FROM THE LIBRARY A Much Needed Synthesis in Colliding Worlds
By Julia Buntaine, Editor-in-Chief
Art history, the academic discipline rooted in the exploration of art as framed in its historical and cultural context, remains a popular major among liberal arts students and is required for those who pursue studio arts at most institutions. To ground oneself in the historical context of art is to understand what a work’s significance was when it was made, context that often involves biographical details of its maker. In shedding light on the life of the artist we can enhance our understanding of how this work came to be, which in turn informs what it means to us today.
For example, that Picasso was reading French mathematician Poincare’s publication Science and Hypothesis, which Einstein read at the same time, provides a meaningful link between Picasso and Einstein, who were both focused on the relationship between time and space in their own ways.
Picasso’s formative work of this time, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, clearly takes on notions of the relationship between time and space, showing more sides of a figure than normal space/time perspective allows for. Or that Russian artist El Lissitzky based his famous Monument to the Third International, containing highly complex mechanized geometries, on Russian mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s publications concerning the relationship of the four dimensions. Or that surrealist painter Salvador Dali was largely influenced by reading Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory (think: the image of melting time in his Persistence of Memory). Or that Billy Klüver, brilliant electrical engineer at Bell Labs in New Jersey was also a pioneer in computer art, a co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), as well as a pioneer in science-art collaborations in the piece Homage to New York that he made with artists Jean Tinguely and Robert Rauschenberg, debuting at MoMA in 1960?
What... none of this sounds familiar?
While Picasso with his African objects and Dali with his Freud are the common influence narratives of these rock star 20th-century artists and their contemporaries, there is a whole other side of this art history that is not well known; science and technology have, since the carving tool was conceived, continually played a critical role in the developments of art in both idea and process. And if there is anyone to write about this subject, it is Arthur I. Miller. Trained physicist and founder of the Science & Technology Studies department at the University College London, Miller has long been interested in the relationship between art and science, both of which hold the ideas of creativity and beauty dear.
Colliding Worlds is not Miller’s first book on the subject, but is the most recent. While his previous works Einstein & Picassoand Insights of Genius had a more narrow focus, in Colliding Worlds Miller presents the concurrent historical trajectories of art movements, technological breakthroughs, and scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning when our scientific understanding of the world was rewritten anew by physics, the book follows the breaking of the aesthetic canon of the salon, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA, and the birth of electronic, new media, and science-based art - the 20th century was indeed the time when art and science boomed, loud enough that artists and scientists finally started to hear each other across the cultural divide.
Miller describes the development of today’s avant garde movement - SciArt (or artsci, as some call it) - through the stories of over 100 artists, scientists, and innovators in technology. While many names may sound familiar, the richness of the stories he presents is due to his ease in spanning the history of various disciplines. With biographical sketches, quotes, and images, this book would serve as a primary text for a class on the subject. Miller puts special emphasis on contemporary art and shows us how artists today are basing their work on science, rather than merely being inspired by it. Importantly, much of this history is shaped by science and tech figures like Billy Klüver, who saw not a scientific application of their research, but artistic.
With chapter titles like “The Computer Meets Art,” “Imagining and Designing Life,” and “The Art of Visualizing Data,” this text not only treats the histories of science, technology, and art as one - because indeed History is singular - but settles, through example after example, the oft-mentioned debate of whether art and science can ever see eye to eye, ever find a common ground; the overwhelming conclusion, Miller helps us understand, is that not only have science and art found a common ground, but that they found it long ago.
In offering a singular history for the development of art, science, and technology, Miller also offers us the idea of a third culture in which science (and technology) and art are not separate, but partners in the exploration of the unknown, in the pursuit of new truths. By showing us how these disciplines have long been interacting, it makes the idea of a new kind of culture in which cross-pollination between fields is promoted sound not only possible, but probable. Suited for those operating within the science-art world as well as for those who want an introduction to the subject, Colliding Worlds is the type of book that makes you sorry you hadn’t read it earlier and that you will recommend widely to your friends, while refusing to let them borrow your own copy.
