ArtSake

Recently, we posted an Artist to Artist featuring novelist Karl Iagnemma (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ‘02) and installation artist Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07) discussing science and technology in their art.

In an interview to gather material for the piece, Brian spoke on a number of topics we didn’t have room to include in the Artist to Artist dialogue. Below are some “outtakes,” where his imaginative mind ranges from cell suicide to arts funding to an installation artist’s version of lab research. Intriguing stuff!

On working with scientific concepts in his art
Brian: The way I find deeper meaning is to somehow make associations between the science and questions we all have. So you can look at… there’s this process which I find really fascinating, called apoptosis. It’s basically the process of programmed cell death. Say a cell is damaged, its DNA is damaged, maybe from radiation. So the cell has a process where it’s checking its DNA all the time, and it finds it’s damaged. And so it can decide well, let me try to fix it, or it can decide I can’t fix it and I’m going to kill myself. And that process, of making that decision to commit suicide or not, they’ve found out recently is extra-cellular, meaning it doesn’t do it in isolation. It actually sends signals out to its neighbors, and they signal back to it. And somehow, some consensus is made, and the cell decides whether to kill itself or not.

There are all these metaphors–consensus of a suicide, the decisions we make in our lives, how we might think we’re in isolation, but actually, we’re constantly extending, having interactions with people around us. But the other interesting thing is, the scientist who was explaining this to me said that cells have no state of partial death. In other words, if you look at the signaling mechanism, the actual chemistry, that figures out whether it’s going to kill itself or not, it’s a switch. It’s not a lever. It’s yes, I’m going to kill myself, or no, I’m not. So when I hear that, and I think about cell suicide, I start thinking about how we all live in a state of partial death. There’s a lot there to explore, about the ways we hold ourselves back, about anxiety, neurosis, all these ways that we are not very present in the moment. I’m not saying that there’s this exact connection–at all. It’s the metaphorical connection that fascinates me. So I can make a piece using the science, which hits people on two levels. One, it’s sort of cool science. And the other is that there’s a deeper meaning to it, which I think hopefully can speak on a more unconscious level, and a deeper level, and maybe create some sort of transformative experience. When I have both of those, that’s when I feel like I make some of my best work. (more…)

If an avant-garde composer and a pinhole photographer were trapped on a sinking lifeboat, could they get beyond their media’s differences to find a solution? Can a political performance poet ever truly - TRULY - see the world through the eyes of an experimental sculptural knitter? Are dance and theatre the ultimate frenemies? Our new series, Artist to Artist, probably won’t answer any of these questions. But it will bring together artists of different disciplines, to talk about their work and explore common issues they share as art-makers and innovators.

Below is an excerpt of the first installment of Artist to Artist, featuring the intriguing artists Karl Iagnemma (a robotics engineer and fiction writer) and Brian Knep (who often incorporates cutting-edge science and technology into his installation art) discussing the intersection of science, technology, and art in their work.

MCC: It’s tempting to assume that work incorporating technology and science would somehow be about science. But that’s not necessarily the case here. Could you speak about how you use your work to reveal something about human beings, or human nature?

Karl: I would argue that my work is, in part, about science, but that the scientific focus is secondary to the more “traditional” preoccupations with character and story. I have found science (and pseudoscience) to be a fertile subject area, since the everyday work of science gives rise to surprisingly rich palette of emotions and conflicts–the stuff of fiction. The clichéd view of science is that it’s cold, analytical work performed by cold, analytical individuals. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Brian: I love when I look at something that happens on a sub-cellular level, and it feels like things that are happening in society. You’ve got cells that are talking to each other and interacting and dying and giving birth. It’s all stuff that we deal with. These similar dialogues are happening at a different scale, the scale of the cell and the scale of the human, and I love that. And I think we can make those connections… I see science as a very rich way of making the art work on deeper level for people.

Read the full Artist to Artist dialogue.