SciArt Magazine Volume 21
December 2016
Table of Contents

Cover image: "Daft Dank Space" by Aaron Curry.
​Photo credit Mona/Remi Chauvin.
Letter from the Editor

Dear readers, 
​
What is the purpose of art? At one point or another most artists, critics, curators, historians, and appreciators all ask this question. Of course, it’s unnecessary to answer—there’s no need to really argue for art, because art happens every day, all over the world, in every culture, independent of means, nonexclusive to beliefs, no matter if we know the purpose or not. 

It is certain, however, that our society’s relationship with art has changed over time. From those who still classically train in anatomical drawing to those who snap selfies, technology has enabled artists’ skills to lie not only in the steady hand, but in the thoughtful mind. While this has opened up the world of art to frontiers which our Renaissance masters never knew to dream, it is a double edged sword—it is easier, for those who wish, to devalue art. Now “anyone can make it.” 

So, what can art do, and how can it have value, in an age where anyone with an iPhone can be an instant artist? This is where science–based art comes in. SciArt inherently embodies the rigor, depth, and intellectual sophistication that science is built on. Art takes on the properties of what it’s made of, meaning that SciArt will always be relevant now that science has become a cultural constant. Art about science gives us the steady hand and the thoughtful mind—the best of both worlds. SciArt can build a bridge between art, science, and society—a bridge we desperately need in our ever specialized, ever divided times. 

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

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REVIEW
Landscape = Laboratory with Herwig Turk

Some months ago scientists, gathered at Harvard Medical School in Boston to talk about creating a synthetic human genome. As a follow–up project to the Human Genome Project, this new initiative aims to synthesize an entire human genome from chemicals. While fabricating a fully artificial Homo sapiens 2.0 is a ways off, the main aim of this project is to improve the synthesization of DNA in general; to make it cheap, easy, and completely reliable. For more than 20 years, the Austrian artist Herwig Turk has been fascinated by such debates...

SPOTLIGHT
Katie Paterson's "Totality"

“Totality is a mirrorball made with images of nearly every solar eclipse documented by humankind. Totaling over 10,000 unique images, these eclipses come together to reflect the progression of an eclipse across the room—from total through to quarter and half eclipses—mirroring the sequence of the Sun eclipsed by the Moon... 

STRAIGHT TALK
Biohacking and design with Raphael Kim

I feel a little uneasy when I get asked to talk about contemporary art as I don’t feel qualified to do so. Rather, having studied under, and being influenced by Dunne and Raby’s work during their tenure at the Royal College of Art in London, my work shares many elements of their Speculative Design thinking instead: focusing on emerging technologies...

STRAIGHT TALK
Scott McIntire's energy fields

For most of my life I pursued two paths at the same time, one as a commercial artist and the other as a fine artist. In my late teens I started out doing custom car painting, that’s how I came to embrace Enamel paint, which was oil–based then but has changed to water...

INTERNATIONAL 
Finding the Truth in Biology-Art's Origins
​Explored at the Museum of Old and New Art

Truth is the specter of intellectual query. Unlike facts, which are objective and verifiable, truths are often beliefs generally accepted as true. The arts promise access to such truths through methods that resist the rigors of scientific investigation—creative expressions that provoke intangible, deeply human ways of understanding that cannot be probed by laboratory instruments or predicted by complicated algorithms. In our attempts to grasp these mysteries...

RESIDENCY
Schmidt Ocean Institute's Artist-at-Sea 

In 2009, Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Google, established the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Founded in response to a national crisis regarding the advancement of the standards of critical seagoing research infrastructure and a lack of ocean access to scientists and engineers, the Institute seeks to work with the best innovators to accelerate the pace of ocean science aboard its global research platform, R/V Falkor. To date, the Institute has completed over 36 research cruises resulting in numerous discoveries...

ON VIEW
"UNCERTAINTY" at Williamson Gallery

To the best of our knowledge is never a phrase frozen in time. It’s a bit like asking for 10 percent of eternity, but that which cannot be counted also cannot be halved or quartered. A percent of infinity is the same as all of infinity. We can’t even say “all,” really, when speaking of something limitless. Likewise, what is knowable keeps expanding, trailed by our best of it, and it summons the realization that there’s something else...still...and then even more-even if all we know is all we think there is to know...
​Founder, Editor in Chief: Julia Buntaine
Contributing & Guest Writers: Ingeborg Reichle, Danielle McCloskey, Joe Ferguson, Ana Novak,  Stephen Nowlin