Art and Science

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This article examines how the rhythmic repetition of graphic gestures transforms attentional experience and the sense of agency in drawing practice. Situated within an artistic research approach, the study draws on reflective observation of a graphic language developed since childhood, whose familiarity does not exclude unpredictability or discovery. The succession of hatching strokes, together with variations in their pace, density, and direction, gives rise to a musical quality inherent in graphic movement. While attention may shift almost instantaneously towards drawing, the repetition of strokes progressively modifies the experience of action. The artist remains fully engaged, while sometimes experiencing the rhythm of the hatching as guiding her hand as much as her hand generates that rhythm. This experience invites a distinction between initial intention, movement execution, and the subjective sense of control, without equating the absence of conscious decisions for each movement with a loss of mastery or attention. By bringing this observation into dialogue with research on the relationships between perception, attention, and action, the article proposes drawing as a field of investigation into the subjective experience of gesture. It explores how the repetition of a deeply familiar graphic language can renew the experience of action and become a source of unpredictability and discovery.

Chemical Gradients and thresholds, including hormones and neurotransmitters, are operated with signaling and amplifications. These are often sensed at the cellular level by the largest family of membrane receptors, termed the G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which as it happened also facilitates our sensory inputs. The more famous rhodopsins, light-sensitive GPCRs, which have ancient lineage with bacteria, are found in the imaging tissue of our eyes and in many organisms. Between the extremities lie the capacitance of lifeforms, and of our lives. Is it not the moving averages and ranges that captivates values and challenges for us to behold? GPCRs stand out as cell-surface proteins that exhibit remarkable specificity toward extracellular ligands and, in some cases, light perception. GPCR signaling, initiated through ligand-receptor interactions, underpins fundamental sensory experiences including vision, taste, and olfaction. Dopamine- and opioid-mediated pathways further contribute to the perception of reward and pain, processes that are harnessed in both analgesic therapies and, conversely, implicated in substance dependence. In this ScienceArt Reciprcate, I celebrate the biology of GPCRs through personal appreciation expressed in two- and three-dimensional artistic interpretations of molecular processes. Engagement marks only the beginning; it is the intricate network of downstream signaling and feedback mechanisms that ultimately confers relevance, adaptability, and meaning within biological systems, much as sustained interactions shape the function and resilience of societal assemblies. This second Science=Art Recipricate was written in more concise style, with poetic connections and ArtingScience between artworks, when compared to ‘Whirling in Waters’.

When I run, my attention accompanies the manifestations of my body: changes in breathing, muscular tension, the onset of fatigue, and the adjustments required to sustain movement. When I draw, this relationship changes. Although my body remains fully engaged in drawing, certain sensations cease to occupy an identifiable place in my conscious experience. Hunger, fatigue, and muscular tension may go unnoticed during the activity, only to become perceptible, sometimes with striking intensity, when drawing stops. This change is neither intentional nor deliberate. I do not decide to divert my attention away from my body, nor can I identify the moment at which certain sensations become less accessible. It is only upon leaving the drawing activity that I retrospectively become aware of what had escaped my attention. Drawing on this recurrent experience, this article examines the relationships between attentional engagement, immersion in artistic practice, and bodily awareness. It adopts a practice-based artistic research approach grounded in the reflective analysis of situations experienced during my drawing practice, brought into dialogue with research on attention, interoception, perception and action, and cognitive absorption. The hypothesis explored is that intense attentional engagement in drawing may alter conscious access to certain bodily signals without necessarily interrupting their physiological processing. This hypothesis remains exploratory: the reported experience does not make it possible to distinguish a change in the intensity of sensations from a change in their conscious accessibility. The interruption of drawing provides the principal point of observation. It reveals a contrast between bodily experience during the activity and the experience that follows it. This temporal discrepancy also raises a methodological difficulty: how can a variation in bodily awareness be observed without the attention required for its observation altering the phenomenon itself? This research does not claim to establish a causal mechanism or to generalize from an individual experience. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate how a situation arising from artistic practice can generate a scientific question concerning the relationships between attention, creative gesture, and bodily perception.

