Collaborations between the arts and science are becoming commonplace. Evelyn Wilson looks at one scheme that pairs artists and scientists with often illuminating results.
Last year saw the start of a new fellowship programme co-developed by Arts Council England (ACE) and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) called ?Artists and Scientists Working Together?. Brighton-based, Norwegian artist Sol Sneltvedt and neuroscientist Professor Mike O?Shea from the University of Sussex won one of the fellowships with a proposal to work together on making visible the complexities of the human mind. The end result was an audio-visual installation, ?Mindscape?, shown for the first time in Brighton this summer. Images of nerve cells in the brain were magnified, digitised, processed and combined with sound to represent the dynamics of the brain in action. The animations and sounds are determined by electrical impulses recorded with micro-electrodes placed inside living nerve cells in culture.
Symbiosis
The project simply would not have come about without the inputs of both the artist and the scientist. It also became resoundingly clear that the collaboration and fellowship award was seen as much as a benefit to the institution as to the artist. Artist Sol Sneltvedt had worked previously with a meteorologist and a composer on an Internet-based project called ?Interlude?. It was out of her intense desire to find out more about dynamics in the brain that she made contact with the neuroscience department at Sussex University and that is how she teamed up with Professor O?Shea.
His response was an invitation to undertake an internship in the department, in effect to carry out a pilot project to prove that the work could be realised. He points out that in the academic community, in order to get project funding it is vital to begin with a pilot project. ?The work has in some senses almost got to be undertaken before the relevant funding can be expected to be successful. You propose work that is ?do-able? to establish the proposal and spend time developing the team of people who will be working on the project, and I was keen to apply the same processes in making the application to ACE/AHRB as I would to any other scientific bid.?
In this instance, success was measured in terms of both research and also output. Output is defined in different ways by artists and scientists. As they pointed out, ?Science is more about the written word, about publication, whilst artists tend to put up shows, which often are open to viewing by the public at large. Scientific output, on the other hand, is subject to formalised scrutiny through periodicals and also through a peer review system.? The difference within the arts is largely that the process of review occurs at different levels, with the audience often being the toughest judge of all.
Unique sharing
In pieces like ?Mindscape?, which have been produced to articulate very specific scientifically-proven knowledge (in this case about the way in which the brain works), the foremost question that arises, perhaps ironically, is one that concerns representation or the truth. The highly magnified nerve cells shown in the Mindscape installation are not human cells. They are cells taken from a rodent brain. While this poses questions about authenticity ? more often associated with fields like photography ? it also questions the nature of an audience?s relationship to projects that span scientific facts and an arts-based approach that is not primarily concerned with factual evidence.
As Sneltvedt observes, ?The project is based on a true story but the characters are fictional. The real thing that happens scientifically in Mindscape is what happens inside the brain of the viewer.?
The output of work of this nature is about much more than making evident accepted scientific fact, yet, without access to the specialist scientific knowledge that collaborations of this nature impose, the result would invariably be different. So, although there are many different views of what constitutes ?interdisciplinarity? there is no doubt that the sharing of knowledge and approach that occurred through Mindscape?s evolution has resulted in a piece that could not have otherwise existed.
Evelyn Wilson is a creative projects developer, consultant and lecturer. e: evelyn@ouhypo.org