ARTSCIENCE: THE ESSENTIAL CONNECTIONg e n e r a l

n o t eArt, Science andCommunities of PracticeB r e tt W i l s o n , B arbara H aw k i n s

ABSTRACTa n d S t u art S i m

Through editorials such as Bob Root-Bernstein’s ArtScience“manifesto” in Leonardo Vol. 44, No. 3 (2011), Leonardo has
long encouraged a broader and more inclusive understandingof the subtle interplay between science and art, and the belief
that as individuals and cultural agents we all blend both aspects
in our respective fields of endeavor. However, discourse andcollaboration across the arts, sciences and humanities is not yet
a mature and fully effective process. The authors contribute to thisdebate by drawing on elements of their Project Dialogue research
program, set alongside published accounts of experiences at earlier
U.K. art-science programs, to sketch out a theoretical frameworkthat could inform ArtScience through a re-formulated cultural modelof knowledge encompassing art and science.
The Authors and Their Approach

Through previous collaborative projects, the authors of thispaper have listened to, assimilated and responded to eachother’s arguments, criticisms and conceptual models withmuch closer attention than is typical between practitioners in science, philosophy and art education. Appreciating
more clearly how other disciplines go about their “ways ofknowing” has helped to bring into sharper focus the knowledge, values and boundaries associated with our respective
research communities. Discovering how the foundational
assumptions and ideological baggage of one’s own field of
research are seen through the eyes of practitioners fromother disciplines helps to reveal underlying commonalities
Brett Wilson (scientist), PLaCE, University of the West of England, Bristol, U.K.
Email: <brett.wilson@uwe.ac.uk>.
Barbara Hawkins (arts educator), PLaCE, University of the West of England,
Bristol, U.K. Email: <barbara.hawkins@uwe.ac.uk>.
Stuart Sim (philosopher and cultural theorist), Dept. of English, Northumbria
University, U.K. Email: <s.sim@northumbria.ac.uk>.

Article Frontispiece. Susan Aldworth, Elisabeth, monotype,250 x 200 cm, 2012. Exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London,as part of the exhibition The Portrait Anatomised (March–September 2013).
Growing out of residencies at hospitals and clinics, Susan Aldworth’s
work frequently explores how new scientific imaging techniques impact
our understanding of the relationship between contemporary notionsof self and the physical brain. (© Susan Aldworth. Image courtesy of
the artist and GV Art, London.)©2015 ISAST   doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00972

in research processes and broadens our perception of therelationship between the arts, sciences and humanities. An
analytical auto-ethnographic approach of this nature [1]therefore promises valuable insights into how the growing
relationship between art and science could evolve into aneven more fruitful knowledge paradigm.
We established Project Dialogue in the Faculty of Creative
Arts at the University of the West of England, Bristol, U.K.,
in 2006 to offer a contemplative space for exploring the underlying commonalities between art and science through arolling research program and invited seminars from a wide
range of speakers. Co-author and recently retired scientist
Brett Wilson presented a number of seminars looking at thecultural history of scientific ideas alongside the more usual
visual culture material to initiate a broader debate on art andscience as related communities of practice rather than as separate research tribes. This paper summarizes a number of the
key concepts explored in our research program that can help
inform the ArtScience movement [2]. Figures 1 through 3 andthe Article Frontispiece are images of artwork by artists who
contributed to Project Dialogue’s 2010 seminar series andto our recent book Art, Science and Cultural Understanding,which grew out of that collaboration [3]. These four artists
are representative of a new generation whose involvement invarious scientific fields is being used to frame fundamental
questions about the nature of human perceptions and identity through their artworks.
Producing Knowledge:
Studio and Lab Practice

