Appliance of art and science

With the opening of a science gallery in Dublin in January, Irish artists are well placed to contribute works that cross the divide between science and art, writes Cathy Dillon.

There are plenty of slim, silver laptops placed on the elegant tables in a well-decorated room upstairs in the Odessa club in Dublin. Artists who are working on the borders between art and science are gathered for a "show and tell", to introduce us to their work and pitch ideas for projects for Dublin's first Festival of Light, which will open the new Science Gallery at Trinity College in January 2008.

Some, such as Laurent Louyer, a French light artist, and Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at the University of London, have already established themselves in territories straddling the art/science divide; others are just beginning their explorations of this fascinating terrain.

The festival will be a citywide event, celebrating the creative potential of light and involving artists, scientists, engineers and schools. "The idea of the festival is to delight and create wonder," explains Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman. Louyer and Lotto manage to do both with their work.

Louyer has created site-specific light installations for, among other events, the Glow light festival in Newcastle in the UK where, as his projected images from the laptop showed, he filled a series of train arches with vivid colours and created what look like giant knotted or coiled illuminated flexes that light up dark public spaces. For the Geneva Festival Arbres et Lumierès last December he created Breathing Trees, transforming two massive purple beech trees into strange red "organs", the "breathing lungs" of the city at night.

"My approach to light is very site specific. I'm interested in people and their interaction with the environment and in community related projects," Louyer explains. He is currently working on a project for the illumination of different squares in Shoreditch in London. "It's interesting to look at the city and how the light can connect the different parts."

Beau Lotto studies the visual brain and is the co-author of a book called Why We See What We Do.He makes frequent public presentations and has exhibited his work in, among other places, the Hayward Gallery in London - the first scientist to do so. His colour illusions have been used by scientists, artists, teachers and science museums internationally. In examining the complexities of vision and the neurobiological basis of our understanding of light and colour, he creates richly coloured hyper-real rubric-style illusions. His installation for the Hayward was based on his study of colour vision in bees and featured large, glass-fronted boxes filled with Perspex flowers illuminated in different colours which live bees had been "trained" to pick out.

Lotto is reluctant to pigeonhole himself either as a scientist or an artist. "I don't really see it that way. I think that both scientists and artists are exploring at different levels, and in a way have to transcend both. What's important to both is asking questions."

Often the work is made in collaboration. "Its origins are often utilitarian, an artist wants to learn a technique in order to realise an idea they have had and so they work with scientists or technical people who can provide a way of making the idea a reality."

He concedes that there can still sometimes be a degree of insecurity among those working in either discipline when entering the other's area, but as collaboration becomes more common this is becoming less of an issue.

Though the spirit of exploration and questioning meant there was always some overlap between art and science - as the current exhibition of Leonardo's Codex Leicester notebooks at the Chester Beatty library illustrates - the recent breaking down of the barriers to a large extent has come via new computer technology and the consequent growth of multimedia art in the 1990s.

"In the mid-1990s a lot of artists began working with new media which involved engaging with the technology," says Brona Ferran from Belfast, who until recently was director of interdisciplinary arts at the British Arts Council, and who is now working directly with Beau Lotto and others in the field.

"Following that trend, in the UK we then set up a programme for artists to work in science labs. Now it's no longer just 'new' media, it has broadened out and artists are now working in many areas, such as biology, engineering, neuroscience and physics." If moving into the art world helps scientists bring their work to a new audience, for artists, working outside of the mainstream enables them to escape from the sometimes overly commercial and competitive fine-art arena. As American bio-artist Philip Ross observed: "One of the things I like about working in this area is that I don't have to do the whole gallery thing." Ross's work includes "growing" live sculptures using, among other things, fungi and young oysters in controlled environments.

Perhaps the best known science artist in the world at the moment is Eduardo Kac, the Brazilian who created Alba, the genetically modified "glow-in-the-dark" rabbit. Kac, like Ross, is a recent visitor to Dublin, also at the behest of Michael John Gorman, who for more than a year now has been facilitating discussion, debate and collaboration with his Seed talks at Odessa. The Seed group is devoted to developing creative projects connecting art and science, and Gorman believes passionately that interdisciplinary work is the future: "Because people have access to so much information online now, there's really no need to spend years and years studying in one area. So the guys who spend years and years hidden away in a lab learning more and more about less and less, or working for years in a garret, are no longer necessarily leading the field. What is useful now is an ability to find and absorb information quickly in one area and then move onto another and to bring everything together to make something new."

He says Irish people are in a good position to participate in interdisciplinary projects. "I think this new way of working may suit the Irish very well, because in a way it means being a bit of a chancer - being able to move quickly into an area of knowledge and pick and choose and then move on, rather than being very dogged and disciplined."

A team from  the physics department in Trinity College has come to show some of their work with light to the show and tell and the young Irish artists who are submitting ideas include Emma Wade, whose installation Cheer-up, at the entrance to the Filmbase building in Dublin's Temple Bar, used both sound and vision.

It involved setting up a sensor at the entrance of the building which, when someone crossed the threshold, set off the sound of cheering. She also placed a camera at the door so that amused if non-plussed punters were filmed reacting to their undeserved applause. She would like to adapt the idea using light for the festival.

Wade began her career with a degree in interactive media and became a graphic artist. She then returned to the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) to do a Masters in fine art. Though she still supplements her income with graphic work, she is keen to continue her adventures in sound and vision. "It's really refreshing to do this kind of experimental work, because the ideas are all my own and so it feels much more creative." Cliona Harmey, another young Irish artist, showed a project she had designed in which daisies were filmed opening in time-lapse and the resulting footage was connected via sensors to regulated "daylight", so that the filmed daisies opened and closed according to the level of light, just as in real life.

"I was interested in the idea that the word 'daisy' comes from 'day's eye', and that they open and close like people's eyes according to the time of day," Harmey explains.

"I come from a science family," she adds, "and I did computer science for a year before I went to NCAD to study sculpture, so in a sense for me there was never really a big barrier between art and science."

Harmey is involved with the artists' publishing website Blackletter, which is currently organising 10x10x10, a project that will enable 10 "artists and other interested parties" to exchange 10 skills over a 10-week period this autumn. "People are realising that to make interesting work now you have to collaborate rather than constantly reinventing the wheel."

While observing that the proposals presented for possible Festival of Light projects were at a very early stage, especially given that the deadline for applications is August 15th, Brona Ferran in general agrees with Michael John Gorman that we do have the talent in Ireland to make waves (so to speak) in the area of art science: "I think there are a lot of people with vision in Ireland and there is a particular capacity to dream, but without the organisation of projects it won't be harnessed."

As in any area, the talent must be nurtured. "It's important to create programmes that actively invite people to work in collaboration," adds Ferran. "In the UK the initiatives were set up in response to a trend but then more and more people got involved and, for example, the Wellcome Fellowships [funded by the pharmaceutical company] enabled artists to work with scientists for a period of 18 months. There is a real need to mirror developments with training, critical debate and funding."

The deadline for expressions of interest for the submission of proposals for installations, events and workshops for the Festival of Light is Aug 15. The forms are available at www.sciencegallery.org/light/

The Seed Talks will resume in September