Exploring new collaborations between the arts and sciences
By Jill Beck
Inaugural address, May 7, 2005
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
When I first arrived in Appleton in July, I took it upon myself to learn more
about this great college and, most particularly, to discover what makes it
unique.
In my first Matriculation
Convocation last September, I spoke about the prevalence
and potential of individualized instruction at Lawrence, one of the distinctive
features that, I believe, differentiate the college from its counterparts
in American higher education.
This morning, I would like to talk about what I have identified as another
distinguishing characteristic of Lawrence — the unusual qualities arising
from having a nationally recognized conservatory of music housed within an
undergraduate college of the liberal arts and sciences and the combined strengths
the college can bring to bear in both the arts and sciences. In doing so,
I want to acknowledge that these strengths and achievements in the sciences
and
arts are reflected elsewhere within the college and that there are many other
areas of excellence at Lawrence to which we can point with pride. I will
be speaking about other areas in future talks.
Collaborations and common interests
For many years I have had the strong conviction and some evidence that, if
the arts and sciences were to collaborate effectively, they could address
questions and problems confronting humankind that were beyond the scope of
either. I
have been inspired and informed by historical figures such as Leonardo da
Vinci, recent research in the neuroscience of music and other arts, the results
of
ArtsBridge partnerships in K-12 education, and the awakening of science’s
interest in the arts — all of which offer encouraging signs for pursuing
collaboration between art and science.
Yet, in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature, devoted
to crossovers between art and science, an article by novelist Simon
Mawer may give us pause
in our assumption that effective collaboration is in fact possible. In restating
C. P. Snow’s famous dictum that science and art occupy two separate
cultures, Mawer emphasizes that science is concerned with logic and facts,
while art employs imagination and fantasy.
Physicist and novelist Alan
Lightman adds that, while both art and science
ask questions, scientists are able to answer their questions because they
are part of well-posed problems. For artists, however, says Lightman, “the
question is often more interesting than the answer, and often an
answer doesn’t exist.”
But Mawer sees common interests in art and science, such as their preoccupation
with ideas and inquiry. Both use inquiry to reduce or foreground uncertainty,
and he says, “Uncertainty permeates literature and modern science
alike. The unreliable particle and the unreliable narrator are two sides
of the
same weirdly spinning coin. And just as scientists employ thought experiments
to
focus their ideas, so a work of literature is a thought experiment about
this uncertain
human condition.”
Reasons for optimism
In fact, all forms of art share common objectives and methods with science:
both utilize observations, both experiment, both draw on probability and
chance, and both, more than ever, seek to contribute to the well-being of
humanity.
Thus emboldened, I would like to explore several empirical reasons for my
optimism that art and science share more dimensions than differences and
that the potential
for great synergies exists when art and science are brought creatively and
rationally together.
The world has always admired such titans as Leonardo and Goethe. Consider
also Nabokov, who contributed to the taxonomy of butterflies as well as writing
novels, and Djerassi, who
wrote
novels and invented the Pill: figures whose interests bridged both arts
and sciences and who found and explored new problems requiring the perspectives
of both art and science.
Let’s examine Leonardo’s approach to the understanding and
design of early flying machines. Beginning with his observations in the
wild and
exquisite sketches of birds, Leonardo then proceeded to the careful dissection
of avian
muscles and the morphology of wings. Finally, he built various kinds of
apparatus to model and test his theories.
Never mind that his machines would not have worked as planned, given that
human muscles are not powerful enough to achieve the necessary lift — although
the modern hang glider owes more than a little to his ideas. What we universally
admire, in fact, is his artistic excellence and rigorous empirical approach
to examining problems from several perspectives.
Another premise for collaboration is that modern and postmodern cultures
have drawn heavily on science in the creation of art. Whether in film (Kubrick’s
2001), theatre (Frayn’s Copenhagen), painting (Duchamps’ Nude
Descending a Staircase), photography (Muybridge’s studies of the horse in motion),
and dance (Nikolais’ Tensile Involvement), contemporary art commonly
features science as content or uses advanced scientific technologies to
create art.
