The Influence of Art on Science

On a visit to the newly opened galleries in The Museum of London this weekend I noticed a display of stop motion film showing one nights worth of activity in London. The night time shots of the city, beautifully framed views of luminescent glass and steel towers laced with walkways, and criss crossed with layers of trains and blinking car traffic, immediately caused me to visually reference both Fritz Langs masterpiece 'Metropolis' and also the more recent anime rendering of the same name. How much influence does the world of art, and the visualisation by artists of the future, have on the actual outcome? Art which depicts the future can surely be seen as a commentary on the present, by extrapolating forwards and therefore magnifying problems and issues that are in the embryonic stages in the present day. More than this, the visual language and design of science and technology is often influenced by the visions of artists and filmmakers. Science is still limited by the ability of the human brain to imagine, and to create new ideas, therefore art often provides the stimulus for technological progress.

  The Chris Cunningham directed video for Bjork's All is Full of Love is a good example of this phenomenon. The video itself was informed by the previous decade of cyberpunk films, and japanese anime, but distills these influences into a short and haunting 4 minutes.

 

My favourite part of the video is the opening shot, which sees the camera pan upwards, trailing a huge bunch of cables, which eventually connect to the floor of the empty white room which contains the robots. The visual design of the room, and the machinery, seems to have informed the modern day robotics industry. If you look at the Honda robot ASIMO, the parallels between the design are uncanny.

The link between the way science expresses itself visually, and the art that informs these designs, is interesting for two reasons; firstly because groundbreaking science is usually accomplished by very creative individuals, therefore not only is the design component of the scientific discovery informed by art, but it is likely that the underlying science is influenced by art as well. Secondly, the way science is presented in art and film is also relevent to the consumers of science.

Many products, for example MRI scanners, appear to have borrowed design aspects from science fiction. The Siemens system shown above seems to share a lot of design elements with the Bjork video. This is especially important for products that are going to be used by the general public, because people find it hard to trust technology if it is not presented in the correct way. Suspicion can be avoided by using design to make products seem familiar, or seem 'futuristic' to inspire faith in the technology.

Amazing data maps showing geographic density of photographs taken in world cities

Very interesting and beautiful use of data; the author has taken information from Flickr about where photographs were taken in world cities, and overlayed this onto road maps. The result is a density map showing the most and least photographed regions in these destinations. It highlights the trend for cities to become islands of tourist hotspots, informed by guide books and tourist information, while certain areas of cities remain unexplored and unphotographed. It also links into the theory that for an individual a city becomes a small collection of regularly visited locations, effectively shrinking the city into a small, personal interpretation of the whole.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157623971287575/

Interesting article on the use of fMRI in courtrooms

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/05/brain-scans.html

Charlie Brooker on Craig Venter's new life form

This cracked me up;

"So far, so baffling. Then it gets weirder. To "watermark" their artificial bug, the geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase "to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" written through it like letters in a stick of rock. In other words, it's the world's most pretentious bacterium. After Quentin Letts."

Read entire article at The Guardian; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/24/charlie-brooker-artificial-life-here

Royal Society Science and Art Festival

http://seefurtherfestival.org/

The interface of science with the general public - the internet part 1

This Sunday morning I'm sipping a cup of Japanese Sencha, listening to Grant Green and wondering about how the world of science interfaces with the general public, and with other scientists. This is a big problem for an industry where knowledge is so specialised, and sometimes so abstract, that communicating to anyone who is not in the 300 strong group of experts in that particular field can be like trying to explain the merits of the cinema of Wong Kar Wai to a group of X-Factor enthusiasts. However, for the purposes of the scientific industry, and the cross pollination and dissemination of disparate ideas, which is vital to the progress of academic science, this boundary is one worth investing time and effort into understanding and exploring.

