Science and art: two long-lost lovers?

[Darin Boville]

"Does it thrill you that you’re bringing C. P. Snow’s two cultures closer together?

You bet it does. Science and art are two long-lost lovers, yearning to be reunited. And now I get to be a matchmaker."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/science/alan-alda-wants-to-make-science-accessible.html

--Darin

[John Kasaian]

I am not impressed. Generalizing Science and Art is like generalizing a pork chop.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Perhaps it is more appropriate to consider the coupling of technology and art.
An example would be photography.

[paulr]

Science and art make fantastic bedfellows. Unfortunately most of the science-based art I see strikes me as lazy. It's by people who like idea of science, or a particular effect of science, but who haven't really explored it enough to get past the surface.

My favorite art/science matings are by people who actually do science with their art. Jonathon Keats has worked with a biology team to place God on the phylogenic tree. He's also written a symphony for the universe, with each note based on the extrapolated resonant frequency of an existing star or planet.

Christian Bök has written a poem and encoded it into the DNA of a bacterium considered to be the most indestructible organism on Earth. But that seemed too easy, so he constructed the poem so that the proteins it creates will, when decoded with the same cypher, be readable as a second poem that responds to the first. The protein also happens to glow in the dark.

If you have some time to spend with a mind that bends spoons, check out his talk here (http://vimeo.com/58653647).

[Drew Wiley]

The late Johsel Namkung was a wonderful example of a professional scientific photographer who applied his technical skills to landscape work. I believe it was a vintage 4x5/5x7 Norma he used the whole time for both.

[Struan Gray]

I have become hugely cynical about most popular science these days. Even more cynical than my usual cynical self.

Most popular science contains no science. No investigation, no mystery, no challenges. Just gnostic facts in shiny suits. The success of that 'Longitude' book seems to have formed the nucleus of a motivation, but the general piecemealisation of information, the packaging of knowledge into cool, easily digestible, isolated fragments, has had a major effect too.

The problem is not that scientists fail to communicate, it is that their audience has receded further and further from them. The real rewards of science are things like experiencing the thrill of a dawning understanding; or of seeing a link between previously separate bodies of knowledge; or grasping the significance of a trivial but deeply subversive observation. These things can be explained, and people can be motivated to experience them for themselves, but explanations either rely on a shared background body of knowledge, or there must be time available for understanding to be built up from fundamentals – neither is applicable in most of today's forms of popular science.

Alan Alda deserves credit, but, for example, the rules of his 'Flame' competition ensure he'll only be doling out sound bites to his eleven year olds. They get enough of those already. I would be more impressed at attempts to communicate the interrelatedness of science, the systematics, and the way small facts aggregate into large conceptual bodies. But that requires work, and effort, not just popcorn and a front row seat.

[Darin Boville]

I have become hugely cynical about most popular science these days. Even more cynical than my usual cynical self.

Most popular science contains no science. No investigation, no mystery, no challenges. Just gnostic facts in shiny suits. The success of that 'Longitude' book seems to have formed the nucleus of a motivation, but the general piecemealisation of information, the packaging of knowledge into cool, easily digestible, isolated fragments, has had a major effect too.

The problem is not that scientists fail to communicate, it is that their audience has receded further and further from them. The real rewards of science are things like experiencing the thrill of a dawning understanding; or of seeing a link between previously separate bodies of knowledge; or grasping the significance of a trivial but deeply subversive observation. These things can be explained, and people can be motivated to experience them for themselves, but explanations either rely on a shared background body of knowledge, or there must be time available for understanding to be built up from fundamentals – neither is applicable in most of today's forms of popular science.

Alan Alda deserves credit, but, for example, the rules of his 'Flame' competition ensure he'll only be doling out sound bites to his eleven year olds. They get enough of those already. I would be more impressed at attempts to communicate the interrelatedness of science, the systematics, and the way small facts aggregate into large conceptual bodies. But that requires work, and effort, not just popcorn and a front row seat.

O.K., what's wrong with the Longitude book? I'm missing your thought here.

Why not offer us an example of popular science done right? Perhaps Faraday's lecture to the youngsters on the candle instead of Alda's format on "Flame"?

--Darin

[Jac@stafford.net]

Most popular science contains no science. No investigation, no mystery, no challenges. Just gnostic facts in shiny suits.

[...snip stimulating ideas...]

Gnostic? That is a term of which I am familiar but have never put into a discussion of science, but I could!

[Struan Gray]

O.K., what's wrong with the Longitude book? I'm missing your thought here.

It never says what John Harrison actually did to make his chronographs work. The thing that was most important to him, and which marked him out as different from his contemporaries, was left out in favour of a lone-inventor-against-cruel-world celebrity biography.


Why not offer us an example of popular science done right? Perhaps Faraday's lecture to the youngsters on the candle instead of Alda's format on "Flame"?

Faraday is surprisingly readable, and early enough in the C19th that you can follow his logic without advanced maths. Lord Kelvin and Maxwell too, although their maths gets a bit hairy towards the end.

