Nature of Neptune

The Way Things Go

Peter Fischli and David Weiss's 1987 film, The Way Things Go, has become a classic art film, still shown in contemporary art museums around the world.  The Swiss artist's timeless work, which documents a thirty minute long chain reaction using commonly found objects, is still as fascinating to watch today as it was twenty years ago.

The chain reaction was set up in a large warehouse room, and includes objects like tires, planks, water, gasoline, candles, and fuses.  The clip above shows a segment of the film especially devoted to fire and pyrotechnics.  There is no mystery to the work; the artists do a fantastic job of breaking down physical phenomena into simple, mesmerizing steps.  It is an exercise in ways to transfer energy between different objects and systems.

The real genius of The Way Things Go is its timing.  The reactions are paced in a way that makes clear what is happening at each step, but also has a spellbinding rhythm in which objects speed up, slow down, and build into each other.  This fastidious pacing is what sets this piece apart from a mechanical assembly line, or many Rube Goldberg contraptions.  This use of time scale calls to mind the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and perhaps Ganson was influenced by Fischli and Weiss.

Measuring Reality: Spencer Finch's Light Installations

As a philosophy, the scientific method holds one axiom above all others: objectivity.  Unbiased observation of measurable evidence forms the basis for reproducible experiments that seek to uncover fundamental truths about nature.  The objectivity of this method has helped push the frontiers of our knowledge to incredible limits.

However, the proliferation and success of the scientific method has led us to sometimes assume that objectivity equals truth.  Artist Spencer Finch demonstrates the precariousness of this assumption through large scale, thought-provoking installations.  In these installations, Finch takes of careful, studied observations of certain characteristics of scene, such as hue and luminosity of light, and recreates them in a new context.

Recently exhibited at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) consists of an entire wall of stained glass windows that reproduce the exact same color profile as candlelight (photo by srdaly11).  Finch used a colorimeter to precisely measure the RGB values of the light eight inches from a burning candle.  The room is beautiful and hypnotizing to stand in, and asks the viewer how similar and how different the experience really is to the illumination from a room full of candles.  He has broken candlelight into window panes of different color that vary in luminosity with the strength of the sunlight.  If the light in the room is precisely the same hue as the light from a candle, is it the same light?  Finch shows how important context is to the meaning of objective measurements.

The photo to the right is of another piece by Finch that uses similar ideas as Candlelight (photo by Spor).  This piece, called Shade (At the Grave of Walt Whitman, October 19, 2006, 10:15 am), recreates the hue and luminosity of the light at an exact place and an exact time.  Again, Finch is asking the viewer what exactly these objective measurements have to do with the emotions and feelings associated with a scene.  Is any emotion conveyed?  And if so, is it due to the precise measurement of light, or to the stylistic way Finch has broken the light up into overlapping colored ovals?

The MASS MoCA restrospective also included the piece to the left, called Night Sky, Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 9, 2004 (photo from Finch's website).  In this installation, Finch mixed colors of pigment to achieve the precise hue of the sky described in the title.  He then created light bulb models of each of the pigment's molecular structures.  By hanging these from the ceiling, Finch compares the hanging lights to the way the actual sky would have looked.  In doing so, he asks how well scientific models can recreate reality.  The beautiful installation does seem to convey a sense of the original Arizona night sky, but only to a point.  The piece occupies a middle ground between abstracted concepts and recreating an actual scene, asking the viewer how closely objective measurement really brings us to the truth.

Read more about Finch's work in the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

Art in the Lab: The Artist in Residence

Many of the the posts on this blog have examined the work of artists who incorporate concepts or methods from science into their artwork.  This, however, is only one way the incongruous worlds or Art and Science can combine.  What happens when, rather than bringing science into the studio, we bring art into the lab?  This scenario is happening in research institutions more and more, often in the form of the Artist in Residence, an artist brought into a lab to create artwork, or to offer a new viewpoint on the research being done.

Daniel Kohn, currently an Artist in Residence at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one such artist who has been invited to work at a premier genetics research center.  For a place to create artwork, Kohn was given part of a research lab to covert into his studio.  I recently had a chance to sit down with Daniel to discuss his experience at Broad and the work he has created while there.

