Science and Art: Illustrating Scientific Ideas (Transcript)

Image credit: Antony Hall - Projection with Fluids 2015

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Rah! Science and Art - Episode 03: Illustrating Scientific Ideas 

Rah! Opening Jingle 

Martin Kratz:  Hello, and welcome to the Rah podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University. My name is Martin Kratz. June's series of episodes, will explore the intersections of science and art. In our third interview, I will speak to Antony Hall about his experiences of how drawing in particular can help in thinking through and communicating scientific ideas. 

Antony Hall:  What's great about arts as a disciplined way of looking at a focused way of looking at and I think that has benefits for the sciences as well if that's also a process of looking, 

Martin:  You can join the conversation on Twitter by hashtagging #RAH_Podcast. So let's get into our third episode in our science and art series.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: Hello, I'm here today with the artist Antony Hall. Say I was going to start by just describing, well a series of photos I’ve seen on Antony's website, which were titled projection with fluids. And you can look at them if you go to antonyhall.net. So it's a series of tubes and files and glass containers containing a green fluid. The really striking thing is it's all about fluids, but it's kind of how solidly they come across. 

Antony:  Yeah, thanks for that, that was really interesting to listen to you describe it verbally, that sort of an evolving body of work, which is based on 18th century science. And specifically, that came from a book experiments with soap bubbles, which are just lovely, this lovely old book, which went with a lecture by Charles Burn on voice. And he's demonstrated all of his experiments through a slide projector, where the experiments were actually performed in this field of focus, so they could be projected for the audience. And for that one, I had to maintain it. So there's really, yeah, there's continual maintenance which has to occur while you're continually refilling the funnels and cleaning the device as it’s projecting. 

Martin:  That's interesting that maintenance. Do you do have to keep doing it, this is very slightly sort of simplistic way of looking at it, but I kind of, when a painting is done in some ways it's done. 

Antony:  It really reflects what I do in the studio. And sometimes I think when you make a finished piece of work for me, a lot of the some of the work is sometimes missing in finishing it. So I find it more exciting to present the work as that exciting moment of discovery, you know, as that moment of something happening. 

Martin:  That moment you described there, of the kind of you're doing this thing and you think actually what I want to capture, Is this, the kind of the moment of its happening, not necessarily the kind of product of of it, if that makes sense, if I’m thinking about science that kind of makes me think of that moment of discovery that you hear about. My background is in writing and criticism and poetry, where you also have that moment of in the writing were suddenly like, oh, this is the happening of it. But I think is there a link then to – is that where the science element also comes into it? There's technical equipment involved. There are scientific processes involved a lot of scientific language involved, but then there's also the kind of significance of this. Yeah, seeing things in happening in the discovery. 

Antony:  So I think what's quite important to me is this element of not knowing and not being an expert. And in that amateur approach is, yeah, something that I kind of hold, hold dear, in a way I embrace that not-knowingness, I guess and almost don't want to get to the point where I understand it too much, because then some of the mystery is somehow gone. And, but it is about that moment of excitement, I guess that drives my practice, and it keeps the work alive slightly. 

Martin: So where are you now with your work?  

Antony: I'm still thinking about that approach as an amateur scientist, and I'm still thinking about experience. And for this research, I'm looking at perceptual illusions, not optical illusions but illusions which combine sense, of touch, you know, maybe Sonic illusions, tactile illusions, and illusions of proprioception. So the sense of where our body is in space. And the main experiment that I've developed is called the clay hand illusion, which is based on an illusion known as the rubber hand illusion, which you might have heard of, it's quite famous. So it's where you, you stare at a rubber hand and while your real hand is hidden, and someone strokes, both hands in synchronisation, and you start to believe that the rubber hand is your own hand, and that's because you can see the touch occurring at the point where you can feel it. So I had this idea, well, you know, why don't we make a get clay and just get people to make them. Firstly, when people make a clay hand, they're all completely different. Some people might be good at sculpting a hand to make a realistic one and other people or children might make a hand, which is not necessarily realistic. So I repeated the experiment with these various forms of clay hand, and I found people could embody these really unusual shapes, really un- un-hand-like hands, which were also made of clay. So then during the experiment, I asked them to make new hands or modified hands, maybe with three fingers or extended fingers. What I've been doing now is asking them to make things which are un-hand-like in order to try and embody them to see if that, how far they can stretch their perceptual imagination. So I started exploring this idea of imagination plays a role in embodiment, which is a question I'm still not quite sure how to answer. But I think certainly like empathy, you use imagination. And I'm wondering if, in a similar way, you have this empathy for these inanimate objects somehow. And I'm wondering if the process of having made them affects the extent to which you can embody them? 

Martin:  I need to know now, what was the most un-hand-like, hand? 

Antony:  Yeah, so the most extreme case is simply a round blob. So the artist I worked with was able to create a round blob and she felt attachment to this. To the extent she felt like it was actually her hand was the blob. So I have to re- I have to sort of map her hand over this unfeasible object. The other interesting thing is like people can embody a clay hand quite easily. But then you can remove a digit and they will still embody the disembodied digit. And then you can remove the rest of the hands, so they're just embodying the disembodied digit, or, or blob. 

