[…] [Susan] Aldworth featured in an exhibition, Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement, at the GV Art Gallery in London last year (its current group exhibition, Polymath, explores similar themes). Long at the forefront of the science/art or “sciart” movement, this is the only independent commercial gallery with a human-tissue licence, enabling it to show challenging and often controversial work exploring areas such as prosthetics, transplants and genetic engineering.
Last year’s exhibition was curated by a long-term enthusiast for the “revolutionary new art movement” (and the eventual creation of a “third culture”), Arthur I. Miller, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London.
“There has always been science-influenced art,” he says, “but [there were] no major collaborations until the 1960s.”
Of course, “there will continue to be a market for emotional art”, he adds, but he is far more enthusiastic about the areas that have been explored on the frontiers of science: from robotics art and zero-gravity dance to attempts to redesign the (increasingly obsolescent) human body.
Until now, there has been “much more biology- than physics-based art, because it’s easier for artists to learn the basic principles and get access to labs”, Miller says, but he has been involved in a number of attempts to redress the balance.
One was a collaborative project with graphic artist Fiorella Lavado called Weaving the Universe (2009-10), which set out “to evoke the ambiguity and beauty of the Cosmos in the large and in the small, while exploring the human mind, the means by which we imagine these strange worlds”.
Miller is now working with photographer Anaïs Tondeur on another project devoted to the notion of the multiverse, addressing questions such as: “Is there any evidence our Universe once collided with another one?” […]
From Third-culture club by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education – 15 March 2012.