The mission of the Artist in Residence is two-pronged.  First, the artist must absorb the research being done around him or her and translate or incorporate it into artwork.  Secondly, the artist should try to influence or augment the actual research being done.  Certainly the dialogue between artist and scientist should go both ways.

Kohn dove into the first objective head-long, unabashedly questioning the Broad scientists, and trying to learn and absorb what he could of the research being done around him.  While allowing the scientific concepts to "wash over" him, he started a long series of water color paintings exploring "genomic space."  He used these paintings to work through different ways of representing concepts from genetics, such as the linear string of nucleotides in a strand of DNA, or the spiral structure of chromatin.  The results are lush, abstract paintings, often with swirling movement and a strong sense of depth and ambient light.  A vague but fundamental sense of structure comes through as spiral/circular motion is contrasted with a linear/gridded framework.

Clearly, Kohn has successfully incorporated scientific concepts into his own visual language, but do his paintings speak about science?  The work is a pleasure to view, but it is fair to say that almost no one looking at them without any background knowledge would guess that they are based on the structure of DNA.  This is where we must ask if Kohn's work at Broad is engaging both directions of dialogue between artist and scientist.  Certainly his artwork has been influenced by the science, but how can the artwork itself return the favor, and in turn influence the science?

This is a tough question.  It applies not just to Kohn's work at Broad, but to the work of any artist working closely with scientific research.  There seem to be a few possible ways of achieving this goal.  One way is rather than directly influencing research, artwork can set a framework for scientific knowledge by putting it into the context of our own lives, specifically through our senses and emotions.  The work won't drive new scientific advancements, but can instead show a new way of understanding the information.  Successful artwork of this nature is very difficult to achieve.  It requires a very thorough and fundamental understanding of both the physical properties of an object or system, and the subjective experience of encountering the object.  Kohn acknowledges this, remarking that the process of turning his work at Broad into "art" will be a very long one.  See the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Ned Kahn for stunning examples of artwork that place scientific concepts in the context of our own everyday experiences.

Another way an artist can influence science is to address the methods rather than the concepts.  As visual thinkers, artists can offer new viewpoints about how to visualize scientific data in order to see information in a new light.  In fact, this is the method that Kohn has used at the Broad Institute in order to influence scientific research.  Together with a group of researchers, Kohn is helping to develop "functional visualization" tools that aim to help scientists understand complex biological systems.  Rather than working to provide generalized visualizations for communication with nonspecialists, the team is building tools that will drive new science.

Thus, one way of creating artwork that addresses science is to contextualize or personalize it; i.e. make art that brings scientific facts into the realm of personal experience.  The problem with this method is that it is very unlikely it will ever directly influence scientific research and help uncover new facts.  Another way artists can influence science is by using their visual skills to help scientists develop new methods of visualizing or modeling data.  However, this isn't actually artwork, it is design.  It uses visual methods to achieve specific, practical goals, and therefore must ignore many essential attributes of artwork: perception, emotion, and reflection.

Herein lies a fundamental difference between Art and Science.  The objectivity of science cannot, by definition, be influenced by the subjectivity of artwork.  Any notions that artwork could provide a missing key to driving scientific research are simply illusions.  When becoming involved with science in any way, an artist must choose between helping push the science without using actual artwork, or contextualizing the science without directly influencing it.  Kohn's success has been doing the former, and it will be interesting to see how other Artists in Residence will address this fundamental difficulty.

All images are from Daniel Kohn's Broad Institute webpage.

Sex, Food, and Shit: The Art of Wim Delvoye

As controversial as he is clever, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has received broad critical acclaim, as well as public outrage, for projects that have included tattooing pigs or selling machine-made feces.  Bent on undermining common conceptions about what it means to be "human," Delvoye has utilized several imaging methods and concepts from science to drive his points home.

Controversial as they may be, Delvoye's projects go far beyond simple shock value.  The image on the left shows an example from his Chapel series, which consists of a number of x-ray and stained glass combinations that were installed in a gothic chapel.  He obtained the images by taking x-rays of two friends in various stages of love-making. This window, called Erato, tiles images of the same scene taken (or processed) at different x-ray opacities.

