Make room for art amid the quarks

Make room for art amid the quarks

The artists Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon in 1989 • Photo by Boldstripe (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Originally published 20 October 1997

Michael Weny­on, with his col­lab­o­ra­tor Susan Gam­ble, is an artist-in-res­i­dence at MIT’s Haystack Radio Obser­va­to­ry in West­ford, a place dot­ted with huge dish anten­nas that eaves­drop on radio fre­quen­cy radi­a­tion wash­ing through space.

Artist-in-res­i­dence? At a bas­tion of science?

It may sound strange, but it’s not a first.

In 1987, Weny­on and Gam­ble were artists-in-res­i­dence at the Roy­al Green­wich Obser­va­to­ry at Her­st­mon­ceux Cas­tle in Eng­land. Before com­ing to Mass­a­chu­setts, they also spent time as artists-in- res­i­dence at The Roy­al Obser­va­to­ry at Edinburgh.

One of their instal­la­tions is cur­rent­ly on dis­play in an exhib­it called “The Physics of Art” at Brock­ton’s Fuller Art Muse­um, a col­or­ful cre­ation called Opti­cal Exper­i­ments, 1994/96, incor­po­rat­ing holo­grams and his­toric astro­nom­i­cal pho­to­graph­ic plates and mirrors.

The cat­a­log intro­duc­tion to a 1991 Weny­on and Gam­ble exhib­it at the Wolver­hamp­ton Art Gallery in Eng­land says this of their work: “Weny­on and Gam­ble’s holo­grams have a cool alien beau­ty like objects from anoth­er world. They stand on their del­i­cate tripods; win­dows into zones of shift­ing spec­trum col­or. In some, an every­day object hangs in a boil­ing fur­nace of col­or, in oth­ers we glimpse the end­less voids of deep space.”

As artists-in-res­i­dence, Weny­on and Gam­ble are not PR reps for their insti­tu­tions, nor should they be. Their work is inde­pen­dent, per­son­al, and vision­ary. Yet, at their host insti­tu­tions, they are close observers, will­ing, if nec­es­sary, to mas­ter new tech­nolo­gies. They are trans­form­ers of eso­teric sci­ence into human-tem­pered beauty.

The idea of artists-in-res­i­dence at sci­en­tif­ic research insti­tu­tions strikes me as excep­tion­al­ly use­ful. God knows, as a soci­ety we are alien­at­ed enough from sci­ence. Our tax dol­lars sup­port basic sci­en­tif­ic research to the tune of $16.5 bil­lion a year, but most of us have only the vaguest notion of what the mon­ey is spent on — or why it is worth spending.

Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, just one arti­fact from the mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar Hub­ble Space Tele­scope — the Hub­ble Deep-Field Photograph.

This remark­able image is the deep­est we have ever seen into the uni­verse. It shows a tiny part of the sky that could be cov­ered by crossed pins held at arm’s length; it would require 40,000 such pho­tographs to cov­er the bowl of the Big Dip­per. The total expo­sure time was 10 days.

In the pho­to, we see fainter and more dis­tant objects than ever before. In this pin-prick patch of sky we see sev­er­al thou­sand galax­ies, galax­ies as numer­ous as snowflakes in a storm. Every galaxy con­tains hun­dreds of bil­lions of stars, each, per­haps, with plan­ets. If we sur­veyed the entire sky at the scale of the Hub­ble Deep-Field Pho­to­graph, we would see 100 bil­lion galax­ies, reced­ing into infin­i­ty — worlds and worlds with­out end.

This image flashed briefly on the screens of our tele­vi­sions and in the pages of our mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers. We nod­ded. We said “Wow!” Then we put the remark­able image out of our minds. We don’t give a thought to what it might mean to live in a uni­verse of 100 bil­lion galax­ies. We pre­fer a cozi­er, human-cen­tered uni­verse, con­struct­ed on the human scale.

In the same way, we give only pass­ing notice to oth­er sci­en­tif­ic research that has the poten­tial to trans­form the way we think of our­selves and the world we live in: the sequenc­ing of the human genome; the inter­sec­tion of neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and com­pu­ta­tion­al the­o­ry; exper­i­men­tal quan­tum physics and the the­o­ry of non-local­i­ty; plan­e­tary explo­ration; X‑ray, gam­ma ray, and infrared astron­o­my; the deep- ocean drilling program.

We are vague­ly inter­est­ed in these devel­op­ments, but we haven’t a clue how they touch our lives at the lev­el of our emo­tion­al, esthet­ic, and erot­ic lives. We need artists who will go into the envi­rons of research, and return with dis­turb­ing works of art that shake us out of our intel­lec­tu­al sloth and help us to see the world in fresh new ways.

In an often quot­ed pas­sage, nov­el­ist and essay­ist Arthur Koestler wrote, “Ein­stein’s space is no clos­er to real­i­ty than Van Gogh’s sky. The glo­ry of sci­ence is not a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tol­stoy… The sci­en­tist’s dis­cov­er­ies impose his own order on chaos, as the com­pos­er or painter impos­es his; an order that always refers to lim­it­ed aspects of reality.”

Ein­stein’s space is cer­tain­ly clos­er to the world “out there” than is Van Gogh’s sky. But Van Gogh’s sky is clos­er to our inner world. We must find ways to make these two worlds, these two visions of real­i­ty, mutu­al­ly rein­forc­ing. Artist-in-res­i­dence pro­grams at sci­en­tif­ic research insti­tu­tions can help.

Every research insti­tu­tion sup­port­ed by more than $10 mil­lion of fed­er­al funds should be required to have an artist-in-res­i­dence. Sci­en­tists and artists need to brush shoul­ders, learn from each oth­er, pass vibes back and forth, look for the places where quarks and quasars touch the long­ings and pas­sions of the human heart.

Sci­en­tists may protest that man­dat­ed artist-in-res­i­dence pro­grams will divert funds that might bet­ter be used for basic sci­ence. But unless we find cre­ative ways to con­nect basic sci­en­tif­ic research to the human-cen­tered world of Van Gogh’s sky, the pub­lic will con­tin­ue to with­draw their sup­port from sci­ence, and sci­en­tists may find them­selves liv­ing in the lab­o­ra­to­ry equiv­a­lent of the starv­ing artist’s garret.


More of the work of Weny­on & Gam­ble can be found at their web­site. ‑Ed.

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