REVIEW OF BOOKS

Art and Science,

On Speaking Terms
Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited by
Eduardo Kac, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007;
;399 pages, $34.95.
The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman
Present to a Biocultural Future, edited hy
Marquard Smith and Joanne Moira, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press, 2006; 340 pages, $34.95.
Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and
Philosophy of Artificial life, edited by Jessica
Uiskin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007;
389 pages, $25.
Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images,
by Barbara Maria Stafford, Chicago, University of
Cliicago Press. 2007; 281 pages, $45.
Scnsoriuni: Embodied Experience, Technoiogy,
and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones,
Canibridgp, Mass., MIT Press, 2006; 268 pages, $30.
The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and
Science, by Cretien van Campen, Cambridge, Mass.,
MIT Press, 2007; 208 pages, $29.95.

responses to new scientific developments in these

fields (particularly to genetic manipulation)-
again, an attitude alien to the leading figures of
the Renaissance but so common in modern visual
and literary culture that it is often left unexamined. There is also a tendency, among artists, to
look to the explosion of new technology for stray
evidence of other worldsa paradoxically mystical response characteristic as well of the late 19th
century, a period with its own explosive growth
of new technologies. (Both the wariness and the
supernaturaiism are approaches to science more
readily associated with fundamentalist religion
than advanced art, which may or may not be relevant to cultural prodnction under the woridmde
shadow of extremist theology.)

But a sea change seems under way. The postmodern suspicion that hard science is a pillar of
the patriarchy survives (here, citation of Foncault
is .still inevitable). For some intrepid souls, though,
this anathema has broken down under the pressure of evidence that relativism, lately the province
of cultural theory, has been newly associated with
science (where, after all, it is not altogether unfamiliar; witness physics's uncertainty principle and
theories of relativity, beloved by early modernists).
BY NANCY PRINCENTHAL
In the 20-plus years since Donna Haraway's "Maniif/IIS of Life: Bio Art and Beyond is co-pub- festo for Cyborgs," roboticists, biologists and fanlished by the Leonardo Society, which also tasists have come to share a body of truth-blurring
publishes a magazine that, like its books, addresses imageiy, at once outlandish and real. That many
the intersection of art and science. The society's artists overstate their "discoveries" in science and
namesake made contributions of equal moment to mistake some of what they see there goes without
the fields of mechanical engineering, anatomy and saying. No matter. Exaggeration is as well-proven
visual representation; for the contributors to this a rhetorical choice as science's own distinctively
hook, and to the other five reviewed here (among bureaucratic, neologism-laden idiom.
dozens in a very crowded field), that's not really
In fact, for al! the virtues of, for instance,
a viable option. Artists and scientists freely scout genetically modified sculptures, the most fruitful
each other's work for ideas and data, butgiven hybrid to emerge from the new science and the lay
the specialization of knowledge in our timeno response it has generated may well be linguistic: a
one can he expected to engage in botb practices polyglot vocabulary that draws equally on biology,
with equal commitment or sophistication.
technology and art. Such a lexical shift would be an
Nonetheless, interdisciplinary dialogue now enormous boon, but it won't be easy to forge. While
abounds, and it is cause for cheeror, at the very the many rich metaphors derived from science by
least, careful notice. Not since the virtual reality artists and writers elicit understandable resistance
craze of the early '90s, when wildly infiated claims from researchers, there are surprising reserves of
were made for the impact that a new kind of digital conservatism on both sides. Irrespective of their
equipment would have on human perceptual expe- day jobs, language preservationiststhose who
rience, have so many artists been so involved with balk at the most strenuous metaphoric stretches
the promises and threats of cutting-edge scientific and heaviest theoretical exertionstend to be
research. This time around, the preponderance of people who benefit from the new technologies in
concern is with biology rather than digital-imag- tangible ways; those most venturesome in their
ing technology (or, as in the first part of the 20t,h theoretical excursions tend, a little paradoxically,
century, quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis). to be most leery of science (and likeliest to cite
Genetics has attracted the lion's share of atten- such hoaiy figures as Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan,
tion, though studies of brain and mind are still Derrida, Deleuze and so on), What seems shared
drawing a great deal of interest, and there are new is an assumption of humankind's creeping disdevelopments in prosthetics and robotics that have embodiment. Reproduction without sex, fetishnatural appeal for technophilic artists. But even ism without eroticism, minds without wetware,
for those examining the implications of new work fatal damage without death: in describing this new
in psychology and neuroscience, the trajectory of state of affairs, observers from every discipline find
exjjlorationwith speculation invariably acceler- themselves at a loss for wordswhich the authors
ating as it proceedsleads outward from the self, of these several books are eager to supply.
finding increasing porosity in borders separating
individuals from one another, one species from the
duardo Kac, editor oi Signs of Life (and,
next and even the biological from the artificial.
with Avital Ronell, of the just published Life
Along with avid interest, there is a great deal of Extreme; Kac also wrote the essays collected in
entrenched fear and anger in artists' and theorists' Telepresence & Bio Art, 2005), is an artist respon-

