Thursday, November 7, 2013

'Experimentations - An MA Art and Science Group Exhibition' at Central Saint Martins, 7th November 2013

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Royal Institution to attend their Research as Art exhibition. This exhibition was the end product of scientists working at Swansea University being encouraged to interpret their work as art, creating an exhibition of evocative and informative imagery. Experimentations at Saint Martins is aiming at the same target from the opposite direction: artists investigating science. Both exhibitions meet at approximately the same place, tracing the intertwining of art (the ultimate subjective) and science (the ultimate objective).

On entering I immediately felt overwhelmed - every surface was bristling with countless works - how on earth am I supposed to process all this?  The walls are crammed, the floor is busy, art hangs from the ceiling, is strapped to the artists or hides tucked behind dark curtains. This is a tornado of ideas - there's almost too much to keep track of.  A stiff drink might help...

Thankfully, the nucleus of the room is a cocktail bar, there's four on offer, each linked to one of the four medieval humors (I love a drink that comes with an explanatory leaflet).  So we have the Melancholic (rosemary-infused white wine granita), Phlegmatic (a cucumber gin tonic), Sanguine (mulled red wine) and Choleric (beer with lime and chilli).  I grabbed a Choleric - a cocktail with a mean kick to it.  The chilli powder settles at the bottom, so as you glug it down it gets spicier and spicier, until the last gulp which feels like you're being very mildly maced. 

by Libby Heaney
Drink in hand, throat pleasantly tingling, I went a-wandering.  Tucked away in one of the offices was this piece by Libby Heaney.  The white pyramids softly tumbling out of the white walls reminded me of CG polygons, the room itself becoming a decaying virtual space. Five minutes in the future is augmented reality, a smudging of the lines between the real and the virtual.  Here, we see possible consequences, structures around us collapsing into avalanche of geometric shapes - both beautiful and disturbing.

by Boris Raux
I love a bit of tactility in art, so I'm immediately enamoured with what Boris Raux' has produced.  Laying on the floor is the shape of a boat, and filling the interior are thousands of clear, soft spheres.  These spheres are made of seawater, existing in some mysterious state somewhere between liquid and solid.  Raux explains to me that he made a pilgrimage down to Brighton beach to gather seawater, adding a chemical to it that transformed it into these gorgeous spheres.  He encourages me to run my hands through them, it's like fondling frogspawn, soft, slippery and wet - and yet your hand comes up dry. Raux even encourages me to eat one to prove that it's seawater.  I politely decline this invitation.

by Charlotte Law
The process of transforming one substance into another runs right through the exhibition. Modern science has some roots in alchemy, which is now a vestigial organ, useless and discredited but fascinating nonetheless.  You can see an alchemical metamorphosis in Charlotte Law's piece here, taking heaping lumps of dung and turning them into building materials.  The idea of taking waste and making something beautiful out of it appeals to my optimistic side - if life hands you a big heaping pile of crap then put it on your flowers!  

by Rebecca Price
Rebecca Price's eggs work similarly, connecting hen's eggs with the embryos inside them. We work very hard to maintain the disconnect between animals and what we eat - the abstraction between chicks and eggs is one of the most powerful.  Though we chuck them on our breakfasts, the egg is an incubator, created to nurse an organism to life.  Images of very recently conceived embryos show remarkable similarities right across the animal kingdom, be they fish, bird, reptile or human. The pictures here could be of any creature, the artist sharply drawing a link between chicken, egg and observer.

Daniel Nutt and his prototype neural network.
Similarly transformative is Daniel Nutt's work with neural networks.  I don't know too much about neural networks, but it's safe to assume they're pretty complicated.  Nutt is making his out of polystyrene cups and bits of rubber tubing.  He explained that the cups represent individual neurons and that he eventually intends to build a device capable of learning lessons and repeating actions.  Out of foam cups.  And I don't think he's kidding.  It sounds bonkers, but he had just the right kind of glint in his eye to make me think maybe, just maybe, he can pull this off.  Whether he can or not, I really want to see him try. Again, the art takes the mundane and imbues it with semi-life, breathing some basic intelligence into inanimate, 'trash' objects.

by Keivan Sarrafan
The most intricate and carefully constructed piece was by Keivan Sarrafan.  Behind a black curtain lay darkened room.  Gently revolving in the centre, suspended from the ceiling by a chain, was a dangling piece of metal.  This was lit in a spotlight, framing it within a circle of light on the wall.  On the metal was written algebra in mirrored writing, and as it span the words were reflected onto the darkened walls, creeping a path across those present.  The cherry on the cake was another mirror on the wall.  Once every rotation everything would align and "laboARTory" would be projected onto the floor for a brief second.  

The way the precision of the arrangement echoed the exactitude of mathematic language was great. It takes a moment to figure out just how everything fits together, what light is bouncing where and how the words appear so briefly on the floor.  The rotation and graceful motion was hypnotic, the central spinning plate reminiscent of a mandala, a dark, dense star illuminating the room.

After a few more Cholerics I was feeling pretty good about myself, yet just as I was getting into it the lights started flashing - the indicator that we had to clear off into the night.  But I obstinately planted my bum on the floor. Charlotte Law was topping the night with a performance piece and I wasn't about to miss it.  At the entrance to the gallery was a typewriter, and throughout the night those passing were encouraged to tap out a few words. As a finale, brandishing the sheets of typewritten paper she lay down on a shiny silver sheet and began reciting the combined mental gibberish of an art gallery crowd.

Charlotte Law
Charlotte sounded like a malfunctioning computer and looked like Evelyn McHale, her voice sounding out long strings of "aaaaaa"s and the occasional string of garbled coherence. It didn't feel particularly insightful, but I don't think that was the aim.  We swim through a tangle of etheric signals every second of the way, text messages, love notes, emails, phone calls all flying past and through us on electromagnetic wings - a jumbled, jangled chaotic soup of information, too bitty and coded to make any sense to us. It's that livewire current that Charlotte was tapping into, the information age spiritual plane. 

So, all told, I had a good time.  There's a ton of stuff I don't have time to mention, but it was a pleasure poking around and finding new works tucked away in corners and on ceilings.  The gallery isn't open to the public, though the exhibition is set up until the 14th.  If you're dying to see it, get in contact with the artists via Facebook or Twitter and I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.

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