Arts: The third culture [1]

Michael John Gorman is intrigued by a survey of art informed and invigorated by science.
Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art
Arthur I. Miller W. W. Norton: 2014.

After months of injections with horse immunoglobulin in 2011, artist Marion Laval-Jeantet had a transfusion of horse blood in a Ljubljana art gallery. She walked around the donor animal on prosthetic hooves; then samples of her hybrid blood were freeze-dried and placed in engraved aluminium cases. In 2005, a New York gallery showed a starburst of glass orbs and aluminium rods depicting the explosion of space after the Big Bang, by sculptor Josiah McElheny and cosmologist David Weinberg.

Such are the collaborations chronicled by historian Arthur I. Miller in Colliding Worlds. Miller argues that we are seeing the emergence of a “third culture” — a term coined by writer John Brockman — in which boundaries between art and science dissolve.

The past decade has seen a proliferation of galleries, labs and residency programmes devoted to mingling art and science. Miller surveys these, from London's Wellcome Collection to the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria; the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin (of which I was founding director); Le Laboratoire in Paris; and the Collide@CERN [4] artist-residency programme at Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. He provides engaging pen portraits of many of the artists involved, such as Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, who experiment with sonoluminescence.