Fabian Oefner is a Switzerland-based artist whose work includes kinetic installations, photography, and film. In his installation Field of Sound, he explores the interactions between sound and motion, translating sonic waves into mesmerizing movement. “Just like a field of barley waiving in the wind, thousands of illuminated stems move to the sound of music,” he explains. Using a control mechanism hidden at the base of the installation, Field of Sound “captures the ephemeral sound waves…

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Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish artist known for his large-scale installation artworks and sculptures. Driven by an interest in perception, feelings of self, movement, and embodied experience he employs elemental materials such as air temperature, water, and light to add dimension to his  works.  While Eliasson does not explicitly describe the influence of science in his works, he has collaborated with scientists many times throughout his career. Perhaps as a result, scientific concepts permeate many…

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Name: Donna Hamil Talman Which came first in your life, the art or the science? On the Colorado ranch where I grew up I avidly searched for Native American arrowheads. As an adult I became interested in evolutionary processes, particularly the way some things change while others endure with the passage of time. As an artist/photographer, I visited natural history museums all over photographing dinosaur bones. I would then manipulate photos extensively in the darkroom,…

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How do science and technology frame our experiences of the natural world? Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt tackle this empirical question in their work: Catching the Light (2014). The duo, better known as Semiconductor, uses visual data collected by telescopes in a 6 metre wide projection. Their work disrupts original spatial relationships to create new patterns and points of reference across a multitude of screens—remapping the sky across the installation screens. Semiconductor’s Catching the Light…

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Name: Cara Gibson Which came first in your life, the science or the art? Art. My mom, a professionally trained art teacher, taught private lessons in our home and so our dining room always had a still life set up in it. Each time she would use some drapey material for the backdrop, and then usually there would be a metallic or reflective item, like a silver teapot or glass bottle. Often she would include…

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Can you name 10 well-known female scientists? Better yet, can you explain what they’re known for? A quick online search for “World’s Top 10 Scientists” is all it takes to understand why gender representation is such an important issue in the sciences. Marie Curie aside, female names seldom appear on any of these lists. When they do, they often occupy the last spot—an afterthought to a long list of male inventors and researchers. When it…

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Deep in Amsterdam’s Amstelpark, tucked between the trees, stands a large glass house full of strange and beautiful objects. Het Glazen Huis (which literally translates to “The Glass House”) is the stunning presentation centre of Zone2Source, an international exhibition platform that invites artists to develop alternative creative projects exploring the ‘natural’ environment. Through public art shows and performances, the organization invites audiences to “imagine possible worlds on the cross points of art, science, and nature”—to…

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“At high magnification the surface of even the plainest looking beetle or fly is completely transformed,” says Dr. James Hogan, a collections manager at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. “Details of their microsculpture become visible: ridges, pits or engraved meshes all combine at different spatial scales in a breath-taking intricacy.” This concept of microsculpture—the details of the insect form—is well-known among entomologists. But it comes to life like never before in Microsculpture, a collaboration…

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Name: Steven Gawoski Which came first in your life, the science or the art? It is hard to say. As a child I was a compulsive naturalist. Pouring over field guides, crawling around in fields for insects, getting soaked in creeks after pond life, scaling the scree in gorges to ferret out fossils, and haunting beaches for shells and crustaceans. Cap that off with aquariums, reptiles, amphibians, and birding. Parallel to that I had an…

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Name: Katrina Vera Wong Which came first in your life, the science or the art? Academically I’d been in the science stream since I started school in Singapore. I loved biology but wasn’t so keen or adept at chemistry and physics. Though my teachers encouraged me to switch my core to literature, the humanities remained my electives. In my opinion, artistic creativity isn’t really valued in Singapore’s education system (unless it directly affects your grades)…

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