SciArt Magazine Volume 3
December 2013
Table of Contents

Cover image: "Portrait of William Frosch" by Steve Miller.
Letter from the Editor

Hello readers!
​
As we head into the colder months here in New York, things in the SciArt world seem to be heating up. Lately it has felt more and more like if there’s one sci/art event I plan on attending, there’s probably another one I’ll be missing because of it. Although a source of occasional frustration, I am always delighted by these schedule overlaps, because it is surely a good sign and indicative of the growing presence of the sci/art dialogue.

As it happens sometimes when putting an issue together, an underlying theme can emerge across the interviews and articles, and we are able to address what seems to be truly on everyone's minds. The place of science-based art in the art world is a central topic this December, touched upon by artists in many of the Straight Talks, and is the focus of our own On Topic article. As with most big questions in art, the answer here is multifaceted and evolving - I hope you enjoy our take on it. A second common thread running through our December issue is the idea and possibility of scientist and artist collaboration, with the future of sci/art collaborative practices discussed explicitly in our Dialogue by contributor, Suzanne Anker.

While some of the topics we discuss may never have a concrete answer and may in fact be more valuable as a continuing dialogue, we can make concrete plans in the mean time. I’m pleased to announce that in conjunction with the Art Science Observatory, we are now hosting a science-art event calendar for the New York area on our website. As always, we encourage you to write us if you have an event, or anything else you’d like to add. Happy reading. 

Sincerely, 
Julia Buntaine | Founder, Editor-in-Chief

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ON TOPIC
SciArt in New York

||Julia Buntaine & Ashley P Taylor
The logo of this magazine is a Venn diagram that represents the worlds of art and science as two intersecting circles. The overlap is where SciArt resides along with other kinds of cross-talk between artists, scientists, and their practices. SciArt could never be called science, and is at the end of the day Art. Despite that, its public affiliation with science is the stronger of the two: SciArt is more likely to be displayed in science museums, universities, or conferences than in galleries and art museums...

STRAIGHT TALK
Visualizing weather with Nathalie Meibach

I began working with scientific data in 2000, when I attended astronomy classes at Harvard University and studied basket weaving with a local craft artist. Astronomy was fascinating, but frustrating. I never seemed to be able to get a real sense of the time and space dimension we talked about in class, because everything we ever looked at was on the two-dimensional plane of the projector wall...

INTERNATIONAL
Andrew Carnie

||Andrew Carnie
[Hearing Francis Crick talk] was an important event and a marker, way before I started doing art-science work, but I think the notion that there could be subjects we could look at outside art became important at this stage... 

IN THE STUDIO
Physics & particles with Jonathan Feldschuh

||Ashley P Taylor
Paintings from Feldschuh's "Large Hadron Collider" series, inspired by the Geneva particle accelerator where the Higgs boson was detected, appeared as a window display at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood last year. This fall, "The World Egg", a series of radiation maps of the universe, was on view at the Gallery at Skink Ink Editions in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I spoke with him in his Chelsea studio this October... 

SPOTLIGHT
The Chemistry Notebook of Maxfield Parrish

||Raphael Rosen
When you’re interested in the intersection of art and science, you can be struck by amazement at any time, in the unlikeliest of places. For me, my moment of revelation came in 2003, in The Booksmith, a neighborhood bookstore on San Francisco’s Haight Street... 

STRAIGHT TALK
Ceramics & corals with Courtney Mattison

I’ve always enjoyed creating art and have been fascinated by the marine environment since my childhood along the California coast, but I first began combining art and science as a student at San Francisco University High School. In my first marine biology class, I quickly realized that I am a three-dimensional learner and it was difficult for me to fully understand the anatomy of the organisms I was studying without sculpting them...

STRAIGHT TALK
MRI and X-rays with Steve Miller

Right now, if you view the “larger picture,” there is an enormous amount of art that could be considered SciArt... 

RETROSPECTIVE
Imag(in)ing Science

||Danielle McCloskey
From visualizations of neurons, Fukushima seismographs, light-sensitive chloroplast-generated photographs, and electron microscope captured specimens of the HIV virus, the idea for “Imag(in)ing Science,” the exhibition at Grunwald Gallery of Indiana University, sparked about three years ago when Jeffery Wolin, Ruth N. Hall’s Professor of Photography at IU, began his hunt for lens-based imaging in all methodologies... 

SPACES & PLACES
Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations

​||Richard Lowenberg
SARC (Scientists/Artists Research Collaborations) is a project of the 1st Mile Institute set up by founder, Richard Lowenberg, located in New Mexico. The mission of SARC is to commission new works of art that grow out of collaborative involvements at the intersection of the arts and sciences..

AT A GLANCE
China Blue's 8 Bit Cricket

||Raphael Rosen
Interacting with electronic animals used to only be possible in Philip K. Dick stories. For October and November of this year, though, at the Tokyo Experimental Festival Vol. 8 in that city’s Hongo district, American sound artist China Blue exhibited an art piece that proves otherwise... 

DIALOGUE
The Future of Science-Art Collaborations

||Suzanne Anker
Bringing together an international group of artists, scientists, museum curators, art historians, and philosophers, the Lorentz Center (Leiden, the Netherlands) hosted a five-day workshop in October of this year on the future of art-science collaborations. The aim of the workshop was to try to create “a survival guide for artists and scientists.”...
SciArt Magazine, founded in 2013, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States).
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