get used to things and take them for granted is astonishing and often a blessing. But it is also sad that the sense of wonder we all once had so easily evaporates as we grow up. Lots of my work is driven by a desire to stay passionate and open, in the mindset of a child or a tourist for whom everything is new every day.
The choices for the two proteins you mention, the villin headpiece and the human antibody, were made in collaboration with scientists. The Scripps Institute asked me if I could make a sculpture based on the antibody molecule and I came up with the idea of combining the antibody with Leonardo’s famous drawing of a human body. The actual protein data set I used for the piece, published by Eduardo Padlan, was suggested by a Scripps scientist. This data set is unusual in that it combines different crystallographic experiments with a region that was modeled on the computer. The villin headpiece protein was also suggested by a scientist, Dan Gurnon of DePauw University, with whom I collaborated on making those sculptures. Villin naturally folds very fast which is the reason Klaus Schulten’s computational biophysics group at the Beckman Institute in Illinois picked it to simulate its folding process from first principles in the computer. Together with art and science students and an art professor we made four sculptures based on successive snapshots of the folding process.
JVA: I was always interested in the very small things. My mother tells me that as a kid I would often sit in the sandbox, looking at individual grains of sand for hours on end. I just love the idea of zooming in into the world with my inner eye, for example zooming in into the marvel that is our body. Being alive in this material body is such a profoundly exciting experience and I love trying to grasp a facet of that miraculous dance of matter and enlarge an aspect of that world into the world of our immediate experience. Our ability to get used to things and take them for granted is astonishing and often a blessing. But it is also sad that the sense of wonder we all once had so easily evaporates as we grow up. Lots of my work is driven by a desire to stay passionate and open, in the mindset of a child or a tourist for whom everything is new every day.
The choices for the two proteins you mention, the villin headpiece and the human antibody, were made in collaboration with scientists. The Scripps Institute asked me if I could make a sculpture based on the antibody molecule and I came up with the idea of combining the antibody with Leonardo’s famous drawing of a human body. The actual protein data set I used for the piece, published by Eduardo Padlan, was suggested by a Scripps scientist. This data set is unusual in that it combines different crystallographic experiments with a region that was modeled on the computer. The villin headpiece protein was also suggested by a scientist, Dan Gurnon of DePauw University, with whom I collaborated on making those sculptures. Villin naturally folds very fast which is the reason Klaus Schulten’s computational biophysics group at the Beckman Institute in Illinois picked it to simulate its folding process from first principles in the computer. Together with art and science students and an art professor we made four sculptures based on successive snapshots of the folding process.
Above: Synergy, 2013, Stainless steel and colored glass, 20' x 6' x 6' (6.10 x 2.00 x 2.00 m), Location: Rutgers University, NJ. Image courtesy the artist.
PS: How do you see sciart broadening the scope of inquiry not only for scientists and artists, but also for the general public?
JVA: I think sciart has a great potential in helping a new paradigm to emerge. We have been on a path of separation at least since the age of enlightenment. We separated subject from object, us from the world, nature from culture and, too often, ethics from our deeds, because we fail to reconnect the dots. A change from that started to happen in the early 20th century with the advent of quantum physics. At the same time art began to change drastically. It is now becoming painfully clear how much the individualist-reductionist mindset has shaped a world that threatens to become a nightmare for our children.
Sciart has the potential to offer us a deeper-than-just-intellectual understanding of nature and ourselves, a necessary prerequisite for acting in a more holistic fashion, as opposed to acting like ants, with a single isolated goal in mind. I think it is really important for the sciart movement to not be satisfied with staying in the rarefied academic communities, as art has often done in recent decades. I feel that as art/science practitioners we have to get out there and create work that is widely appealing and speaks to general audiences beyond the immediate artsci community.
JVA: I think sciart has a great potential in helping a new paradigm to emerge. We have been on a path of separation at least since the age of enlightenment. We separated subject from object, us from the world, nature from culture and, too often, ethics from our deeds, because we fail to reconnect the dots. A change from that started to happen in the early 20th century with the advent of quantum physics. At the same time art began to change drastically. It is now becoming painfully clear how much the individualist-reductionist mindset has shaped a world that threatens to become a nightmare for our children.
Sciart has the potential to offer us a deeper-than-just-intellectual understanding of nature and ourselves, a necessary prerequisite for acting in a more holistic fashion, as opposed to acting like ants, with a single isolated goal in mind. I think it is really important for the sciart movement to not be satisfied with staying in the rarefied academic communities, as art has often done in recent decades. I feel that as art/science practitioners we have to get out there and create work that is widely appealing and speaks to general audiences beyond the immediate artsci community.
Julian Voss-Andreae lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
You can see more of his work here and contact him via email at [email protected].
You can see more of his work here and contact him via email at [email protected].
