"Every culture lives within its dream"
-Lewis Mumford, 1934
Lets see, I guess they remove the dna from some cell and inject it into the nucleus of an egg. Is the egg then fertilized? It's grown in a petri dish, right...
I envisioned a guy, always a guy, wearing a white coat and eyeglasses, equipped with tweezers. Tweezers? But there it was, tweezers. I had no idea how this widely discussed procedure was actually done, despite the stories on NPR and the New Yorker. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention. Surprisingly though, that image of the scientist armed with tweezers, surfaced again and again when I asked people to describe how they visualized an assortment of biotech procedures such as genetic engineering or cloning.
This is admittedly cutting edge scientific research, but what about electricity, which is hardly a new branch of knowledge? The Greeks studied the nature of static electricity in amber. So can you picture it in your mind? How does it happen that you throw a switch and you have light? You may remember the correct words from 6th grade science about negatively charged electrons, but do you really see it?
My guess is that it's a matter of scale, scale and speed, and how our ability to imagine is limited to the physiology of our own bodies.
At what point did science become physically incomprehensible to the rest of us?
"The entire history of intellectual progress has been a gradual replacement of direct experience with abstract signs." In Art and Discontent Thomas McKeviley relates the way measurements were made in ancient societies. Chinese texts refer to "as long as it takes to eat a bowl of rice", Vedic texts to the time it takes to milk a cow. Distances were marked by the distance a woman throws a bowl of water from her back door.
One indication that change was afoot was the invention and use of the camera obscura in the 16th century. Although described by the Arab scholar Alhazen in the 10th century, and used by 15th century astronomers, it was not until the mid 16th century that glass lenses replaced the simple pinhole and the resulting image was sufficiently bright to be useful to artists.
Monocular vision was assumed to be a more objective, empirical mode of seeing which isolates the observer from the event, a vision independent of the distortions of the mind and body. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary postulates, "the camera obscura is a metaphor for the rationality of the seer."
Lewis Mumford argues that the invention that had the most significant influence on the way we perceive the world was the clock, which began the transformation from organic time to mechanical time. "Time took on the character of space… made us feel that experience is quantifiable."
Still, the 18th C machine to the 20th C robot has been patterned after the human body. The telephone and phonograph grew out of an exploration of the mechanics of human vision and hearing. Much of the initial research in artificial intelligence has been an attempt to emulate the workings of the brain, to the extent that we understand it.
At one time the scientist and the artist both operated by observation and intuition. Science has long since pushed beyond the observable. That which we can smell, touch, see, hear, and taste is now too small a part of the puzzles that drive exploration and invention. The tools no longer have to fit the hand or work on the same principle as the eye. Methods and conclusions are counter-intuitive. However, most of the rest humanity, in this first decade of the 21st C, still operates in the world of the senses. We may use the internet but the technology is as mysterious as static electricity to the Greeks.
According to the writer David Noble in his recent book, The Religion of Technology, "the modern scientific community…is like a secret society. Its' members speak a private language unintelligible to the rest of us ... obsequious to state power."
The dream in which we live as a culture is changing, and the transition is fraught with misunderstandings and ethical questions. The drawings in this series are done by hand, and are about my own visual pictures of this new landscape of uncertainty and misperceptions. The photographs are recreations of home science experiments most of us remember from childhood.
SCIENCE PROJECT PHOTOGRAPHS and DRAWINGS
The first of the drawings made for this project, alluded to in the statement, are my own, sometimes silly, usually erroneous, visual images of what goes on in the laboratory. The other drawings and photographs are about science fair projects and experiments most of us remember from childhood.
This visual work is to be shown with a sound installation. There will be three loops of approximately 6 minutes each in which people describe their mental images of scientific phenomena and processes. I asked the same set of questions of each anonymous speaker and their responses in the first part of the soundtrack are unedited. Although admittedly unsystematic, the project includes people in a variety of disciplines; lawyers, artists, teachers, writers, and even a few scientists and engineers. The loops will play simultaneously but each is to be heard in a defined zone of the exhibition space.
M.J. Marshall
