Salt Lake City Bridges the Gap Between Science and Art

By Fiona Marcelino

Science and art are often positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum; science or art. There exists the common combination of science with medicine, technology or nature; and art with literature, culture, and music; but rarely do people collaborate art with science.

It is that cultural divide that hinders art and science from gaining new insights and perspectives.

The idea that artists and scientists can collaborate, inspire and improve each other’s fields is one that Salt Lake City is running with.

The Leonardo is a contemporary museum that explores the unexpected ways that science, technology, art and creativity connect by holding themed activities that combine art and science.

Previous projects have consisted of creating temporary water art, exploring the science of bubbles, creating lenses out of gelatin to see how it affects light, and drawing with light using a camera, lasers and light bubs.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has also found ways to incorporate science with art by collaborating with the Clark Planetarium, The University of Utah’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Utah Museum of Natural History. They have also organized Art and Science Artful Afternoons, where families could enjoy a month of art and science by learning about various science related topics through a series of free family art-making festivals.

Often times the reaction of the science world is that art is too imprecise for the scientific process, but science and art both ask the same questions. What is everything? Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

String theorist, Brain Greene, recently wrote that the arts have the ability to “give a vigorous shake to our sense of what’s real, jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.” He also expressed his thoughts on how artists can make the metaphors of physics tangible, which can provide new mathematical meanings from a different perspective.

In a recent NPR interview with Cormac McCarthy (novelist), Werner Herzog (filmmaker) and Lawrence Kruass (physicist) the idea of how science can be inspiration for art was examined.

Herzog and McCarthy both described their involvement in science as inspiration for their films or novels. Both men explore themes of science in arts and culture and each spoke of how they create an imaginary world related to a real world.

The potential influence that art and science could have on each other seems endless. The combination of these two fields could help answer the world’s deepest questions by providing a broader view of the world.