Uncertainty
Principles
(1)
Stephanie
McBride eavesdrops on a discussion about art and science between
Catherine Fitzgerald, Brian Hand, Michael Cronin and Mick Wilson
see
part 2
(the online
continuation of this roundtable)
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Catherine
Fitzgerald: I worked for ten years in biological sciences
before going to art college. I've also been involved in
environmental work in Ireland and abroad and will be undertaking
an art placement in St James's laboratory later this year.
I'm interested in how we experience nature though the
lens of science and technology and how that might be translated
through art.
Top:
Anita Gratzer: from Human Time Anatomy; photo the
artist; courtesy Ars Electronica
Bottom:
George Gessert: Pacific Coast Iris 95-19C, hybridized
1995, first bloom 1998; courtesy the artis
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Brian Hand: I would be influenced by the debates between
arts and sciences, the intersections as opposed to cross-overs.
A specific area which interests me is the area of visual technology
which is so influential in the discourses of art and science.
The engagement with that technology interests me.
Another key area between the two, another meta area, which again
I don't see as a cross-over, is the entire area of historiography
which sets up questions to do with subjectivity and objectivity,
with a positivist approach in contrast to intuition, immediate
or contingency issues. I suppose, that like yourself, Michael
[Cronin], translation is another area which is another kind
of in-between space.
Michael Cronin: I am coming at the science/art area from
a number of different angles. A key area for me is the role
of science/art in Irish cultural history which was written out
of the artistic histories of Ireland. Even science's own self-reflexive
moments didn't feature in any scientific or technical histories
so that kind of project of reinstatement and the discovery of
buried traditions engages me. Translation studies interests
me as a kind of 'third culture'. In other words, people who
work as scientific and technical translators are very much people
who are of the culture of the words and yet must be completely
integrated into particular scientific cultures in order to do
their job properly, so that kind of intersection between the
two fascinates me.
Lastly, I'm conscious of the extent to which the imagery and
representations, whether verbal or visual, constantly inform
how science is perceived and conceptualised and I'm interested
in going back to the sources of those representations.
Mick Wilson: A central concern for me is the role of
critique. Within popular perceptions of science there's a notion
that there's a stringent, rigorous critical procedure in place,
yet in early arguments about the history of science between
Kuhn and Popper, Kuhn makes the point that when science gets
going, that's precisely when criticism stops and that the vast
majority of science is conducted without any real critique about
the broader questions of what's being done, especially about
the larger social role of science.
A similar problem exists in art, perhaps not to the same extent,
but there's a sense in which the role of critique is marginalised,
although art values the role of critique to a greater degree.
So, I'm interested in the role of critique as the overlap between
art and science and I see the 'and' as needing to happen with
some kind of substance, and I would see the role of critique
as key to this.
BH: I think that a dominant scientific discourse, because
it's more clearly translatable into economics, is the science
which produces profits. The instinct to pursue certain processes
of invention, of vivisection, experimental practice, is primarily
to increase profits. The whole patenting process itself that
goes along with scientific discourse is the accumulation of
wealth. Now, that's different within art. It's true that there
is an accumulation of wealth but the actual premise of why you
would take a project further is not solely judged on its economic
merits. In fact, art is often an antithesis to commerce, although
that can be a mask for something else again. Capitalism has
really produced a scientific discourse for its own ends and
what I 'd be interested in seeing is a critique of capitalism
through science.
CF: I think it's quite well known that Darwinism as a
whole theory was a support to the industrial revolution, with
the idea of breaking things down into smaller units and how
science and technology fed into that as well. If we look around
us we can see that the scientific gaze is such a strong one,
whereas the visual art practice is almost insignificant. We
seem to have valued science more in our culture than visual
arts and I'm interested in why that is.
MC: One of the repeated difficulties in trying to think
about science is that science comes in very many forms but one
of them is the instrumentalist form, where a certain kind of
production-centred thinking becomes a dominant paradigm for
thinking about everything from how people mate to how they conduct
their political bias. This has been popularised through chat-shows,
particularly evolutionary psychology. So it's a very instrumentalist
use. But another area is the use of science as a kind of mythological
or imaginative war chest for artists to plunder from time to
time for exciting pictures or some kind of interesting metaphorical
construct. In more recent times, for example, you can see the
non-linear dynamics of chaos theory being used in those ways.
But it seems to me that part of the problem is that a certain
kind of scientific instrumentalism has come very much to the
fore in contemporary society. On the other hand, the art world
isn't entirely blameless either. One of the things that tends
to characterise the contemporary situation is the aestheticisation
of production and consumption - in other words, aesthetic values
are absolutely crucial to the production, the symbol processing
and the goods produced and how and why we choose to consume
them. The whole aesthetic industry is complicit in that, just
as much as certain kinds of scientific instrumentalism are complicit
in their production. Part of the difficulty for people working
in these different areas is where to find the critical space
that Mick was talking about.