sible for perhaps the best-knovm example of the

"bio art" that is the curreni book's subject: the
genetically modified rabbit. Alba, that he commissioned a French lab to create in 2000; it glowed a
fiuorescent green (when exposed to a certain kind
of light) with the help of DNA borrowed from naturally phosphorescent fish. Right from the outset of
the book, Kac establishes an antagonistic relationship to the science in question. "It is not clear
what are the henefits, if any, to the consumer." he
says of genetically modified foods on the introduction's first page, refiecting an aversion rife among
wealthy Western consumersnot those likeliest to
benefit from the new, hardier crops. But his wideranging selection of essays, most of them recent
and many newly commissioned, is more judicious,
and occasionally inspired.
Among the book's 30-odd contributors, the only
scientist is Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), who
won a Nobel Prize in 1945 for the discovery of penicillin and is represented by a charming one-page
manual on making paintings from living colonies
of moid; the images thus produced are pronounced
"useful for... museum and teaching purposes." No
other contributor is quite so circumspect about the
implications of taking biology in hand for esthetic
purposes. In the book's first, theoretical section,
written mainly by cultural critics and philosophers,
there is considerable hyperventilating about monstrous hybrids, designer bodies and subject/object
confusion in the brave new world of cloned sheep
and crossbred lamh/goats. Theoretician Bernard
Andrieu wonders whether the new, genetically
engineered "chimera [is] a trial to initiate humans
to the dark side of creation" and further muses, "Is
not the wish to end the castration imposed by our
genetic identity an acknowledgement of our species' self-loathing, or tbe evidence of our forgetfulness ofthe genetic mutations infiicted on the children of Chernobyl and Hiroshima?" This last goes
to the postwar heart of lingering biotechnophobia,
the same bleak area artist Louis Bee visits when
he warns of a new breed of electro-digital-genetic
"technoteratogens."
More optimistic observers include Richard
Doyle, a professor of P^nglish and one of the few to
note that while the new biology may have promised
triumph over death or at least a new understanding of life, "its deliveiy has been rendered more
in anxiety than gnosis." Like many others, he calls
attention to the long reach of genetic manipulation, which is as old as agriculture and the domestication of animals. But Doyle'.s particular subject is the cultivation of marijuana, which (as he
describes it, with some sympathy) involves fiendishly complicated genetic modifications; moreover
getting high, he observes, and playing with the
human genome "botb hack into our agency as
humans," a perspective that administers tonic
doses of both humility and humor.
Sigm of Life'ti next section, on bioethics,
includes a compelling if slightly digressive legal
perspective on animal rights (on which ground,
among others, Kac's own work has been challenged). Also under this heading, philosopher
Dominique Lestel observes that neither the drive
toward expressiveand even decorativebehav-

ArtinAmerica 45

ior nor the willingness to go out of species to satisiy

it is an exclusively human prerogative; as evidence,
he cites spider crabs that make "garlands" for
their shells from algae and small sponges. Regarding genetically modified organisms, Lestel sensibly writes that "the existence of GMOs (already
invented by nature millions of years ago) is less
problematic than the privatization of living organisms, accomplished by means of patents owned by
a select number of multinational companie.s."