Off the top of my head exceptions to my Jeremiad include the technical and scientific sections of the National Museum of Scotland and the re-opened Pitt Rivers museum of natural history in Oxford. Both mix modern museum-based infotainment with traditional missions to educate. Iain Stewart's geology TV shows impressed me and my kids. Some of the Royal Institution online lectures are also quite good, and continue the tradition of a lecture series in which the lectures build upon each other while still remaining popular.

I cut my teenage teeth on Eddington's and Poincaré's descriptions of space-time to the masses at the dawn of relativity. A high standard - literary as well as scientific - which I honestly don't think can be matched in commercial publishing today. There is a wholly different assumption of what an educated person should be expected to know.

I know I'm probably coming across as a 'Bah Humbug!' merchant. I'm really just saddened because what I find and found exciting about science very rarely makes it into the mainstream of popular exposition.

[Struan Gray]

[...snip stimulating ideas...]

Gnostic? That is a term of which I am familiar but have never put into a discussion of science, but I could!

I think working scientists are becoming more and more of a priestly class - or scrivener monks, in the service of an analphabet king.

Trust me, I'm a doctor.

[paulr]

Struan, watch the Christian Bök lecture. It's probably too out there to be "popular," but it's a hell of an antidote to what irks you.

[Drew Wiley]

Around this part of the world, whenever someone is too incompetent to otherwise support themselves in a given profession, they become an "expert witness" for
trial lawyers.

[ROL]

I have become hugely cynical about most popular science these days. Even more cynical than my usual cynical self.

Most popular science contains no science. No investigation, no mystery, no challenges. Just gnostic facts in shiny suits. The success of that 'Longitude' book seems to have formed the nucleus of a motivation, but the general piecemealisation of information, the packaging of knowledge into cool, easily digestible, isolated fragments, has had a major effect too.

Thank goodness, I'm not the only one. I try watching our PBS science/discovery series like NOVA and find them hard to follow these days. Missing link jumps in presentational logic, it seems (FWIW, I am/was a research and operational scientist). I've been looking forward to reading Longitude for years now. Thanks for crushing another dream.

[Darin Boville]

Struan, watch the Christian Bök lecture. It's probably too out there to be "popular," but it's a hell of an antidote to what irks you.

Hey Paul,

I'm not getting the fascination with the Bök lecture--I'm into the Malware section so maybe I haven't seen enough.

It looks to me that he is just running a biological substitution code. There's no magic, no real art or poetry. The descriptions hype it up as if the response from the organism is somehow meaningful--but, of course, Bök has carefully chosen the substitution encoding and worked out the input poem so that the output poem--known perfectly in advance and indeed selected by Bök--appears to contain meaning. Neither the input poem or the output poem seem very interesting as poems and take advantage of poetry's "poetic" nature--Bök's poems seem to hide behind a wall of vagueness and forced meanings. With the same one hundred word vocabulary and a few rules of syntax you could create equivalent poems with a refrigerator magnet set. The biology part adds a great deal of pizzaz to the idea but I'm not seeing what it adds to the substance of the idea.

It's an impressive technological feat but I'm not sure what it means to poetry, let alone to art.

From what I can see this is another example of science/art projects where the science is really the key to why it is interesting and the art is just there, along for the ride, adding a veneer of the exotic to the enterprise if not simply playing the role of illustration.

I've had the opportunity to be in the same room with Nobel Prize winning scientists and their peers and watched their exclamations of amazement and amusement when watching elephants make paintings that resemble abstract art or when monkeys make paintings that look a whole lot like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. No matter the superficial resemblance of the works--no matter in fact if they were identical, drip for drip--the elephants, the monkeys, the computer program has not made art. I could never really get the idea across.

Or should I keep watching the video?

--Darin

[Struan Gray]

Thank goodness, I'm not the only one. I try watching our PBS science/discovery series like NOVA and find them hard to follow these days. Missing link jumps in presentational logic, it seems (FWIW, I am/was a research and operational scientist). I've been looking forward to reading Longitude for years now. Thanks for crushing another dream.

It's a short book. The pain won't last long :-)

There are pdfs of Gould's 'Marine Chronometer' floating around the web if you want the technical story. It's old enough that copyright issues don't apply, although you may end up in some sketchy parts of the web looking for the file. I wish the Longitude book had been a half-way house between what it is, and what Gould produced.

The history of science seems to be a little better served than current developments. I stumbled over, and then thoroughly enjoyed, Jim El Khalili's 'Pathfinders' book on early Arabic science. I'm sure there are others, but they don't achieve mass success in the way the dumbed down books seem to.

[Struan Gray]

Struan, watch the Christian Bök lecture. It's probably too out there to be "popular," but it's a hell of an antidote to what irks you.

I'll try to find a quiet hour and a half. Not easy right now.

In my personal realm, I find the division between art and science wholly inexplicable. I experience the same aesthetic thrills in looking at microscopy of adsorbate atoms on semiconductors as I do in galleries and museums of canonical painting. I enjoy intellectualising about art just as much as following the line of argument which constructs quantum mechanics or chaos theory. My personal aesthetic and emotional responses are the same - I feel the same thing.

