This past weekend I entered many of my books into a delightful website, LibraryThing. It’s the internet incarnation of those wonderful old wood card catalogs with the tiny brass-labeled drawers, only much simpler to use. (Does anyone actually remember how to use a card catalog anymore?)
(Just in case you think cataloging books is a waste of time and energy, let me point out that today, after many long debates, the International Astronomers Union finally decided Pluto isn’t a planet:
“Some people think that the astronomers will look stupid if we can’t agree on a definition or if we don’t even know what a planet is,” said Dr. Pasachoff of Williams College. “But someone pointed out that this definition will hold for all time and that it is more important to get it right.”
Or the definition will hold until their next big meeting. . . But back to LibraryThing.)
Really, all I wanted was the little widget on my sidebar which displays random covers. I love it. A familiar book cover is like a snapshot of a smiling friend. Hello there, “A Wrinkle in Time”! When you were on my bookshelf, I never got to see your face, only your boring spine!
So I compared my library with the other user libraries on LibraryThing, but I should have known an n of 200 (the maximum number of books allowed in a free account) is too low for meaningful conclusions. Several of my books are shared with zero other users, and my disproportionate representation of Dorothy Sayers and Stephen Jay Gould skews my data towards users who share those books but none of my others (check out the AuthorCloud function, it’s nifty). Basically, I have weird taste in books. But I hope that as LibraryThing grows, it could be an interesting source for book recommendations.It’s not as if you can search Amazon for “art and science” and get the most relevant hits. Someone has written a how-to book entitled “The Art and Science of X” for every topic imaginable, from Operative Dentistry to Personal Magnetism - whether or not the topic has a clear artistic and/or scientific component. I think the two words come together in this titular cliche precisely because they’re seen as disparate: any guide covering the art and the science of Culinary Preparation must be a comprehensive survey indeed!
So here are a few “Art and Science” books I’d actually like to read. When I have a significantly larger disposable income, they will be showing off their spines on my shelf.
Art and Science by Sian Ede
The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age by Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin
The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat by Martin Kemp
Colour: Art and Science (Darwin College Lectures) Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau, Eds.
August 24th, 2006
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brand-new blog is in desperate need of a topic. (And readers, of course - but you’ve found your way here somehow.) Bioephemera is about the intersection of science - mainly biology - and the arts. I am a biologist and an artist, but I’ve always felt awkward identifying myself as both. This strange combination seems to beg an explanation. But why?
Several years ago, as a graduate student in neurobiology at UC Berkeley, I helped to create a popular science magazine: the Berkeley Science Review. The original editorial team envisioned the BSR as a way to expose scientists to areas of research outside their “comfort zones.” We were more successful than I’d hoped, and the BSR just released its tenth issue. Check it out if you have a minute!
It was important to me from the start that the BSR bridge the yawning gap between science and humanities - art and poetry are about as far as you can get from the stereotypical scientist’s “comfort zone.” I don’t think we were as successful in that respect. We ended up with a wonderful publication, and we found room in each issue for a collection of art or photos. However, I felt the art ended up secondary to the science - illustrating and enlivening the science, but not presented as a serious topic of research in its own right. I began to wonder how practical it really is for art and science to cohabitate as intellectual endeavors.
Last year, as I taught a freshman class called Introduction to the Natural Sciences, I found myself enforcing a strict distinction between rational, inquiry-based fields of knowledge like biology, and. . . art! This simple division was useful from a teaching perspective - my point was that art, religion, and ethics all lie beyond the purview of the scientific method. But to be truthful, it can be darn hard to untangle biology, that most visual of the sciences, from art. Images of new species or patterns of gene expression are the centerpieces of biological research papers. Neurobiological processes inform the visual process and through it, the appreciation of art.
In all areas of science, theories (and experiments) are revered for their “elegance” (as in Brian Greene’s excellent popularization of string theory, “The Elegant Universe”). Speaking of popularization, vintage scientific illustration is now embraced as a trendy design aesthetic everywhere from Martha Stewart Living (I love this article - it turns out botanists actually use botanical illustrations to study plants! who knew?) to Pottery Barn (either Pottery Barn’s designers are copying my house, or I’m really tuned into the zeitgeist).
The truth is, I can’t begin to draw a clean boundary between biology and art, but I really enjoy wandering the DMZ between them.
If you ask a biologist why he or she chose biology as a career, I’ll bet most will cite a deep feeling of wonder and appreciation for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. But that feeling is not so easy to find in the lab, where we try to be objective and logical (and efficient). How we can initially turn to biology for such emotional, unscientific reasons, and then neglect them afterward, is a puzzling thing. We may never have tried to formally articulate our wonder. We may enjoy the richness and motivation it brings to our work, without needing any articulation. Even so, since art is all about capturing inarticulate truths and inspiring wonder, art may have something practical to offer biologists - a way to recapture that original feeling of wonder and surprise that brought us here.
All that said, this blog doesn’t promise to dismantle the inner clockworks of the brain, or define “beauty,” or anything nearly so dramatic. It’s just a home for my art and musings. Hopefully you’ll find something to spark your interest now and then. Enjoy.
August 24th, 2006