 The internet seems an obvious place to start exploring this relationship, because in the modern age it represents the newest and fastest form of communication, and the one available to the widest audience. I have chosen a group of websites that I think quite fairly represent the places the general public would begin looking for scientific information, and places scientists would venture to look at the work of other scientists. I have not included any academic journals in my study, because to me these are supposed to be used by clients who are already experts in a particular field, and therefore need to present information in a very specific visual language to make them accessible to the international scientific community, and to project a feeling of authority that is appropriate for a peer reviewed journal.

  The website for CERN seemed to be a logical place to start, representing a very high profile, cutting edge scientific organisation (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/). One thing I noticed immediately was the use of a blog like structure, with a post elaborating on a recent experiment using a clear graphic. The second thing that struck me was the use of 'fast' media; users are invited to join the CERN twitter feed. The lack of clutter and clear focus of information impressed me, especially considering how complex the science being investigated by this organisation is. I also found some interesting images of the equipment itself;

This immediately reminded me of the old images taken during the manhattan project;

A nice example of how the visual language of science in the popular conscience hasn't really changed for half a century.

My second website for todays post comes from the MIT website, the homepage of which is a little cluttered, but they seem to allow each department the freedom to create their own identity on the internet. I have chosen the following department website because it focuses on the develpment of sensors for use in urban design. Urban design is an area of scientific research that crosses disiplines and and also the line between public and scientific domains (http://senseable.mit.edu/) I especially liked the way this website allows the scientific projects to stand out, by having the research summary presented visually in the centre of the page. This method of presentation also invites interaction from a visitor, drawing them in with clever use of graphics combined with links to research projects. Compare this to the slightly drier list of research projects usually presented on departmental websites, for example from the MIT physics departmental website. (http://web.mit.edu/physics/research/abcp/areas.html). The comparison of these MIT websites offers an interesting observation; both of the departments behind the websites obviously draw a lot of research dollars, however the physics department is working in a less public space than the department designing sensors for use in urban environments. The use of smart design to interact with the public and governing bodies is apparently one that is already in the scientific vocabulary, but perhaps not used when communicating directly to other scientists.

 Overall, my impression is that scientists are actually developing good skills for knowing when not to use scientific jargon and equations to explain concepts to non-scientists, and also that on the internet scientists are exploring modern design concepts to communicate ideas. The MIT sensor development website shares a lot of visual charateristics with the design or art world, for example the grey helvetica on a white background that is so ubiquitous at art or design exhibitions.

Science Friction - Is there a place for design in science?

The visual language of practical bench science is well developed and understood, and recognised widely in the public sphere from press releases, and the interaction of the scientific world with the media world. Test tubes, glassware, and laboratory interiors have their own visual language with symbolic and narrative depth, which is usually utilised in films and by the wider community to try and interpret what 'science' means and what it does. However this is a rather involuntary visual language, and not one that is actually familiar to scientists themselves, or useful for the communication of scientific ideas to the general public. In an era of advanced scientific achievement it seems that the role of scientists as communicators of ideas has been overlooked. Modern design and the practice of efficient and aesthetically pleasing communication has become a vital part of any international organisation or business in the private sector, and in the age of branding and marketing it seems that those working at the cutting edge of human knowledge have not made the best use of the advances in visual communication made over the last 50 years. This blog aims to explore the role of design and visual communication in science, and how it can be used or misused to aid or hinder the advancement of science.
 Anyone wondering whether this is really an issue should consider why science, which accounts for the same percentage of the British GDP as banking, is still not seen as a first choice career option for science graduates, why the number of science graduates is falling, and why the higher eduation budget has been slashed by the government while the failing banking sector has been supported financially. The debate about whether banking is more or less important than scientific progress is something to think about, especially in relation to how much money, and how much prestige is bestowed on each career respectively. On Sunday afternoon as I walked past a flashy Deutchbank office in the city, I found myself wondering why my own research department are sitting in a portacabin, and how much smoother and more effient our own research could be if resourses were allocated differently, or if as scientists we could employ designers and architects to create our working environment.