So, although I understand the division in terms of analysis, or history, or categorisation, and I am used to the comfort blanket-like effect it has on some scientists and some artists, I dislike using the dichotomy as a way of explaining or describing the world, even when talking with those for whom it is concrete and self-evident. It's like racial classifications or social class: it has a reality, but it's a self-reinforcing, latching ratchet of a reality which does as much harm as good.

[Heroique]

In my personal realm, I find the division between art and science wholly inexplicable... I dislike using the dichotomy as a way of explaining or describing the world...

All right, that's enough...

Struan, to the blackboard, right now, and don't stop until you've chalked-up this sentence 1,000 times:


I will never again forget Pascal's distinction between the esprit géométrique [geometrical temperament], and the esprit de finesse [intuitive temperament], representing two different directions that the one human mind can take.

[Struan Gray]

All right, that's enough...

Struan, to the blackboard, right now, and don't stop until you've chalked-up this sentence 1,000 times:


I will never again forget Pascal's distinction between the esprit géométrique [geometrical temperament], and the esprit de finesse [intuitive temperament], representing two different directions that the one human mind can take.

Does it count if I used an iPad?

Most non scientists would be surprised to learn how much real dirt-under-the-fingernails science proceeds by the indulgence of hunches and intuition. Often, the geometrical temperament comes in later when packaging your findings for publication. Even Newton didn't really puzzle out his optics or mechanics in terms of axioms and derived theorems - that was just the accepted way of presenting a mathematical argument.

The Romantics (and various ancien regimes threatened by technological nouveux riches) turned Pascal's distinction into a value judgement rather than a tool for thinking about thinking. I am always aware of Pascal's version, but see the two as complementary rather than antagonistic (or, worse, mutually exclusive). I am deeply resentful of the perverted version of the idea which thinks that only the artistic temperament employs intuition and feeling.


Darin, I seem to have taken over your thread. Something touched a nerve. I admire Alan Alda for his work to popularise science, and I agree with much of what he says in the article you linked, especially the need to feed curiosity in the young. I just think that current methods of satisfying that curiosity are counter-productive, particularly the tendency to hand down neatly packaged received wisdom as if everything worth knowing was already known. I'll take Mythbusters over a standard science documentary almost every time.

[Winger]

Around this part of the world, whenever someone is too incompetent to otherwise support themselves in a given profession, they become an "expert witness" for
trial lawyers.

As a forensic chemist, I both agree and am ticked off at this assessment. Most expert witnesses do their job correctly - it's the liars-for-hire that make headlines and ruin it for the rest. I only worked in the criminal law area and for the Commonwealth of MA, so those in the civil law trials aren't as well known to me. I can definitely think of a few who called themselves scientists and who did not belong on the witness stand. Since it is an adversarial situation, there was opportunity to rebut their testimony with actual tested results. Several people who tried to put themselves up as outside experts in MA got their butts handed to them on the stand and never came back. While watching one trial on CourtTV, I sent info to the prosecutor to ask the defense expert because he was mixing up the definitions of natural and synthetic fibers - which was important to the case and hadn't been covered by the prosecutor; until I sent him a message.

Overall, though, I like what Alda is trying to do. I see a big part of the problem these days as being the media as well. They interview the scientist only with soundbites in mind and don't try (imo) to get the whole story, much less try to give the viewer the whole story. I don't think a lot of schools teach kids how to think and how to relate to the scientific approach either. They're fed bits of info in order to pass multiple choice standardized tests and they're not shown how to investigate and actually learn. Too many people have been sucked into science having opposite views of religion as well. Science is not a belief system, yet it gets portrayed that way.
Scientists, by and large, DO have problems explaining their work to laypeople because the average person in the country doesn't have the basic info to understand what they're trying to get across. Many have trouble explaining the basic levels of what they did because they barely remember the time when they didn't understand it. Similar things happen when totally fresh newbies come here or other film sites - there are a number of people who assume a level of knowledge that beginners do not have, yet, and practically berate the newbies for trying things they don't understand rather than explaining it from the start. I see this as being the part that Alda is trying to combat. Scientists need to make what they do sound more interesting and in terms the average person can understand.

[Winger]

…….
Most non scientists would be surprised to learn how much real dirt-under-the-fingernails science proceeds by the indulgence of hunches and intuition. Often, the geometrical temperament comes in later when packaging your findings for publication. Even Newton didn't really puzzle out his optics or mechanics in terms of axioms and derived theorems - that was just the accepted way of presenting a mathematical argument.

The Romantics (and various ancien regimes threatened by technological nouveux riches) turned Pascal's distinction into a value judgement rather than a tool for thinking about thinking. I am always aware of Pascal's version, but see the two as complementary rather than antagonistic (or, worse, mutually exclusive). I am deeply resentful of the perverted version of the idea which thinks that only the artistic temperament employs intuition and feeling.


