What do STEM disciplines bring to the creation and understanding of art?
When people discuss the intersection of sciences, technology, and engineering with art, the focus is largely on what the arts bring to the sciences.
Instead, I want to look at what the sciences bring to the practice and understanding of art.
Where I see value in this disciplinary intersection is that STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) expand the possibilities of artistic expression and ability to connect at a human level.
For example, the affordances of digital technologies offer new extensions in modes of expression. When I say affordance, what I mean is an aspect of the medium. It’s not the medium itself; it’s not the content. It’s what qualities or opportunities the medium has to offer, and I think those qualities extend our artistic potential.
I’m drawing on Janet Murray’s work Inventing the Medium here. Go read it. It’s worth it. Also, I’m thinking of these qualities of digital technologies as extended dimensions of art — or broadening our potential artistic lexicon. For example, how would your creative practice change if someone could interact with your artwork and see or hear or feel it respond? or if your work could simulate an environment that someone can navigate?
The VR project “In the eyes of the animal” by Marshmellow Laser Feast takes advantage of digital media’s spatial affordance — or the ability for a person to navigate through what feels like a spatial environment. MLF uses this ability to show viewers perspectives of the forest from different animals’ points of view.
The medium’s encyclopedic affordance is demonstrated here by Wind Map. It’s a piece by Point B. Studio that visualizes data from the National Digital Forecast Database. Digital technologies are encyclopedic in the sense that they can collect and store information in a database.
Quantum Dance is a good example of how interactivity that is possible through digital media can intersect with performance art in compelling ways. When we think about interactivity, I think it’s important to remember that at its core, interactivity is most compelling when a piece responds to a person’s action meaningfully. When a person can clearly understand which action leads to which feedback, she gets a satisfying sense of control and agency, and it can be a route to experimentation or play. Interactivity is so compelling for artistic creation because the artist can craft the way a person will experience the piece at a more finely-grained level.
Digital media open the possibility of procedural artistic expression. In Refik Anadol’s Virtual Depictions, for example, the image that you see in the high-rise at 350 Mission is generated by a set of rules instead of in a pre-scripted pattern.
You can read a lot more about these qualities of digital media in Janet Murray’s book, but this is how I see them enhancing artistic expression and bringing a new dimensionality to art.
Because artistic creation can give form to concepts, allowing students to put their hands on abstract theories, art can be used to teach STEM disciplines in a new way, like the complex polyhedra pictured here. However, through disciplines like mathematics, artists and students can learn to look at artistic form through new lenses.
Like the mathematics example here, I could also imagine an engineering student seeing an art form like kinetic sculpture from a much different perspective than others.
These disciplines bring new perspectives to artistic creation. In the earlier examples, you can also see ecology, earth sciences, physics, and computer science at work.
So, I’d argue that STEM disciplines can extend artistic vocabulary and provide new lenses for understanding art.
Traditional pedagogy tends to affirm an old cultural assumption: that artistic creation is the result of inquiry within the person (and is subjective); whereas, STEM disciplines are the result of inquiry into the world outside of the person (and, hence, is objective). This is a binary opposition worth deconstructing.
When artistic practice and thinking are informed by STEM, we find explicit evidence of the world outside of the artist — context is explicitly present in the work instead of implied. Whether we see it labeled or not, city data is directly represented in Virtual Depictions and weather patterns are read in the swirling lines of Wind Map. This explicit representation broadens the opportunity to engage in artistic dialogue with the world in explicit ways.
So, this intersection of disciplines also increases the rhetorical scope of art.
Importantly, engaging STEM disciplines with art also builds a pedagogical or artistic ideology that is integrative and non-dualistic, which accounts for educating the whole student — that is, the student as she is situated in her cultural/environmental/political/social context.
