STUDIOTOPIA RESIDENCIES
19.01.2021
50.000.000 shades of art between science, or
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by: Adriaan Eeckels, Joint Research Centre, SciArt Project Leader 19.01.2021 |
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The Northwest passage is the northern route between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, through a labyrinth of moving shores, mist banks and frozen ice. For centuries, explorers have tried to find a passage to India by navigating these artic waters. They did not succeed until Amundsen in 1903-1906 was the first to complete the passage completely by boat. In more recent and sadder times, global warming opened it for regular shipping.
The French philosopher Michel Serres uses this mythical passage as a metaphor for the road that brings art and science together. In his 1980 classic, The Northwest Passage, he describes it as a narrow, ever-twisting fairway that opens up, then is blocked again by the weight of floes that melt then freeze up again, twisting around changing islets, never staying the same for longer periods of time. This is, for Serres, the passage between the exact sciences and the human sciences, or, more generally speaking, between science and art: an unpredictable and ever-changing route, arduous to walk on, continuously mutating.
Trained as a mathematician, as classical philologist as well as philosopher, Serres embarks on his own itinerary in art and science, zigzagging from science to art to human science to mathematics and back again. He dazzles the reader with that easy tacking between various disciplines and the arts, which is the hallmark of his vast and always interesting oeuvre. Every Frenchman knows Serres because of Petite Poucette or Thumbelina, his little declaration of confidence in the future that was a resounding success in 2012. Yet, he is too little known outside his country. One of the reasons might be his magnificently poetic French, which earned him a seat in the famous Académie française. Even the best translator will in the end betray Serres’ often poetic but always enlightening tournures de phrase – or twists of sentence. And Serres twists, nay rather swings as a dancer, jumping from one insight to another, often tracing his path on a map of expanding knowledge with the silver of pure discovery, always combining fields and disciplines, always arriving at startling insights.
(continue reading under the picture)
In his 1959 speech on The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution (later published as The Two Cultures), CP Snow called for a better knowledge and hence, appreciation of science by a society still dominated by its literary establishment. Presenting the two cultures as mutually ignorant, Snow depicts them as irremediably separate: the second law of thermodynamics should be feted as a cultural monument on a parr with Mozart’s fortieth symphony. Yet the scientists will not be able to read Shakespeare, nor will the literary wo.men understand the basics of physics, let alone quantum physics.
Snow basically made a call for more science in British education, comparing the educational systems of different countries, mostly the UK, the USA, Germany and the Soviet Union. While this was an entirely justified point of view, it was eclipsed by the success of the little speech and the furious debate it provoked, pitting the scientists against the literary wo.men.
"There is no such chasm between science and the arts. At all.
The Two Cultures thus became a synonym for the rift between art and science. Let’s leave aside the importance of this debate in the UK and beyond or its influence even until today and stick to the highly symbolic role of the speech. It gave rise to an impressive trove of academic literature on its influence and effects, readily quoted whenever science and art are discussed together – and often, in stark opposition. All of these manifold documents, articles, studies and blogs can deny or endorse the rift between art and science, but nobody has ever succeeded, since CP Snow, to undo this distancing. Suffice it to say that, once this kind of opposition is created, it is very difficult to overcome (as the political polarisation of these days demonstrates). Snow himself was a published novelist and an affirmed scientist, combining both with success. Even if he did not intend it as such, he has become a symbol of what many have defined, often with absolute certainty, as a chasm, an abyss, a deep cleft that will and cannot be overcome.
There is no such chasm between science and the arts. At all. That is why many of the participants to Studiotopia practice SciArt: they have overcome what is nothing more than a cultural construct. They have embarked, and more than once, on the difficult passage that brings them to the Northwest, and found that it is much more feasible than the old thinking implies. They have found that these itineraries are sometimes difficult, always engaging, and often enriching beyond expectation. In this way, they have put themselves in the position to understand that this cultural construct is a thing of the past, by now thoroughly superseded. It impedes us to respond to the urgent demands of our times with its many crises and great challenges.
"If we want to explore our humanity to the fullest,
I do not pretend to talk for each and every participant to this exciting and urgent project, but I believe that most of us see the difference in art and science rather as a difference in gradience – with the understanding that there are not fifty shades, but at least 50.000 if not 50.000.000 shades of art between science, or of science between the arts.
It is not a question of opposing poles and the wealth of shades between them, but of a circle of 360 degrees. The more you travel this endless circle (as Serres knew), the more nuances and refinements you can perceive. A circle has no opposing poles – only gradations of inquiry that help scientists as well as artists to investigate the world. The arc of inquiry invests us all, some more intellectually (though not necessarily scientifically), some more emotionally (though not necessarily artistically), yet it is still the same curiosity that moves us all.
Juxtaposing Serres to Snow – without wanting to create a new opposition! – I could conclude that it is better to be unknown than to be widely read and misunderstood. Which would be not more than a temporary conclusion. But let us end with Serres’ take on what this cultural construction of the rift provokes: an arid opposition, where both extremes lose and all practitioners are impoverished. That is what it means, to live in a polarised world, where the one can only affirm itself by excluding the other. If we want to explore our humanity to the fullest, we must remember that there can be no good art without science, and no good science without art. And celebrate this infinite circle in all its 50 Giga shades of discovery.
This is how Michel Serres expresses it in The Northwest passage. |
