Bridging the divide of art and science

Maybe artists and scientists can be friends. Studio and lab doors are opening for a relationship rethink, writes Arminta Wallace

'We", the critic George Steiner wrote in his book, Grammars of Creation, "are an animal whose life-breath is that of spoken, painted, sculptured, sung dreams." Well, yes. But we are also curious cats with an insatiable interest in matters material and technological; so it is a pity that over the past century or so, many of us have come to think of art and science as totally different - if not outright contradictory - spheres of human activity.

This "two cultures" view was famously articulated by another critic, CP Snow, in the 1960s; and for all practical purposes the laboratory and the artist's studio have been as far apart as a pair of parallel universes, rotating in splendid isolation, ever since. Now, as governments in the Western world - and especially in Ireland - invest heavily in the science and technology side of the equation, and as technology makes alarming inroads into even the most Luddite of lifestyles, it may just be time for a radical rethink of the relationship.

In the essay quoted above, Steiner suggests that art and science are motivated by contrasting impulses. Art asks the big questions about human existence: science answers them. Artists rely on intuition, scientists on evidence. Art thrives on ambiguity: science does everything it can to wriggle out of it. This is all fine - as far as it goes. But perhaps it doesn't go far enough. Meticulous observation, mathematical exactness and painstaking empirical measurement are, after all, intrinsic to the artistic process as well as the scientific one; think of Josef Albers's colour studies, or Bach's cello suites. And modern science has done a quantum leap or two away from the black-and-white, true-or-false certainties of the Aristotelian logic upon which it is based; think of Godel's incompleteness theorems, or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

For many people in the arts world, the dense jungles of mathematical equations - let alone the hazy horizons of theoretical physics - might as well be marked on the intellectual map by a note reading "Here be dragons". But there are signs that for a younger generation, the boundaries are dissolving faster than a spoonful of sodium crystals in a glass of H2O.

Take the visual artist Bea McMahon, who decided that a good way to prepare for a career as a visual artist would be to study maths and physics at UCD. "I thought of doing philosophy," she says cheerily, "but then I thought, really, maths would be better. My thesis was in quantum field theory."

McMahon's drawings of Dublin Docklands are currently on show at Lemonstreet Gallery in Dublin; earlier this year, her show Order at The Lab Dublin City Gallery explored the concepts of closed loops and knots in space which inspired the physicist Richard Feynman to devise his famous diagrams.

APART FROM BRIDGING the science/art divide with her work she has, she says, experienced it first-hand. "There's no doubt that artists simplify or reduce what physics does. They see it as something grid-like or classified; something which is quite rigid and doesn't have much organic content. The other side of the coin, of course, is that physicists look at theory in art and go 'Oh, well, that's making a lot of fuss about nothing'."

What really interests McMahon is description. "I've chosen a particular visual language to describe things," she says. "But I have a background in maths, which has a very different way of describing things. In maths, often, what you're thinking about is the role of the observer; especially in relativity and quantum mechanics. Which makes it strange that there hasn't really been a philosophy of modern physics since Werner Heisenberg in the 1930s and 40s. He was the last person to go into what these discoveries mean in terms of the macroscopic - and in terms of how we as human beings interact."

As someone whose instincts are primarily artistic, did McMahon not find maths fiendishly difficult? "Yes," she says." Very. But I find art difficult as well. You work just as hard at it. What amazed me about maths is that if you go and go and go at it, you get it eventually. What I really find difficult, though, is the switch from one to the other. There's a certain way I was used to working and understanding and learning from maths. For visual art I almost have to undo that - widen, I suppose, would be the word."

But it's not simply a matter of a different "kind" of creativity.

"Creativity is an odd word," she says. "I'm not 100 per cent sure what it means. It's bandied about as a term that covers loads of things, but doesn't really describe what actually happens. A lot of the time 'creativity' is about continuing with an idea you actually have and seeing it through to the end - to have that belief, almost. I think belief is a better word than creativity."

