While Picasso with his African objects and Dali with his Freud are the
common influence narratives of these rock star 20th-century artists and
their contemporaries, there is a whole other side of this art history that is
not well known; science and technology have, since the carving tool was
conceived, continually played a critical role in the developments of art in
both idea and process. And if there is anyone to write about this subject, it
is Arthur I. Miller. Trained physicist and founder of the Science & Technology Studies department at the University College London, Miller has long
been interested in the relationship between art and science, both of which
hold the ideas of creativity and beauty dear.
Colliding Worlds is not Miller’s first book on the subject, but is the most
recent. While his previous works Einstein & Picasso and Insights of Genius
had a more narrow focus, in Colliding Worlds Miller presents the concurrent
historical trajectories of art movements, technological breakthroughs, and
scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beggining when our
scientific understanding of the world was rewritten anew by physics, the
book follows the breaking of the aesthetic canon of the salon, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA, and the birth of electonric,
new media, and science-based art—the 20th century was indeed the time
when art and science boomed, loud enough that artists and scientists finally
started to hear each other across the cultural divide.
Miller describes the development of today’s avant garde movement—
sciart (or artsci)—through the stories of over 100 artists, scientists, and innovators in technology. While many names may sound familiar, the richness
of the stories he presents is due to his ease in spanning the history of various disciplines. With biographical sketches, quotes, and images, this book
would serve as a primary text for a class on the subject. Miller puts special
emphasis on contemporary art and shows us how artists today are basing
their work on science, rather than merely being inspired by it. Importantly,
much of this history is shaped by science and tech figures like Billy Klüver,
who saw not a scientific application of their research, but artistic.
With chapter titles like “The Computer Meets Art,” “Imagining and
Designing Life,” and “The Art of Visualizing Data,” this text not only treats
the histories of science, technology, and art as one—because indeed History
is singular—but settles, through example after example, the oft-mentioned
debate of whether art and science can ever see eye to eye, ever find a common ground; the overwhelming conclusion, Miller helps us understand, is
that not only have science and art found a common ground, but that they
found it long ago.
In offering a singular history for the development of art, science, and
technology, Miller also offers us the idea of a third culture in which science
(and technology) and art are not separate, but partners in the exploration of
the unknown, in the pursuit of new truths. By showing us how these disciplines have long been interacting, it makes the idea of new kind of culture
in which cross pollination between fields is promoted sound not only possible, but probable. Suited for those operating within the science-art world as
well as for those who want an introduction to the subject, Colliding Worlds
is the type of book that makes you sorry you hadn’t read it earlier and that
you will recommend widely to your friends, while refusing to let them borrow your own copy.
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