Instant Genius - Dr Tilly Blyth: How has art influenced science?

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

Science and art have not always been separately defined. Leonardo Da Vinci studied anatomy, neuroscientist Cajal created beautiful drawings of the cells in the cerebellum and hippocampus, and the painter John Constable observed the skies with an almost scientific study. Though their pursuits have diverged into distinct fields, the relationship between art and science has remained tightly woven together. Documenting the history of this tumultuous relationship is The Art of Innovation. Comprised of a 20-part BBC Radio 4 series, an exhibition at the Science Museum and an accompanying book, The Art of Innovation shows how scientific discoveries have influenced, and been influenced by, artists and the general public. Editorial assistant Amy Barrett visited the Science Museum’s Dana Research Centre and Library to meet the Head of Collections & Principle Curator at the Science Museum and the co-host of The Art of Innovation radio series, Dr Tilly Blyth. The Science Museum’s major free exhibition runs from now until the 24 January 2020. You can also read 20 stories from the history of art and science in The Art of Innovation (£25, Transworld). Image: A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on an Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, by Joseph Wright, exhibited 1776, oil on canvas © Derby Museums Trust Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Why is Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific legacy so often overlooked? – Martin Clayton What can the father of Gaia theory tell us about our future? – James Lovelock Richard Dawkins: Can we live in a world without religion? Do you believe in magic? – Gustav Kuhn Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox Inside the mind of a comedian – Robin Ince Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Science and art have not always been so separately defined. Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy, Neuroscientist Santiago Ramon and Kahal created beautiful drawings of the cells in the cerebellum

in hippocampus, and the painter John Constable observed the skies with an almost scientific eye for detail. Though their pursuits have since diverged into distinct fields, the relationship between art and sciences remain tightly woven together. Documenting the history of this intimate relationship is the art of innovation, comprising a 20-part BBC 4 radio series, an exhibition at the Science Museum and an accompanying book.

The Art of Innovation shows us scientific discoveries have influenced and been influenced by the works of artists. Editorial assistant Amy Barrett visited the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre and Library to meet the Head of Collections and Principal Curator at the Science Museum and also co-host of the Art of Innovation radio series, Dr Tilly Blythe. I'm Head of Collections and Principal Curator, which means that I'm responsible for our wonderful curatorial team

that think about researching the collections, acquiring new objects into the collections, but also developing our galleries and exhibitions. And I'm also responsible for the research department. So we do lots of interesting research into the objects that we hold and into the history of science, technology and medicine. And finally, I have a responsibility for the life. library and archives. We have over seven million items in the collections. Obviously, you won't see

many of those on display in the Science Museum and we hold those items in store. So, yeah, there's many more stories that we're able to tell about our wonderful collections than you might find just coming on a visit to the Science Museum. You've been working with the BBC on a project called The Art of Innovation. What is that project? And what have you been doing for it? So it's a really exciting project that we've been developing with the BBC, and I think it's really fun because it's actually a trends media project. It's one of the only projects that we've done that works in three different formats. So there's the radio series that we've worked with the BBC on, which is a 20-part radio series. And then there's an exhibition that

will accompany that radio series. So lots of the things that we talk about in the radio series will be able to be viewed in the exhibition. And then we've also created a book as well that enables us to elaborate on some of those stories that we're talking about. And I think for me, it's been the first time that we've been able to use those three different mediums to really help to tell rich stories in different ways. So you get something totally different from the exhibition that you'll get from the radio series or the book. So the series tells us how art has been an observer, a friend and a critic of science. Can you explain how those roles have come about and evolved over time?

Well, I think, I mean, as we show in the series and the exhibition, it's very interesting if you look at the relationship between the two. We tend to think of them as quite separate disciplines. We tend to think of sciences about experimentation and routine and about knowledge and art is about creativity and imagination. But if you actually begin to explore that, those divisions are not really there. Many of the activities that you undertake as a scientist are the same as an artist.

So in particular with relationship to the observer, you know, if you're an artist looking at the sky, you're observing the clouds, you're thinking about the form of those clouds, you're thinking about how that might change at different times in the day. And if you're a scientist, you're doing exactly the same thing. So, you know, it's the same types of activities. You might be bringing different knowledge and understanding to those things, but there's very much the same basis of kind of inquiring, trying to understand the world around us,

and trying to make sense of that. So one of the stories we talk about is actually how Constable was looking at the clouds. He undertook this activity called Skying, where he would walk around Hampstead Heath and draw pictures of the clouds, to go to quick pictures, but he would always put the time of day, the date on them. It was almost like a scientific observation, and he would kind of study their form at different times. And at the same time that he was doing that, there's a scientist called Luke Howard. He was one of the very early meteorologists, and he was actually studying the clouds in a similar way,

