Artifice that shapes our ends
By Matthew Reisz
Times Higher Education – The Pick – 7 July, 2011
Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement
Davide Angheleddu’s corroded bronze sculptures transform the illustrations of plankton taken from a 1904 book by the German philosopher and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms of Nature, into a totally different medium. Strangely beautiful, they stand on the frontier between the industrial and the organic – a frontier increasingly blurred by technology, and where many of our deepest anxieties and ethical challenges lurk. This exhibition (from 8 July to 24 September) offers a series of frequently disturbing reports on what artists have found there.
There is nothing particularly new about artists being inspired by science, as curator Arthur I. Miller, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London, reminds us in the exhibition catalogue. Picasso was interested in X-rays, Dali in relativity and quantum physics. Yet today’s artists who go into the lab to collaborate with biologists have some fascinating new media with which to work. […]