Oscillating categories

Everything has been painted or drawn, as we all know since we have been told a few times already and it is time to move on to other techniques and processes to make art. Right? Then why not leave porridge-eating slime molds or chemical oscillators do the job for you? This is exactly what was on offer at University College London and the Wellcome Trust on 26-28 September during an event called Drawing on Life, which brought together several leading artists and scientists.

Artist Heather Barnett regularly collaborates with scientists from all sorts of background. I first met Heather while she was artist in residence at Sussex University, a fascinating job that brought her to ask the local cell biologists, geneticists and protein designers their definition for beauty in science (what is a beautiful experiment?). At the Drawing on Life event, Heather presented her project with microbiologist Simon Park that the pair called “Creative collaborations with unruly natural forms: the Physarum experiments”. The giant unicellular organism Physarum polycephalum moves at the speed of 1 cm per hour to find its food. When subjected to a pattern of shocks at regular intervals, it demonstrates rudimentary form of memory by anticipating the next perturbation. Heather drew patterns onto wet felt to guide the amoeba’s meandering and growth, shots of which were taken at regular interval other the course of one week. The pictures, once organised into stop-motion films, show organic shapes full of tiny details growing and changing unpredictably over time.

Andrea Sella lectures chemistry at UCL and is a local star: his demonstrations are known to be colourful and spectacular. Here he teams up with artist Antony Hall for a presentation of their tabletop experiments, compiled in booklets the first volume of which was given away during the event. The works presented here all make use of well-known physicochemical phenomenon such as surface tension and chemical oscillation. The first oscillator on display today is a throbbing droplet of mercury in sulphuric acid. A paper clip is dipped in the solution and catalysis the redox reaction that causes the silvery blob to oscillate between a round and a triangular shape. If I had come back a bit later, I would have witnessed a demonstration of the rather intriguing Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, a classical example of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and probably one of the earliest examples of chemical oscillator. Antony’s website shows a collection of pictures (see more under research/BZ reaction) taken during the course of the reaction. Fragile spiral-like patterns grow and disappear, resulting from the contact of wave fronts spreading from points where the reaction is occurring. What I particularly find appealing and satisfying in these pictures is how the matter of factness of the wave fronts finds its perfect counter point in the unpredictability of the resulting patterns.

Now it begs the question: is all this really art? One could see these solely as pretty pictures of chemical reactions and micro organisms, beautiful scientific documents indeed, but nothing more. Is it really that simple? Maybe not, maybe what Heather Barnett and Antony Hall (amongst other artists using scientific tools to produce art work) are getting at is the opening of new possibilities through the exploration of techniques and tools that are usually confined in research labs.
Furthermore, a parallel could be drawn with the ‘process art’ movement, which explored new ways of producing artwork through the use of restricted sets of decisions as starting point. Then the actual realization of the piece was to be left entirely up to the interaction between the starting conditions and some natural phenomena such as gravity, weather. Hence, the process was the artwork. As defined here: “process artists engage the primacy of organic systems, using perishable, insubstantial, and transitory materials such as dead rabbits, steam, fat, ice, cereal, sawdust, and grass. The materials are often left exposed to natural forces: gravity, time, weather, temperature, etc”.
Clearly, swapping “dead rabbits, etc” with “slime molds, chemical oscillators” gives a fairly good description of the two projects described above. Process art, but with lab coats on this time.

Why didn’t anyone figure out earlier that artists and scientist might have a hell of a lot to share? Actually quite a few people did, a long time ago. Leonardo da Vinci was both a talented scientist and great artist. The specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge and practices probably dramatically increased after the second industrial revolution, when the belief that an appropriate set of specialized engineers was the solution to every problem settled for good in social consciousness. Although, one could argue that western societies have been split into well-defined classes for centuries, giving a template for further sub-classes and categories to appear. Blame on the lack of porosity between established categories then!

Talking of which, here is an artist concerned with categories: their definition, origin, their becoming and the ensuing tension. His name is Richard Wentworth, he worked as an assistant for Henry More while studying sculpture and later had a strong influence on the Young British Artists, group which included Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. “The sort of things that really interest me is these little anxieties between what one thing is one minute and what it is the next - and it’s humans who are capable of changing that” (read more here). According to UCL neuroscientist Mark Lythgoe, Richard’s brain “is different to mine, you are the most disinhibited people I know, because you move from topic to topic to topic very, very quickly. When you talk, it is slightly outside what we might call the social norm”. According to Mark, creative people (like Richard and artists in general) are able to lower the walls down in order to allow what others might judge irrelevant to hold some significance. The flip side being that these people are easily distracted for the same reason, and I can confirm that Richard Wentworth is very easily distracted! Nevertheless, it has been an insightful experience to follow the artist on his train on thought during the hour and a half a bunch of us was lucky enough to spend with Mark and Richard, wandering around the back of the main UCL building and exploring this intriguing no-man’s land.

Listening to both the artist and the scientist it soon became clear that they do share some strong traits (curiosity, creativity and attention to detail are indispensable to both trades) but their focus and aim are of a rather different nature: the scientist asks questions because (s)he is interested in the answer (why and why is it this way); on the other hand the artist asks the question because the process of formulating it and asking is interesting and constitutes the work of art in itself. In a work of art the answer (and there are usually many) is up to the audience and critics, not the artist. One could say that scientists propose scenarios, stories as they often say, with a starting point (hypothesis), a development (questions in the form of experiments) and end with conclusions, in order to explain observed facts. As a difference, artists only suggest new ways of commenting that are open to, and welcome interpretation. No hypothesis or model there, or only to be constantly shaken off, confronted.