In this piece, Delvoye uses the cold, but beautiful, objectivity of x-ray imagery to "see through" one of humanity's most cherished acts, the kiss.  By presenting such sterilized views of such an intimate act, he suggests that despite any emotional or physical beauty and complexity, it all boils down to primitive activity among two bone and organ-filled organisms.  While Slow Moving Photon astutely proposes that the series may offer the possibility of "diagnosing true love," I see the beautiful stained glass windows as more of a cynical take on acts (kissing, loving) that we cherish as defining aspects of humanity.  In other parts of the Chapel series, Delvoye creates beautiful patterns from x-rays of skulls, teeth, and intestines, showing that underneath the human mystique lie the simple biological activities of sex, food, and shit.

While not directly about science, Delvoye's Chapel series (as well as his Cloaca project) uses scientific knowledge to show different ways of thinking about the human body.   In an age where we have discovered that we may share up to 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, Delvoye suggests that human activity may be no different than that of other life forms.

Image from Delvoye's website.  See more images here.

Delicate Boundaries

The further the limits of our scientific knowledge are pushed, the harder it is to relate new discoveries to our everyday experiences.  One frontier where this issue is most evident is in terms of scale, both large and small.  When cosmologists discuss the large scale structure of the universe, or molecular biologists report on the genetic effects of certain protein molecules, the rest of us are left struggling to find any sort of subjective meaning.

New media artist Chris Sugrue brings our knowledge of the microscopic into our realm of experience through an elegant and engaging interactive installation piece.  While the piece, called Delicate Boundaries, doesn't quite tackle life on the cutting-edge molecular level, it does call attention to the ways that tiny single-celled organisms can interact with the human body.  Delicate Boundaries consists of a computer screen, a motion sensor, and a projector.  At first, a dozen or so little outlined microbial forms wiggle around the computer screen.  But when a viewer extends his or her hand and touches the screen, the little forms swarm towards it.  The captivating (or startling) part of the piece happens next, when the forms actually appear to jump the computer screen and flow up the viewer's arm, this time as projected light.  Once on the viewer, the beautifully outlined little microbial shapes wiggle up and down his or her body.

Aside from cleverly addressing very relevant cultural issues about the boundaries between virtual space and real space, Sugrue's piece explores human interaction with microscopic life.  Before the invention of the microscope, nobody knew such life existed, even though it has an enormous impact on human lives, from digesting our food to causing disease.  Now, many people feel squeamish when thinking about the millions of tiny creatures crawling all over our bodies all the time, even though the vast majority of them help us live.  When presented with Sugrue's delicate cartoon-like microbes "crawling" over your body, would you be captivated, repulsed, or a little of both?  This is the question the piece asks that successfully relates scientific discovery with personal experience.

Images from Sugrue's website.

Patricia Piccinini's Synthetic Organisms

With the dizzying number of groundbreaking advancements in biological sciences in the past few decades, questions of their use and morality keep challenging our society.  As mentioned in regard to Eduardo Kac's genetically modified rabbit, scientists (and artists) who "play God" by manipulating the genetic material of living creatures are not always well received by the public.

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini continues this debate by creating stunningly realistic silicone-based sculptures of genetically hybrid organisms that raise a number of questions about current advances in biotechnology.  Piccinini's piece, The Young Family (shown above), initially shocks the viewer with its grotesquely realistic portrayal of genetic modification gone disturbingly wrong.  Yet the almost-human features of the creatures also induce empathy within us, especially the incredibly realistic emotion on the face of the mother.  It is not the expression of suffering, but rather of the all-too-realistic weariness of child rearing.

Are these creatures abominations resulting from our society's scientific hubris, or do they show basic human/animal domestic tenderness?  Are we disturbed by the photo because it blurs the line between human and animal?  It is rare to find works of art so repulsive, yet so captivating.

The piece above, called Still Life with Stem Cells, tackles the swarm of issues surrounding another biological issue: stem cell research.  An incredibly realistic little girl sits on the floor, joyfully playing with an array of blob-like fleshy creatures.  The sculpture serves as a metaphor for stem cells and emphasizes their malleability.  Are these happy blobs of flesh a welcome modification, or a disturbing alternative to the human embryos they came from?

