Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time: four stories without an end

I have four stories to tell. They are interwoven; I will hop from one to another as I gradually reveal the development of my main characters over a period of 10 years or so. The characters I refer to are either scientists or artists who, first, have pooled their knowledge and resources to create ideas which bring the realms of science and art closer together and secondly, have been given an opportunity to develop their ideas as recipients of a Sci-Art Award.

The Sci-Art competition was launched in 1996 with 12 Awards being given to successful partnerships in 1997. Since then, every year until 2006, Sci-Art partnerships continued to benefit from the receipt of sponsorship. I don’t want to dwell on the history of Sci-Art but more on what’s been achieved in those years. The original sponsor, the Wellcome Trust, stayed true to its belief in Sci-Art from its initiation onwards. I am always amazed by the fact that from the germ of an idea, where nobody could foresee the result, there emerged a powerful creative force for change, innovation and potentially wealth generation. My task now is to explain why this is so and to put forward suggestions on how, for the future, full benefit can be obtained from the Sci-Art experiment.

Now back to my four stories. Each traces the course of a successful Sci-Art project but, more than that, during the course of my recounting of these stories, you’ll find that the main characters (ie. the scientists and artists working in partnership) give candid opinions both on one another and on the learning curve they have underwent together. Sci-Art was an extraordinary adventure.

Take Alexa Wright as an example. In 1996, she was an artist, working with photography and interactive media, who was interested in understanding more about how we as humans experience the world and ourselves. She didn’t really set out to explore science/art boundaries or relationships; she wanted, at that time, to explore the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’ experienced by many amputees. It was only after receiving the first Sci-Art Call for Ideas that Alexa felt she had the status (her word) to approach experts on the subject, Neurologist John Kew and Neuropsychologist Peter Halligan, to discuss her ideas.

During a five hour conversation, the scientists described phantoms and similar phenomena, discussed the potential causes and answered Alexa’s questions. Thus, the idea of AFTER IMAGE was born. The artist and scientists together made a successful application for a Sci-Art Award

Alexa went on to interview and photograph eight people with amputated limbs. In consultation with each subject, she then made a series of digitally adjusted photographs, in the subjects’ own homes, which sought to ‘normalise’ for the amputees the more bizarre images of their phantoms.

Terry Trickett is grateful for the valuable material and observations provided by the following scientists and artists who, between them, have been responsible for creating the remarkable Sci-Art projects described in this presentation:

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, artists

Igor Aleksander, Professor Emeritis in Neural Systems Engineering, Imperial College

Richard Brown, freelance entrepreneur at mimetics.com and Artist in Residence at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics, EAR Institute, UCL

John Tchalenko, Camberwell College of Arts, Reader in Drawing and Cognition, University of the Arts London

Howard (Sid) Thomas, Leverhulme Emeritis Fellow, Aberystwyth University

Alexa Wright, Assistant Research Fellow, EAR Institute, UCL

These four projects (and 120 others) could not have happened without a decade of support and sponsorship provided by the Wellcome Trust.

On her work, she comments:

"Whilst investigating notions of normality and the relationship between identity and body-form from a philosophical perspective, the work aims to question ‘public attitudes to physical differences and disabilities."

It was this project that confirmed Alexa in her conviction that she had something to offer the science community. She’s been following that path ever since. Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics, Centre for Auditory Research, UCL,who became Alexa’s scientific partner for a wide range of projects that followed AFTER IMAGE has this to say:

"It is beneficial to the collaborative partnership when the artist can learn about science, contribute to the extension of scientific language and processes and help develop new scientific methods."

Now on to my second story: In 1996, artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey were creating extraordinary living grass photographs.

Unfortunately, these images lost their greenness fairly quickly. The artists became aware of the work of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) through publicity about scientific research on staygreen grass. They visited Howard (Sid) Thomas, Head of Cell Biology, and Helen Ougham, Pricipal Research Scientists at IGER, Aberystwyth to explore the possibility that the use of staygreen grass would preserve their images longer than conventional grass. The artists and scientists immediately struck up a close personal rapport and began to develop ideas for a collaboration which they called FIXING THE EPHEMERAL.

In this story, too, a Sci-Art Award acted as a catalyst in bringing artists and scientists together. As a first stage, it enabled Heather and Dan to work as artists in residence at IGER.

Sid Thomas has total recall of what then happened at the point when the artists first demonstrated their grass photographs:

"At that point the realisation dawned that the visual information in the work resides not just in the distribution of shades of pigmentation but also in the textures, orientation and nearest-neighbour interactions of the individual plants. This in turn led us to new insights into the interactions between vegetation and the light environment."

