Again on Art and Science

What do an iPad, an ant colony, Blade Runner, a first date and this blog have in common? They all exist on the boundary between science and art. One of the joys of having an online presence is being found by people that you never expected. I’ve been honoured to be invited by Athena publishing to read and review one of their new eBooks. 

Science and Art embodies it's own argument by espousing a view of science and art as co-existing through common concerns with beauty, function and rationality, in a pithy, sleekly-designed modern form of the book. It is refreshing to see this now fairly well-trodden boundary considered from a scientific perspective. Gilbert-Jones makes a compelling case for the importance of aesthetics in our appreciation of technological function. By focusing on Apple products, he argues that it is the design as much as the technology which gives the iPad it's edge, seen as the most functional tablet on the market. Likewise, he argues for the presence of beauty in mathematical and scientific design, from the famous golden ratio to the Parthenon.

Both Gilbert-Jones and Holdsworth consider what technology means for our lives and environments: is it making us less human, less in touch with the 'real' world? They argue that our large high-tech cities, and our increasingly controlled bodies, are merely the next stage in our development, no different from an ant colony. We merely have the capacity to question what our cities and technologies mean, and to make the mental connections between modernist design and the kinds of dystopian future envisaged in Blade Runner. What will the future look like? Art is our only real means of answering that question, by adding imagination to technological development.

But what does that mean for our ethics? Holdsworth ends the book with a section on people, morals and politics, arguing that morality can be a science as much as an art. The key is methodology rather than subjects or instruments. A moral life requires the application of both rational analysis and narrative structures to have meaning: the marriage of science and art. Her only concern is what the increasing availability and use of big data will mean for individual freedom.

I am left uneasy, however. As an argument for the marriage of science and art this book highlights the pitfalls as much as the opportunities. It is profoundly science oriented, focusing on the concerns of modern technology and design, showing no real engagement with histories of art or science as disciplines or within histories of collecting. The common historical grounds of what are now considered distinctively 'art' or 'science' objects are surely crucial. Their meanings are central to these discussions, yet the chapters are interspersed with largely unexplained and unattributed images. It is a shame that the authors have not discussed their creation of these images, and how they see them working within the book as a whole.

I am left wondering where art fits in the argument when not a catalyst for scientific change.