At the beginning of September,
scientists from across the UK and beyond descended on the city of Newcastle for
this year’s British Science Festival. From 7th to the 12th
September, the city became home to pop-up labs, science street buskers,
debates, workshops and exhibitions designed to educate, engage and inspire
visitors of all ages and interests.
Much to our great pleasure,
artiscience (the discipline of art-science collaboration) seemed to feature
prominently in this year’s Festival. From family-friendly arts and crafts to a
national conference for artiscience practitioners, visitors were encouraged to
explore the role of art-science collaborations in science communication from a
public, artistic and scientific perspective.
As this exciting world of
artiscience continues to develop and evolve, there is a growing rejection of
the somewhat exploitative use of art as an instrumental or illustrative device
to interpret science. Rather, an appreciation of the common characteristics of
art and science as performative approaches to producing knowledge is beginning
to be cultivated. It was on this theme
that the BSF centred its art-science Symposium and Networking Day on the 9th
September, as well as the Festival’s artiscient exhibition Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science. Hosted by the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary
Art, the exhibition featured work by artists from BxNU, a research institute
birthed from the partnership between the BALTIC and Northumbria University. Although unique in their renditions and
interpretations, the artists each sought to challenge the all-too-common
segregation of specialist knowledge by presenting a rendition of science
outside of its traditional and technical parameters.
On the theme of commonalities and
the production of knowledge, the work of Chris Dorsett stood out as particularly
illuminating. Dorsett’s central aim is to explore, from the perspective of
exhibition practice, the interface between contemporary art and museum
collections. This focus has produced artworks and curational experiments that
rethink museological claims about the construction of knowledge through the
display and interpretation of objects. While mulling these heady concepts,
Dorsett regularly meets geneticist Volker Straub and David Elliott (both of the
Institute of Genetics Medicine, Newcastle University) on their local commuter
train. His contribution to Extraordinary
Renditions revealed the remarkable value of their seemingly unremarkable
conversations.
In the format of short fragmentary films, Dorsett shared the lessons they had learned about the similarities between DNA and museum collections through their discussions of their work. Museums, like genes, have traffic between storage and display. Museums, like proteins, are created when things they have been inaccessible become expressed. At the heart of their discussions was the role of archival information on the expression of meaning. According to Straub and Elliott, there is a growing appreciation amongst geneticists that the presence of previously labelled ‘junk’ DNA (that is, DNA sequences which do not encode proteins and which have therefore been considered relatively unimportant by scientists) is in fact vital for the meaning of the 'useful' protein-encoding DNA. Likewise, that which has been selected for display in a museum is always informed by the unselected, notes Dorsett. Even the processes of art and science were found to bear a certain degree of similarity. When art is displayed, Dorsett explains, there are the unfathomable remains of what has been left behind before the artist is finished. Similarly, when a scientific paper is written, there are always a mass of data, of experiments and discoveries, which are left unpublished.
Despite their expertise and distinction, all three were able to explain the intricacies of their work in a manner that was unassuming and understandable. This accessible collision of two worlds usually renowned for baffling lay audiences with jargon and complexities was a refreshing and inspiring experience. What’s more, the willingness of Dorsett, Straub and Elliott to lay aside technical terminologies and bring themselves to a common level of understanding has facilitated the production of new knowledge that neither their science nor art alone would have achieved.
It seems there is a lot to be gained from the sacrifice of our linguistic barricades. And it seems it is true that the collaboration of artists and scientists can do much more than illustrate existing knowledge. There are so many new insights to be found on common ground.