of bacteria cloned from his DNA, presented in a

framed rectangle of agar jelly.
A concluding historical miscellany contains the
fascinating story of Edward Steichen's lovingly
hred delphiniums, exhibited in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was chair of the advisory committee on photography. As art historian
Ronald Gedrim points out, Steichen's one-week
flower show followed (by two years) the museum's
"Machine Art" exhibition, which featured func
The book's largest set^tion is devoted to examples tional and decorative objects both industrial and
of bio art as Kac defines itthat is, work involving domestic, a lineage in which the fancy d^cor-suitactual living matter, not simply its representa- able blossoms might be said to belong. For his part,
tionand I.S written by that work's creators, some Steichen sounded a great deal like his 21st-century
of whom began playing with DNA molecules not descendants when he wrote, in a 1949 article for
long after they first became widely available in the a horticultural magazine, "The science of heredity
early 1980s. By 2002, when the first complexly func- when applied to plant breeding, which has as its
tional synthetic genome was made (these dates ultimate purpose the aesthetic appeal of beauty,
are courtesy Joe Davis's essay), artists were busy is a creative art. Instead of words or pigment or
interpreting and exploiting its implications. (Col- tone the plant breeder works and struggles with
laborating artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr cite factors and forces that have been locked up . . . for
19H) as the year that living tissue from complex tens of thousands of years." (In 1999, Delphinium
organisms was first cultured; they note that H.G. Steichen Strain was still available from Burpee,
Wells's prophetic Island of Dr. Moreau followed at $2.95 a seed packet, but the current catalogue
soon thereafter.) Some of the bio art surveyed seems to have dropped it. Will old packets now
evolve into art?)
is fairly benign: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Har
vey exploit analogies between photosynthesis and
Some of the artists left out of Kac's survey, prephotography to make pictures with chlorophyll,
developing them in fields of grass. George Ges- sumably because they picture rather than implesert breeds plants, and notes rather enigmatically ment genetic research, include Suzanne Anker,
that evolution is smarter than we are; the "DNA Dennis Ashbaugh, Wim Deivoye, Ifiigo Manglanoharmonic," he says, is not in our range, But then Ovalle and Patricia Piccinini. Al.so omitted are the
again, Gessert says, art uses mental energies that now dormant hut lately headline-grabbing Critical
other disciplineslike sciencereject, "and is Art Ensemble (one of whose members, Steve Kurtz,
widely recognized as everyone's business," which has been prosecuted as a suspected terrorist for
puts it in a useful position to promote science's his role in producing the group's "biotech" projects). Though Kac's criteria for inclusion are peradvances.
fectly sound, it seems a shame to have overlooked
Equally benevolently, Marta de Menezes manip- the insightsand powerful worksthat these
ulates the spots on butterfly wings through cross- artists offer.
breeding, documenting her efforts, and Brandon
Ballengee has produced stunning photos of the
lectro-mechanical simulations of human
frogs he has bred by pairing like with like, in a
life and its constituent parts, in the form
quixotic attempt to "resurface" lost traits. On of robotics and prosthetics, are theoretical
the other hand, Paul Perry makes art with can- goldmines hardly less rich than genetics. The
cer cells. Catts and Zurr's indisputably creepy Prosthetic Impulse: From a Poslhuman Present
"semi-living sculptures" involve live tissue culture to a Biocuitural Future establishes its ambigrown around various symbolic objects, such as tions in its mouthful of a title, and with essays
a glass flgurine shaped like a bomb. Two artists, that go all over the map. It is especially clear
Paul Vanouse and Regina TVinidade, seem to have from this book's range that the gravest alarm is
arrived independently at the idea of using gel expressedand widest poetic license takenby
clectrophoresis, a process used in forensics to those who are whole and healthy; those living
produce "DNA fingerprints." Like Alexander Flem- with prostheses have an entirely different pering before him, davJdkremers makes paintings spective on the artificial parts' theoretical implifrom microorganisms, though those that form his cationsand, on the whole, a vigorous resistance
mediumbacteria^have been artificially col- to metaphorical usage (as would likely be true of
ored and genetically altered. Immodest even by any future patient to benefit from not-yet-proven
this book's rather lax standards, davidkremers genetic therapies),
muses that "what once was a role played by a god
In an introduction written jointly by the book's
is today just somebody's job." By contrast, Natalie
Jeremyenko humbly propo.ses that artificially bred editors, Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra,
hybrids be contextualized, as nature always is, by approving attention is drawn (as in several essays
the conditions of nurture: the project she docu- that follow) to the term "metaphorical opportunments here, a model of simplicity, involves planting ism," a two-word critique of heedless analogizing
1.000 genetically identical trees in hundreds of credited to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder,
different placeswith, inevitably, widely varying who coined it for the introduction to the book they
outcomes, Along with Marc Quinn, Jeremyenko is edited in 1097 on IHscourses of Disability. Smith
one of the better-known of the contributing artists; and Morra go on to express skepticism about the
Quinn i.s represented by a rather uninspiring por- "frenzied" warning issued in 1993 by Jean Baudriltrait of a British scientist in the form of a colony lard, who wrote, "the point when prostheses are
introduced at a deeper level, when they are so