This paper explores the dynamics between human creativity and artificial creativity, drawing on a personal approach at the crossroads of art and science, as well as on the Titan 2358 project, a hybrid work combining art, science, fiction, history, philosophy and artificial intelligence. Human creativity is analysed through the theoretical frameworks of Margaret Boden (Novelty, Surprise, Value and Combinational, Exploratory, Transformational) and Mark A. Runco (the four Ps: Person, Process, Product, Potential). Artificial Creativity (a concept forged by Runco) is analysed by an Artificial Intelligence in response to a very lengthy prompt written after researches by the author. Three visions are compared con-cerning AC in general (it is possible, it is not yet possible, it is impossible). The discussion comments on that analysis and tries to explain why AC is impossible using the theory of Antonio Damasio who highlight the importance of affects, emo-tions, sentiments, consciousness and homeostasis in the creative process. Ray Kurzweil contradicts this point of view and affirms that computers are, or soon will be, far more intelligent and creative than humans. But can a computer decide to create art to please other computers or to increase its chance of survival? Can AC be a revolutionary tool for artists, just as photography was at one time? In appendix a conversation between the author and the AI provides some interesting insights on the Human versus Artificial creativity.

In 1859, Darwin’s Origin of the Species provoked a revolution in biology, providing an explanation for the tremendous diversity of life forms. However, it had no explanation of how life originated on earth, nor discussion of a primordial life form that would give rise to existing life forms. Two of Darwin’s most devoted followers, Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel, believed a solution had been found in the form Huxley’s discovery in 1868 of a microorganism he christened, Bathybius Haeckelii. It was a featureless gelatinous masse, covering the floor of the deep sea, according to Huxley, and plausibly formed by spontaneous generation, according to Haeckel. Although widely heralded, it was short-lived as gelatinous masses found in samples of deep-sea mud were found to be an artifact of sample preservation in 1875. Here the view put forward is that Bathybius was accepted, if only for a few years, not only because it filled a perceived lack in Darwin’s theory, but also due in large part to Haeckel’s illustrations of Bathybius as life-like creature, shown here through a pictorial biography of Bathybius.

Beyond its practical and functional aspects, all architecture fundamentally stems from a poetic structure that summons a web of sensory, historical, and symbolic relationships, anchoring it to a place, a history, a line of thought, or the memory of an event. The Hubert-Reeves Science Library, part of the Université de Montréal’s new MIL campus, is no exception. By offering a personal and geopoetic interpretation of the library, this article seeks to elucidate the trajectories connecting it to the ideas of the renowned astrophysicist — whose son is the author — as well as to his values, his relationship with the world, and the imaginary of the Quebec landscape. The MIL campus is thus approached as a form of geophysical architecture, employing an explicitly mineral vocabulary of geodes, topographies, fault lines, strata and crystals. It appears to emerge from the tectonic imaginaries that shape the territory, drawing a map where the local and the cosmological, the ephemeral and the immemorial, collide and converge. The library’s two gardens — small, tree-filled craters carved into an elevated ground plane — serve as transplanted fragments of Mount Royal, the magmatic landform that hosts the university’s historic campus. They form the project’s living, poetic heart. The library can thus be read as a geology of knowledge: a subterranean stratum where insights from the crystalline structures above settle and transform, much like fertile sediment preparing the ground for future harvests. It also makes palpable a resonance, a link forged between human thought, the landscape, outside, but one arising from the very heart of the flows of matter and memory to which he, like all of us, owes his existence.

I was lucky enough to meet Hubert Reeves on 1965 when he arrived in France. He then accepted to be my thesis advisor. Hubert was both a brightest scientist, science popularizer and ecologist. This short article evokes his two most important discoveries in nuclear astrophysics such as the origin of the light elements (lithium, beryllium and boron) and that of the isotopes of hydrogen and helium and lithium 7. The ways by which Hubert undertook his researches and popularizes them are also presented.

This article traces the essential role of music in Hubert Reeves’s life, work and commitments. Drawing on his writings, his collaborations with musicians, and the performances created with the author and her Ensemble Calliopée, it shows how music, science, poetry and transmission are intertwined within a shared sensitive experience of the cosmos and nature.