The Blog Blog discusses Piccinini's thoughts on her own work, and you can read an interview with her here.  Ron Mueck is another interesting artist who makes sculptures in a very similar way, but with a different focus.  Both photos in this post are from Piccinini's website.

The Sea Organ of Zadar

The city planners of Zadar, Croatia have come up with a unique and harmonious way to meld their coastal city with the surrounding ocean.  Designed by architect Nicola Basic, the Sea Organ (Morske Orgulje) encloses 35 underwater pipes that resonate musically from the lapping of the waves.  The Sea Organ is located right along the water, underneath a series of long, elegant white stone steps where residents and tourists can sit and relax (photos by felber).

The Sea Organ is cleverly engineered to create musical notes from the motion of the ocean.  When you properly blow into a hollow cylinder, such as a flute, a didgeridoo, or an empty beer bottle, you are inducing the air inside to vibrate at the object's resonant frequency.  If it falls in the range of human hearing, this specific frequency is heard as a single musical note.  The pipes in the Sea Organ are designed to resonate when water rushes into them, causing the air to be pushed upwards through the tubes.  Ocean waves ebb and flow, making the pipes resonate frequently.

Listen to the Sea Organ

From a critical standpoint, why should ocean waves be turned into musical tones?  Is the sound of breaking waves not soothing enough?  Yet think about where ocean waves come from.  Waves themselves are created in the open ocean by steady gusts of wind.  The wind provides the driving force for water resonance in a very similar way that blowing across the opening of a flute provides the driving force for acoustic resonance.  Thus, in a way, the sounds of the Sea Organ represent the winds across the open ocean, brought to the coastline encoded in waves of water, where they are re-released inside the organ's pipes.  The organ draws attention to this environmental cycle.

The notes of the Sea Organ may be "played" randomly, but they are not arbitrary.  The 35 pipes are separated into seven sections of five, where each section forms a chord of a diatonic scale.  The five sections alternate two different but harmonious chords, G and C6.  According to a paper by the Acoustical Society of Croatia, this arrangement was chosen to reflect the four-voice male singing tradition of the region.

 

Both photos of the Sea Organ were taken by felber, and the sound clip and diagram are from Oddmusic.  Watch an interesting video about the organ from National Geographic, and you can even buy a 70 minute cd of Sea Organ sounds here.

Alba, the Fluorescent Green Bunny

In 2000, artist Eduardo Kac enlisted a geneticist to bioengineer an animal that does not exist in nature.  The result was a rabbit containing genes that cause it to fluoresce under black lights, a characteristic of certain kinds of jellyfish and sea pens.  The project caused considerable controversy in the press, as people questioned the morality and usefulness of genetically engineering an animal solely for art's sake.

The truth is, the project was specifically created to generate this controversy.  The rabbit, named Alba, questions the morality of genetic engineering, a practice that is often taken for granted in our current society.  The public outcry proved that the project had touched on a nerve.

But what, exactly, was that nerve?  Was it the morality of genetic engineering for science, or was it more related to the fact that the rabbit was created solely for art?  In addition to questioning the morality of certain aspects of science, the Alba project calls specific attention to the line between science and art.  Many thousands of animals are genetically engineered every day for the cause of science (mice, rats, fruit flies, etc.), so why not for the cause of art?  The project shows the disparity in credibility between science and art, especially in the public's eye.

The reason for this disparity is, of course, extremely complex, and would require a thorough examination of science and art history.  Yet whatever the cause, it is clear that contemporary art is viewed by many as useless; a luxury for a privileged intellectual elite.  I believe that it is this apparent lack of utilitarianism that frustrates many with contemporary art.  Science, on the other hand, is the ultimate utilitarian establishment, generating useful technology at a blistering rate.  Kac's Alba project throws this reality right in our face.

The Alba project offers no answers, though it does ask some very important questions.  But as a work of art, its main flaw is that it is purely conceptual.  The effect of the project is only perceived when you take the time to think about it, rather than being initiated by a subjective experience.  Kac originally planned to keep Alba as a pet, and have her interact with people.  After the outcry over the project, Kac was not allowed to keep Alba, and this final part of the project was not realized.  Coming face to face with a creature like Alba would have indeed provided the necessary subjective experience, forcing viewers to judge for themselves whether this creature was a normal animal, an abomination, or a clever critique of science and art.

