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June 07, 2004

Art and Science Converge?

Envisioning Science, a new book by MIT researcher Felice Frankel, urges scientists to consider the aesthetic aspects of the images they produce in their research. It has also sparked a mini-debate about how much art should be found in the scientific image. Eric Heller, a colleague of Frankel's at MIT, has been working hard at creating representations of his own investigations that pass aesthetic muster.

Looking at the images in Heller's gallery, however, one is immediately struck by their overwhelming nerdiness. At best, they look like blacklight posters. More often, though, they have the look of the early, clumsy attempts at computer-generated 3-D "art" that your high-school computer teacher had calendars of. Those old pictures, just like these new scientifically-created ones, had bizarre, unreflective palletes which only made them seem cold and alien. Perhaps that was the intent of some of the first generation of computer artists, but by now there ought to be a movement towards a synthesis of the computational and the organic.

For our money, the acme of scientific art has got to be Vesalius. His De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) not only revolutionized the science of anatomy (he was the first person to systematically document human dissections), but also serves as an early touchstone of naturalism in scientific renderings. His engravings capture every minute corner of a human body while situating them in the context of a whole body that was once a whole person. Until contemporary scientists can match this level of care, the images they produce, while they may be thought-provoking, will never be art.

Posted by matt at June 7, 2004 10:55 AM

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