Sciart, funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the Art and Science Research Fellowship, run by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council/Arts Council England, are two examples oftypical art-science schemes that took place in the U.K. overa 10-year period, ending in 2008. Subsequent independent
evaluation of the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart program [4] notedthat while participants had learned something about eachother’s disciplines as a result of collaboration, they had generally not developed any additional insights into their own
LEONARDO, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 152–157, 2015 153

artscience: the essential connection

So while there appears to becommon acceptance of fundamental differences between art
and science on the one hand, there
is also general agreement that thetwo endeavors share many similarities when viewed as communities of practice. It seems that muchof the background philosophicalframework of both scientists
and artists has been inherited
second-hand from a previous
age. The economic, industrial
and intellectual expansion in theWest that characterized the 17thcentury Enlightenment program
was crucially dependent on thedisenchantment of science—in
which matter effectively became
Fig. 1. Luke Jerram, T4 bacteriophage in glass, 2011. Luke Jerram’s 3-dimensional representations“de-animated”—but it did notof permeable, almost invisible, colorless and semi-transparent glass virus sculptures have altered­depend on the idea of objectivthe visual vocabulary of virology, in both the public and scientific arenas. (© Luke Jerram)ity. The notion of “mechanicalobjectivity” was only adopted inpractices. However, it was widely felt that the schemes had
scientific enquiry around 1830, following the previous “truth
been valuable in fostering experimentation, resulted in into nature” standpoint, and only lasted for just over a century
creased levels of risk-taking and had shown that innovation
before evolving into the current ideas of “expert judgement”
in process was as important as the finished product. Other[6]. Yet the notion of objectivity still seems to impart a
published accounts described how both collaborating scien­powerful influence on what contemporary scientists, artists
tists and artists saw the role of scientists as being to uncoverand the general public take to be “modernity,” where utility ispreviously existing objective evidence in a physical world,
expected of science through technology to fuel never-ending
while both parties agreed that artists, through their labor andgrowth. In contrast, art is seen as an aesthetic expression
original creativity, were producing artifacts that embodied
of inter-subjective knowledge, personally created by thesome form of inter-subjective cultural expression [5].
artist. Greater emphasis is now being placed on utility
In our early debates, Project Dialogue graduate students
throughout the arts as well as the sciences under the present
and early-career researchers similarly voiced the opinion that
neo-liberal economic doctrine, with art increasingly being
scientists were discovering and harnessing something thatjudged and funded on its profit potential rather than its aeshad always been there for the finding, whereas artists were
thetic qualities.
creative because they conjured up something personal and
What Is Research?
novel from within their own minds. In contrast, when looking
The recent growth of arts-based, practice-led doctoral reat science and art as related communities of practice throughsearch has raised a number of pressing questions within
our Project Dialogue workshops, we found agreement thatthe academy about what actually constitutes research andthere were numerous tempting parallels to be drawn between
how it should be presented and evidenced [7]. Presenting
the “culture of experiment” in art and science. Studios andvisual, aural or performance-based material as an integral
laboratories could both be described as places of discovery
element alongside a text-based thesis to form part of an artsand curiosity—places where new conceptual structures andresearch program for evaluation is, in principle, essentiallyinvestigative methods were explored; where mastery of craft
no different to a traditional scientific Ph.D. In both casesand expert judgement played important roles; where new
candidates need to demonstrate how investigative laboratory
metaphors could illuminate unexpected directions and conexperiments or innovative studio works constitute creative
sequences; and where teasing obliquely glimpsed possibilities
artifacts that act as respective sites of discourse, embodyinto working artifacts was often decisive. Crafting a work ining and exercising the central research question under study
progress towards a state of exhibition, inspection and judgeusing language specific to the inquiry. Both represent thement by fellow professionals, sponsors and the wider public
public face of private imagination acted out through cultural
was a strong driving force for scientists and artists alike. Artprocesses, and the closed-loop path that is considered such
ists and scientists often more strongly identified with beinga distinctive feature of scientific inquiry is clearly evident inpractitioners directly involved in research than they identithe debate, review and critique adopted by contemporary
fied with the specific traditions of their own individual fields
arts-based, practice-led reflexive practitioners.
of practice.

