THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

 

Science is empirical, grounded in evidence, and supported by facts. A hypothesis is constructed and it is tested.

SEE: 'What is this thing called Science?' by Alan Chalmers:

 

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WQh5wDlE8cwC&oi=fn

 

 

Of central importance is the relationship between observer and observed

 

Scientists and artists both observe the world, however, their intentions are different.

 

Scientific observation involves control of the visual field, measuring, units that can be repeated. Technology is often used (such as micrsoscopes, genetic sequencing machines).

 

Importance of non-contamination.

 

Above all, there is a clear cut division between the observer (as scientist) and observed.

 

In comparison to the scientific approach, I now want to explore how my own work as an artist engages with the material world.

 

IMAGES OF EARLY PAINTINGS:

Methods that employ intuition, 'non-control' over materials and the visual world, reading into the image using imagination,

I will use some examples of early work I made as a painter.

Trained as a painter I use the processes of painting to explore inner states (often emotions, memories, etc.). The position is highly subjective.

 

This is very different to the observer/observed relationship in science.

 

Ideas, in the form of paint, emerge in an order that is POETIC rather than an linear order.

 

 

1ST BODY OF ART RESIDENCY WORK

MOLECULAR LABORATORY

RE-PRESENTING TIME

 

ARTISTIC PROCESSES

 

* Suspension of the rational mind

* The Subconscious

* The Role of Accident

* Ambiguity

 

* SURREALISM

 

* THE UNCONSCIOUS

 

* WORKING IN DARKSPACES

 

THE SCIENTIFIC  LABORATORY

First impressions

GEOMETRIC

HARD-EDGED

PURITY

REPETITION

WHITISH LIGHT

CLASSIFICATION

GRIDS

 

 

GENOMIC DIRT

TRANSITIONS
NEWLYN GALLERY

 

RECOVERY OF 'FLUIDITY'

EXISTENTIAL RESPONSE TO KNOWLEDGE

 

ARTISTIC PROCESSES

* NON-PREDICTIVE

 

* ABDICATION OF CONTROL   OVER VISUAL FIELD

 

* USE OF CHANCE

 

* CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

 

* LONG EXPOSURE TIMES

WELLCOME TRUST SANGER INSTITUTE RESIDENCY

 

http://foresight.stanford.edu:3455/3/118

 

http://www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/egenis/people/artistinresidence/finalpiece/

 

 

ARTWORK EXPLORING GENETICS

Joanna Kane

THE SOMNAMBULISTS

 

'The Somnambulists' is a series of photographic digital prints based on  photographs of early nineteenth century phrenological casts.The images are large format monochrome digital photographs with subtle digital adjustments which suggest an illusory sense of the original living subject of the cast.

 

The project is called 'The Somnambulists', with refererence to mesmerism, current at the time that many of the casts originate from, as the resulting portraits appear to exist in an ambiguous suspended state between life, death and sleep.

 

The images are created using layered digital techniques which are essentially photographic in nature to produce the illusion of skin, while still retaining the details and marks from the original plaster surface.

Data Profile Series

The Data Profiles series envisions fragments from an imagined fictional data archive, - recognising that where there are 21st century equivalents of nineteenth century categorisations and taxonomies of the human psyche, they exist in virtual or invisible numerical form, in code, online, in data form, in files, in databases, data warehouses on globally distributed networked servers.

The series aims to give visual form to these coded encryptions of personal data, creating data profiles or data portraits using photography and digital imaging, to create geometric mathematically generated 3D data portraits or 'profiles'. The notion of the profile is used to bring together portraiture, genetic profiling, criminal profiling, and consumer profiling, and related privacy issues.

 

Asa Johannesson

Portraits of Her series
These area  series of portraits taken in the historically important style of the conventional 'mugshot' which was developed as a flawed physical measuring system to catalogue and measure peoples faces by French policeman Alphonse Bertillon. Asa Johannesson has used images of women that are powerful and outside of the conventions of femininity to raise questions about the idealization of women.

Portraits of Him series
These are portraits that explore the vexed area of biology and gender. Johannesson questions in what respect our genetic inheritance is gender determining, and what effect does nurture have on gender identity. These tender elegiac portraits are all of females who identity as male transgender because they have undertaken testosterone treatment. It raises questions about how biological advances realte to the cultural and social sphere of identity.

 

Eduardo Kac

GENESIS

 

http://www.ekac.org/geninfo2.html

"Genesis" (1998/99) is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet. The key element of the work is an "artist's gene", i.e., a synthetic gene that I invented and that does not exist in nature. This gene was created by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed for this work. The sentence reads: "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." This sentence was chosen for its implications regarding the dubious notion of (divinely sanctioned) humanity's supremacy over nature. Morse Code was chosen because, as first employed in radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age -- the genesis of global communication

Marc Quinn

Quinn's self portrait "self" is his signature piece in the art world. A frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres of his own blood, taken from his body over a period of 5 months.

Portrait of John E. Sulston (2001)

His portrait of John E. Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in 2002 for sequencing the human genome on the Human Genome Project,[3] is in the National Portrait Gallery. It consists of bacteria containing Sulston's DNA in agar jelly. "The portrait was made by our standard methods for DNA cloning," writes Sulston. "My DNA was broken randomly into segments, and treated so that they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria containing the DNA segments were spread out on agar jelly in the plate you see in the portrait."

Suzanne Ankers

Suzanne Ankers made sculptures of chromosomes, emphasizing their resemblance to hieroglyphics or letters of the alphabet — basic units of cultural information-storage.

Websites:

http://geneculture.org/

http://cfcul.fc.ul.pt/projectos/projecto_imagem/textos_imagem/ingeborgr_textos/TheArtofDNA11.pdf

http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/materials_genetics_culture/art_is_where_you_grow_it.pdf

http://www.ekac.org/gessert_council.html

Anker, Suzanne and Dorothy Nelkin, (2004), 'The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age', Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press