The art of science

Miranda Grounds spoke with Susan Williamson about how art is helping to drive things forward in science.

WILLIAMSON: As a director of SymbioticA and having been involved in the vision to set up a biological art centre in the 1990s, do you consider that artistic inquiry can drive new perspectives and possibilities in the life sciences?

GROUNDS: Yes, the artists are constantly questioning and trying out new possibilities that move into novel areas. I think that artists can serve as a huge catalyst that can take science and scientists in unusual directions, with rich cross-fertilisation of the two cultures.

Tissue engineering is an area that is of tremendous interest to the artists -- they work with bioreactors, bioscaffolds, semi-living objects, and their expertise is very impressive in that area.

The artists are able to escape, if you like, the constraints of both the professional expectations and procedures in science that rather limits what you could call the 'wilder' experiments that you might want to mess around with. Like mixing up, for example, plant, animal and human DNA -- you're not going to get a grant to do that and yet some of the concepts that emerge are seriously interesting and challenging.

SymbioticA is turning out some pretty cutting edge sort of stuff, how do you find it as a scientist working with artists?

It's been unbelievably dynamic for our school on many levels. Many people in the science world are rather drained from the academic demands, with excessive teaching loads, endless writing of grants, serving on committees, organising conferences, etc. The artists have great enthusiasm and energy, which is really a bonus.

I feel that the fundamental basis of good science ultimately is creativity, because original science at the end of the day is really based on the quality of your ideas -- you still have to do excellent lab work, but people who have very open and inquiring minds and are making new connections with lateral thinking, come up with new ways of looking at science. Thus creativity is a very exciting aspect of the scientists and artists' presence here.

So the artists at SymbioticA are exploring new possibilities, or non-mainstream science techniques and activities?

Yes, I think they are. The artists are fairly fearless and they have humour and they like to spar with the public and say well what about this?, how do you feel about that? Some of them do push the boundaries, but their work is a very healthy vehicle for getting people to think about important social and other issues in a fairly nonconfrontational way: a tangential approach.

This is a very important area that I think the artists play a huge role in, that is, in terms of holding up a mirror to society. They allow an interface for the wider public to question and become engaged with a lot of these really very provocative scientific topics.

There are many critical issues that need to be debated and scientists are sometimes a little reluctant to be identified with these topics because they can get pretty distorted, and it distracts them from their scientific activities.

The artists' works are designed to stimulate reactions; so it actually brings science into a much closer interface with the wider public. The artists are very interested in engaging in debate, for example on issues in tissue engineering and semi-living objects, stem cells and ethics If it is ethically acceptable to use animals in scientific research, then does this also apply to artistic research?

Can you describe some of the works?

One Tissue Culture and Art project was related to Guatamalan worry dolls, and the idea was that through the internet people could actually email in their worries. The artists welcomed people to comment on how they felt about issues.

A lot of these worries were about technology and it became a way for people to put these ideas forward and raise their concerns. I think it's quite difficult to find an opportunity for this to occur and the artists provide and welcome this exchange.

Another project is 'the semi-living artist', now known as MEART, which has just been at the first Moscow biennale for contemporary art; it was previously exhibited in New York, Spain, Austria and Melbourne.

This has been a huge success and was devised by the SymbioticA Research Group. The initial exhibition 'Fish and Chips' (Ars Electronica, Austria) used fish neurons attached to a robotic arm that produces two-dimensional drawings. This work has evolved and been renamed MEART, which uses rat cortical neurons grown at a remote site in a neuroengineering laboratory in the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA, with the electrical stimuli from these neurons being sent over the internet communicating in real time to the robotic arm, at another site.

In Moscow, MEART interfaced with a painting by Kashmir Malevich (The Black Square). This semi-living artist crosses boundaries and has raised all sorts of very interesting questions about creating entities in the future that might have some sort of emergent behaviours, geographically detached entities and the use of neurons for computational devices. Who knows what will emerge.

Another issue that we are interested in is getting indigenous artist interaction with SymbioticA, particularly because there is a very big Aboriginal population in WA. We had these residencies created by the Australia Council and the very first residency that we got was an indigenous artist from the Northern Territory, Jason Davidson. His real quest is to address the health issues within the Aboriginal community and communicate with them using an Aboriginal perspective rather than the perspective of beaurocrats in Perth, because the message just doesn't seem to get across in the way that it should.

Jason was very interested in using his artistic insight into this particular interest, particularly kidneys and dialysis, to engage Aboriginal people and give them a greater understanding of science and health. The aim is to give them another dimension because culturally they haven't had, if you want to call it, a big exposure to modern science; however, art may be one way that you can actually capture peoples' imagination and once they are visually captivated they will start to ask questions and want to know more.

I would love to see that go on as a major issue. Jason did a residency and we would like to maintain connections with him. We would like to facilitate additional things, although it's quite hard to follow up on these issues. It would be very nice if other people could come in underneath this and continue to support it. The problem with a residency is that he is really just starting to explore these things and it is quite overwhelming all the ideas and different things one is exposed to, particularly for him coming down from Darwin it's potentially very lonely, so it almost needs a follow up thing to almost realise the full potential in that particular instance.

But again the passion for engaging in those things opens up new doors - it's a new way of looking at things.

Do you see that there will be more art-science collaborations in the future?

I think so. There are several instances now where people are setting up exactly that. We recently had a Portuguese artist here in residence, Marta de Menezes, who was previously based out of Oxford University as an artist with her husband as a scientist: they are both going back to Portugal where she intends to set up a European equivalent of SymbioticA in Lisbon.

The artists based in SymbioticA are pioneers in this field and considered some of the leading biological artists. The invitations that they receive are amazing - they are becoming exhausted from going off to New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Spain and Thailand!

Invitations recognise their innovative contributions, and this is further endorsed by people starting up the equivalent of SymbioticA in several places around the world.

The uniqueness of SymbioticA is that it is embedded in a school for anatomy & human biology. We also run courses in biological techniques for artists, this has led to international invitations to stage the SymbioticA BioTech Art Workshops.

So in a way the artists are filling a niche with discovery research in a left-field kind of way.

I think so and feel there should be more mainstream integration between artists and scientists: this enables both to ask 'what happens if?' Some of these ideas turn out to be provocative and challenging, some might be dismissed as irrelevant, others are humorous, some directly contribute to scientific endeavour, whereas ideas that fall outside the conservative mainline may even be dismissed.

I don't necessarily endorse all of the experiments, everyone has very different tastes, but they raise discussion and some of them definitely challenge the direction in which things are going. You need to have people who will be innovative and bold.

Prof Miranda Grounds is a director of SymbioticA and is based at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, at the University of Western Australia in Perth.