154 Wilson et al., Art, Science and Communities of PracticeMetaphors and Conceptual Models“cognitive fluidity” arising from a highly plastic and figurative general intelligence [12]. Appropriate metaphors andanalogies (part of Todd Siler’s family of figurative “metaphorms” [13]) help scientists, artists and other practitioners
to link experience, intuition and imagination when erecting conceptual scaffolding for moving into new realms of
the “not-yet-known-or-experienced,” where literal language
on its own may be insufficient. A well-chosen metaphor
often illuminates a problem in a way that literal language
simply fails to do and frequently suggests fertile new directions for study—as with the planetary metaphor of the atom,
for example.
Accepting that models and theories are metaphorical constructs intended for mapping onto aspects of the observational domain also helps us to see how science works as aknowledge system. No single conceptual model need aspire
to be a complete description of reality capable of capturing all
the various observations that might be made. We happily use
different atomic metaphors when considering the physicaland chemical properties of matter, for example [14]. Consequently, approaching scientific models more as extended
conceptual metaphors structured for predictive purposes
through theory formation rather than direct literal attempts
at mimicking some form of external reality also removes therequirement for any access to a contentious “objective” world

Science has recently taken a more considered attitude to its
underlying epistemology, absorbing some of the concerns ofpostmodernism along the way. It has eventually accepted thatscientific research is not simply a cosmic treasure-hunt for
pre-existing knowledge objects embedded in some form oftheory-independent reality, but is crucially dependent on theconceptual models we create to make falsifiable predictions
for interacting with the world—from cosmology to how thebrain functions [8]. Detailed and painstaking experimental
work is vital, but we must never forget that observational data
do not exist in a universal theory-free vacuum. As Einstein
commented to Heisenberg: “It is the theory which decides
what we can observe” [9]. The
quantum world, for example,
was not discovered as a selfcontained and ready-packaged
entity, it took many world-classscientists decades to create andrefine the conceptual models required to make sense of it. The
quantum world as we understand it today is just as much a
crafted product of human imagination as it is a physical one.
Whether science is inherently
self-limiting in what it can everknow is also a question both scientists and philosophers are currently exploring [10].
Science has also only belatedly
appreciated the role metaphorsplay in constructing its own
conceptual models, despite thefact that linguistic metaphorsabound across the arts and humanities and visual metaphorshave long been powerful conceptual tools for visual artists.
Writers such as Barbara Maria
Stafford argue that consciousness is the art of connecting [11],Fig. 2. Shelley James, Lacuna 2, print in hot glass, 10-cm diameter, 2010; glass blown by Liam Reeves.
echoing Steven Mithen’s suggesShelley James creates intimate small-scale glass sculptures relating to the eye and vision. Her sculptures
tion that modern humans arehave produced a closer sense of personal engagement between patients, medical staff and the clinicalcharacterized by their evolved
environment through their ability to open up multiple perspectives. (© Shelley James)

Wilson et al., Art, Science and Communities of Practice 155

artscience: the essential connection

The approach we have evolved through Project Dialogue tothe question of what constitutes research in general across diverse communities of practice is that it challenges fundamental structures, models and metaphors in one way or another,or proposes a conceptual model where none has previously
been acknowledged. All research proceeds by asking explicit
or implicit questions, and it is the nature and quality of thesequestions that determine the usefulness of the outcome. To
get good answers, first one has to learn to ask good questions;to discover powerful paradigm-shifting answers, one needs
to devise extremely insightful questions.