Oxford art historian Martin Kemp points to Marc Quinn’s recent “portrait” of
Sir John Sulston that uses Sulston’s DNA. Novelists such as A. S.
Byatt explore themes such as mathematical prodigies, how the brain sees,
and evolutionary biology.
As experimental composer Roger Reynolds observes, innovative composers
of music, such as Varese and Xenakis, drew respectively on scientific explorations
for
poetic inspiration or “explicit and detailed computation” as methods
of composition. The use of chance procedures and probability theory is also
well documented in the collaborations of Merce Cunningham and John Cage in
postmodern dance. Reynolds himself tests his formal musical experiments in
concert with both musically trained and naïve listeners.
Modern art has, in fact, glorified science. Psychoanalysis became the theory
that inspired surrealism and hence consciousness as a subject. Duchamps explored
visually the space-time continuum informed by the theory of relativity. Numerous
artists have drawn on principles of optics for representing reality.
A sampling of recent visual and environmental art reveals other art/science
interactions, such as Damian Hirst’s placement of a dead tiger shark
in a tank of formaldehyde (that recently sold for $13.3 million), Francis Alys
using 500 volunteers to shift a sand dune, and the re-emergence of Robert Smithson’s
altered “Spiral Jetty” from the Great Salt Lake.
Another reason for believing in the collaboration of art and science stems
from recent advances in neuroscience. Consider for a moment the strides
being made in our understanding of music alone: the discovery that a region
of
the auditory cortex in the right hemisphere is more associated with pitch
discriminations
than a comparable region in the left hemisphere; the existence of the Mozart
effect on proportional reasoning and the effect of keyboarding on mathematics
performance; the arousal of the immune system through choral singing; the
heightened abilities of undergraduate musicians in second language pronunciation;
or interest
in the physics of music — the last three of which are research programs
and courses currently being conducted at Lawrence.
Beyond this, I can report on productive learning experiences that occur when
undergraduate artists participate in ArtsBridge programs, in which they
ally the arts with various K-12 subjects, including science, at 22 universities
in the United States and Northern Ireland.
An analysis of ArtsBridge evaluations reveals that K-12 students like learning
science through the arts because the arts give physical reality to and
contextualize relevant concepts. Another reason cited is that art elicits
individual differences
and that examination and comparison of these differences is a means of
increasing and diversifying learning. Not least was the frequent observation,
ordinarily
rare in test-driven classrooms — that learning through the arts is
exhilarating!
Humanistic goals
We can proceed, then, to propose a model of the way art and science might
work with one another. This is not suggested as an exhaustive theory, but
as a pragmatic
philosophy for fostering inter- or multidisciplinary research engaging
artists and scientists. Let me turn to what I see as one Lawrence approach
to collaboration
in art and science: cultivating research partnerships.
As an artist raised in the humanities, I tend to see the relationship between
art and science as humanistic — that the disciplines
are drawn to work together to accomplish some humanitarian goal. I see
the arts and sciences as forming relationships to solve common human problems
such as those of health, education, and economic development. Through this
problem-solving, both art and science
deepen their own disciplinary understandings, in addition to building greater
appreciation of the interrelatedness of the fields. But each is also interested
in helping the other discipline understand itself better.
Therefore, I think that one excellent way to stimulate constructive interaction
between art and science is to have them work together on a common problem
that interests both disciplines independently and inter-dependently.
I will take as an example of the research collaboration I envision between
artists and scientists a study of singers’ immune systems that is
currently going on at Lawrence and involves four professors and students
in the college
and conservatory. Here the principal research questions focus on how cognition,
emotion, and physiology are involved in vocal arts activities.
At
present, the research is concerned with measuring the production during singing
of Immunoglobulin A, commonly known as IgA, a protein associated
with the immune system. What has been found thus far is that levels of
singers’ IgA
jump during formal rehearsals and public performances. Moreover, the degree
to which
singers self-report that they have positive emotional experiences and performance
satisfaction predicts the strength of the IgA effect.
While, in one sense, science has been cast in a supportive role in this research,
helping us to understand better the arts as an integrated emotional and
physical experience, the science disciplines will in fact benefit from the
study on their own terms.
