Science and Art: Towards a New Kind of Dialogue

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Jean-Marc Philippe, a painter, is also a former scientist. He is interested in the junctions between art and various fields of knowledge, in particular in Art–Science relations, having long been fascinated by the link between art, drugs and creativity. Since his last one-man show at FIAC 81, his next exhibitions will take place in Belgium (October–November 82) and in Japan (during 83). He is currently a consultant to the future Musée des Sciences et des Techniques de la Villette.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF SCIENCE

Among all the pyramids of human knowledge, the only one that is cumulative is without any doubt the scientific pyramid, whereas the other pyramids of knowledge reach their peak and then die out, giving way to new currents of ideas, so many new starting points. In this landscape of human knowledge, the scientific pyramid never stops growing, even overflowing its own bounds to nourish fields that until quite recently were still foreign to it. The Scientific Fact and the achievements it bequeaths to us now put down essential roots in the most diverse disciplines, from philosophy to art.

How, for example, could we form any idea of man and the world without recourse to science?

Science is omnipresent in our every act and gesture, through all the hypotheses it suggests to us, through its applications and its technological spin-offs. Our most intimate behaviour has been modified and adapted to what it provides: each of us, at one time or another, has been the fortunate beneficiary of chemotherapy; information travels at the speed of light; the pill allows adolescents to live in tune with their hormones; a single event can be seen instantly by several billion human beings; the scale of the Earth is no longer the same, understood as it now is as a life raft in space; the infinitely large is measurable, the infinitely small within reach. Fabulous scientific pyramid that helps us so much in describing what surrounds us; pernicious Science which, while it reveals the “how”, divulges nothing of the “why”.

Although, generally speaking, the Scientific Fact is indeed perceived by all, it is perceived to varying degrees. Some perceive only its Form, through its highest-performing objects as highlighted by the media (space shuttle, computer “chip”…). Others see in it its Services and Means (television, surgical lasers…). Lastly there remain those who perceive Science in the nature of its reasoning, that is to say in its very essence. They are few in number.

In one way or another, we are all indeed concerned. Moreover, with the technological effort that derives from fundamental science resting on a prodigious and unique collective human effort in people, resources, skills and equipment, all the elements that go into the making of myths are brought together. Do we not see T-shirts bearing the likeness of Marilyn Monroe side by side with T-shirts reading E=MC 2!

But, as in every myth, there is somewhere a form of deception, and the lie here lies in the fact that mythologised Science seems capable of containing and offering remedies for all our earthly ills (world hunger, lowering of infant mortality, increased longevity…). When in fact it — Science — merely shifts the problems. And it will go on doing so as long as it is not associated with a new kind of moral order, which itself remains to be defined and invented. Otherwise it will continue to scatter demonic nuclear swords of Damocles, the worst and the best.

SURFACE RELATIONS BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

In such a context, the artist could not remain a stranger, and an interaction between the world of the Sciences and that of the Arts was bound to develop. Indeed, historically, one can observe that the artist is a kind of born experimenter, who has always been able spontaneously to make his own the new means that Science offered him and that suited him. But this borrowing of means, fundamental as it was, in no way disturbed his creative gesture: the Artist was merely widening his palette of possibilities.

Without the advent of the chemistry of coloured pigments in the course of the 19th century, the Impressionists could never have produced the body of work we know them for. Likewise, without the commercial availability of acrylic pigments, around the 1930s, Rothko could not have accomplished his own in the same terms.

In music, such borrowings of means had equally decisive effects on the very way musical composition was conceived. Wagner, for instance, without the extraordinary development of the brass — the saxophone, the French horn and the trumpet all postdate

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ERICH MENDELSOHN, the Einstein Observatory in Potsdam

1850 — could not have settled on his orchestration as he conceived it. Without the Western instrument-making industry, the phenomenon of jazz would never have existed.

In architecture, although the case differs from that of the arts mentioned above, the sequence of iron, cast iron, steel, concrete, aluminium and glass has had the consequences we know on the appearance of the buildings, monuments and engineering works that surround us.

What is more, in the 20th century science lies at the very foundation of entirely new arts. Together with its industrialists, it has offered artists wholly unprecedented means of expression: photography accessible to all, though invented in the previous century, and also cinema, the talking pictures, television, video, and holography too. Thus the face of the arts as we know it today truly derives from this extraordinary array of means placed at the disposal of each person's sensibility, means which stem directly from the Scientific Fact.

It should be noted here that all these means placed at the disposal of artists lent themselves to new investigations but neither disturbed nor altered their creative act — artists who, moreover, cared very little about the scientific provenance of these means.

Another kind of involvement between science and art also arises from the fact that, helped by the scientific myth, many artists have been sensitive to the form of certain scientific objects, which they have diverted from their function or their origin. The sculptors and graphic artists inspired by the Möbius strip are past counting, as are the sculptures inspired by representations of mathematical curves. For some years now the computer — its punched cards, its magnetic tapes, the enlargement of its micromodules — has borne witness to this interest, now coupled with the social changes being felt in parallel.

