By Natalia Zdorovtsova
In my last blog post, 'Art Is Not Science,' I talked about the distinctions between what the arts, humanities, and sciences can offer us on a personal and civilisational level. I emphasised that we ought to look at these disciplines as contributing to our lives in their own ways: while science offers us a predictive understanding of causal relationships in the world, the humanities investigate causality in a profoundly unregimented and descriptive way. Meanwhile, the arts allow us to explore rich inner experiences and establish a connection to cultural traditions. All of these disciplines act upon our lives in important and transformative ways, but their methods and intentions vary considerably.
The aim of this blog post is to discuss a feature of human interaction with the world that influences how we engage with both artistic creation and scientific inquiry. I've decided to frame this as a process of communion - that is, a deeply embodied interaction with our surroundings that enables us to learn about the environment and mould it in our image. To illustrate this phenomenon, I'll use examples from my experience as an artist and as a neuroscientist.
As an artist, I find myself hesitating to integrate digital media into my practice. I've tried digital drawing a few times, but I can't seem to get used to the transition between the physical world and the level of abstraction that lies inside of a screen. It's harder for me to make sense of the steps that normally go into creating a physical painting in the context of a two-dimensional image on a tablet. Realising this has made me aware of the fact that I rely a great deal on manipulating the 'feeling' of paint on a canvas, and that my approach to making art is a highly embodied one. Outside of the context of physical texture, pigmentation quality, and viscosity, paint doesn't register in my mind as something that I can readily manipulate. This is definitely a shortcoming; digital art is an incredible field, and it represents a much more accessible approach to drawing and painting than the range of techniques available to more traditionally-minded artists. It's also a lot cheaper. All you need is a tablet, some decent editing software, and maybe a couple of courses in digital drawing. In-the-flesh art often requires a much greater investment into materials and in-person tuition (though the latter isn't always true - many artists, myself included, are self-taught).
Maybe I need to give it a more earnest attempt. Regardless, I find it interesting that I'm able to make a physical set of tools feel like an extension of my own mind, yet unable to achieve a similar degree of mental flexibility when transferring my skills to a digital realm. This 'communion' is an embodied one, where I use a variety of senses - particularly touch - to create visual art that I actually enjoy.
If you're interested in embodied cognition and the extended mind thesis, like I am, the previous paragraph may have resonated with you a little bit. These two closely-related branches of philosophy of mind have influenced some recent studies of how we rely on more than just our brains in order to make sense of the world (and ourselves). If you want to know more about the topic of extended cognition, I recommend starting with this paper by Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
As a PhD student, I'm always trying to find ways of engaging with scientific ideas in a manner that gives me the same feeling of flexible control that I have as an artist. While art gives me an avenue through which to directly act upon my environment, it's harder to put this into practice when dealing with abstract theories and concepts that lack an immediate sense of physical grounding. I work in cognitive neuroscience, which doesn't require me to do any 'wet lab' research that one might usually associate with the sciences (particularly biology). My work mainly revolves around running brain scans, reading a lot of scientific articles, and building statistical models of neurodevelopmental change based on large amounts of neuroimaging, cognitive, and behavioural data. Something that I've found helpful in 'embodying' my research is directly visualising my findings and ideas on paper. My notebooks are filled with flow charts, drawings of brain networks, and plans for diagrams that I eventually construct using digital software. Having a physical reference at my disposal is useful because it gives a feeling of groundedness to something more abstract. Undertaking a research process requires you to manage not only your data, but your own abilities and preferences, too.
Despite the fact that art is a much more physical process for me, communing with scientific ideas is something that I massively enjoy. On reflection, I don't think that the process of scientific theory-building is too dissimilar from the feeling of creating an artwork. In both cases, you begin with something ill-defined: a blank canvas or gap in the theoretical literature, a set of tools, (hopefully) some knowledge, and some ideas about what you think the end-product of your efforts might look like. Then, you make iterative changes to whatever you're working on using information that you gain along the way. In science, this often means running experiments and analysing your data according to a set of well-defined parameters, which should get you closer to forming predictive theories about the phenomena you're interested in. In the case of art, you use sensory information (visual, tactile, and auditory) to figure out whether your creative process is leading you in the right direction. Both require you to establish a direct feedback loop between yourself and the object in question, whether it be a scientific theory or work of art.
Perhaps what I'm saying here is trivial. Of course we use feedback loops to engage with the world - that's how we learn, evaluate our beliefs, and practice our skills. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's much easier (for some people, including me) to establish this sort of feedback loop when there's an element of embodiment involved. By turning abstract ideas into physical things, I can hold them in my mind more concretely and commune with them in a meaningful way.
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