The path of exploration

leads outward from the
self, finding increasing
porosity in borders
between one species and
the next and even
between the biological
and the artificial.
completely internalized that they infiltrate the
anonymous and the micro molecular core of the
body . . . : this point meant the end of the body,
the end of its history," Rejecting Baudrillard's
"overexcited fear" of cybernetic prostheses. Smith
and Morra offer (or so their book's subtitle suggests) a "biocuitural future" in which, as defined
by contributing writer Lennard Davis, "the study of
the scientificized and medicalized body in history,
culture and polillcs" will supplant outdated frameworks for social and cultural analysis.
In fact, especially in the latter half of the book
(which has a dozen essays by cultural theorists
of various stripes), intellectual caution is often
thrown to the wind, as when it is claimed that
by externalizing the mind, photography and film
constitute forms of prosthesis, and that "turntablism"that is, being a disc jockey in the manner
of Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookj'represents "an
instance of media as technological extension/prosthetic," But along the way, there are more nuanced
observations by writers closely involved with latemodel artificial limbs and other body parts. "Experience of any kind requires both bodies and language for its expression," writes Vivian Sobchack,
a film historian who relies on an artificial leg,
While arguing for attention to the literal and material ground for using pro.sthetics as a metaphor,
she also notes that "metaphor is, by tropological
nature, a displacement" of a kind not unrelated to
the displacement of physical function from living
flesh to artificial substitute.
In his own essay, co-editor Smith elaborates on
the media life of athlete, actress and model Ainiee
MuUins (Sobchack discusses her, too), A double
below-the-knee amputee, Mullins had a lively presence as a successful contender again,st able-bodied
track and field stars, and also as "an eroticized
Cyborgian sex kitten" in fashion magazines and
other popular print media, even before she landed
a starring role in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3.
Wary, too, of "opportunistic" language use. Smith
goes on to question whether Mullins's wide appeal
might not suggest ways of thinking ahout "perversion and fetishism , . . that are resoundingly not
sexual at all." Though his logic is less than watertight. Smith's discussion opens intriguing territoryand leaves, oddly, altogether unexplored the
highly provocative prostheses Bamey fashioned for
himself throughout the Cremaster cycle.
In the course of a very interesting essay that
considers genetic therapies as themselves forms of
prosthesis, Lennard Davis (who teaches English,
disability studies and medical educationsurely
a culturally symptomatic job description) offers
a wonderfully succinct summary of genes, DNA
ArtinAmerica

