Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world by Ariane Koek Luc Lalande Jun 26, 2017 · 6 min read The following post is a copy/paste of an article by Ariane Koek that deeply in9uenced my thinking of true art-science collaboration. . . . Original Source: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Cern%3a+where+art+a nd+science+collide/24678 By Ariane Koek. Published online: 04 October 2011 Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world https://medium.com/@luclalande?source=post_page-----b5624a2ffe2a---------------------- https://medium.com/@luclalande?source=post_page-----b5624a2ffe2a---------------------- https://medium.com/@luclalande/arts-and-science-are-similar-in-that-they-are-expressions-of-what-it-is-to-be-human-in-this-world-b5624a2ffe2a?source=post_page-----b5624a2ffe2a---------------------- https://twitter.com/beautyquark http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Cern%3a+where+art+and+science+collide/24678 Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Split Second House”, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, took physics as its jumping-oK point It is one of the fashionable arts movements of the moment. It is also one of the most troubled because the aesthetic is unsubtle and still evolving. With the seemingly giddy rise of the wonders of science in our culture, epitomised by the boyish Brit physicist Brian Cox’s blockbuster TV series, “Wonders of the Universe” on the BBC, arts/science (sometimes called “sciart”) is gaining ascendancy in the 21st century as a movement of inXuence and power. Almost every week, across the world, exhibitions are opening that are billed as arts/science to cash in on this emerging trend, which is also driven by new funding possibilities from science in the current arts cash crisis. But we are in the middle of a crisis of another kind — a reduction in the wonder of creativity itself, and the question of who controls it and how. Creativity, and where it comes from, is one of the last great human frontiers, and one over which we have little control, cash crisis or no cash crisis. But there is a battle to do just that, and reduce creativity to a systematic formula in our function-obsessed, input-output, application-driven world. Artists are being driven to become scienti]c, from the moment they ]ll in a funding application predicting their ]nal production. Let me explain. I work in arts/science myself. So, you could argue, who I am to talk? After all, I have created an artists’ residency programme at Cern, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and home to the large hadron collider. But it has at its heart the wonder of the creative process. It is not a residency which is process- driven or de]ned by an outcome; nor does it demand communication about or homage to the science. I have deliberately set it up to be a laboratory of the imagination, where freeplay can hap.

1. Arts and science are similar in that they
are expressions of what it is to be human
in this world by Ariane Koek
Luc Lalande
Jun 26, 2017 · 6 min read
The following post is a copy/paste of an article by Ariane Koek
that
deeply in9uenced my thinking of true art-science collaboration.
. . .
Original Source:
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Cern%3a+where+art+a
nd+science+collide/24678
By Ariane Koek.
Published online: 04 October 2011
Arts and science are similar in that they are
expressions of what it is to be human in this
world
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2. https://medium.com/@luclalande/arts-and-science-are-similar-
in-that-they-are-expressions-of-what-it-is-to-be-human-in-this-
world-b5624a2ffe2a?source=post_page-----b5624a2ffe2a---------
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https://twitter.com/beautyquark
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Cern%3a+where+art+a
nd+science+collide/24678
Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Split Second House”, shown at the
Venice Architecture
Biennale in 2010, took physics as its jumping-oK point
It is one of the fashionable arts movements of the moment. It is
also
one of the most troubled because the aesthetic is unsubtle and
still
evolving. With the seemingly giddy rise of the wonders of
science in
our culture, epitomised by the boyish Brit physicist Brian Cox’s
blockbuster TV series, “Wonders of the Universe” on the BBC,
arts/science (sometimes called “sciart”) is gaining ascendancy
in the
21st century as a movement of inXuence and power.
Almost every week, across the world, exhibitions are opening
that are
billed as arts/science to cash in on this emerging trend, which is

3. also
driven by new funding possibilities from science in the current
arts
cash crisis.
But we are in the middle of a crisis of another kind — a
reduction in
the wonder of creativity itself, and the question of who controls
it and
how. Creativity, and where it comes from, is one of the last
great
human frontiers, and one over which we have little control, cash
crisis
or no cash crisis.
But there is a battle to do just that, and reduce creativity to a
systematic formula in our function-obsessed, input-output,
application-driven world. Artists are being driven to become
scienti]c, from the moment they ]ll in a funding application
predicting their ]nal production.
Let me explain. I work in arts/science myself. So, you could
argue,

4. who I am to talk? After all, I have created an artists’ residency
programme at Cern, the world’s largest particle physics
laboratory
and home to the large hadron collider. But it has at its heart the
wonder of the creative process. It is not a residency which is
process-
driven or de]ned by an outcome; nor does it demand
communication
about or homage to the science.
I have deliberately set it up to be a laboratory of the
imagination,
where freeplay can happen. The science and the place are
springboards of the imagination for the artists, not the
destination,
reason, mission or simulacra of production. When they apply,
prospective artists may be asked to imagine a project they
would like
to carry out, but we fully expect that to change completely once
they
come to Cern — and who knows what will happen then? That’s
part