artscience: the essential connection

with its implied notion of a privileged frame of reference
that offers such a tempting target for cultural commentators. Our next step should be to acknowledge that since nomodel and its metaphorical base can therefore expect to beuniversally true, all models should be treated as provisionaland not be expected to last in perpetuity—a point implicitly
supported by both Kuhn and Popper [15]. Recent confirmation of the Higgs boson and its properties has sent many
theoretical physicists back to their drawing boards since it
represents the final piece of their Standard Model jig-saw
puzzle: This completed model still has little to say about thegrowing puzzle of Dark Matter and Energy [16].
The appropriation of scientific concepts by philosophers,
artists and cultural theorists is often criticized for being imprecise, when it could instead be viewed as an attempt touse those concepts in a figurative way that makes us rethink
our assumptions about reality, generating interesting newquestions in the process. That metaphors are now regarded
as central agents in developing new conceptual models inthe sciences as well as the arts further highlights the commonality of creative thought and that the arts, humanities
and sciences should not be viewed as separate intellectual
realms based on immiscible modes of thinking. Acceptingthat science also is built on both figurative and literal modesof understanding opens the door for a genuine aesthetic ofscience to emerge.
Bayesian Epistemology

incorporate experience with already-established information
to create an improved belief capable of further testing and refinement. Bayesian epistemology’s analytical combination of
the not-quite-objective with the not-quite-subjective mirrors
how cognitive science now accepts that embodied humanproblem-solving probably evolved [18].
Perceptions in general are now being viewed as Bayesian constructs that we adopt as a provisional hypotheticalframework when testing sensory data for inconsistencies andinterpreting for potential meaning [19]. Normally we remain
unaware that we unconsciously treat perceptions as working hypotheses (i.e. informed guesses) but accept them astrue and accurate representations provided by our eyes-ascameras. Occasionally we perceive the struggle when two
different hypotheses appear to fit the data equally feasibly, aswith optical illusions involving Gastrow’s ambiguous duck/rabbit figures and Necker’s cube, for example. Here ourbrains consider each of the two possibilities in turn, giving
us the distinct impression of jumping between two alternate,
yet equally valid, views of the world. As neuroscientist V.S.
Ramachandran remarks, “It’s as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely
selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current
input” [20].
The principal weakness of traditional epistemology has always been that it deals with knowledge as absolute certainty
and is incapable of recognizing doubt, suspicion or “maybes” that form such a valuable part of our everyday detective
kit. However, it is now possible using Bayesian calculus to
explore quantitatively how our credence in a proposition isaffected by new information when we attach varying degrees

Project Dialogue has also been about unpacking aspects of
the assumption that art and science have divergent notionsof truth and knowledge. One very promising step forward
was made with a concept initially explored by Thomas Bayes in the 18th
century and refined shortly afterwards
by Laplace before being taken up by
Alan Turing to help crack the German Enigma code in World War II.
By this route Bayes’s idea of how we
handle incomplete or uncertain information eventually found its way intomachine learning and artificial intelligence, then into the fields of neuroscience and visual perception. Initiallyslow to be adopted, it now has widespread practical uses in applications
such as spam filters, search-and-rescue
patterns and machine translation algorithms to search for best-fit solutions
with incomplete information [17]. A
Bayesian approach to epistemology
effectively recognizes that real-world
theorizing is neither purely objective
Fig. 3. Helen Pynor, Untitled (heart lungs), knitted human hair, 25 cm (h) × 40 cm (w) × 15 cm (d),nor purely subjective in the traditional
2007. Helen Pynor’s catalogue of work raises intriguing questions about the sense of ownershipand identity invested in our bodies and internal organs, questions that often become very personalsense, but utilizes both approaches
and pressing to recipients of transplant organs. Her joint installation and performance workwhen we wish to make useful predicwith Peta Clancy, The Body Is a Big Place, explores this theme by involving members of thetions involving less-than-certain infortransplant community alongside the spectacle of re-animated pig hearts. (© Helen Pynor.
Photo: Danny Kildare. Image courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.)mation. It offers an iterative route to

156 Wilson et al., Art, Science and Communities of PracticeAcknowledgement
The authors are grateful to the artists who have allowed their work to
be included in this article.