Darin, I seem to have taken over your thread. Something touched a nerve. I admire Alan Alda for his work to popularise science, and I agree with much of what he says in the article you linked, especially the need to feed curiosity in the young. I just think that current methods of satisfying that curiosity are counter-productive, particularly the tendency to hand down neatly packaged received wisdom as if everything worth knowing was already known. I'll take Mythbusters over a standard science documentary almost every time.

I agree, especially with the bolded parts.
As the mom of a 4 year old, there has to be a way for schools to encourage curiosity and actual learning rather than feeding them soundbites. No, I don't really want to home school, but I do plan to add to his scientific education on my own. But I worry for the kids who don't have parents who love science. Nate has several generations of scientists before him (even his great great grandmother had a Masters in bacteriology and did some of the early work with using sodium hypochlorite to sanitize things). Scientists do have a responsibility to make their work accessible. The media needs to help, imo - maybe there's the science + art that needs to happen. A la Mythbusters?

[Jim Jones]

I am not impressed. Generalizing Science and Art is like generalizing a pork chop.

One step at a time: simplistic science for the masses may trigger the natural curiosity of fertile minds that otherwise would lie fallow.

[paulr]

Yes, keep watching the video!

First, I think it would be helpful to look at this work in the context of conceptual poetry, which could also be described as the poetry of extreme constraint. Poets like Bök choose outlandish constraints for their work and use them partly as challenges and partly as architects for the work itself. An earlier example is his Eunoia (http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eunoia/a.html), a book-lenght narrative in which each chapter uses only a single vowel.

The constraints for the Xenotext project were more extreme. He needed to create a cypher alphabet that would allow writing two meanful texts (in the sense that they can be understood conventionally, and can be paraphrased) which mutually encipher one another. Nothing like this had ever been done. It required programming a University supercomputer to create versions of aphabets based on probability, and ultimately for Bök to work with each alphabet to see if he could make it happen. This took years, and required him to teach himself supercomputer programming.

He freely admits that neither of the texts is particularly compelling as traditional poem. It's the fact of them, and the circumstances surrounding them, and the added touch that second one actually responds to the first, where the artistry lies.

But this is only the beginning of the science. He didn't just encode a poem into the junk DNA of a bacteria, which would be almost trivially easy today. He created his poems so they would actually manufacture a viable protein. Stop and think about that for a minute. The response poem isn't just English language, it's genetic language that makes organic tissue. And if this weren't enough, the new protein/poem had to glow in the dark. This was for fun, and also allowed a quick test to see if the protein is viable.

He ran into many molecular biology hurdles along the way. Early versions of the protein were too physically weak to survive, so he had to study protein structures and rewrite the poem to make a more robust one. He did this all by himself. His partners in the biology department only did the physical work of injecting the nucleotides; they didn't tutor him or participate in the design work. The biologists were stunned that an English PhD with no biology background pulled this off.

So, what are the implications to poetry, or art as a whole? Bök intends this work as a provocation. He's saying, hey everyone, wake up. Stop being lazy. You don't live in the same world that made Tennyson or Keats or O'Keefe or Ashbery. Science has emerged as the most powerful influence on contemporary civilization, including science that probes and manipulates the basic stuff of life. If you habitually ignore this in your work, or treat it casually, superficially, or lazilly, you are missing the biggest opportunities in the world. Likewise if you are working in modes that were exhausted a century ago, you are missing the biggest opportunities in the world.

Xenotext isn't about a poem anyone will want to memorize, or about communicating with whomever lands here after we're extinct (although both are possible ...) It's a demonstration and a wakeup call, like Duchamp's readymades. We don't all hang snow shovels in our living rooms today, but we are incapable of looking as narrowly as we did before 1917.




Hey Paul,

I'm not getting the fascination with the Bök lecture--I'm into the Malware section so maybe I haven't seen enough.

It looks to me that he is just running a biological substitution code. There's no magic, no real art or poetry. The descriptions hype it up as if the response from the organism is somehow meaningful--but, of course, Bök has carefully chosen the substitution encoding and worked out the input poem so that the output poem--known perfectly in advance and indeed selected by Bök--appears to contain meaning. Neither the input poem or the output poem seem very interesting as poems and take advantage of poetry's "poetic" nature--Bök's poems seem to hide behind a wall of vagueness and forced meanings. With the same one hundred word vocabulary and a few rules of syntax you could create equivalent poems with a refrigerator magnet set. The biology part adds a great deal of pizzaz to the idea but I'm not seeing what it adds to the substance of the idea.

It's an impressive technological feat but I'm not sure what it means to poetry, let alone to art.

From what I can see this is another example of science/art projects where the science is really the key to why it is interesting and the art is just there, along for the ride, adding a veneer of the exotic to the enterprise if not simply playing the role of illustration.

I've had the opportunity to be in the same room with Nobel Prize winning scientists and their peers and watched their exclamations of amazement and amusement when watching elephants make paintings that resemble abstract art or when monkeys make paintings that look a whole lot like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. No matter the superficial resemblance of the works--no matter in fact if they were identical, drip for drip--the elephants, the monkeys, the computer program has not made art. I could never really get the idea across.