Martin:  Like a phantom phantom limb. 

Antony:  Yeah, yeah. And what I found is that not everyone's able to experience the illusion. I'm not sure whether it's how it's affected to creativity as yet. But if you are able to experience embodiment over clay hands, some people can then go further and embody empty space. 

Martin:  That's fascinating. I want to come back to something you said some time ago, which is about this notion of the amateur scientist and sort of vice versa. Actually, in some ways the amateur artist, the scientist who is an amateur artist or is an artist, but where that, how that relationship between science and art, where it begins for you?  

Antony:  So, I think they go hand in hand. And for me, my, my practice is, I don't think I ever really stopped to think about whether it was art or science. It was I spent most of my time really being inspired by science, even though I'm not a scientist. So I think when I was younger, I always wanted to be a scientist from a really young age and I had my room set up like a laboratory and a sign on the door saying lab. So that, actually I really struggled at school. Now I'm able to explore the sciences in a really, really fun creative way. You know, I managed to come to the studying science through a different route altogether, I guess. My my studio really is more of a laboratory. It's more about the equipment and the space to perform experiments, it isn't full of artworks. I think, what it is for me I I love drawing and I always, when I'm doing anything about science, I use drawing as an activity at some point, because I think, in what's great about arts as a disciplined way of looking and a focused way of looking, and I think that has benefits for the sciences as well, if you bring that to the sciences, that's also a process of looking. 

Martin:  And drawing actually sits kind of really sort of perfectly between the two disciplines. Because, scientists, you know, there's a whole history of scientific drawings of observational drawings, field notes, things like that. There's a connection between them, isn't there? 

Antony:  Yeah, I think so. 

Martin:  Which is the what we described as this way of looking and this trained way of looking. 

Antony:  Yeah, I think so. Yeah. One of my experiments is uh, on something called the strange face illusion, and I asked people to gaze at their own face in near darkness. And they and they begin to see hallucinatory effects, which are only describable through words.  

Martin: Okay. 

Antony:  So I've tried to make a visual representation of that. I've been desperately trying to draw what I could see and make diagrams of exactly what was happening. For me drawing can be a perceptual tool. It's how I see it, it's, it doesn't necessarily document the reality of the thing or the phenomenon it, it documents your understanding of it. And it helps you qualify what was important about that thing, what is important about that thing, in relation to your perception of it, I guess, and I think in education a teacher might not be trained in drawing and therefore feel uncomfortable about teaching drawing, because they believe that drawings about skill and about teaching people how to make a good drawing, which is a misperception really, because although that is one element of it, the skill of it, making a drawing can communicate how you understand something and what, for so for children, it can communicate their gaps in understanding as well, which I think’s an important use for drawing. 

Martin:  So it's, the joint shows the gaps in their knowledge, but I think also sort of thinking of my own kids that when they do it, sometimes it also shows me things that they knew, which I didn't know, they knew, you know, different kind of types of knowledge, 

Antony: Yeah, for sure.  

Martin: And sometimes also, then you go, oh, I didn't know that because of the way they look at it. 

Antony:  Yeah. So I asked people to draw their hand without looking. So I get various collect collections of drawings of people's hands how, you know how big is that hand, how distorted is it. 

Martin:  Is people's response to it quite emotional? I know that sounds strange, but I think like the hands are, I think sometimes something you might take for granted.  

Antony: Yeah. 

Martin: If you're someone who works with their hands, that's perhaps you'll have a different relationship to them to someone who doesn't. 

Antony:  There's some really interesting implications in terms of, I guess, maybe it comes back to the empathy but so when we make distortions in the hand, and modifications to it, people often get like a really powerful response. I've had several people say that the hairs are standing up on the back of their neck, their heart rate increases and also, previous experiments have shown people get a galvanic skin response spike as well. So there's definitely a strong emotional response to it or specifically when when you push it to its limits and do something that's surprising and unusual. Yeah. 

Martin: Yeah I bet. I can really imagine. 

Antony: Yeah. And with the strange face illusion that that is very disturbing for some people to the point, one person just had to leave the room during the experiment. And, yeah, people get really freaked out by that. 

Martin: Because you're taking these things which is so familiar to us. Are you also making them unfamiliar? But in the case of the face one, it doesn't seem like you're doing anything particularly radical, you're looking at your face in the mirror, which is what most people do probably on a daily basis. And there's just a couple of things which is the duration, and then maybe the lighting that changed that. 

Antony:  It's, I guess, making people slightly aware of their perceptual vulnerabilities. 

Martin: Yeah. 

Antony: Or something like that. 

Martin:  I can, I can definitely imagine it would be emotional. 

Antony: Yeah. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: Don't forget to follow us on Twitter a future podcast updates. You can find us @mmu_rah. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the Rah website for full links. In our next and final episode in the series, I'll be speaking to artists Dave Griffiths by the role of storytelling and disciplines across both art and science. Tune back in soon for more episodes. 

Rah! Closing Jingle 

Martin: This episode was produced and edited by Lucy Simpson presented by me Martin Kratz and mixed by Julian Holloway.