Scientists are logical, making observations and running experiments, then building theories that explain the data. Artists are emotional, working in solitude and by intuition. Or so we are told.
In 'Colliding Worlds,' the historian and philosopher Arthur I. Miller argues that artists and scientists have always had the same mission: to 'fathom the reality beyond appearances, the world invisible to our eyes.' And he argues that after drifting apart during the Enlightenment, the twin branches of understanding have been coming back together over the last century, a reunification that is accelerating in the digital age.
Dr. Miller's encyclopedic survey begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when physicists as well as painters were testing radical new models of space and time. In the vein of his previous book ' Einstein, Picasso,' Dr. Miller shows how the discovery of quantum mechanics inspired a generation of avant-garde artists, including Picasso, Kandinsky and Dalí, who said, 'It is with pi-mesons and the most gelatinous and indeterminate neutrinos that I want to paint the beauty of the angels and of reality.'
Starting in the 1980s, Dr. Miller began to spend time with artists who have found their muse in science, and has watched as the scene grew. He knows the field like few others, interviewing many of the artists for hours at a stretch and visiting museums, galleries, media labs, and corporate behemoths like Pixar and Google.
Inventors and engineers make up a large share of his subjects, among them Neri Oxman, who is using her knowledge of bone formation to design better buildings from concrete, and David Edwards, the founder of Le Laboratoire in Paris, who has come up with methods for inhaling food and beverages and transmitting odors using cellphones.
Dr. Miller is at his liveliest on the field of 'bio-art,' which uses living tissue as raw material, the subject of a London gallery show he curated in 2011. It is hard to resist a tiny gold-plated pair of wings grown from pig stem cells, or a transgenic rabbit that glows green with jellyfish protein.
Then there are those who experiment on their own bodies. A French artist has had cow bones inserted at her temples. Another, after a transfusion of horse blood, says she felt 'the emotionalism of an herbivore.' And then, in a class of his own, there is Stelarc, the Australian artist who coaxed his own cells to grow in the shape of a human ear grafted onto his left arm.
Questions of attribution tend to come up. (Should Stelarc share credit with his surgeon?) 'My colleagues are sometimes miffed on my behalf that I am not listed as the co-creator,' confides David Weinberg, an astronomer who advised on a chandelier-like sculpture with hundreds of glass orbs that The New York Times called ' the entire universe on a dimmer switch.' But he is quick to add that the work was seen by more people 'in one day in Madrid than have ever read my Astrophysical Journal articles.'
One gets the sense that Dr. Miller is more comfortable as an encouraging curator than as a critic. But he does let some cynicism in, as when he relays complaints from scientists at CERN, home to the world's largest particle physics laboratory, that 'almost nothing was discussed or explained' when the German artist Julius von Bismarck, known for bullwhipping statues and stones, was brought in as part of CERN's acclaimed artist-in-residence program.
The book brims with an underdog mentality, as the author explains how the establishment art world has turned a cold shoulder to science-driven artists. The tide seems to be turning, as wide-eyed futurism goes mainstream and everyone wants to do a TED talk. 'Some people who have been out in the wilderness for years are now getting traction,' as a museum director puts it.
When it comes to the future, Dr. Miller holds a utopian vision that includes young people 'working with computers made of not-yet-invented materials' and 'producing theories that generate images that can be manipulated like equations.' Tech gurus seem to agree that a discipline-blurring digital renaissance is underway. Some researchers counter that real science will continue to demand ultraspecialization rather than skillful dabbling.
Dr. Miller's grasp of the scene is impressive, and he has 'an intuitive feel for the beauty of the unseen,' as the biographer Walter Isaacson puts it in a dust-jacket blurb. At times, his profiles can feel scattered, without the kind of sustained story or argument that usually holds a book of this length together.
A good approach, I found, is to browse the book as if it were a Who's Who of science-driven artists - marveling at a profusion of art that is, just as the author warns, 'sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, sometimes subversive, sometimes downright crazy, but always interesting.'
Entities 0 Name: Dr. Miller Count: 7 1 Name: Picasso Count: 2 2 Name: CERN Count: 2 3 Name: Paris Count: 1 4 Name: New York Times Count: 1 5 Name: Australian Count: 1 6 Name: Pixar Count: 1 7 Name: Dalí Count: 1 8 Name: Madrid Count: 1 9 Name: French Count: 1 10 Name: David Weinberg Count: 1 11 Name: David Edwards Count: 1 12 Name: Kandinsky Count: 1 13 Name: Arthur I. Miller Count: 1 14 Name: Walter Isaacson Count: 1 15 Name: Le Laboratoire Count: 1 16 Name: Google Count: 1 17 Name: Astrophysical Journal Count: 1 18 Name: Stelarc Count: 1 19 Name: Neri Oxman Count: 1 20 Name: Julius von Bismarck Count: 1 21 Name: London Count: 1 22 Name: Einstein Count: 1 Related Keywords 0 Name: artists Score: 46 1 Name: miller Score: 43 2 Name: stelarc Score: 20 3 Name: science-driven Score: 20 4 Name: sometimes Score: 19 5 Name: picasso Score: 18 6 Name: cern Score: 16 7 Name: book Score: 15 8 Name: beautiful Score: 14 9 Name: intuitive Score: 14 Authors Media Images 0
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