Art and Science

ArtSci - ISSN 2515-8767 - © ISTE Ltd

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What is the relationship between the physical extent of a colour and the effect it produces on the perceptual organization of a drawing? This article examines this question through a situation encountered in my own practice: a very small amount of yellow noticeably alters the balance I perceive within a drawing as a whole. This observation becomes the starting point for a practice-based investigation. Adding, removing, reducing and then relocating the yellow constitute a sequence of operations through which variations in its perceptual action can be observed. he experience is considered in relation to research on the contextual dependence of colour perception and chromatic induction, as well as Josef Albers’s experimental approach to colour. It is not presented as a psychophysical experiment and does not allo generalization to other observers. Rather, it provides an opportunity to examine how a perceptual phenomenon can become, within the drawing process itself, an instrument of decision-making and knowledge. The hypothesis explored here is that drawing practice can produce situated knowledge of perception when it makes observable the relationships between material transformation, attention and decision-making involved in the construction of an image.

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.