New and Old

This afternoon saw me visit one of my favourite London high streets, the Kings Road in Kensington, for a relaxed Sunday afternoon. After pouring over the economist while grabbing a quick lunch and coffee at my favourite Lebanese cafe, I filled by bag with pastries from Paul, and made a beeline for the Saachi Gallery. British Art Now is the theme of the latest exhibition, and unsprisingly, to me at least, it was a little bit too knowing and ironic, and I found it hard to really connect with much of the collection. There are of course some standout works, and the permanent Richard Wilson installation in the basement gallery is worth the trip on its own.

One gallery that stood out for me was a large installation by John Wynne, which looked at first glance like the worlds worst curated hi fi shop. Scattered speakers of various vintages, dimensions and designs are scattered across the space, culminating in the corner of the gallery, where they stack against the wall like a hi fi wasps nest. An old upright piano is embedded in this audio diaspora, operated by means of an old hoover. The resulting sound is combined digitally with ambient noise from the gallery space, and played through the speakers, creating a continuously undulating and evolving tide of sound described as an "abstract 3-D opera in slow motion".

The decrepid piano, and speakers, combined with cutting edge digital audio equipment reminded me greatly of the laboratories where I spend much of my professional life. The visual language of laboratories can often be the very embodiment of this 'old meets new' aesthetic that worked to great aesthetic effect in the Wynne installation. Old combining with new is of course also the visual language of the future, one of the reasons 'Blade Runner' captures the imagination so well is the way the film sets build the future on top of the present and the past. Anthony Burgess also achieved a similar effect in A Clockwork Orange, by splicing archaic English vocabulary in to the mix when confecting the slang spoken by the feral youth of the future.

I think it is time to curate a gallery of work inspired by the equipment that scientists have used over the last one hundered years to achieve our current state of technological greatness. These are machines and devices which were often not designed with aesthetics in mind, but accidentally ended up part of the visual fabric of modern life. This accidental aspect is facinating, how many times have I wandered past an unused piece of eqipment in a corridor and marvelled both at how out of date it looks, but also at the way it still suggests a narrative even today. For next week I might start my own photographic record of these devices to honor them.

As an aside, the economist this week contains a special section discussing the human genome, which I found very thought provoking.

Scientific Glamour Models

I visted Antony Gormeys new exhibition at The Cube gallery in London this weekend, which amazed me, and also filled me with a lot of questions about the role of artists in explaining scientific ideas to the general public. In the course of my education as a Physicist, I have formally studied Euclidian Geometry, and have some grasp of the more advanced mathematical expressions of space and form, like fractional dimensions for example. From a philospohical perspective, I have also studied the metaphysical ideas of our relation to objects and space, as layed out by Kant and many others; so how was it that a dark room filled with glowing rectangles could speak more to me about the relationship between space and objects than any of the forementioned studies?! This is of course not giving enough credit to the rigid mathematical explorations of space and form that have gone before, but methods of explaining hard scientific ideas to the general public in a fashion that encourages wonder and excitement is also a noble and important aim. I was amazed to see trendy Shoreditch kids in their skinny jeans and oversized black glasses walking gingerly around the glowing geometric forms, in an almost reverent study of geometrical beauty. I find it hard to imagine that some equations written on the wall, even if they were grey helvetica on white background, would enspire the same reaction.

When I got home I did a little bit of digging and found that the victorians had been at it too! The new exhibition of deep sea creatures at the Natural History Museum includes a display of victorian glass models of deep sea aminals. The purpose of these models was to allow curious Victorian citizens a glimpse of deep sea life without having to risk a Moby Dick style incredibily dangerous sea voyage. In a sense this is the same phenomenon as the Antony Gormley exhibition, which allows a casual visitor to appreciate the beauty of geometry without having to get their feet wet by sailing into the choppy seas of mathematical formalism.

I was therefore delighted to discover a modern artist named Luke Jerram who makes glass models of viruses for public displays. one of the most interesting quotes from the artists website was that;

  'Scientists aren't able to answer many of the questions I ask them, such as how the RNA is exactly fitted within the Capsid? At the moment, camera technology can't answer these questions either.'

Swine Flu Virus

So in effect the scientific models that are used by scientists to visualise and understand the processes going on inside a virus suffer the same limitations as the visual models created by Jerram. It is intriguing that the cutting edge of science is limited in a way that can be understood visually and not just through mathematical jargon. The second most interesting observation made by Jerram was that false colour microsopy images of viruses made by scientists are actually very misleading, and result in many people assuming that viruses look like multicoloured plates of spaghetti! By rendering viruses in 3D, in a medium like glass, it is possible to interact with the form of a virus, and gain an intuitive understanding of the science.

These models of science therefore should serve a reminder to non scientists that scientists are always dealing in models that are the closest fit to reality, and in no way are the 'real' phenomenon itself. For example, the way I choose to visualise a water molecule as an MRI physics student is different from the way another scientist may choose to visualise it, but for our individual purposes it will lead to accurate predictions and interpretations of reality. For a member of the general public it may be more satisfying to look at a model of water that is both visually pleasing, and also allows the maximum interaction and intuitive understanding of water without having to have any deep knowledge of physics.