Or should I keep watching the video?

--Darin

[bigdog]

I have no idea what this thread is about ... :confused:

[Heroique]

I have no idea what this thread is about ... :confused:

Not to worry!

I see Alan Alda on his way to hold our hands and reassure us with baby talk. :)

Better, read Swift about the Houyhnhnms and learn why these horses (of "geometrical temperament") would shake their manes and neigh in bewilderment at "O My Luve's like a red, red rose," but be fascinated by the work of their well-meaning stable keeper, Christian Bök.

Me, I'll take Christian over Alan, but Swift in lieu of either.

[Tin Can]

Well said Paul. I agree with your every word. This has quite literally timeless implications, communication at a very advanced level, well beyond our imagination.

This guy I met once and was not impressed with his dayglow rabbit.

http://www.ekac.org/


Yes, keep watching the video!

First, I think it would be helpful to look at this work in the context of conceptual poetry, which could also be described as the poetry of extreme constraint. Poets like Bök choose outlandish constraints for their work and use them partly as challenges and partly as architects for the work itself. An earlier example is his Eunoia (http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eunoia/a.html), a book-lenght narrative in which each chapter uses only a single vowel.

The constraints for the Xenotext project were more extreme. He needed to create a cypher alphabet that would allow writing two meanful texts (in the sense that they can be understood conventionally, and can be paraphrased) which mutually encipher one another. Nothing like this had ever been done. It required programming a University supercomputer to create versions of aphabets based on probability, and ultimately for Bök to work with each alphabet to see if he could make it happen. This took years, and required him to teach himself supercomputer programming.

He freely admits that neither of the texts is particularly compelling as traditional poem. It's the fact of them, and the circumstances surrounding them, and the added touch that second one actually responds to the first, where the artistry lies.

But this is only the beginning of the science. He didn't just encode a poem into the junk DNA of a bacteria, which would be almost trivially easy today. He created his poems so they would actually manufacture a viable protein. Stop and think about that for a minute. The response poem isn't just English language, it's genetic language that makes organic tissue. And if this weren't enough, the new protein/poem had to glow in the dark. This was for fun, and also allowed a quick test to see if the protein is viable.

He ran into many molecular biology hurdles along the way. Early versions of the protein were too physically weak to survive, so he had to study protein structures and rewrite the poem to make a more robust one. He did this all by himself. His partners in the biology department only did the physical work of injecting the nucleotides; they didn't tutor him or participate in the design work. The biologists were stunned that an English PhD with no biology background pulled this off.

So, what are the implications to poetry, or art as a whole? Bök intends this work as a provocation. He's saying, hey everyone, wake up. Stop being lazy. You don't live in the same world that made Tennyson or Keats or O'Keefe or Ashbery. Science has emerged as the most powerful influence on contemporary civilization, including science that probes and manipulates the basic stuff of life. If you habitually ignore this in your work, or treat it casually, superficially, or lazilly, you are missing the biggest opportunities in the world. Likewise if you are working in modes that were exhausted a century ago, you are missing the biggest opportunities in the world.

Xenotext isn't about a poem anyone will want to memorize, or about communicating with whomever lands here after we're extinct (although both are possible ...) It's a demonstration and a wakeup call, like Duchamp's readymades. We don't all hang snow shovels in our living rooms today, but we are incapable of looking as narrowly as we did before 1917.

[Struan Gray]

Yes, keep watching the video!

I listened rather than watching, but it was interesting all the same.

I agree with everything you said in your excellent long post (aahhhhh), so I'll be lazy and just list some random impressions.

The strongest traditional poetic association I see is with various constrained literary forms. Acrostics rather than haikus, or things like novels not containing the letter 'e', or poems written in compilable programmer's code. The constraints are artificial, but the examination of language they force upon both the writer and the reader can be both creative and productive. My only caveat would be that the constraints in themselves do not guarantee any such creativity or productivity.

I was impressed with Bök's dedication and engagement, in getting to grips with the actual science at the same level as the professionals. His work could easily have been a PhD project. Given the superficial engagement of many arts-sciences crossover projects this is actually very impressive. That said, the work he has done is 'self-evident' in the sense a patent lawyer would use, and the respect I give him is more for getting his hands properly dirty than for any particular skill or creativity he has shown in the science. I like Bök's telling comment towards the end about how many resent the time and effort required to become proficient in the field. Again, there is a caveat, and it is the usual one about nobody caring how hard you worked, but in a world where art is a an activity that critique loses almost all its force (and I've never had much time for it myself anyway).