and would do lots of watercolours of those clouds, and ended up naming the clouds. So he came up with these different forms of clouds, these different categories, which became the basis that we still used today for the scientific understanding of cloud formations. And even the terms of scientists and artists, it's only recently that we've used them to define a career. You had artists who were scientists or scientists who were poets. Absolutely. And that's one of the main things that we've tried to pull out through the series and the exhibition and the book, is that actually if you look at the 19th century or even earlier the 18th century,

you know, you don't have this same distinction that we would have today between art and science. They are very much intertwined. It's actually all about being engaged with the world and thinking, you know, bringing ideas to the fore and sharing that knowledge with others. And there isn't this kind of distinction between the two. A really good example of that is actually the creation of the South Kensington Museum, which is the basis for the Science Museum. It's the original museum that was created in 1857 after the great exhibition. And that's the basis for the V&A and the Science Museum. And at that point, they were acquiring things relating to the industrial arts and the decorative arts.

So those two worlds were very much seen as together and in one museum. And it's only, you know, when you move into the 20th century that you start to see that division coming in, and that's reflected in the fact that you start to have a separate science museum to what we now know is the VNA. So you don't just see it in the discipline itself, but you see it in the institutions that are surrounding it. And what happened in the 20th century to cause that divide? I don't think there's any one thing. can't come and put your finger on it, but to a certain extent there's a professionalisation of the scientific disciplines. You know, there's a need for lots of different disciplines to start

carving out their space. And so as you build up those particular disciplines, you have specific scientific journals that communicate that knowledge. You know, you have institutions that are developing research in those particular areas. So this starts to become more of a need for people to identify with each other and a certain group and it becomes much more stratified. Is that a word? It becomes much more segmented in terms of the science that you see happening. Art was also and still it is, a critic of science. Can you tell me about any stories in the art of innovation that show art being used to criticise? Yeah, I mean, there's lots of times that I think that artists kind of question what the approach that science is taking or the massive changes that are happening around us that have been implemented by science and technology.

One very clear example that we draw on is during the First World War with the development of Dada, a new kind of movement that really came. from a concern and a fear about the way that the First World War had gone and about this new time where people were being maimed and injured due to the new technologies that had been developed. And what was the Dada movement? I'm not historians. I'm not sure I'm very confident to go into a lot of detail about it. I mean, how do you talk about?

I mean, so in many ways the Dada movement was almost a kind of anarchy, you know, it was a rejection of everything that science and progress and technology stood for. And one artist Otto Dix really kind of violently immortalises this through this picture called The Card Players, which is three soldiers playing cards, but actually they're almost not human. You know, parts of their body have been removed. they've lost their limbs, they're playing cards using their feet. One has a peg leg. And it's a very shocking image actually that shows the kind of horror of this new mechanised warfare

and what had happened to people as a result of that. So it's both a critique on the war itself, but also on the kind of conditions and the economic conditions that had resulted from the war. And the fact that people were now being expected to contribute to the economy in some way, so they're almost being turned into machines that you had to provide your value to the economy

by being useful in some way. And so in the exhibition, we show a prosthetic arm where you can actually have the hand is replaced with tools that are useful for doing work. So the whole section is about this kind of rejection of rationality and this rejection of the way that humans have become seen as tools for production and tools for efficiency. And we've lost the humanity behind it. So there's a real need to kind of look at that totally in contrast to other times where you've got the two worlds completely intertwined. You might see artists and scientists much more in support of each other.

Technology is now assisting art. The developments we see in science and tech are contributing to art itself. Is that right? I think so, yeah. Let me just think of a good example. One example you use in the series is the Polaroid. Yeah, I mean, there are times that you see artists as absolutely working with new scientific and technological developments and as scientists as having helped to push those new artistic forms forward. So something like Polaroid is a really good example.

So the Polaroid Corporation was set up by a man called Edwin Land. he is interesting because he had some scientific background. He wasn't really a formal scientist. He didn't have a scientific degree. But he was fascinated with scientific research and questioning. He would work long hours in the lab until he kind of resolved something. And he was very interested in not just how you create a camera that can take an instant picture and develop that picture all in one machine.

but also fascinated in colour perception. So how is it that humans actually see colour? He did lots of experiments around that because he was thinking about colour within polaroid. So it's a really interesting way to looking at how somebody, you know, with a bit of a scientific background, started to use science to think about the development of a new technique. And it's that new technology that then goes forward to people like David Hockney

who did incredible joiner pictures using lots and lots of polaroid photographs. And again, you can see that just as Land was thinking about human perception, so does David Hopney think about that through the use of Polaroid? So he's taking pictures of, for the example we use in the exhibition, it is the Sun on the Pool in L.A. So he's got lots of photographs of this pool in LA. He took them, you know, over a short period, but he then pulls them together to build up this image

that almost kind of stops time for a moment and allows you to look at the picture in the way that an eye would actually see. So rather than a single photograph where he just captured an instant and that's that, he allows you to look at the image in a way that you're focusing on particular details in the way that we actually look at an image. I mean, I'm looking at you now. I don't just see one image. You know, I see, I look at different elements.