MW: Historically one can crudely suggest that there was
a historical project to the link between the two or more distinct
areas. There was the conflict of the faculties in the 18th century
to distinguish the areas of competencies, the particular types
of knowledge, the types of skills and so forth. More recently,
there seems to have developed a new project which is the project
for the reunification of knowledge and the disciplines. There
is very strong critical argument for interdisciplinarity and
cross-disciplinarity and then there's an economic, practical
one urging to bring it all together...suggesting that there's
a basic set of skills that a consumer needs to participate,
to navigate through the bibles of consumption that are now available
in the 21st century.
It's interesting how the project to bring science and art together
comes back on the table and how that relates to the earlier
project to sever them. I wonder how can we enter into this arena
without becoming complicit with forces which have not yet fully
revealed themselves. It's curious that it seems to be everywhere,
from national arts councils, within the the cutting edge of
trendy graphics - Wired magazine - it's coming from all these
different directions that there should be this integration,
a merging of the spaces between the arts and sciences and I
am curious about the origins of this.
BH: I wonder if funding is a central issue? I've read
about SciArt and about the NESTA funding, but I think there
are arguments to be made about a critical element within research.
It's important that there's some form of critical engagement.
Obviously productivity is an issue. A different set of values
come into play. Art is as much an ideological mask for a whole
series of social injustices and inequality but I wonder if there
is more of an exposure to critical ideas in an education forum
than there is, say, in a laboratory training situation. Is that
kind of critical engagement part of a lab education?
CF: I'm not quite sure how to answer that as I've been
distanced from the lab situation for some time. But going back
to the issue of critical review of science, science operates
on peer review of research, and science, by its own definition,
sees its operations as being objective, so that there is a double
stumbling block. While peer review cuts across this, the core
notion that what scientists do is objective makes it difficult
to introduce this valuable notion of critique...it doesn't operate
that way. Popular media circulate this notion of science's objectivity
but also mediate ideas about the individual scientist and the
work.
MC: Certainly the powerful Romantic philosophy has been
instrumental in mediating the artist but the same thing might
be seen to apply to science in many ways. Although teamwork
is the way in which it's done - entire football teams seem to
sign scientific papers - the actual mythology of science itself
is still very much a romantic enterprise. You need only glance
through the science columns of the Irish Times to see how individuals
are singled out and described very much in this kind of Boys'
Own prose - "usually having been ignored, despised, spat upon...overcame
these obstacles eventually persuading the people around them
that they possessed a kind of shining truth..."
CF: Like Crick and Watson...'Great Men' theories of science
history...
MC: Exactly. So whereas on the ground there may be a
lot of teamwork - and certainly it's there in their published
papers - the way in which scientists enter into the public domain
seems to me to be very similar to how artists or writers do
so. To some extent, science itself, in order to become palatable
in a public sense has almost to be romanticised and aestheticised.
BH: Yes, Christopher Frayling explores that in his writings
in terms of the image of the mad scientist becoming the mad
doctor...the serial killer who is also the mad artist. These
are strong iconic figures but it is a construct of the power
of science as a kind of mesmeric or religious power. But in
art practice too there are lots of examples of collaborative
art projects and recently some have been about media images
and also involved with activism, and that is certainly a tradition
from Surrealism onwards in Modernism. But one aspect that seems
central to a critique is that the inherent notion of progress
(which comes with the scientific discourse) is less easy to
pinpoint within art movements now. Science has not gone through
the same kinds of ironic reassessments or current disillusionments.
There is a counterargument to this, perhaps, where eco-scientists
would say that, in fact, the notion of progress within the dominant
scientific model is actually regression, that society is going
backwards. So whereas 200 years ago the world was a more stable
place in which world populations could develop, now you have
areas of extreme poverty. So we can have the most sophisticated
mobile-phone technology but also people without any fresh water
or basic eyedrops or whatever...So I think that's important,
that notion of critiquing that idea of progress.
MW: It's also important to acknowledge that within science
there is conflict. Within science, people are engaged in debates
about the ways in which science and scientists have become compromised,
about how a scientist has to operate as a bureaucratic administrator,
engaged in writing the research-grant application and scientists
are contesting this - arguing that there is something wrong
about how research is being funded and managed and the degree
to which capital has entered the university space. It's not
necessarily a battle that they're winning but there is conflict,
there are people taking on these issues. I also find it interesting
the way in which, sometimes, science, particularly the bio-sciences
can be implicated in public, in social and political debates.