Judged as standalone texts, the actual poems are fairly worthless. Judged as a pattern of activity, the project has a nice mix of artistic and scientific engagement. The stuff about space travel and aliens, and the cute fact that the protein expressed has a pink fluorescence, I see as distracting fluff, and Bök could usefully edit his cloud of conceptual waffle - if only to avoid handing weapons to his detractors – but overall, I can see why people in the sciences and the arts find his work both interesting and inspiring.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned information theory in connection with his work. A sign, perhaps, that he's spent too much time with the wet sciences. One of my favourite pieces of predictive deduction was the body of work by physicists which, while the search for DNA was going on, proved that however genetic material eventually turned out to be encoded, it would need at least four letters to its alphabet. Bök has rediscovered that you can express ideas in a few words of a complex language, or many words of a simple one; and that if you try to force a one-to-one correspondence between the simple and complex languages, you necessarily end up with a very restricted set of available expressions. This is a warning - familiar to anthropologists - that simple languages are not just subsets of complex ones, and that linguistic and conceptual complexity can take many forms beyond the merely structural.

In the end though, Bök's project offers me too little of the aesthetic or intellectual pleasures which I derive from my favourite pieces of science and art. Perhaps it's because I am already familiar with the biology, and so less in awe of the mere fact that he has applied it. Or it's because the poems themselves are bad, and the apparatus around it, although fascinating as a discussion, and as a wake-up call highlighting current circumstances, ultimately does not add up to more than the sum of its parts.


Here's a recent project more to my taste:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/02/25/caleb-klaces/at-the-wellcome-2/

Less frantic paddling. More grace. Admittedly, less cutting edge too, but an elegant example of how knowledge, aesthetics and perception interact.

[paulr]

Poor Dr. Bök. Everyone's a poetry critic. ;)

[Struan Gray]

I think he can cope :-)

[paulr]

I do think that with this kind of work, the final form of the piece isn't a poem or a bacterium, but a lecture like the one in the video. Or even better, some kind of interactive installation that could make all the abstract stuff more real.

[Jac@stafford.net]

I do think that with this kind of work, the final form of the piece isn't a poem or a bacterium, but a lecture like the one in the video. Or even better, some kind of interactive installation that could make all the abstract stuff more real.

Given that I am academically oriented, nonetheless when an artistic explanation requires more time than my great patience can tolerate I blot-out, intentionally forget the whole thing.

Call it a survival short-cut.

[Tin Can]

Each to his own.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/02/25/caleb-klaces/at-the-wellcome-2/[/url]

Less frantic paddling. More grace. Admittedly, less cutting edge too, but an elegant example of how knowledge, aesthetics and perception interact.

[NancyP]

I was highly amused to see a book by Catherine Wagner featuring LF photography of a molecular genetics lab run by Dr. Helen Donis-Keller, one of the earlier Big Names in the Human Genome Project. I was at the neighboring university and collaborated with her and one of her trainees on various translational research projects. So I go to the bookstore and see this volume in the used photography monograph section - heyyyyy, I KNOW that minus-80 freezer shelf! It was a novelty to see scientific "objects of daily life" through the eyes of a non-scientist, at that time I was too busy picking clones or running PCR reactions and gels to reflect that my world was pretty foreign to most people.

There are many scientists who have "an eye" and some artistic talent. Donis-Keller is one of these, and she left the highly competitive gene mapping and sequencing biz and her 30-person university lab. in mid-career to go to art school and eventually to teach art in an engineering school context. I saw her pre-art-school work hanging in her home, and she was pretty talented then. I have to say that not everyone is temperamentally cut out to be a lab director of that sort - dealing with often-whiny, immature, irresponsible students can get old fast. My lab technician and I used to marvel at the "business" side of the HDK lab meetings - why can't the students just Shut The F*** Up, do their radioactivity monitoring duties, clean up after themselves, sign up to use common equipment and show up on time, make the stock solutions they are assigned to make, and generally behave themselves and act like professionals (hint - highly competitive environments are not good places for students to learn essentials of cooperation, at least not if the lab chief doesn't fancy being Kindergarden Cop 24-7-365).

http://www.catherinewagner.org/#/photographic-work/art-and-science-investigating-matter/

So what pays my bills in this no-g*dd*m-funding time? I have basically reverted to being a full time anatomic (surgical/autopsy) pathologist.

[Oren Grad]

So I go to the bookstore and see this volume in the used photography monograph section - heyyyyy, I KNOW that minus-80 freezer shelf! It was a novelty to see scientific "objects of daily life" through the eyes of a non-scientist, at that time I was too busy picking clones or running PCR reactions and gels to reflect that my world was pretty foreign to most people.

The big secret is that a biology lab really is just like a big kitchen, pretty mundane when you're immersed in the day-to-day tasks that go on there. (Like a darkroom, too!) The portentous art-speak overlay on top of the pictures sounds silly.

"I began looking at science, specifically genetic research, as a model of both who we are and who we will become."

This for boring pictures of a freezer.

[Vaughn]

...As the mom of a 4 year old, there has to be a way for schools to encourage curiosity and actual learning rather than feeding them soundbites. No, I don't really want to home school...

I was not into home-schooling, also. But I just made a point to answer all those "Why?" questions as best as I could, and in a way that showed I was actually interested and not 'bothered' by questions. And if I did not know the answer, I said so, and we'd often look up the answers. And on our adventures, I'd point out stuff, ask the boys questions about what they were seeing...or not seeing, and so forth. Fun, really.