I look at your eyes. I look at your dress, you know. So what he was trying to do is actually recreate using Polaroid technology a way of thinking about how people see the world around them. So it's a really nice way of thinking. about the two things where they're kind of interacting. You've got the technology and the science, both feeding the art, but also the other way around.

You mentioned the long hours they have to put in, the passion they have. These are attributes that both scientists and artists have. There are a lot of similarities between the two, aren't there? I think absolutely, yes, there's a lot of similarities between the two. But as well as passion and dedication, I think a really important one is imagination. So it was Einstein that said that imagination is more important than knowledge.

And I feel like actually, you know, for artists and for scientists, imagination is absolutely critical because it's not just the hard work. It's actually being able to think outside the box, not block. It's actually being able to think outside the box and think in original ways that's very important. to both. Should scientists today pursue art in that case? I think people should pursue whatever they're interested in. I'm not here to dictate, you know, all scientists should be drawing at the weekends.

I think, you know, following your interests. But for many people, if you begin to follow your interests, you realize that those divisions break down, that they are constructed divisions. And actually, if we can, you know, think more broadly and educate people more broadly than it invites us to be inquiring about the world around us. And naturally from that, I think you find that those two worlds are intertwined. And art was often used to educate the general public, wasn't it? What examples are there of art being used as a scientific communication tool? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you talked about

art as an observer and I think, you know, it's observing and then sharing and communication and communicating that more broadly. So one of the sections we have in the exhibition, the first section of the exhibition is called sociable science. And it's all about how art has worked with science to communicate scientific ideas, be that through politics or, you know, through other forms. So a really interesting example is the first story we start off with, which is the shows this right of Darby. It's called a philosopher giving that lecture on the ory in which a lamp is put in place of the sun. And it shows this majestic almost philosopher in the centre of the painting in red, which gathered around him is a cluster of people, including children.

And they are centred on this ornery, which is showing the movement of the planet in the solar system. And at the centre of the image, you have the sense of the sun spreading light on all of their faces. But it's also this sense that scientific knowledge is being spread

across their faces. So they're all learning new scientific ideas, the ideas that Newton had first put forward about the movement of the planets. So it's images such as this that are quite interesting, but we also know that Joseph Wright of Derby had actually seen a demonstration of an aurory and we think that he may have seen a demonstration by a man called James Ferguson

who actually came to Derby just before Joseph Wright painted this picture. And Ferguson was very enthusiastic about communicating scientific knowledge to a broader public and communicating the ideas of Newton. So he published lots of books and went around and gave lectures in coffee houses, you know, in lecture halls, really to make sure that these ideas about scientific, you know, these new ideas were being spread to the masses, were being spread to the middle of classes. There's a story about artists responding to the Royal Institution lectures. I wasn't aware of such a history.

The image you're talking about is the Gilray, where he, it shows a particular scientist who worked at the Royal Institution called Humphrey Davy. And Humphrey Davy was interested in the effects of nitrous oxide, what we now call laughing gas. And he conducted lots of scientific research into this, but mainly he did it with friends because they were extremely interested in the effects that this new gas had. And he had friends and colleagues such as Robert Sothe, the poet. And because they found it so difficult to describe the experiences that they were having with this new gas, there wasn't really a language for that.

There certainly wasn't a scientific language. They turned to poetry. And so Robert Sothe actually used poetry to describe the effects of nitrous oxide. And so did Davie himself. But this is interesting this picture because it's actually at the time where the French Revolution had happened. There's a lot of concern about political radicals. And some of this research was seen to be quite radical in its nature. And so Gilray is really, you know, laughing at the great and the good of London society who are gathering around blowing this hot air with each other and trying this new gas out.