For example, the study is poised to make a unique contribution in immunology,
in understanding the daily and weekly fluctuation of IgA production as
a human immune function. And, when compared with previous research in this
area, this
study will contribute to an understanding of age differences in IgA production.
The cognitive science faculty may potentially make advances in mind-body
measurements of different arts-related practice, such as listening, rehearsal,
and performance.
And voice faculty and student singers may learn that their intuitive sense
that singing is healthy for them has some supportive evidence. In this kind
of collaboration there is a research yield for each particular discipline,
while the full ensemble contributes to the study as a whole.
But just as I cast science in the helper role in the description of the previous
study, we should also ask, what can the arts do for science? Let me briefly
report on a study in which visual arts observation training was used with
third-year medical students, to improve their clinical decision-making.
This study’s premise was that there exist similarities between techniques
for observing and evaluating works of art on the one hand and the diagnosis
of medical conditions on the other. Both processes could involve, for example,
detailed and reflective observation, the clustering of those details into
patterns, interpretation of the meaning of those patterns, reference to
the history and social milieu of the individual artist or patient, and further
observation to arrive at a defensible aesthetic judgment
or diagnosis.
The study’s hypothesis was that, if the processes of aesthetic valuing
and diagnosis have underlying parallels, then it should be possible to
improve clinical decision-making by adding the observation and analysis
of artwork
to the medical school curriculum.
Last year, I participated on the research team that tested this hypothesis
at the University of California. While results on the medical students’ formal
exams have yet to be analyzed, improvements have been self-reported by
the young doctors on their confidence in observing and forming opinions
during
hospital rounds, on their willingness to acknowledge assumptions that can
impede unbiased observation, on their openness in listening to alternative
viewpoints,
and on their empathy for the emotional realities of the human condition.
This second study is similar to the study of singing and the immune system
in that one discipline (here art) helped to heighten understanding of the
other (clinical decision-making in medicine). But there was new knowledge
generated
for art as well. Like the earlier study, there was a research yield for each
of the disciplines involved, while the collaboration was a necessary condition
of the research as a whole.
Listen to Wriston
How does all this discussion of art and science matter to liberal learning?
Why is this distinctive aspect of Lawrence — outstanding strengths in
both the arts and sciences — so significant?
The key, I think lies in Lawrence President Henry Merritt Wriston’s
idea that the emotional life of students forms a necessary complement to
their intellectual life and that “education, if it
is to be defined as growth, cannot escape [including] the cultivation of
an
expanding
emotional life.”
Part of what Wriston called the “cultivation of emotional life” is
acquired in “intimacy of contact,” as in the one-to-one relationships
that characterize individualized instruction. But he reserved for the arts
the primary means of cultivating students’ emotional life, just as
they, the sciences, and other subjects in the liberal curriculum develop
our students cognitively.
Wriston argued, “whereas…the intellectual process lets us make
contact with a subject…in many cases it is possible to enter it fully
I would say, only through our emotions; then only do we know it in any genuine
sense, rather than merely knowing about it.” By “imaginatively
participating in the lives of others” — such as through the characters
in a play, the parts in a musical score, or in grasping the motivation of the
visual artist — we not only think their thoughts but feel their
responses as well. Only then, as Wriston suggests, will students acquire
imagination
and empathy, capacities often proposed as beneficial outcomes of arts
activities.
Wriston’s conclusion was that “only when the intellect and emotions
work together can a satisfactory result be achieved.” That is,
only when the fine arts and the liberal arts and sciences interact and
cross-inform
each
other in classrooms and research do we achieve an approach to liberal
education that forms the mind, the emotions, the imagination, and the
spirit with
equal vigor and skill.
Lawrence is uniquely positioned to develop courses, programs, and research
projects that promote this holistic, humanistic construct of liberal education,
in which each student is potentially a Renaissance man or Renaissance woman.
In the coming years, let us work together to enhance this strength of Lawrence
and build new examples of what Lawrence historically has articulated as the
finest values in undergraduate education.