47

and chromosomes and what is now known of their

function (not as much as you might think). But the
book's paj;c-turner is an essay by Lisa CartwTight
and Brian Goldfarb describing the latest in prosthetic technology, in which manufactured parts
are wired (literally) to the living body's intact
ner\-e systt^ni (this medical technology was also the
subject of "Muscle Memory," a July 30, 2007, New
Yorker article); in one experimental device, a camera mounted on a pair of eyeglasses communicates
with an electrode array in the subject's visual cortex, enhancing control over the user's "virtual arm"
and prompting the authors to wonder whether it is
not as much a visual as a motor prosthetic. Indeed,
artificial vision for the blind (and, though not
described here, hearing for the deaf) are in development; one researcher has produced an "electrical sensor that interfaces with the tongue and
transmits visual iuformalion," ostensibly as an aid
to firefighters, rescue divers and others working
in low visibility conditions. Sounding remarkably
like E.H. Gonibrich, the scientist who created it is
(juoted as saving, "you don't see with your eyes, you
.see with yciur brain,"

they've inspired, the book begins with the hydraulic animated figures of the ancient Greeks and proceeds to medieval alchemy and various automata
dating from the Renaissance forward hefore concluding with 21st-century robots. Editor Jessica
Riskin writes in her introduction that by the late
18th century, automata and the speculation they
provoked were sufficiently widespread that a satirical story was penned with the title "Humans Are
Machines ofthe Angels."
One fascinating essay looks at Shakespeare's A
Winter's Tale (and others of his plays) in light of
Elizabethan automata, and Descartes's deus ex
machina in light of Shakespeare's, tracing a lineage
of ghost-in-machine solutions to problems both
trivial and profound. Jacques Vaucaason's famously
intricate 18th-century mechanical figures, among
them a music-making flutist and an animated duck,
are compared to contemporary work in anatomy in
particular the flayed, preserved and artfully posed
corpses that publicized pioneering physiological
explorations then under way The species, race and
gender of remarkably capable but patently soulless
colonial-era automata (more often representing
women, animals and Africans than European men,
for reasons that are fairly obvious) are considered
in a historical context.

One scientist has created

a sensor that transmits
visual information via
the tongue. Sounding
remarkably like E.H.
Gombrich, he says, "you
don't see with your eyes,
you see with your brain."

