Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art - Hardcover

Miller, Arthur I.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393083365 ISBN 13: 9780393083361

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

A dazzling look at the artists working on the frontiers of science.

In recent decades, an exciting new art movement has emerged in which artists utilize and illuminate the latest advances in science. Some of their provocative creations―a live rabbit implanted with the fluorescent gene of a jellyfish, a gigantic glass-and-chrome sculpture of the Big Bang (pictured on the cover)―can be seen in traditional art museums and magazines, while others are being made by leading designers at Pixar, Google’s Creative Lab, and the MIT Media Lab. In Colliding Worlds, Arthur I. Miller takes readers on a wild journey to explore this new frontier.

Miller, the author of Einstein, Picasso and other celebrated books on science and creativity, traces the movement from its seeds a century ago―when Einstein’s theory of relativity helped shape the thinking of the Cubists―to its flowering today. Through interviews with innovative thinkers and artists across disciplines, Miller shows with verve and clarity how discoveries in biotechnology, cosmology, quantum physics, and beyond are animating the work of designers like Neri Oxman, musicians like David Toop, and the artists-in-residence at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

From NanoArt to Big Data, Miller reveals the extraordinary possibilities when art and science collide.

70 illustrations, 8 pages of color

About this title

About the Author

Arthur I. Miller is a professor emeritus at University College London. He has published many critically acclaimed books, including Einstein, Picasso; Empire of the Stars; and 137. He lives in London.

Reviews

Science historian Miller coins the term artsci to describe the growing realm of creativity that merges art, science, and technology. Beginning his exploration in the early twentieth-century artistic engagements with X-rays and radio waves, Miller goes on to map a wide-ranging contemporary field of practice that encompasses computer-based art, robotics, data visualization, and biotechnology. This well-illustrated and accessible text is refreshingly short on academic theory, instead surveying the vast landscape of artsci through profiles of individual artists, projects, and institutions. Tracing collaborations at the CERN Supercollider, Pixar Studios, and the MIT Media Lab, Miller finds particular inspiration in artworks that go beyond the illustration of scientific principles and actually contribute to real-world scientific advances. Miller’s anecdotes of bioluminescent brains, emotive interfaces, and climate-change mappings trace an exciting new avant-garde of creative research with the potential to realign aesthetics toward an appreciation of information. The author’s comprehensive text not only codifies an important contemporary cultural movement, it also marks the rise of an interdisciplinary “third culture” that fuses the disciplines of art and science. --Lindsay Bosch

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393083365
• ISBN 13: 9780393083361
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352