The Art of Science

The first day of Create World presented to us a panel of image-making superstars, including renowned nature photographer Steve Parish,  and Eureka prize winning science photographer Phred Petersen (RMIT).

It was billed as a Visual-Art- interfaces-with-Scientific-Research event, but I’m not quite sure that we had time to get to the pointy end, you know where we answer that question as to what the Arts-Science interface really entails. Mostly, we just oohed and aahed at lots of awesome graphics straight out of the science lab – water rippling in slow motion, frantic technicolour human cell imaging, patterns of shockwaves ….

Phred Petersen put it all modestly and matter-of-factly, constantly insisting that he was not an artist, and that structures in the natural world revealed themselves to be ‘far more beautiful’ than anything than his own imagination might produce under its own steam. He is into scientific photography, he says, because it allows him to see things that he wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. And much of the time, what he sees, often by virtue of incredibly expensive, high speed cameras, is simply ‘cool’. No further critical comment needed, it’s just ‘cool’.

I guess it raises some interesting questions about how we define artistic endeavour. Just because you don’t create something entirely from the ground up doesn’t mean that  you’re not an artist. After all, don’t we consider found art a legitimate field of artistic expression? Admittedly, found art practitioners will often modify, frame, contextualise the pieces they pick up. But doesn’t one suspect that those scientific imagers are doing the same thing – framing, situating in space, colorizing, and so on – in ways that are irrelevant to the scientific data being communicated, and that just make for better visual appeal? So maybe they are artists after all. But what does it matter – the photos are cool.

Image: Phred Petersen’s prize-winning ‘Blast Wave’, taken from: http://mams.rmit.edu.au/jcw64n3jaclz.jpg

Ian Green