5. of the process.
This goes against the trends that can be seen in the arts/science
aesthetic which has emerged from the 20th century, which
contains,
in my view, three very dangerous strands.
First, art as a communicator of science, where the artist
represents the
science to the outside world. This is, essentially, art as a
publicity and
communications tool, and can happen consciously or
unconsciously
when the artist becomes subsumed in the science. This is
becoming
critical in the current cash crisis, when artists are seeking new
ways of
funding their work and science promises new purse-strings.
Second, science as a means of production, where scienti]c
methods,
experimentation and technologies become the channel through
which art is processed and made, subjugating the imagination to
reductive processes.
Third, science as art — for example, when a snapshot of a cell

6. is
admired as beautiful or a chemists’ laboratory is found in an art
gallery. Both instantly become art, “daringly” crossing the
threshold
of the arts/science boundary, but in reality saying nothing more
than
that. It is an intervention that leads nowhere.
But there is a fourth, more invisible, strand, where the arts and
science are in Xuid interchange — just as they were in the time
of
Leonardo da Vinci, when he moved easily between the two.
Here, the
disciplines are honoured for their similarities as well as their
essential
dicerences.
Let me explain this fourth and more subtle strand in full. Arts
and
science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to
be
human in this world. Both are driven by curiosity, discovery,
the

7. aspiration for knowledge of the world or oneself, and perhaps,
as the
conceptual artist Goshka Macuga said on her recent visit to
Cern, a
desire for world domination. She was half joking.
But they express themselves in dicerent ways: the arts through
the
body and mind, often driven by the exploration of the ego,
contradictions and the sheer messiness of life; science through
equations, directed, collaborative research and experimentation
that
works in a progressive, linear fashion.
As Dr Michael Doser, the experimental physicist on Cern’s
cultural
board for the arts, says: “What I ]nd wonderful about working
with
artists is that they are just as fascinated by side routes and
diversions
as they are by the direction in which they are going. This is
what
makes artistic work really dicerent from scienti]c work.”
These oscillations between sameness and dicerences form what I
call

8. the fourth aesthetic — the Leonardo way. Honour the dicerences
and
then amazing work, true arts/science work, happens. One
example is
Olafur Eliasson’s Your Split Second House, shown at the
Venice
Architecture Biennale in 2010, which took physics as its
jumping-oc
point.
http://www.olafureliasson.net/
https://vimeo.com/17332056
This installation of twirling water-sprays momentarily separated
the
drops of water under strobe lights. It is a piece about
perception, and
was inspired by thinking about how long it takes an astronaut to
get
out of a black hole. The answer is about a day. But to people
who are
not in the hole, the astronaut takes forever.
Or take the work of Mariko Mori, which is driven by engaging
with

9. opposites and the oscillations between the two: reality and
fantasy,
seriousness and humour, human and machine, technology and
nature, science and religion. This is shown very clearly by
Wave UFO,
which is simultaneously an architectural piece, a scienti]c
experiment
in which the visitor’s brain waves become the work of art in a
space-
age pod, and a temple to meditation.
The piece is fuelled as much by science and technology as it is
by
Buddhism and an investigation of religion. Critically, Eliasson
and
Mori are not so enthralled by the wonders of science that their
work
loses its wonder and integrity.
For nine months, I tracked a very con]dent young Swiss artist
and
astrophysicist working together on a residency. For four
months, they
were equally enthralled by each other. But then there was a
turning

10. point. The artist said to me: “The science is so amazing that I
have to
prove that I understand it and that I too have a brain.”
From that moment, I knew he was lost. The work he did at the
end of
the residency was at best a communications piece trying to
explain
what quantum ]elds were. Now, a year later, he has rediscovered
his
http://www.faoufoundation.org/
playfulness by regaining his distance from the all-intoxicating
wonder
of particle physics, and is starting to create great work again.
I will leave you with two quotes, one from an artist and one
from a
scientist, in order to practise what I preach: mutual respect,
equal
exchange and dicerence.
Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is
the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the
cradle

11. of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can
no
longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his
eyes are
dimmed.”
Keith Tyson: “If you attempt to marry and equate art with
science,
then you fail. If you allow what is not similar about art and
science,
and their dicerent methods and processes, to co-exist and thrive,
then
a real art/science collaboration and aesthetic will emerge. But at
the
end of the day, art and science are united by one logic and one
impulse — both are attempts to understand what it is to be
human
and the world around us.”
That’s why I call [email protected], the programme I have
created, Cern’s
latest great experiment, colliding elements even more elusive
than
the Higgs boson: namely, human creativity and the imagination.
It

12. was founded to honour the creative process, and to keep science
and
the arts in an equal balance of wonder — and apart, too. Let’s
just
have spaces for this to happen, and let the magic and the
mystery —
those chance operations the great John Cage talked about —
occur.
http://www.davidrisleygallery.com/artists/keith-tyson
The writer is a Clore Fellow and is head of international arts
development and the arts programme at Cern. She created
Cern’s arts
policy and its main strategy, the [email protected] Artists’
Residency
programme.
Submissions by artists working in the digital domain to win a
funded
residency in the [email protected] programme are open until 31
October.
For more information, see www.cern.ch/arts/collide. A
submission
form can be found online at http://collide.aec.at

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