“It was once thought that the imaginative outlook of the artist was death for the scientist. And the logic of science seemed to spell doom to all possible artistic flights of fancy.” Robert E. Mueller observed in The Science of Art (1967) that the antagonism between science and art lies in the contrast between the logical and the aesthetic response to (visual) experience. Whether we agree with him or not, the first step towards a sustainable interdisciplinary communication is to properly recognize the reasons behind this antagonism. Because of the nature of scientific inquiry, we have to acknowledge the fact that the questions of individual scientists will always be very limited in scope. The artist, on the other hand, wants to understand the visual phenomenon in its totality. Where the vision scientist often starts from intuitions acquired through phenomenology, she must operationalize those intuitions into concrete experiments. In other words, she has to (temporarily) isolate the phenomenon to make it measurable and therefore objectifiable. On the other hand, the artist, even though she wishes to investigate individual phenomena, doesn’t need to render the phenomena objectifiable. She can investigate them purely from her subjective sphere. Whereas the individual phenomena form an endpoint for the scientist, for the artist, they are means to a broader artistic purpose. Moreover, the scientist will need to place her discovery in the larger theoretical framework that she adopts within vision science. The artist, however, has the liberty to connect her interpretation of a phenomenon to narratives that not only stem from the existing art theory, but potentially come from any cultural sphere. She even has the freedom to place the phenomenon in a narrative of her own construction.

 

The differences in both types of approaches result in a communicative gap. Whereas the methodology of the scientist and the community-based aspect of her enterprise will ensure a shared but proprietary language among vision scientists, the art world lacks such a homogeneous language. At best, the language shared by artists and art historians could be seen as a common denominator of the multiple narratives historian can be seen as the mediator between the many narratives in art and art theory. Given these differences, between Scientese and Artese, the question imposes itself as to how these two parties can communicate meaningfully. The aim is not to translate or to incorporate Artese into Scientese or vice versa, since any translation would amount to an appropriation that fundamentally undermines the uniqueness and value of the appropriated language. Respect for each other’s alterity doesn’t imply that communication between both groups is impossible, however. Indeed, the artist can use findings from vision science to inform her thinking about specific visual phenomena, while she retains the freedom to use them for her own goals and to place them within a narrative of her choosing. On the other hand, the scientist can learn from the artist’s intuitions and phenomenology: artists offer the vision scientists a never-ending supply of material to investigate, in the form of new visual phenomena or by placing known phenomena into new contexts of different levels of complexity. The need to overcome the antagonism between art and science has turned into a thriving enterprise, as evidenced by the current amount of collaborative research in which scientists, artists, and art historians work closely together in scientifically inspired art production, the incorporation of empirical research into art history and in the visual science of art. In some cases, we see that the cross-pollination even leads to interesting transformations: the scientist becomes an artist and the artist becomes a scientist.  

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​​This vision text was originally written for the VSAC 2019 Art@VSAC exhibition catalogue. 

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