So I think it's a wonderful commentary both on the politics of the time as well as on the science of the time and of the ability of art to caricature. science and laugh at new ideas and new progress. Can you describe what's going on in Gilray's cartoon? So it's described as scientific researchers, new discoveries in pneumatics are an experimental lecture on the powers of air. And you have men and women all gathered around Humphrey Davy with this big air bag that he's holding in the middle with air coming out of the top, presumably nitrous oxide coming out at the top. And one particular gentleman who's trying this nitrous oxide

and is farting from the other end all over the crowds behind him. But yes, they're very much the elite of London society, aren't they? So was this what the public thought of scientists at the time? Were they laughing at scientists? I don't think it's so much a laughing. at scientists, I think what was interesting is that this is more intertwined with the politics of the time. So it's kind of laughing and ridiculing some of these new ideas, perhaps radical

ideas that had been coming in and this type of science was associated with those ideas. So it's more a question about the elite groups of society and science's role in that than just laughing at science. So sometimes art is a friend, sometimes a critic, do they ever overlap? I think often it's a friend and a critic and I think the way that the two interrelate is often it allows us. to question this sense of progress and progress can be both a positive thing and a negative thing, you know. And so to have a way of, you know,

thinking about this sense of progress, you know, are we sad about the past that's gone, are we nostalgic for that past that we've left behind? Or are we, you know, excited about the new future and what it could behold. Art allows us to kind of question that those two scientific and technological realities, what's been before and what may be coming. So often technology holds a great promise.

You know, we might be able to go faster than we've ever gone before. We might be able to travel, well, we've traveled to the moon, but we may go to Mars, you know, all of those kind of opportunities to really think about what could come next. But it also allows us to question perhaps what we might lose as a result of that and to be nostalgic for that past that we had. And I think you see that in many artworks at the same time. I think that's quite interesting. So another example is the rain steam and speed, the Turner image.

So this is at the time. There were enormous changes in the railways. You've got the 1830s, a massive kind of development of the railways across Britain. And Turner painted, let's show you this one. Turner painted this incredible picture with this locomotive coming over the Maidenhead Bridge. And this was exhibited in 1844.

and it really is, you know, both the excitement of the speed that these new railways could travel at. You know, if you were going on this locomotive, it's called the Firefly, you were travelling faster than anybody had ever travelled in the world before. You were really state of the art. So in this amazing picture, he captures that sense of speed, but you've got the rain and the steam. We've got all this other swirling. kind of emotion that's coming through.

So whilst it's, you know, the excitement of progress, I think it also very neatly illuminates that slight nostalgia about what's been left behind. And you have, you know, this little boat in the corner. There's also, you can't see it in this image, but there's a hair running away. And it is really a question about, you know, do we want this progress? Should we be excited by such progress or should we be fearful

of the changes that it's making and the changes to society that we might never be able to go backwards again? But this is very, you know, it's wonderful to have this type of painting in the exhibition, but we're also delighted that we're able to show some of the scientific objects that accompanied this time. So we actually have a model of the Firefly locomotive that's come from our collections within the Science Museum group. And we will be placing that on display in the exhibition. It's a beautiful rosewood model that was made by a man called Daniel Gooch.

And it really expresses that sense of change and commemorates, you know, the fact that this was an enormous step forward in terms of the speed and rate of change that was happening in Britain. The exhibition for the art of innovation, what will that look like? What would it be like to walk through the exhibit? So the way we've approached this exhibition is to think about 20 wonderful stories. It's divided into four sections. So there's a first section called sociable science that looks about how scientific ideas are developed and communicated through religion, through politics, through fashion. Then second section called Human Machines

that is about the relationship between the machine and the human that asks questions around the efficiency of humans about whether technology is a tool for liberalisation of humanity or whether it's dehumanising and breaking us down. Then there's a third section called the troubled horizons and this really touches on those questions that we're talking about around what constitutes progress, what does progress really look like. And so it's about how artists and scientists question our relationship with the landscape

and relationship with the environment. And then the final section is called Meaningful Matter and it looks at how artists and scientists might categorize nature and explore nature. So clouds or molecules or plant species. So through this kind of structure and these 20 stories, we hope to really place the art and the science at the same level, give it the same status.

And in many cases, there isn't a distinction between the artist's object and the scientific object. The artworks and the scientific works are indistinguishable. So there's nice examples where you can see that something has been developed by somebody that is neither an artist or a scientist. Why is it important for the scientific objects and the art to be placed on the same level, status-free almost? The premise for the series and the exhibition is that there are not two separate worlds. So C.P. Snow gave a lecture called the two cultures in 1959.

And in that he described, you know, the division between the arts and the scientists. We feel very strongly that, you know, they shouldn't be thought of in that way. And so to see them as, you know, one culture, you know, that we define and think about in many different ways, I think is really important. Yeah. So if you think about it as one culture, it's important that there isn't a, you know, a hierarchy. between the two and that science isn't given the higher status than art or the other way around. I think they interlink in the ideas that they play off. They, you know, question the world around us and they critique what's happening.

