The Wake

Illustration by Sarah Morean

Society perceives scientists and artists as mutually exclusive, polar opposites. Artists are right brained, left leaning,free spirits while scientists are logical, analytical, left brainers.. Conventional wisdom says that scientists do not make art and artists do not do science. In However, one only has to look at Bohr’s model of the atom, inspired by Cubism, or the highly controversial Body Worlds exhibit to realize that art and science have more in common than meets the eye.

“There has been a trend recently of a lot of art which responds to current science,” says Chanai Matteson, the organizer of the Bell Museum’s Cafe Scientifique. The intersection of art and science will be the topic for an upcoming Café Scientifique discussion on March 11 at the Kitty Cat Klub, entitled “Is Art the Future of Science?”

“It’s about what art can tell us about science, and also about what science can tell us about art,” Matteson says.
Local artist Matthew Bakkom, who does cross medium research based projects, is one of two artists in the Twin Cities who will be leading the discussion. “Artist and scientists share a common ground, they always have,” Bakkom says. “The poets and the scientist come from the same place.”

Although they may come from the same place, the paths art and science have taken into our minds are very different.

“Both art and science are aligned with production, and science and art are both social practices. But as they’ve evolved, there’s been an increase in specialization and concentration. Especially in universities, they’ve been separated into discrete areas,” Bakkom says. “Artists have been relegated to basically becoming decorators and designers, serving the elite. Science is serving a more general sense of production…the results are more direct and on the table, whether it be food or medicine or jet propulsion.”

Lynn Fellman, the other speaker takes it even further. “There’s a lot that we have in common: an artist’s temperament and a scientist’s temperament, especially for creativity and imagination and living in a world of ideas,” She says. “There’s a lot that we share there.”

Inspired by the human genome project, Fellman began creating DNA portraits. “[The idea] evolved gradually as I started to do a lot more reading about science and particularly about genetics. As I started to develop my imagery, I ended up focusing on a portrait idea. It’s intriguing to me because there’s such nice history in the art world…many artists will do portraits. So this to me was sort of a really interesting way to have a new take on this sort of traditional scene that artists work with.”

For $650—$1800 Fellman will incorporate your unique DNA sequence into a portrait describing your ancestral journey out of Africa. Fellman’s entirely unique incorporation of genetics into her art led her to be the first artist ever invited to attend the American Society of Human Genetics Conference in San Diego last October. “It was wonderful. [The scientists] were interested, they were excited. There were a number of scientists who said, ‘Well it’s about time. We wanted someone like you here.’”

Fellman wonders where the separation between art and science originated. “I think it’s a holdout from the industrial revolution, and maybe even as far back as Descartes. I think we’re just recovering from that. I think it’s just old information that I think is going to be turned around pretty quickly here in the next decade. The sci-art trend [is] getting a lot more attention. It pops up in the media with more frequency..”

So is art the future of science? Both Fellman and Bakkom are unsure. “How the artist connects with culture is a little bit different than how a scientist does,” says Fellman. “I interpret science and I give it my own personal voice…Science is driving huge changes in who we are as human beings, so my piece is more sort of the cultural piece. I’m not quite the initiator of these things, I’m responding to science.”

Bakkom also thinks it unlikely. “But it is possible that some of the most important developments of the next few decades will depend on a combination of the two,” he says. “The card the artists hold is that we know about imagination and innovation. That’s the card that is also crucial for the breakthroughs in the sciences – how we understand the world in potentially new ways comes from a creative perspective on a specific situation or material,” says Bakkom.

The Café Scientifique discussion on the intersection of art and science will be held on Tuesday, March 11 at 6 pm at the Kitty Kat Klub in Dinky Town. The event is free, but a $5 donation is suggested. For more information about Café Scientifique, and to view a schedule of future events, go to http://www.bellmuseum.org/prog_cafescientifique.htm.