It’s interesting, by comparison, to hear Heather and Dan’s view on this same revelatory meeting:

"The subtlety and range of tonal colour captured in our grass photographs made a deep impression on our science colleagues and, in a remarkable shift in perception, they realised that observations of plant material could occur in very different circumstances than the established investigative paths, which involved grinding up leaves and subjecting them to various kinds of separation."

This new awakening at IGER, which both the artists and scientists remember so vividly, can best be described, I think, as a ‘catalysing moment’. You will see, as I develop my theme (and my stories), that catalysing moments, of one type or another, are common to all successful Sci-Art partnerships. There has to be a time when each partner contributes in equal measure to the idea which, from then on, forms the basis of on-going project development. This idea can never emerge from a single source; it has to be a mutual moment of inspiration and, for this reason, I believe it represents a new type of creativity, which we can now recognise and evaluate as a direct result of the Sci-Art experiment.

In AFTER IMAGE, the catalysing moment occurred during the initial five hour meeting I’ve already described. Alexa’s life took on a new course from that time onwards. Similarly, at IGER, nothing was the same again after Heather and Dan’s demonstration of grass images; Sid and Helen adopted new methods of investigating the molecular indices of leaf death through non-invasive high resolution imaging – a change of direction which has had a radical impact on the fortunes of IGER. I will continue the story of FIXING THE EPHEMERAL later but, for the moment, let me introduce two further stories to you.

For BIOTICA, the catalysing moment also occurred during the initial meeting between scientist and artist. Igor Aleksander, Professor of Neural System Engineering at Imperial College, remembers Richard Brown, Research Fellow in Computer Related Design Research at the Royal College of Art, coming to see him early in 1998 to discuss how neural nets could be incorporated into a dynamic and interesting computer generated work of art.

(I should explain that neural nets are computer simulations that mimic the structure and functioning of neurons and their interconnections in the brain.)

Igor was impressed with Richard’s idea to interconnect the neurons to their neighbours through ‘springs’. (When a neuron fires, information is not only distributed to the neurons to which it is immediately connected but, also, to neighbouring neurons by means of a physical ‘tug’. It is the combined effect of all these billions of interconnections that makes our brains so remarkable and, at the same time, so difficult to comprehend.)

Richard remembers this first meeting differently; he found Igor’s visualisation of neural nets very flat, two dimensional and purely informative. The breakthrough, which led to a successful application for a Sci-Art Award, was seeing how two dimensional information could be re-represented in a dynamic form in three dimensions with movement and colour acting as additional dimensions. This is how my third story, BIOTICA, started. Both Igor and Richard were working at the cutting edge. As Richard puts it:

"We decided to pursue the quest for the A-life philosopher’s stone – emergence; we wanted creatures to spontaneously emerge from a primitive soup rather than craft them by hand."

My fourth story concerns the subject of ‘eye-tracking’. This, too, needs a little explanation. The eye is constantly moving as we see the world and as the brain processes the information received on the retina. An eye-tracker can measure these movements with great accuracy – it’s worn on the head like a bicycle helmet, allowing maximum freedom of movement. As well as providing numerical data for statistical use, a scene camera records the wearer’s view adding a small dot to indicate where the eyes are focusing.

John Tchalenko wanted to do a study using an eye-tracker to trace the eye/hand coordination of an artist drawing a portrait. Not surprisingly, this story is called PAINTERS EYE MOVEMENT.

John is the first to acknowledge that the Wellcome Trust’s support was absolutely fundamental in launching his project. It is fitting, therefore, that this story’s catalysing moment occurred during a seminar held at the Trust.

As John relates:

"The scientists showed a computer model of the movements of the painter’s hand while drawing Luke. An artist friend then said: “Let’s do it”. I said: “Do what?” Answer: “Make it”. We made a life size 3D model in very fine wire; it’s a beautiful object which is now part of the Wellcome Trust Collection. It visualised, and made me realise, fundamental aspects of the visual-to-motor brain process which are central to the success of our project."

It’s not often that such moments can be portrayed visually but here it is! You’ll also realise that, for John and his scientist, Chris Miall (from the Sensorimotor Control Lab in Oxford), the catalysing moment occurred well after the project had started.

The Legacy of Sci-Art

What is Sci-Art?

Can Sci-Art lead to wealth generation?

Sci-Art as a driver of the Creative Economy