Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art
Science historian Miller coins the term artsci to describe the growing realm of creativity  that merges art, science, and technology. Beginning his exploration in the early twentieth-century artistic engagements with X-rays and radio waves, Miller goes on to map a wide-ranging contemporary field of practice that encompasses computer-based art, robotics, data visualization, and biotechnology. This well-illustrated and accessible text is refreshingly short on academic theory, instead surveying the vast landscape of artsci through  profiles of individual artists, projects, and institutions. Tracing collaborations at the CERN Supercollider, Pixar Studios, and the MIT Media Lab, Miller finds particular inspiration in artworks that go beyond the illustration of scientific principles and actually contribute to real-world scientific advances. Miller’s anecdotes of bioluminescent brains, emotive interfaces, and climate-change mappings trace an exciting new avant-garde of creative research with the potential to realign aesthetics toward an appreciation of information. The author’s comprehensive text not only codifies an important contemporary cultural movement, it also marks the rise of an interdisciplinary “third culture” that fuses the disciplines of art and science. --Lindsay Bosch