the brain broadly associated with one or another

basic function (and to the scientists who study
them), in the course of which Stafford draws some
rather untethered conclusions, e.g., "The powerful
impact exerted by a Hat background together with
a clear composition made up of figures arranged
in strongly polarized poses demonstrates that
such summary forms can bypass focal attention
to strike the amygdale directly." ("Demonstrates"
is the problem word there.) Awkward questions
arise, such as "what is the material and ontological coimplication of animals, plants, rocks?" And
If Foucault is the dark angel of theorizing about
vertiginous leaps are taken, as when the husiness
genetics, novelist William Gibson, whose fictional
of making and viewing complex visual patterns is
universe is permeated by digitally controlled hardware, serves the same role for prosthetics. On the
Cultural frameworks are provided for more recent likened to the "binding problem" in scientific and
evidence of this book, he has no real counterpart developments as well, and the most familiar coin- philosophical studies of mind, which concerns the
among visual artists. Apart from the film and pho- ages glossed, from Norbert Weiner's "cybernetics" question of how an integrated sense of selfi.e.,
tography referred to in the essays mentioned above, of the 1940s to Katherine Hayles's definition of consciousnessis derived from the many parallel
and Rauschenberg's transfer drawings, which are "posthuman," in a If)9!) book which contends that programs running in the brain and its neurological
Ihe subject of a sense-stretching concluding essay, consciousness is a distributed phenomenon seam- branches. Throughout, Stafford deploys metaphor
little actual artwork is discussed. Oddly, no one in lessly uniting humans and intelligent machines (this as final analysis, which results in prose as lush as it
Tiie ProRthetic Impulse addresses what are prob- usage is borrowed for Tlir Prosthetic ImpuLse'fi sub- is impenetrable. But her reach is formidable, and
ably the most prominent visual representations title; the term posthuman gained art-world visibility the sheer range of both visual and textual material
of prosthesesthose in paintings, drawings and with Jeffrey Deitch's 1992 exhibition and catalogue she has commandeered for this richly illustrated
collages by Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield of that name). Among the distinguished academics book recommends it as a resource.
and other Neue Sachlichkeit artists working in contributing essays to Genesis Rednx is a lone artTwo conflicting lines of development can be
the wake of World War I. The American Civil War ist, Elizabeth King, whose own work, in figurative
is referred to often because its unprecedented sculpture and \ideo, led to a deepening investigation traced in Sensorium.: Embodied Erperienre, Techcasualty rate created urgent need for artificial of historical automata. Her essay here is on a 16th- nology, and Contemporary Art, the catalogue,
limbs and helped launch a (minor) industiy But century "praying machine" in the form of a IG-inch- edited hy ait historian Caroline Jones, for a 2007
the even greater carnage of the First World War, high mechanical monk that walks (remarkably, it exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center. One line
and the widespread perception that it was fought remains in working order) around the perimeter of follows technology's support, for ever more isolated
in part, hy and for hea\y industry, more forcefully an imaginary cloister, periodically turning its head, perceptual (and emotional) experiencefor solireshaped the understanding of its most visibly raising its rosary to its lips and striking its breast. tary listeners and viewers, hooked up to their own
damaged casualties, who were pictured in art and King explains the figure's connection to Phillip II little iPods and laptops as if to cultural drip-feeds.
the popular imagination as ominous new hybrids of of Spain's dying son, who, legend says, was saved The other line followed, in such collective phenomena as the Internet's pan-connectedness and
technology and tiesh.
by the miraculous posthumous intervention of a the hive minds and raves it permits, is the first's
locally revered monk; the king promised another
That many physically disabled war survivors "miracle" in exchange for the prince's recovery, and mirror image. This is the one favored in Jones's
(now as then) suffer emotional iiyury as well, and commissioned the mechanical animation (said to essay, "The Mediated Sensorium," which describes
thus serve as living symbols of the manifold costs be the local monk's likene.ss) in partial fulfillment a crucial shift, in the production and understanding
of mechanized violence, surely continues to influ- of his vow. Along the way. King delicately traces the of visual art, toward inclusive ness with respect to
ence the perception of prosthetics and those who several registers of faithin reason, in the fruits sensory modalities other than sight, and perceptual
wear them^a subject not discussed. Nor do the of devotion and in resurrectionthat fueled the systems other than the ones we're hom with. Sound,
smell and touch are welcomed, as are technological
authors mention that the many American soldiers automaton's creation.
enhancements. "Distributed intelligence and collecwho have come home from Iraq as amputees have
tive knowledge is the new name of the gan\e, within
motivated considerable new research in this area.
bodies as well as between them," she writes.
These oversights are indicative of a lurking inclinalso taking the long view, Barbara Stafford, an
tion, in all these hook.s, to .scant current political
art historian who contributed to both Signs
An oddly anachronistic focus on high modernreality in favor of an innocently geeky disposition of Life and Semorium (see below) and is the
ism as a regime of sensoiy inhibitionand, even
that is equal parts horror and fa.scination.
author of several previous hooks on various inter- more surprising, on the evil stewardship of that
While its connection to contemporary art is fairly sections between science and visual art., has most regime by Clement Greenbergis demystified in
indirect. Genesi-s Redu.r: Essays in Ih^ History and recently released Echo Objects: The Cognitive an endnote explaining that Jones's essay is a reviPhilosophy of Artificial Life offers exceptionally Work of Images. Not for the acrophobe, her soar- sion of the last chapter of her 2005 book. Eyesight
satLsfving food for thought. Telling one stranger-than- ing flights of speculation lead from William Blake Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the
fiction tale after another ahout artificial beings, to Thomas Struth, touching many unfamiliar fig- Bureaucratization qf the Senses. But her text is
the beliefs that framed their creation and the faith ures in between. References are made to areas in well-argued and plenty germane to the subject at

