Art and Science

ArtSci - ISSN 2515-8767 - © ISTE Ltd

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Born in the interstices between science, art and technology, research-creation has gradually created its own territory — a space that has granted interdisciplinarity the right of citizenship. It became an autonomous field at the turn of the 21st century, with the emergence of the first institutions specifically devoted to its development, dissemination and funding. Through successive bifurcations, it progressively distinguished itself from art–science practices, which, though producing high-level works of high calibre, too often reduce the encounter between disciplines to an ancillary or operational relationship, at the expense of genuine integration. In this article, we explore the potential of research-creation as a site for the production of knowledge through intuition, experience and sensibility. We propose, through a poetic and phenomenological re-centring of our relation to the world, to consider it as an alternative to the loss of meaning and mastery of knowledge brought about by the ever-increasing technologization of our living environments.

Research-creation is a porous framework that brings together arts and technologies, anchored in an academic context. We will argue that research-creation promotes recognition of artistic activity as producing unique forms of knowledge, different from those based on scientific methodology. This scientific methodology has inspired research-creation to legitimize itself, which led to the temptation to use its codes and modalities, particularly in terms of the academic writing required. We will question whether this disciplinary borrowing is wise, since artistic practice does not share the same goals and intentions; any attempt to standardize or discuss these practices remains fragile given the uniqueness of their approaches, which lie outside of thought articulated through language. We will attempto establish why the research-creation label became necessary at a moment in time, and we will highlight the importance of these practices in in order to resist the discourses, stemming from industrial technoscience, advocating efficiency and utility, which have spread like a new dogma throughout our societies.

The core of the Grame project, a national center for musical creation, founded in 1982 by James Giroudon and Pierre-Alain Jaffrennou, is the exploration and development of knowledge and technologies in the service of artistic creation, particularly in the fields of music, performing arts and multimedia expressions. This communication shows how this objective of art/science synergy will be translated over four decades by relying on a research team installed at the center of a system facilitating interactions between the problems and questions of composers and the methodologies, concepts and tools driven by research. In this spirit, particular emphasisis shed on a series of innovative tools accessible to artists and on the mediation of scientific and technological knowledge towards the public, particularly schools, by trans-mitting it through creative actions.

During the 1950s/1960s, the evolution of musical creation was stimulated by its confrontation with new technologies. It emerged profoundly disrupted. By observing its not-so-distant history, it appears as a crucible precursor of research-creation that can today be considered a real avant-garde in the field. From the first radio experiments in concrete music to the beginning of computer music, from the first groups of artists, researchers, technicians to the emergence of creation and research studios throughout France, the dynamics of the interaction between research and creation has never ceased to blossom. This paper bears witness to this history and observes the modalities of all kinds that have allowed its emergence, its developments, and its swarming, up to the recognition by the establishment of the public policies of the National Centers of Musical Creation. It also seeks to show the dynamics that result from this, currently at work and which aim to construct a civic approach to the relationship between arts, sciences, technologies and society.

Art and science intersect in our distant past, that of the first artists of humanity. Even though it has traversed millennia to reach us, prehistoric art remains highly fragile. To ensure the preservation of decorated caves, they must be closed to the public and thus made invisible. How can this paradox be resolved? For about forty years, the success of replicas of decorated caves has proven that they are credible solutions. Through an iterative process between research and mediation, the replica feeds on scientific data and, in return, offers researchers food for thought about their practices.

This article raises the fundamental questions whether all humans are experiencing the same color and taste. Color perception is significantly impacted when the eye loses capability to discriminate color gradients that lead to a shift to more gray and yellow. Cognitive differences are observed between men and women for the perception of color because women can differentiate more shades of colors than males and they have also a wider color spectrum than men. However the complexity in judgment on color is primarily based on the educational level of a viewer and his experience in visual perception. The evaluation of color and taste therefore is subjective and is based almost entirely on personal experience. There is not a single satisfactory answer to the question of whether a particular color and taste is the right one or not, or why we interpret color differently.

A few days before his death on May 8, 1880, Gustave Flaubert was working on the episode about botany, one of the last in his novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. To this end, inspired by a sentence by Rousseau about the calyx of flowers, which “is missing in most liliaceae,” he wrote a note in the form of a botanical enigma: to find a common plant, growing in Normandy in April, that would belong to a family that deviated from a general rule among plants (“Every plant has leaves, a calyx, and a corolla”), but which itself would deviate from this exception within its family (an exception to the exception). Without much familiarity with botany, Flaubert claimed to predict the existence of such a plant, while the enigma aroused caution among his more knowledgeable friends. An investigation by Maupassant allowed him to examine possible solutions, first among the Ranunculaceae and then the Rubiaceae, where the sherardia seemed to meet his expectations. This episode still leaves several questions unanswered, which we will attempt to shed light on, requiring a botanical and historical perspective on this enigma: why did Rousseau write “most”? Why did Flaubert reject Maupassant’s first solution? Why did he accept the second? Was the sherardia in 1880, and is it today, a good solution to his enigma? What natural or epistemological mechanisms produce exceptions to exceptions? How can this imaginary plant become the battleground for different conceptions of nature and knowledge, from the 19th to the 21st century?

Starting from a global historical view of the links between arts and sciences we first focus on the physical content of propagation, before looking at the long story of tiling and packing in art and science with questions and comments on these numerous links between all disciplines. After looking at the connections between art and science at industrial era, a word on the connections between different musical worlds enables us to conclude about how to improve the paths between arts and sciences in the future.

This study aims to understand the construction by Leonardo da Vinci of the Vitruvian Man, which represents the graphic resolution of an ancient challenge set by the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in his treatise De Architectura. It seeks to explain the genesis of this work, its progressive elaboration, and the way in which Leonardo succeeded in addressing a problem that had remained unanswered for centuries. The analysis also highlights the seminal role of mathematics, which since the earliest civilizations has been regarded as a universal language of knowledge and perfection. Long considered to unlock the secrets of the universe, its use in this emblematic drawing reveals Leonardo’s scientific spirit, driven by the pursuit of universal harmony.