In the 1980s, around the AIDS crisis, it was really interesting
the way in which the imagery that appeared on the cover of Scientific
American began to be reproduced in newspapers and television
programmes. There was an argument about that representation
that involved not just cultural critics but scientists from
within the disciplines. There is a much stronger sense of a
framework to argue within for the sciences, whereas in the arts,
while there may be a great deal of argumentation there's no
great consensus about a framework for that argument.
BH: It's interesting the way in which the visual fits
in. If you consider the use of the Hubble space telescope images:
scientists themselves don't even use the visual imagery, they
work on radio waves but the whole thing is constructed around
a Cartesian optical idea and yet part of the critique of science
within modernity is that it's non-visual, it actually challenges
the primacy of the visual. I'm thinking here of commentators
like Jonathan Crary. Science moves away from the visual ground
completely because it's sensual and prone to uncertainty. That's
why you have the systematic notion of mathematical structures,
and other types of scientific languages which are not prone
to this uncertainty or are seemingly not open to the visual
area. I wonder is that some form of a critique within science
- the resistance to the visual?
MC: I think it's partly to do with a question of accessibility,
because an image seems accessible, immediate - and, of course,
while that's always naïve, because we read images according
to our own cultural grammars, there continues to be an assumption
that the image has an immediacy and an accessibility. That seems
to me to be one of the core issues. If you go back to the late
16th or early 17th century there are core moments of mathematicisation
of science which initially, in fact, was an act of subterfuge.
What Galileo and Newton were trying to do was cover their backs.
One of the weapons that Galileo had against the Jesuits was
mathematics. Mathematics was a way of protecting himself unlike
the way that bald prose would leave him open to attack.
Similarly, for Newton, mathematics came as a godsend because
they offered a way of protecting himself politically. But the
notion, then, of science becoming inaccessible to the lay person
- because of the way in which the Book of the Universe, to borrow
Galileo's term, was written in the language of mathematics -
that is something which has operated very powerfully since then
as a kind of distancing factor. Remember what Einstein said:
"Now that mathematicians have gotten hold of the Theory of Relativity
ýwe/you] can't understand it anymore." That is constantly used
as a form of theoretical condescension - this is how the caste
is formed. Yet on the other hand there is a recognition that
there has to be some sort of interface between science and the
rest of the world and that's where the pictures come in.
CF: That's one of the aspects which I deal with in the
Human Genome project. Scientists from all over the world
are compiling this data in their bedroom space, and they want
to have other scientists look at it. I'm looking at how it's
visually presented. Often it's very clinical, with numbers everywhere,
terms you don't understand - there's nothing to relate it to.
As an artist I've been using the images and representations
in a more playful way, but it makes you think about these as
representations which scientists have created and it's a form
which scientists all over in different cultures can understand.
MW: Isn't it intriguing that it's the picture of the
sheep that has become the sign for genetic science - this is
the dominant representation of achievement ?
CF: And so often you log on to these genetic sites and
I've been surprised that you get these cartoon images for genome
science put there by science institutes and the cartoon images
are a way of distancing them from the nature of the animals.
MW: I find it interesting that the space where we find
it easiest to talk about art and science is in the arena of
representation in popular media - the figure of the mad artists,
or the mad scientist - that the idea of obscurity has to be
mediated and turned into a layman's terms. But perhaps, it's
not necessarily the most productive way to think about the intersections.
BH: I think, though, that the issue of mediation exists
in the art world too - the whole notion of how the artwork is
mediated - that training and education are necessary to understand
the art. I think that the distancing device can be part of the
critique too, that abstraction in some way does challenge the
notion of the way in which images are used. It seems very fundamental
with that seamlessness of image production which comes through
digital technology.
MC: I was just kind of wondering about that digitalisation
- it does seem to promise a kind of universal language of transmission;
I mean words and pictures, they all go into that digital mix
and spin round and I wonder whether that's not going to lead
to a very fundamental explosion of the different categories
we're using, Science and Art. We were talking about this thing
earlier, aestheticisation - if both aesthetic values and technical
values are integral to the way digital technologies and industries
operate, where does that leave these older debates? I'm sort
of being devil's advocate here, but are the debates bound up
with a pre-digital age?
The above is reproduced from the magazine. The discussion continues
online here.
Catherine
Fitzgerald is an artist based in Dublin; see also
her article on art, science
and nature.
Brian
Hand is an artist, writer and critic based in Dublin.
Michael
Cronin is the author of several books on travel,
tourism and translation; he lectures in Dublin City University.
Mick
Wilson is an artist and a lecturer in the Dun Laoghaire
Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Stephanie
McBride lectures in Dublin City University; she is
a Board member of CIRCA.