Art in America 49

hand, and it is augmented not only with essays by

co-curators Hill Arning, .lane Far\'er, Yuko Hasegawa and Maijorj'Jacobson (which concern the oddly
chosen group of artists in the show; they include
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Bruce Nauman and Anri Sala), but also by a lively "ahecedarius" where, in fashionably arbitraiy order (that
is, alphabetically), a wide variety of contributors
from the arts and social sciences address topics
that range from "air" to "zoon." Prosthetics and
robotics, synesthesia and nanofacture are all here,
along with Barbara Stafford (as writer), Aimee
Muiiins (as subject), and other familiar figures,
Donna Haraway reflects on animals fitted with
videocams for producing nature films under the
heading "compounding." William J. Mitchell's entry
on "networked eyes" considers the tiny cameras in
cell phones, which he says are helping build a "new
panopticon"; writing on "ocularity," Martin Jay
explores photography's dubious truths. Jonathan
Grary's entry on "spectral" is in fact a fascinating
little text on a sunstnick painting by Turner.
Under the heading '"godscan,'' Peter Lunenfeld
expresses skepticism about the uses to which the
snazzy photos produced by advanced brain-imaging technology have been put by laypeople and
researchers alike, an issue also addressed in an
entiy on "mental image" by cognitive psychologist
Stephen Kosslyn, the book's sole research scientist.
The ahecedarius's penultimate entry, on "yuck factor," is illustrated with a photo of a hairless mouse
hearing, as a graft on its back, a "hai^estable"
baby-size human ear grown from human cartilage
cells; in the discussion that follows, Caroline Bas-

BENTLEY

sett urges caution about assuming that revulsion at

such experiments is hoth instinctive and inherently
moral. Similarly, Mark Doty, writing on "artificial,"
muses that whatever we may have learned from
the back-to-the-land ethos of the '60s, "the desire
to return to nature is inevitably the pastoral mask
worn by a conservative agenda; it presupposes the
authority to tell us what 'natural' is, a power cheerfully seized by preacher, lawmaker, and judge."
As much as anything else, the wildly diverse
approaches to these admittedly incompatible subjects suggest both the enormous promise, and
the Babel-like challenge, of sustaining dialogue
between the humanities and sciences. The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, by
social scientist Cretien van Campen, is a straightforward, readable account of a perceptual condition in which sensory modalities are crossedfor
instance, when music and other sounds are experienced as colors, Though the author says it may
be a neurological syndrome"brain scans" are
introduced to support its neural hasis-he also
writes that all newborns perceive their world as
a unified sensoiy continuum. While "most intermodal connections are eliminated in the first six
months," and such links are gone for good by age
11, some people never lose the tendencythe gift,
in van Campen's viewfor synesthesia. Many artists, he argues, have benefited from it, including
Kandinsky, Klee and Nabokov (van Campen's evidence is in both the work and the artists' own commentar>'). But he concludes by affirming a belief
that everyone has a propensity for synesthesia, and
can enhance it with concentrated effort.

There is a lurking
inclination, in all these
books, to scant current
political reality in favor
of an innocently geeky
disposition that is
equal parts horror
and fascination.
Though it is written clearly and with passion,
van Campen's book lacks the intellectual energy of
the edited volumes, which are invigorated by their
messier shapes and dissonant voices. Ungainly and
blurry at its borders, the subject at hand throughoutroughly, how current science shapes human
experience and its expression, insinuating itself
into the very fabric of our beings^is not really
amenable to linear narrative or simple logic. In
fact, perhaps the best way to distinguish human
beings from their next of kin, whether animal,
chemical or digital, would be to dispense with metaphor in favor of perfect taut.ology. In The Open:
Man and Animal, philosopher Giorgio Agamben
writes, "Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly
defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a
machine or device for producing the recognition
of the human." An unabashedly circular statement, it puts people and technology into a dizzying
orbit that may be emblematic of current relations
between science and art.
Q

BENTLEY PROJECTS 215 E Gram street, phoenix AZ

480.946.6060

bentleygallery.com

602.340.9200

bentleyprojects.com

Art in America 51