The Living Cosmos: a Fabric That Binds Art and Science
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a rt i s T s ’ a rt i c l e The Living Cosmos: A Fabric That Binds Art and Science Chris Impey a b s tr a c T and Heather Green The authors, an astronomer and an artist, have collaborated on a series of seven mixed- media constructions and prose pieces that follow the flow and themes of Impey’s book on astrobiology, The Living The ProjecT In the first art piece, from the Cosmos. The book summarizes viewer’s vantage point on a shore, recent research on astrobiology, After authors Chris Impey and Heather Green worked to- from the origin of life on Earth gether on a series of posters in which artist Green layered Ernst night sky shades imperceptibly into and its environmental range on Haeckel’s illustrations of diatoms with imagery of computer noctilucent sea (Fig. 1). Familiar this planet to the search for life circuitry and dark matter, Chris Impey approached Green with surfaces—a glassy sea, the hemi- in the solar system and beyond. spheric vault of the sky—seem The artist’s work encapsulates the idea of creating seven pieces that would capture the es- these ideas with its use of mate- sence of each of the chapters in his popular book on astrobiol- proximate but each contains vast rial objects, textures, images ogy, The Living Cosmos [1]. depths and each might host un- and metaphors that mirror Over several meetings in Green’s studio, the two discussed known and unseen creatures. The the elements of the scientific approach to astrobiology. how the content of each chapter could be expressed visually. shore represents a boundary be- Green created conceptual sketches of materials and themes tween knowledge and ignorance, that could serve as metaphors for larger ideas in the book dreams and reality. The macrocos- (and that served as the basis for the shadow box designs pre- mic and the microcosmic face each sented below), and Impey followed with prosaic writing that other as mirrors. complemented these sketches, as can be seen in the follow- ing sections of this paper, which draw from those passages. As Fig. 1. Heather Green, The Unfinished Revolution, oil on panel, ideas developed, they became less literal, and in the process etched clock crystals, etched copper, steel and wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green) of their distillation a kind of logic evolved. The conversations resulted in an inspiring exchange of knowledge, and the ico- nography for the project emerged. The pieces are tethered to the sequential development of the book, but they can be observed in any order; the motifs build on one another and are interconnected, like the web of life [2]. The choice of working with shadow boxes was intentional— it allowed Green to work with found objects and 2- and 3D materials that were relevant to the work and to reference mu- seums and scientific specimens (especially the tradition of the Wunderkammer [3]) and the constructions of Joseph Cornell, who created several boxes with astronomical themes [4]. The Unfinished Revolution The first chapter of The Living Cosmos sets the stage for the field of astrobiology. The history of astronomy has seen us continually displaced from our presumed centrality in the universe [5]. We inhabit a hospitable but not atypical rocky planet orbiting a moderate-weight, middle-aged star near the periphery of a normal spiral galaxy, one of billions in the ex- panding universe. Astrobiology is an interdisciplinary effort to discover if life on Earth is special and unique or if we live in a biological universe. Chris Impey (scientist, educator), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Heather Green (artist, educator), Pima Community College and University of Arizona, 515 E. 20th Street, Tucson, AZ 85701, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/43/5> for supplemental files related to this article. ©2010 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 435–441, 2010 435 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/43/5/435/1579669/leon_a_00035.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 At the bottom of the image, an in- we are, formed from a universal bio- Italian of Galileo as he communicated complete periodic table symbolizes the chemistry [7]. science to the general public, Newton’s scientific process. We look for patterns The concave clock crystals in the cen- English as he explained the enigma of in nature, in a process that began when ter of the image draw us in and place us gravity and the German of Einstein and the first civilizations began to track the at the center of the scene. They are pri- his theories of relativity. cycles of time in the sky. Scientists work meval forms, perfect and Pythagorean, The forms are timeless yet modern. A with fragments of knowledge to infer numbering five to represent the Platonic flat horizon conveys infinite extent and the whole: an extinct creature from solids, the moving objects in the night posits Earth as both the beginning and a few scattered bones, the history of sky or the Greek elements. The curved end of the universe, but the clock crystals, animals from the 1% of their bones that surface might be a cornea or the lens of by breaking the plane, refer to Einstein’s are fossilized [6] and the commonality of an early telescope. The nested spheres curved universe and his coupling of life from the overlap of scraps of DNA. allude to mathematical harmony, to space and time [8]. Comforting bound- The power of science lies in its projec- Dante’s cosmology and to the onion aries melt away. The straight edge of sea tive capability. Newton used the orbits skin of knowledge. They move inward is the limb of a gently curving planet, of a few planets to infer the motions of in time, with exterior shells closer to the with no up or down. There is no shel- galaxies that would not be discovered origin, like the growing bubbles of light tering sky, and the air shades smoothly until centuries after his death. The pe- that surround every star. They are etched into the perfect vacuum of deep space. riodic table is universal. Stars are made in languages that bespeak the history of Greek philosophers flinched at the idea of the same ingredients as the Sun, and science: Greek from Plato’s Academy, of a universe with no edge, or an edge yet if planets around some of them host the Latin of Copernicus in his book that nothing beyond the edge. The universe life, it will be made of the same stuff as shocked and displaced the world, the might be boundless, limited by time and not space, our view defined by the dis- Fig. 2. Heather Green, Life’s Origins, oil on panel, etched glass, specimen jar with sand, ash, tance that light has traveled since the big crystal, sculpted book page strata, wood, 14 × 19 × 4 in, 2007. (© Heather Green) bang. All that we see is only a tiny fraction of the physical universe [9]. life’s Origins The Living Cosmos continues its story by going back to 4 billion years ago, a time since which all traces of biology have been churned into the restless Earth, when the motor of life first turned over. Chemical shards slowly assembled by trial and error into chunks of RNA and then into the rudiments of a working cell [10]. From a simple beginning, Darwin’s “end- less forms most beautiful and wonderful” have evolved to carpet the planet. In the second work, an old man and his grandson regard a night scene (Fig. 2). Their starry silhouettes are a remin- der that we are all stardust, our genera- tions of atoms cycled through cosmic cauldrons. The Moon was our first guide to tracking deep time, the word itself coming from a Greek root meaning “to measure.” Its cratered surface is a mir- ror of the Earth’s violent history and the random impacts that disrupt evolu- tion [11]. Yet it also stabilizes the Earth’s orbit, making the planet more convivial to biology. More recently, we have min- iaturized our timekeeping, using vibra- tions of atoms, the precise shimmering of light waves and the radioactive decay of massive atoms—the clocks in the rock. Below us, the book of life is laid out like crumpled pages in the strata beneath our feet. The story of evolution on Earth can be parsed from the slowly mutating base pairs of DNA, but this information de- grades with time, like paper turning to dust [12]. So little remains after eons of geological activity that reanimating a di- nosaur from its blood sucked by an insect 436 Impey and Green, The Living Cosmos Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/43/5/435/1579669/leon_a_00035.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and then trapped in amber would be like trying to reconstruct a library from a few scattered book pages. We are the universe, and the universe is us. Water and carbon are leitmotifs in this story and in these artworks. Water is the placental fluid, a universal solvent, so the fact that all plants and animals are largely made of salty water is a reminder of our origins. Carbon is the universal building block. Its delicate forms are etched on the glass. The specimen jar is an allusion to Miller and Urey’s famous “life-in-a-bottle” experiments [13], which re-created the first steps from simple molecules to amino acids.