References and Notes
Unedited references and notes as provided by the authors.
1 L. Anderson, “Analytical Autoethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 4, (2006) pp. 373–395.
2 Leonardo has been publishing in this field for over 50 years, during
which time it has offered a platform for movements and programs
aimed at trying to break down the conceptual, organizational andpublishing barriers between the arts and sciences. This article wasprompted by Bob Root-Bernstein, Todd Siler, Adam Brown and
Kenneth Snelson’s article “ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration toCreate a Sustainable Future,” published in Leonardo Vol. 44, No. 3(2011), which resonated strongly with our own research program.
3 Art, Science and Cultural Understanding, edited by B. Wilson,
B. Hawkins and S. Sim (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing, 2014) ISBN: 978-1-61229-486-5.
4 P. Glinkowski and A. Bamford, “Insight and Exchange: An evaluation of the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart programme” (London: Welllcome
Trust, 2009) <www.wellcome.ac.uk/sciartevaluation>. Accessed
1 November 2009.

replaced as new experimental evidence or improved theoretical constructs become available, thus ensuring that no one
theory can become elevated to the status of unchallengeable
dogma. The idea of provisionality works well in our search
for a broader research context across art and science, as it satisfies Popper’s requirements of constantly probing and testing hypotheses through a falsifiable model, as well as Kuhn’s
notion of replaceable paradigms.
Conclusions

Art and science not only share many similarities when viewed
as communities of practice, they also display much stronger
general theoretical underpinnings when we step back andview them both from a distance. In particular, sensory andcognitive frameworks built around Bayesian constructs arecoming to replace previous concerns over the subjective/
objective divide often felt to separate science and art, encouraging a broader cultural epistemology of the world toemerge, on which our conceptual models and metaphors
may be based.

9 W. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971) p. 63.
10 J.D. Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science ofLimits (London: Vintage, 1999) p. 2.
11 B.M. Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
12 S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Phoenix, 1998) pp.
65–78.
13 T. Siler, “The ArtScience Program for Realizing Human Potential,”
Leonardo Vol. 44, No. 5 (2011) pp. 417–424.
14 T.L. Brown, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2008) p. 73.
15 S. Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2006) 102.
16 M. Chalmers, “Flawed Genius,” New Scientist, Special Issue: “We’ve
Run Out of Explanations for the Universe,” Vol. 217, No. 2906 (2013)
pp. 45–49.
17 S.B. McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011).
18 G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 1999).

5 J. Leach, “The Self of the Scientist, Material for the Artist,” Social
Analysis, Vol. 55, No. 3 (2011) pp. 143–163.

19 P. Dayan and L. Abbot, Theoretical Neuroscience (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2001).

6 P. Galison, “Judgement against Objectivity,” in Picturing Science:
Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (NewYork: Routledge, 1998) pp. 327–359.

20 V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain (London: Windmill Books,2012) p. 57.

7 T. Kälvemark, “University Politics and Practice-Based Research,” inRoutledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs
and Henrick Karlsson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011) pp. 3–23.
8 S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam
Press, 2010) pp. 42–43.

21 B. Wilson and S. Sim, “Bayesian Provisionality Applied to an Epistemology of Science,” International Journal of the Humanities: Annual
Review Vol. 10 (2013) pp. 15–23.

Manuscript received 16 January 2013.

Wilson et al., Art, Science and Communities of Practice 157

artscience: the essential connectionof belief to the new evidence, thus strengthening traditional
epistemology. By combining prior assumptions alongside
new experimental evidence to make iterative predictions,
Bayesian calculus effectively allows us to blend both subjective and objective elements and is applicable to both sensory
and cognitive domains.
We have recently proposed that theories and conceptualmodels formulated by humans can also be treated as formalized versions of internalized Bayesian constructs, deliberately
and consciously set up to make sense of our cognitive world,
mirroring the way we already perceive and respond to sensory data [21]. These external theories and models should
similarly be treated as provisional ways of seeing the world
and trying to make sense of it, accepting that a degree of
uncertainty in our theoretical framework naturally translates
to a provisional view of the world that must be tested forpredictive and interpretive powers against both new information and other theories. Accepting all theories as provisional means that we do not treat them as permanent truths,
but anticipate they will be challenged, revised and eventually