Impossible Views

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An
artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold,
they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination.That is all wrong.

— Isaac Asimov “Prometheus,” The Roving Mind (1983)

There is more that connects art and science than divides, and it should not be news that those early
pioneers of anatomy, for example, were often skilled draftspersons, too. What better way to share
practical knowledge of the internal structures of the body than through illustration? Explorations of
the body through dissection and the subsequent visualisation of its interior, represent quite clearly
the intertwined nature of art and science, a relationship that has endured. Since the 15th Century, art
and science were arguably part of a potent partnership, a collaborative project which created the
conditions for the Enlightenment and set forth the predominance of Western culture around the
world, for good and ill. Strangely, as Asimov points out, a consensus has arisen in contemporary
society which sees the two as separate and distinct, a crude binary of the rational versus irrational
mind, where the cool detachment of the scientist is set in opposition to the romantic idealisation of
the emotive artist.

Asimov is correct in saying these are misconceptions, a false dichotomy, wrongheaded and
cliché, and his Prometheus sums up this interrelationship very well. He says:

The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art
suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where
reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Impossible Views explores the similarities, overlaps and synergies between art and science, the artist
and the scientist. From the laboratory to the artist’s studio, the work of the artist and the scientist
appear rooted in similar practices, are allied to similar processes, and rely upon similar modes of
thinking. And both seem concerned with revelation, the revealing of something hidden or previously
unknown. Think of the geologist wetting a rock sample to show the grain, and the photographer
developing film to produce an image. Each example though exists in a longer chain of processes and
decisions: the rock sample must found, whether mined or picked from the ground; before this the
decision to begin the process of mining or surveying the ground, and before this, the question of
what to look for and where? The photographer, too, makes multiple decisions setting up the camera
to take a photograph, let alone before developing the film or printing the image.

In essence, art and science are both types of projects. They rely on a research question or questions,
the require planning and thought, they are about experimentation, finding new ways and methods to
approach names problems and questions, and often new problems and questions which emerge
during the processes of investigation and analysis. Often strict planning and careful organisation of
materials and processes are the imperative, the ability to replicate results crucial. Sometimes artists
and scientists appropriate methods and approaches from other disciplinary fields, or use outmoded
techniques or processes in new contexts. Sometimes what artists and scientists expect to happen as
a result of experimentation does not happen, and yet the results are no less interesting or important:
accident and exigency. The work of scientists and artists requires invention, ingenuity and play,
designing and building new tools or experiments, testing the limits, pushing boundaries, challenging
conventions. Often, then, art and science touch upon taboos, they ask us to reconsider the moral and
ethical dimensions of the disciplines themselves but also of wider society and culture. Art and
science rely upon assessment, judgement, the display of results and narratives which contextualise
findings, elucidate practices and inspire further investigation. Science and art are about systems,
finding them, inventing them, using and subverting them. Arts and science have relied upon the insight
of the individual but depend upon the supporting and structuring networks culture and society. Both
can be cold and distant, or emotive and affective, both hold revolutionary and radical potential,
sometimes the opposite, too. Art has borrowed from science, and science from art, their complex
relationship has seen them complicit in positive and negative change, and or appropriated and used in
ways set against their wishes or original conception.

Art and science are fundamentally about the human imagination, the desire and drive to understand
our world and out impact on it.

Mark Rawlinson