And that's an important kind of tool for humans to kind of take things forward. Out of those 20 stories, have you got a personal favourite? Oh, yes, I do. It's a bit mean to ask me to say which one I like best because it's a bit like choosing your favourite child. But I particularly like the story about the BBC series, Edge of Darkness, which was a television series in the 1980s. This is, I think, a really compelling piece of television drama, really exciting series.

It looks at the kind of nuclear state at a time that there was, you know, a lot of questions around nuclear politics, about the role of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. but it does so through a really fascinating drama about a man trying to uncover why his daughter has been murdered. But in this series, there's a reference to Gaia and a reference to some of the ideas that the scientist Jim Lovelock put together around this idea of the planet in equilibrium, that the planet will sustain life. And so I really like this particular story because I think it's interesting in the way that it combines James Lovelock's ideas about environmentalism,

about humanity's role within the planet, whether we play a positive or a negative effect within that, and at the same time allows a television, drama to kind of bring in ideas around mysticism and spiritualism into this kind of scientific discipline. So it's a real, it really strongly shows how science can play such a important role in the dialogue around our culture as a whole, you know, it invites us to think about scientific culture as part of our, what's the term?

It invites us to think about scientific culture as part of something that we're all talking about all the time, you know, through a TV drama that, you know, at the time won many BAFTA Awards, you know, was highly acclaimed. And so it's a quite nice kind of intertwining of those two worlds, you wouldn't necessarily expect to come across the ideas of the scientist, Jim Lovelock, in a TV drama. The Art of Innovation looks right across history from the 18th century to present day. What is the current relationship between art and science? It's interesting.

I think as science has started to move in some areas, say in theoretical physics, it's much more about the imagination and about what's possible. So, you know, again, the role of artists in being able to invite us to open up those questions is really important. In terms of kind of where we are with art and science, I think we're very interested in thinking about a kind of broad culture for education and making sure that art and science are both part of, you know, the education. educational landscape. And so if you're thinking in the current day, you know, many people are very engaged in scientific ideas relating to the environment because we can all see the massive changes that are happening to the world around us. So actually, you know, embracing that, engaging with that and saying, well, you know, places like the Science Museum are a wonderful

place to come and broaden your scientific horizons. You broaden the level of knowledge that you have about science and not to be afraid of science. I think some people are a little bit scared that perhaps they don't know enough and they ought to understand science more. But actually, I think, you know, in many ways, science is underlying so much of what we do think about that there's many ways that we can all engage in science. And not just by coming to see the exhibit, but having the radio series and the book, if you can't get to London, you can still enjoy the project and find out more about the history of art and science. Absolutely. And the radio series is really, really fun, I think. It's been a great opportunity to go and talk to lots of other people.

So whilst Syrian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum and I present the series, we've been all over the country talking to different people, scientists, artists, curators, historians, you know, to get their perspective on the changes that you can see through these 20 stories. So we've worked with a wonderful team at the BBC to really, you know, bring in a range of different voices and different perspectives into the radio series. So whilst the book is very much in my... kind of take on the art of innovation, the radio series broadens that out to a bigger perspective. Finally, I wonder, what do you hope listeners will take away from the art of innovation?

Well, I hope they'll enjoy it. You know, there's some wonderful stories, some really exciting, interesting stories. So I hope it might tell people some new original stories that perhaps they haven't thought of. before and I hope it will enable people to maybe question you know question that divide so when we talk of art and science actually you know should we really be trying to embrace the two worlds and see them as more interconnected because I think we we can all benefit as a society from seeing art and science as more intertwined and interlinked. I think it would make both art and science better.

That was Dr Tilly Blythe, speaking about the art of innovation. Listen to Tilly and Sir Ian Blatchford host the 20-part BBC Radio 4 series available through BBC Sounds. If you can make it to London, the Science Museum's major free exhibition runs from now until the 24th of January. Or, alternatively, track down a copy of 20 stories from the history of art and science in the Art of Innovation book,

published by Trans World. For the latest and scientific discoveries and innovations, check out the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine. We find out why there's no overpopulation crisis, how chocolate boosts brain health, and ask if we should all keep our pet cats indoors. If you'd like to find out more about the relationship between science and art, why not listen to our previous podcast with Martin Clayton,

head of prints and drawings for the Royal Collection Trust at Windsor Castle. Martin explains why Leonardo da Vinci's scientific legacy is so often overlooked. Or, alternatively, listen to scientist James Lublock talking about his life, career and Gaia Theory in our episode recording on the eve of his 100th birthday. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step?

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