Quantum physics and visual arts still make pretty exotic bedfellows. Links between maths and music, on the other hand, are not particularly new. The physicist Werner Heisenberg was a pianist and his colleague Max Planck a composer and singer; Einstein was a competent violinist who could have made a living as a professional musician. But he chose to pursue a career elsewhere; it's possible that as a jobbing violinist in a European orchestra, he might not have come up with ideas which would change the way the human race perceives the world.

The nitty-gritty of those ideas is, nevertheless, difficult for many of us human animals to make sense of. So when Brian Foster, an experimental particle physicist at Oxford, and Jack Liebeck, an up-and-coming young classical violinist, teamed up to bring Einstein to a lay audience with their show, Superstrings, the enterprise proved hugely popular. Originally devised as part of last year's celebration of the centenary of the great physicist's birth, it is still merrily touring the planet - and will touch down at in Dublin and Limerick in mid-November.

That week, as it happens, has been designated Science Week 2006, when various events have been organised around the country under the theme of "Science in our Future". "The Superstrings event is pitched at people who know a little about science - but not a lot," says the geologist Claire Mulhall, who is development executive for science and technology at the RDS. "I approached the British Council, and we came up with this idea to do a number of Science First events towards the end of this year and into 2007. This is our first one. We also hope to have science and faith, then science and art, and science and colour."

Bringing art and science together will take more than a single week or series of events. It will take a sea-change in the thought processes of practitioners on both sides. "Art and science," says Michael John Gorman of Discover Science and Engineering, the government-funded awareness programme for integrated science promotion launched in 2003, "have become languages unto themselves. There's a sense in the wider world that science is a closed language; and the art world can also be quite closed to the uninitiated. So on the one hand you have the rather snobby art world and on the other, the closed laboratories of science. We hope to open up some of those closed doors."

GORMAN IS a founder-member of SEED, a Dublin-based not-for-profit organisation devoted to forging connections between the two cultures. SEED grew - appropriately - out of a conversation between Gorman, his fellow physicist Wiebke Drenckhan, Barabbas actor-director Raymond Keane and the visual artist and inventor Sean Hillen. Its title refers to the process which takes place when you seed a crystal - put a grain into a liquid. "Seeding a crystal produces a new substance - and when you take art and science together you get something new and exciting," Gorman says.

Having studied physics and philosophy at Oxford and curated various exhibitions including last year's Save the Robots at The Ark, Gorman - like Bea McMahon - is familiar with both sides of the debate. He and his colleagues at SEED reject the simplifications, not to mention the evangelical preachiness, of much pop science. Instead, they advocate a more playful approach. "There's a common core of creativity on both sides of this divide," he says. "It's hard to define, but play is a core element of it. When it's at its most innovative, science is play."

The group hopes to kick off a "crane ballet" which would choreograph the cranes on the myriad building sites around Dublin city centre. It would also like to get artists-in-residence into laboratories around the country. "There's some really exciting work going on there, and nobody knows about it," Gorman says.

But its main activity at present is an open monthly salon at The Odessa Club in Dublin, where artists and scientists gather in an informal way for chat, drinks and a spot of live music. At the June salon, the Nobel Prize-winning English chemist Sir Harold Kroto spoke about his discovery of a new carbon molecule - and got people building their own, Meccano-style carbon molecules from plastic kits. A previous salon took a hands-on approach to the physics of foams when photographer Tim Durham, who has been taking intricately patterned, multicoloured images of soap bubbles for more than a decade, and Stefan Hutzler, a physics lecturer in TCD, got together to blow a few bubbles.

Which, Gorman insists, is what it's all about. "Both artists and scientists preserve an element of play that is central to their work," he says. With this in mind SEED has organised the ultimate get-together for the October 7th salon. "It's called SEED dating," Gorman explains. A close relative of speed dating, the evening will - literally - bring scientists and artists to the same table. "They'll get a few minutes to talk to members of the opposite species to see if they'd like to work together," Gorman says. The result could be, not just a fine new romance, but a science/art baby boom.

Lace, by Bea McMahon, is at Lemonstreet Gallery until Oct 5. Superstrings is at the RDS, Dublin on Nov 14 and at the University of Limerick on Nov 15 (tickets required for both events). The next SEED salon is at The Odessa Club, Dublin on Oct 7 at 7pm