Who says artists can’t be scientists too? By Liat Segal
Liat Segal studied AI, worked at Microsoft — and then quit, to explore Big Data as art. A new creative movement, she says, is emerging
Have you noticed how we’re all assimilating scientific jargon at an accelerating rate? Exponential growth, epidemiology, not to mention AI, Big Data and bots — all have
jumped from laboratory language to the everyday. As an artist who’s also a scientist, I find this hugely significant. Art reflects the environment in which it grows, and the two
domains are becoming ever more interconnected.
Artists and scientists aren’t so different. Both observe the world, ask questions and search
for truth. Both are motivated by curiosity and a burning inner call. Both observe their subjects through their personal, unique prisms and ask questions about them. The artistic process, much like the scientific one, grows from an inner seed that germinates in its creator’s mind. Then comes observation, distillation, research and experimentation. Both artist and scientist cherish the value of mindfulness and persistence on one hand, and of exploration and risk-taking on the other.
Cross-disciplinary collaborations are on the rise. It is only natural that boundaries between these two domains loosen too. In the last few decades a growing number of groundbreaking artworks have been created at the
intersection between art and science. Some of these works were the fruit of collaborations between artists and scientists. The recipe for this type of
collaboration is relatively easy to follow: take an artist and a scientist, and put them together. Add a mutual interest and mix well. Assuming that a common language has been found, expect all parties to discover meaningful inspirations for future works.
Today, as information, tools, and tutorials on how-to-make-everything are so accessible, we see a growing movement of people who identify as artists but also as scientists, techies or hackers. These individuals are formally or informally educated in both fields, and speak both languages. And they create art and science in a different way to their peers, not because they are more talented, but because their toolboxes, influences and inspirations differ.
I’ve created physical and digital objects for as long as I remember, but it seemed natural to favour my analytical side when choosing my academic major. With my MSc in bioinformatics and machine learning, I started working as a researcher at Microsoft Innovation Labs. I never stopped creating, but finding my place as an artist came from an unexpected direction. Only when I started playing with electronics, tinkering and making, did I realise that science and technology could be my medium in art. Fast-forward ten years, and today I create art with science and technology, and show it at contemporary art museums and galleries around the world.
Much of my thinking and my inspiration comes from my scientific and technological background. In my artworks I observe human existence in an age of Big Data by materialising the digital through software, electronics, mechanics and information. I question intimacy vs alienation, privacy vs over-exposure, randomness vs order and control, identity, memory, presence, communication and originality.
My recent exhibition Random Walk (Artist’s Residence Herzliya, Israel, 2019; curator: Ran Kasmy-Ilan) started with questions I deal with as a human and an artist, but echoed by scientific concepts that fascinate me. The exhibition dealt with the amount of control we have over our lives and our degree of free will. In a world so overwhelmingly complex, we tend to make simplifications that enable us to view our lives as a series of logical steps and choices. As if the world comprises a clear set of causes and effects and of absolute truths, rather than chaos. The very idea that there are no absolutely right or absolutely wrong choices — and that even if they did exist, we would be unable to make them — is too difficult to tolerate.
The exhibition took its name from the mathematical concept of the random walk, which describes random processes over time. There were three parts: Cause, Effect and Ripple, with three machines that made this random process tangible with form.
Cause, the starting point, is a coin-tossing machine. A large metal cylinder positioned as an altar has a stretched piece of black latex at its head. A coin that rests on the sheet is tossed by an internal mechanism every few seconds. The result of each toss is recorded by the camera positioned above the cylinder. It is displayed in binary values on an electronic screen, updated every few seconds.
Effect: The results of the coin’s continuous tossing affect the second component. A large cone composed of 1,165 narrow black elastic bands, which burst off the gallery wall, extends towards a point in the centre of the space. This beast-like object hovers in the air, held by two mechanical belts that pull the cone sideways, according to the coin-tossing outcomes.
Ripple: Hundreds of clear cups, half-filled with water, are placed on a round metal dais. They are positioned upside down; their rims rest on the surface. Each glass contains a tiny magnet that can be moved by a magnetic mechanism hidden under the surface, selectively making waves within the glasses. Motion at the gallery space, including that of the large cone, is recorded by another camera. When motion is detected, it triggers the ripples inside the glasses, agitating the water and then dropping still, awaiting the next call.
Following this exhibition, I continued to explore questions about free will, as I worked on a painting series called Random Walk 2.0. I built a large painting machine which visualised computational simulations of random walks. At each such process, a virtual agent flips a simulated coin, affecting its following steps. The complex trajectories are then drawn, until the agent reaches its goal. Yet, as often happens in life, the goal is actually set in retrospect, only after it has been reached.
Earlier this year I was lucky to collaborate with Yasmine Meroz, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, as we created a joint work, Tropism (Genia Schreiber Tel Aviv University Art Gallery, Israel, 2020; curators: Dr Tamar Mayer and Dr Sefy Hendler). Dr Meroz is a physicist with the soul of an artist, whose groundbreaking research on plants’ memory and decision-making was the inspiration for our joint venture.
Tropism is the directional motion of plants in response to external stimuli. Although plants are commonly considered static, they are actually highly dynamic, very responsive to their environment. Since their motion is driven by growth, a very slow process, plants effectively appear to be motionless to us humans, who experience the world at a different pace and scale. But watch a plant’s growth in fast-forward, and you can see the shoot swirl and tilt as it moves in response to environmental stimuli such as light and gravity. We were tackling this perceptual gap.
A field of robotic plants is positioned at the gallery. The massive shoots slowly move in response to the changing light. The shoots are covered by carbon-fibres, giving them a futuristic feeling while referring to natural carbon-base beings. Magenta lights create artificial sunrises and sunsets in the gallery. The lights, used in greenhouses for plant growth, give the viewer an uncanny and surreal feeling. The shoots sense the surrounding lights and react by arching their structures towards the most dominant light source. Each autonomous shoot is affected by the changing light as well as its neighbours’ behaviour, and complicated shadowing patterns emerge. This artwork has been inspired by research, but we further plan to use the installation as a physical simulation for research, thus closing a loop between art and science.
Tropism aspires to offer a mindful observation about our environment. Plants, rooted in the ground, act as an integral element of a wide net of species — allies and rivals. Even though plants compete for resources, they succeed in establishing an optimal balance between their need for survival and their need to protect their immediate environment. In this sense, we, human beings, have a great deal to learn from plants about the equilibrium required for a sustainable way of life.
Earlier, I suggested two models for combining art with science. It is important to say that a necessary condition for their existence is communities of people who are artists and also have deep understanding in other domains, such as science. The collaborative strengths, creativity and skills of such communities can be a game-changer — in this case, making one plus one equal three.
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