Another junction between Art and Science, still a superficial one, has been observable over the last 50 years owing to the artist's assimilation of a number of elementary technical systems, which lent the works an implicitly scientific air. We have seen electric motors animate sculptures and photoelectric cells make the public “participate” in the work. The degree of freedom of such systems was so slight that there could as yet be no question of a real junction.

THE FRUIT OF A DEEP RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE: A NEW ART

It is only in the last twenty years or so that we have seen the first stirrings of a genuine, deep relationship between Art and Science — science being called upon no longer for its forms or its means, but for its method, its categories of reasoning and its analytical capacities. As this encounter is coupled with the use of the information processing offered by present-day technologies, we are entitled to expect from it an artistic upheaval, perhaps even a kind of renaissance — without traditional Art dying out as a result; quite the contrary, the two being perfectly complementary.

Before going further in describing this metamorphosis of art, we must briefly develop a simple example from which consequences can be drawn. It is a musical example that we shall consider. Music indeed has the advantage of being entirely analysable and quantifiable; that is to say, all the physical quantities of which it is composed are well known to physicists: they are both identified and measurable (pitch, intensity, timbre). Moreover, mathematics offers a series of techniques and computational tools that make it possible to pin down and analyse the notion of order. And, as a first approximation, one may consider that music corresponds to a certain order in which notes flow through time.

Rather than describing here a notion of order arbitrarily chosen and defined by means of complicated mathematical equations, let us imagine a complex geometric figure — a kind of hypercube, for example — rotating on a screen identical to those of our television sets. Let us lay over this screen a grid like that of a crossword puzzle. And now, still arbitrarily, let us decide that each time one of the vertices of this rotating complex geometric figure passes over an intersection of the squares of the grid, that vertex will be associated with a musical note, to be written into the first violins' part of the score. In the same way, for example,

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let us now decide that each time another vertex of the rotating complex geometric figure passes over an intersection of the squares of the grid, it will be associated with a musical note, in the cellos' part this time. And so on.

We are thus able, through this experimental set-up coupled with a whole series of arbitrary choices, to obtain a score. But what will become of it once this edifice of sound is performed: will it be a stylistic exercise, a demonstration, an illustration in sound, or a musical work? It is precisely to this kind of question that the artefacts still resulting today from Art/Science relations send us back — and this because these relations are still at a very embryonic stage as far as their conception is concerned. But if we imagine that the preceding experimental set-up were completed, and that we grafted onto it a computer powerful enough to integrate the acoustic physiology of the human ear and the laws of musical harmony, then the preceding score would be credible — even if, in the last resort, it would remain for the human mind to decide the final form of the score.

Let us go still further in our imagination and graft onto our latest set-up a sophisticated synthesiser, intended to give us a foretaste of our piece of music. We would then find ourselves in a situation of experimental creation. For any artist, such a gift would be a sumptuous one.

If we return to existing realities and contingencies, we are bound to acknowledge that what exists is still very rudimentary in everything offered to us that stems from a deep Art/Science relationship: the preliminary analyses are not thorough enough, nor are the technological chains powerful enough to process sufficient information. As a result, the degree of freedom remaining low, most graphic results, for example, are very similar and in any case easily classified into groups. As for the other results of this relationship, all too often they still resemble a stylistic exercise or what might be called laboratory research.

Yet a tremendous point of inflection is emerging in relation to traditional creation: Art arising from the classical path, even if that path remains obscure to us, passed through lived experience, through sensibility, through the personality proper to its author.

The creative act arising from a real fusion of Art and Science becomes, for its part, an act that can be analysed in its entirety. It can be followed from its premises to its outcome.

The consequences are manifold, both for the new profile the artist will need to have and for the nature of the relationship that will be established between the work and the public. The genesis of the work is no longer the same, nor are its origins. Nor is the emotional relationship. For while traditional Art conveyed an emotion that reached the sensing body of the one who beheld it, the new Art will address itself far more to the mind. A new threshold of perception could be crossed.

In conclusion, I believe in, and clearly foresee, a day fairly close at hand when no longer a single artist but groups of people with the appropriate profiles, and with considerable technological resources at their disposal, will bring forth a new form of works. Works of art that will no longer rest on an individual emotional context, works of art that will bring to light unknown forms, proportions and sounds arising from the equations of wave mechanics, from the great universal constants, from atomic physics, from mathematics, from human physiology and from the magnitudes and laws that govern the universe. The Work of Art will be of another essence, one that may teach a way of knowing in the transparency of things; it will no longer tell us about the psyche of man confronted with a social and cultural fabric, but will speak of the universality of the world and of life.