[Tin Can]

Yes, some modern parents are responsive, I was raised in 50's when children were to be seen and not heard.

Made me into a bit of a devil, I was jamming the TV by age 7. If I can't join the fun, I may spoil yours, Dad...

Science and Art only separated by the unimaginative.


I was not into home-schooling, also. But I just made a point to answer all those "Why?" questions as best as I could, and in a way that showed I was actually interested and not 'bothered' by questions. And if I did not know the answer, I said so, and we'd often look up the answers. And on our adventures, I'd point out stuff, ask the boys questions about what they were seeing...or not seeing, and so forth. Fun, really.

[Oren Grad]

Donis-Keller is one of these, and she left the highly competitive gene mapping and sequencing biz and her 30-person university lab. in mid-career to go to art school and eventually to teach art in an engineering school context.

Ah... this didn't register at first. The story is even more interesting than that - she's not just at any engineering school but at Olin College, which is an interesting experimental cross-disciplinary venture in its own right:

http://www.olin.edu/faculty/profile/helen-donis-keller

EDIT: Apropos of the topic of this thread, one of the courses she teaches:

AHSE 2130
The Intersection of Art and Science

Science and Art are often considered entirely different worlds inhabited by practitioners who have nothing in common. In this course, we will debunk this myth by closely examining the discovery process in both disciplines and by comparing the culture of science to that of art, historically and in the present. We will consider the influence of scientific discoveries, from optics to “new media” on the production of art and discuss the corollary question “Has art influenced the progress of science?” We will also consider ways in which science allows us to understand artists and the work they create. In contemporary society, artists have begun to comment on science, sometimes with disastrous results, which leads us to ask, “What is needed in order to establish a meaningful dialogue between scientists and artists, and does it matter?”

[Vaughn]

...Science and Art only separated by the unimaginative.

+

Raised in the 50's also.

As a kid, I was an active observer -- everything just seemed pretty darn interesting to me. Encyclopideas were a collection of interesting facts. School was a fun place. And a large chemistry set in the den! And art on the walls.

[Tin Can]

I worked all my life in material testing labs, as a tech. Never thought of art till my 40's. Went to art school and gained a MFA at age 51.

[Vaughn]

I worked in a university art department for 22 years as the darkroom tech. Got a BS in Natural Resources Mgt. Started working for the art dept after 12 years with the US Forest Service; packing mules, building trails, fighting fires, etc. Been practicing my art for a few decades...have not thought about it all that much. Art and science -- of course they go together. Both art and science come together with the artist to create work.

[Heroique]

Art and science -- of course they go together.

I mostly agree, but can they be bad bedfellows, too?

[Heroique]

Just to amplify...

I wouldn't exclude any faculty of mind when appropriate to its subject.

But I think the method of science has its limits; so does the enterprise of art.

Plenty of common ground where they can meet (and I think the trend of this thread is correctly pointing-out they might meet more often, but don't, due mainly to specialism and its symptom of cultural blindness). But there's also plenty of ground where either of these useful directions of mind, with the best of intentions, begins to "invade" the territory of the other. I think this gets back to Pascal, a very great mathematician, who was mentioned in an earlier post. His Pensées is a clear warning about a trend he already saw developing in the 17C – namely, Scientism, or using the method of science on all forms of experience. (BTW, his work is where the famous saying comes from, "The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know.") Coming from such a great mathematician, I think his concern is worth remembering, even as we correctly applaud getting science and art "together" more often.

I also remember an old thread here about art criticism where this sort of thing, Scientism, happens with horrifyingly comical results – over-using analysis, one of the brilliant handmaidens of science, to explore and explain the rich experience of art. For the life of me, I can't find the thread, but it was a few short years ago...

[Vaughn]

I mostly agree, but can they be bad bedfellows, too?

Not normally, usually that is caused by someone else (such as politics or religion) trying to sneak into bed with either one or both of them.

[Winger]

I was not into home-schooling, also. But I just made a point to answer all those "Why?" questions as best as I could, and in a way that showed I was actually interested and not 'bothered' by questions. And if I did not know the answer, I said so, and we'd often look up the answers. And on our adventures, I'd point out stuff, ask the boys questions about what they were seeing...or not seeing, and so forth. Fun, really.

This is me, too. Some of my formative times as a kid were spent diverting streams with my mom. She walked our dog up in a wooded area and would bring home things like owl pellets and freeze them for awhile (kills most of the nasty stuff) and then pick them apart with my brother and me. I can't count the number of times she mailed me questioned hair samples from the woods for ID or saved skulls for me. The best was the juvenile blue-fin tuna they found on a beach on Cape Cod.

So I have to give mom props for encouraging the scientist in me as a kid - I got more from home than at school until at least high school. When kids are little, their brains are sponges - fill them with oooey gooey science, not just water; it's way more fun.

NancyP - I wish I had your skills and education. Way more transferable than mine, I think.

[Struan Gray]

I used to slip exp(i*pi) = -1 into my kids' times tables testing as a screwball to keep them awake. That's led to some lightbulb moments when talking about how rotation can be described with multiplication, and made it easy to explain why military binoculars have grad scales in the field of view.