Both photos are from Kac's website, and are credited to Chrystelle Fontaine.  The first one shows Alba glowing green under black lights, and the second shows Kac holding Alba under normal white lights.

Articulating the Wind: The Architectural Facades of Ned Kahn

One of my favorite trends in contemporary urban architecture, a simple pleasure really, is the lining of buildings with enormous mirrored windows that reflect the city and sky around them.  This melds the buildings to their surroundings, and draws attention to the physical space between them.

Artist Ned Kahn takes this visual trick to another level.  He has created a number of architectural facades and monuments that consist entirely of small mirrored or semi-mirrored squares, each hanging from low friction joints.  Each of these small squares dangles independently, responding only to the wind.  When viewed from a distance, they outline the shapes of the wind gusts ripping across the sides of the buildings (the photo is of the facade for the Technorama science center in Switzerland, taken by Christopher Stumm).  Not only do these squares reflect the surroundings, the sky, and the sunlight, but they show the actual shape of the air around the buildings.  The video below shows the Technorama facade in motion, and I also highly recommend this video of Kahn's Articulated Cloud facade at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum.

The wind, which you can usually only feel and hear, is visualized in Kahn's facades.  Kahn and others have described his work as "digitizing" the wind and the air, but I feel that this trendy allusion misses the point.  First of all, the squares have a range of motion, not just "up" or "down", meaning they are not purely digitized into 0's and 1's.  They can look dark or light, or many grays in between.  Secondly, there is no intrinsic reason to "digitize" the wind around a building.  To do so would introduce postmodern concepts of cultural juxtaposition that are completely unnecessary here.

"Quantization" is a much better way to describe what these pieces are showing.  The small squares each represent a "quantized" unit of space, each moving independently of each other.  When acted upon by the wind, they form the shapes of moving waves, each square being excited individually.  This provides a wonderful metaphor for the structure of air itself, which is made up of tiny "quantized" molecules that bump around, giving rise to the gusts of wind we can feel and hear.  It is also a stunning analogy for modern physics, especially in the realm of quantum field theory, where forces are described as both fields and quantized particles at the same time.  That is what Kahn's facades are: a bunch of individual squares, and a pattern of propagating waves and ripples, existing simultaneously.

The OneTrees Project

Genetics research in the past half century has unquestionably revolutionized the field of biology, as well as humanity's concepts of life and individuality.  Years of research have led to remarkable scientific achievements, such as genetic engineering, cloning, and the Human Genome Project.  The discovery of genes that "cause" many physical and mental attributes, ranging from height and eye color to intelligence and sexuality, has had a dramatic impact on our views of individuality.  There seem to be genes for everything; patterns of chemicals that determine who we are and how we act.

However, as many biologists will tell you, environmental factors also play an extremely important role in determining the attributes of a living creature.  This is a fact that seems to be largely overlooked or underrated by many people today, scientists and non-scientists alike. 

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko's OneTrees project cleverly undermines the idea that genes and DNA solely determine individuality.  The OneTrees project consists of dozens of cloned walnut trees planted in different locations around the San Francisco Bay Area.  The trees are all planted in public places, allowing anyone with knowledge of the project to make their own observations about why each of these genetically identical trees have grown to look far different from one another.  How do the trees vary in terms of their physical locations?  In terms of the cultural and economic differences between the people who care for them?  The metaphor for human lives is thinly veiled.

The OneTrees project is clearly a huge logistical undertaking, but is based on an incredibly simple idea.  It brings the concepts of genetics and cloning into the public space (literally), and shows viewers a simplified context to see for themselves the complex interplay between genetics and external environments that shape all living creatures, including our own bodies and minds.

Watch a feature on Jeremijenko and the project on Spark, and read Seed Magazine's recent interview with Jeremijenko and physicist Lawrence Krauss.  The photo of the cloned seedlings is from the MIT Press, the picture of the tree in front of a Bay Area factory is from a San Francisco Chronicle article and was taken by Lea Suzuki, and the last photo is from a OneTrees exhibit at the Pond gallery, showing striking differences between the leaves of four different clones.