WHY SCI-ART? (2026)

It’s the rare artist whose practice can be described simply, without elaboration. Terms like “multi-media” and “interdisciplinary” can help evade classification. The unique insights of artists who are also scientists—or at least those with fluency in the workings of science—can allow for the skillful and elegant merging of quantifiable ways of investigating the world with more subjective modes of inquiry involving emotion, sensation, and intuition.

The combining of art and science has a long historical precedent. Two hundred and twenty-five years ago in a culture that was rapidly coming to favor dividing fields of study (along with the elements under scrutiny) into parts, the Romantic Naturalists were early critics of what they saw as the destructive potential of dualism…in particular, the abstraction of oneself from the experiment. By the turn of the 18^th century, Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, and other early interdisciplinarians were warning against the dangers of a conceptual stance that places the researcher outside of—and ostensibly above—beings, places, and other aspects of an atomized, externalized, depersonalized “nature.” Goethe proposed a mindset he called “delicate empiricism” (zarte Empirie), an approach to study that can include, alongside concrete data, more abstract forms of understanding gathered from sustained relationship between researcher and researched.

The Romantic Naturalists were spot on. Less than a century later, World War I and a “civilization” that could justify the slaughter of tens of millions enraged and activated many caught in the crossfire. Artists and intellectuals began questioning prevailing definitions of reason, progress, and the rational, and recognized that detachment and objectivity had become strategies in the quest to quantify, conquer, and capitalize. To care, relate, empathize—to feel—had been deemed an impediment to the imperial project. Those who practiced deep immersion in/identification with the focused-upon rejected this position.

The Dadaists led the resistance. Against the backdrop of war, Dada fought absurdity with absurdity. Uncanny cabarets, collaborative collage, and poetry consisting of unintelligible utterances challenged prevailing definitions of logic and reason. Declaring itself an anti-movement, Dada was against everything and for nothing—not even itself. Dadaists, deep in existential crisis, turned the meaning of meaning on its head.

But in posing challenges to the rational, hierarchical, and mechanistic, by embracing chance, enchantment, and collaboration, in the act of venturing together into the unknown, Dada made perfect sense to its practitioners and audiences. To quote Emmy Ball-Hennings, one of Dada’s founding members, “Paradox triumphed.” Purpose found, Dada was dead.

Surrealism flowered forth from its fertile remains.

While the Dadaists had neglected to plan for an alternative (or any) future, the Surrealists were socio-political visionaries. They believed that cultivating the imaginative capacity of a populace is essential to the humanist (i.e., Socialist) project. The Surrealists believed in the revolutionary potential of an empowered, liberated mind, and saw their egalitarian, decentralized, collaborative methods as models of direct democracy and antidotes to despair.

Above all, the Surrealists believed in re-enchanting a culture in which quantification, competition, and industrialization had come to dominate. Like the Romantic Naturalists, they understood for a society to thrive, it cannot consist of disinterested bystanders, detached from one another and their surroundings.

Surrealists, dissatisfied with a dim prevailing real, set out to recraft it.

While the Romantics had been fascinated with “the marvelous”—a term used in early science to describe the paradoxical, ambiguous, or unclassifiable (fossilized sea creatures found on mountainsides, corals stone-like yet alive, and pulsating crystals, for example)—the Surrealists lent the term a kind of social imperative. Access to the marvelous, for them, meant freedom from the shackles of the known and full engagement as active collaborators in a vibrant, responsive world.

A century hence, those who profit when a populace is resigned to cold detachment and cynicism have amassed unfathomable power and control. A creative, critical collective is anathema to the authoritarian. Today’s moguls have even invented seemingly miraculous machines they claim can do the thinking (and most everything else) for us (that is, for a monthly fee, to include surveillance of one’s every word and action). Rejoice, imagination is obsolete is a far cry from L’imagination au pouvoir (Power to the imagination), famed slogan of the Parisian student uprisings in May 1968.

Those unwilling to succumb to a corporate controlled spoon-fed future are among a current wave of re-enchanters, un-realists, romantic futurists. Practitioners span art, science, and philosophy. Scholars in the environmental humanities, for example, focus on the other-than-human, resituating people to a place within, rather than outside of and above, a vast, vibrant, and interdependent world. Marvels abound in mycorrhizae, microbiomes, and mutualistic interspecies relationships. Biology is teeming with exquisite examples of cooperation, including figs and their wasps, yuccas and their moths, humans and the bacteria that perform vital functions related to digestion, immunity, and neurology.

In recent years science and ecology, as topics in dire need of public comprehension, have been gaining in popularity as inspiration for all manner of artists. Whether an artist is considered eco-, sci-, or bio- depends largely on intent and aesthetic:

Sci-art (and its subset bio-art) are terms that have been in use since mid-last century to describe forms of creative practice that engage with scientific methods or topics or involve collaborations with practitioners in the sciences or technology. Illustration, data audio- and visualization, the use of laboratory apparatus (microscopes, telescopes, X-rays, and glassware) and techniques (chemical/biochemical reactions, growth on nutritive substrates, even DNA splicing) are routinely employed, as are technologies such as AI, VR, and 3D printing.

Eco-art, a movement that has been growing since approximately the late 1960s, tends to have some overlaps with sci-art, but is concerned more specifically with environmental issues, the relationships between social and environmental injustices, and sustainable practices. Such works might involve seeds or plants, recycled, renewable, and sustainable materials, outdoor installation/remediation, bioplastics, or field recordings.

Often these kinds of works are employed in an illustrative or didactic capacity in the uncritical service of a mythical, monolithic science, one that acts in the interest of an unspoken “common good.” Today, as in profoundly absurd times past, reexaminations and redefinitions of taken-for-granted concepts have become necessary. In their capacity to illuminate a very particular paradox, works at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy today have the potential to impact culture outside the worlds of art or science.

A clue was alluded to by Goethe, and by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but seems to have become obscured in the current billionaire-backed fervor to embrace the latest technological innovation (catastrophic kinks to be worked out later! Conform or be left behind!):

Good science must be conducted with cold detachment. Controls must be introduced to reduce bias. Its results must be objective, repeatable, quantifiable. The methods involved in making good art, on the other hand, are often quite the opposite. One’s unique vision and feelings are precisely the point. The artist may identify so strongly with the subject that looker and seen become indistinguishable. The results can be ineffable, ephemeral, moving, mysterious.

With “delicate empiricism,” Goethe was suggesting balance could be reached between these two distinctive—complementary and equally necessary—conceptual stances by conducting experiments with rigor while keeping carefully in mind that the scientist is ever-present, inherently interlaced with the subject upon which one’s attention is focused.

The Surrealists reminded a world inundated with scientific and technological “advances”—industrial, medical, agricultural, military—that the illogical, the wonderous, and “mad love”—immeasurable aspects of experience—are among life’s most precious features.

While current scientific research is providing unequivocal evidence of the devastating global effects of certain industries and technologies, those same well-funded industries and technologies—also operating in the name of science—are in an unfathomably profitable race to devise novel, exponentially more intensive and destructive applications.

Artists inspired by science can be scrupulous about the kinds of research selected for reverence, amplification, and nuanced critique. Not all science takes humanitarian and ecological concerns into account; not all science is Science for the People*.

Most importantly, even the best, most humane and just science cannot, by nature of the strict parameters that make it so effective, demonstrate the inherent entanglement between observer and observed (quantum physics possibly excepted), between human and nature, between every being and everything/everyone else. To move, awe, inspire, enchant, empathize, enrage, engage, impassion, activate—to remind humans that we are all part of same strange, wondrous experiment—these dimensions belong to the arts.