Cool facts can be a useful hook, and an inspiration, but it's the connections which seem to provide lasting fascination. I try not to compete with their teachers, but to provide a wider view, and to highlight those cases when they are (necessarily) being told something which is oversimplified.

Our older two are just learning about the nervous system. Their mother got into trouble at school for pointing out that her dad had just proved that the standard picture of reflex arcs was wrong - oversimplified - and now her children are being taught the same wrong thing. At some point, you have to teach to the exam - unless you are truly brave - but that doesn't mean you should narrow their vision to match its limited scope.

[Jac@stafford.net]

I was raised in the forties and later. My mother was brilliant, something of a savant, from a family that included inventors including a famous one. My father was away in Navy operations so it was just Mom and me. She taught me to read by three years, showed me how a slide rule works, and the proof of addition by Casting Out Nines. My second grade teacher was speechless when I showed her that. Fascinating stuff for a hyper, dreamy kid.

A very large part of science depends upon intuitions that leads to discovery.

[paulr]

II try not to compete with their teachers, but to provide a wider view, and to highlight those cases when they are (necessarily) being told something which is oversimplified.

I can imagine greater friction in history class than in science class.

[NancyP]

Vaughn, I like your sigfile "At least with LF landscape photography, a bad day of photography can still be a good day of exercise.". How true. So what if the light / weather turned out to be "meh", I at least got OUTDOORS.

[Vaughn]

Vaughn, I like your sigfile "At least with LF landscape photography, a bad day of photography can still be a good day of exercise.". How true. So what if the light / weather turned out to be "meh", I at least got OUTDOORS.

I developed this way of looking at it after many drives up to my favorite redwoods (50 miles) only to have the wind come up, rain start, light die, etc. Still enjoyed the place, though, and would often carry the camera for a few miles just in case the weather/light changed. Eventually I got better at guessing the conditions under the redwoods from home. The downside is that I 'waste' less time wandering around the redwoods in the rain. :)

[Struan Gray]

I can imagine greater friction in history class than in science class.

Not really. My perception is that Swedish schools have some issues when it comes to teaching hard rigorous subjects (like maths at a higher level, or essay writing), but they are very good at the humanities and social sciences. The children are taught how to find things out for themselves, and are encouraged to think hard about source criticism right from the start.

There aren't any obvious hotspots in history. Everyone is too nice and reasonable. Even if I were the jingoisitic type of expat Brit (which I'm not), I doubt there would be a direct conflict.

What I see as missing in the standard humanities education here is general knowledge about other cultures and the geography of the wider world. Using the things which catch their imagination or attention in everyday life to spark discussion - like the halal candy pigs my daughter found on sale in the UK - seems to work well enough for now.

[paulr]

That's good to hear. The versions of history I got taught (at pretty good schools) were pretty candy-coated.

Things I've ben hearing about Sweden make me want to move there. Even hard-hitting documentaries like this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSLXjsqmXg).

[Tin Can]

Heck, from what I have seen of Norwegian jails, I may have to commit some grand crime, to up my lifestyle.

Not kidding

[Struan Gray]

Paul, that documentary is hideously true (and full of in-jokes).

Sweden's not utopia. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons for me. I just wish there were a few mountains round my part of it. Or just one.

[Mike Anderson]

All I know of Sweden I learned from Stieg Larsson. So it sounds pretty cool except for the little islands of sociopathic rich people.

[Mike Anderson]

Might as well keep this thread going. Scientist's blackboards captured with LF photography:

http://www.alejandroguijarro.com/ongoing/blackboards/

[Bill Burk]

Mike Anderson,

That is an amazingly on-topic post!

[Jac@stafford.net]

What we call science or technology, indeed Art today was sublime craftsmanship in ancient times.

The concept of an Artist is a recent invention, possibly since Dada.

How we might contrast LF photography to contemporary tiny CRT images is pivotal. Imagine a future where screen imaging is considered primitive, and there you are with your 'obsolete' super high fidelity large format film images and be happy. You speak to the future today.

[Darin Boville]

And on and on it goes.

This from the Smithsonian Magazine web page:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/art-and-science-collide-in-the-discovery-of-the-higgs-boson-180950253/

"Though the film deals with some pretty hard science, it strives to depict a very human struggle for understanding. The same struggle is also reflected in the art world, according to director Mark Levinson—both science and art, he says, are human attempts to represent and reveal more about the world."

-----

But beyond highlighting analogies with art—which can be useful for explaining science—the film also shows that conducting physics research is in many ways an artistic process.

"We’re trying to figure out a deeper theory of nature and that process is really a lot of guess work," says Kaplan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the movie's producer. "You take hints, you follow leads, but you’re also being very creative and trying to figure out what it could be, and try to imagine things that aren’t in the current theories but that could be. You have to have an incredibly open mind to push through that process, and so the process itself actually feels very artistic, at least in relation to what my artist friends talk about going through."

-----

There's a video at the link.

--Darin