Category Archives: art

Skin-shuddering intimacy

Posted on by

Visiting Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed, National Maritime Museum, Falmouth for New Scientist, 1 July 2017

TURN left as you enter Tattoo: British Tattoo Art Revealed, and you will be led through the history of a venerable and flourishing folk art. Turn right and you will confront a wall of 100 disembodied forearms. They aren’t real, which is a nuisance for the artists who tattooed them – since silicone is nothing like as easy to work with as human skin – but a comfort for the rest of us.

Alice Snape, editor of Things & Ink magazine, curated this wall to showcase the range of work by today’s tattoo artists in the UK. But you really need to see the rest of the exhibition first. You need time to contemplate the problem Snape’s 100 Hands is there to solve, that this is an exhibition whose subject is entitled to wander off, and cover up.

There’s something frustratingly arch about tattooing. Tattooists jealously guard their stencilled designs (called “flashes”) even as they create pieces that, by their very nature, come with their own sales reps. Clients (perhaps influenced by 2005’s reality show Miami Ink) wax lyrical on the deeply personal stories behind their tats, then plaster photos of them all over Instagram.

Practitioners exploit their liminal status even while they bemoan their lack of recognition. In a show full of repeating figures and useful (though never intrusive) signposting, my favourites were the boards that tell you “what the papers said” at different times in history. Every generation, it seems, has come to the same startling realisation that “tattoos aren’t just for sailors”, yet the information never seems to stick. Tattooing is an art that does not want to be fully known.

The problem facing the show’s curators is: how do you define the limits of your enquiry? If the art has to be invited in, cajoled, reassured, even flattered into taking part, how do you stop shaky inclusion criteria from compromising objectivity?

Natural history solved the problem long ago. The rule used to be that if you wanted to study something you went out and shot it: the rifle was as much part of your kit as your magnifying glass. The Maoris of Polynesia, aware of the value Western visitors put on souvenirs, used to catch people, tattoo their faces, decapitate them and sell their heads to collectors. The draughtsman aboard Charles Darwin’s ship the Beagle had a travel box lined with the tattooed skin of dead Maori warriors.

These days the tattooed collect themselves. Geoff Ostling, for one, has arranged for his heavily (and beautifully) tattooed skin to go to the National Gallery of Australia after he dies. Gemma Angel, an adviser to this exhibition, spent her doctoral study among the 300 or so items in the Wellcome Collection’s archive of human skin, and she reckons there’s a growing interest in post-mortem tattoo preservation.

It is to this exhibition’s great credit that it takes no time at all to find a voice pinpointing exactly what is so discomforting about this idea. In a cabinet of personal testimonies I find this remark by a Catherine Marston: “Tattoo is an art form but I don’t think they should be collected because when a person dies they die too. You hear of some really weird designers that use skin that’s cut afterwards, once they die then that goes on display. I think that diminishes the whole idea of a tattoo. It’s art with a time zone rather than timeless.”

Such voices are valuable here because even this democratic, eclectic exhibition can’t quite capture the shuddering intimacy of the form it celebrates. Tattoos are not just artworks, they are also performances. Getting a tattoo hurts just enough to make you dizzy, and lodges that intimate moment in your memory.

Though the art is the point of the show, it would not work nearly so well without the artefacts it has borrowed from working tattooists and from the Science Museum in London. People make tattoo guns out of virtually anything that vibrates. The first machines were made out of Victorian doorbells. You can salivate at images all you like, but nothing gets under the skin like a doorbell-based tattoo gun once wielded by Johnny Two-Thumbs of Hong Kong.

 

What price original art?

Posted on by

At what point does a practical problem become an existential one? When do we have to admit that not everyone can experience everything – and what do we do about that? Forgery is no solution because good forgeries are, by definition, as exclusive as originals: if the original turns up, the forgery loses all value. But what if we undermined cultural norms to the point where fakery was the norm?

A visit to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and the Tinguely Museum Basel for New Scientist, 13 May 2017.

IMPRESSIONISM, the movement that shaped a generation of European artists, was concerned above all with light, colour and the mechanics of visual perception. Only one of its leading lights concerned himself, without apology, to the business of fame – Vincent van Gogh. He got what was coming to him: absolutely nothing. Dealers failed to sell a single canvas in his lifetime.

Tastes change. On 2 June 1973, in a park behind the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a museum dedicated to van Gogh’s work opened to an ever-swelling crowd of admirers. In 2014, 1.6 million people visited. Last year it was 2.1 million – 20 times the number the museum was designed to accommodate – all there to see just 250 paintings and 700 drawings and letters.

At what point does a practical problem become an existential one? When do we have to admit that not everyone can experience everything – and what do we do about that? Forgery is no solution because good forgeries are, by definition, as exclusive as originals: if the original turns up, the forgery loses all value.

What if we undermined cultural norms to the point where fakery was the norm? This is the state of affairs dreamed up by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem in his 1976 novel The Futurological Congress, which features this diary entry: “Spent a few free hours… in the city. Could hardly control my horror as I looked at all the displays of wealth… An art gallery in Manhattan practically giving away original Rembrandts and Matisses… The fiendishness is that part of this mass deception is open and voluntary, letting people think they can draw the line between fiction and fact. And since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously – you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt, drugs to forget – the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist.”

Doubtless the curators at the Van Gogh Museum have no such nefarious plans. But, faced with those queues, they are resorting to technology, even virtual reality.

Their most innocent-looking intervention is a dedicated location-based app by Marjolein Fennis that will entertain those waiting to enter, turning potentially fractious hordes into ad hoc communities of gamers.

In an effort to avoid delays and bottlenecks, museum designers scrape eye-tracking studies and video footage for insights. Some 85 per cent of the museum’s visitors are tourists, which means they get up late and roll up to the museum at the same time, 11 am.

A computer program developed with Erasmus University in Rotterdam uses algorithms more usually found in stock market trackers to predict visitor behaviour. Thus armed, the museum has come up with incentives to reduce peak time visits by around 60 per cent, even while visitor numbers have increased by nearly half.

“We don’t want as many visitors as possible, we want each visitor to have the best experience as possible,” says Milou Halbesma, the Van Gogh Museum’s director of public affairs.

Amsterdam, also badly bottlenecked, is planning to adopt similar technology later this year to get tourists out of the city and into the rest of the country.

Technology can also satisfy demand, especially in Asia, by bringing van Gogh’s art to the people. To this end, the museum has produced a digitally enhanced immersive experience, Meet Vincent van Gogh. It sounds hokey: visitors can wander with Vincent from rural Netherlands to the streets of Paris, pull up a seat at The Potato Eaters‘ table, and step into a life-sized Yellow House. In reality, the exhibition stimulates genuine interest, without leaving the visitor feeling cheated that they haven’t been in contact with the real work.

The museum’s limited run of Relievo reproductions take the opposite tack. Based on 3D scans of the paintings, including cracks in the paint and traces of paint layers, these surreally accurate reproductions took the museum and Fujifilm Belgium seven years to achieve. If you ever wanted to run your hand down the thick, impasto brushstrokes of van Gogh’s Sunflowers, now is your chance. This approach was also targeted at the overseas market, especially Hong Kong. A Dubai hotel exhibited them in 2015.

The only downside is that these strategies increase the number of people who want to see van Gogh’s real work. An exhibition currently at the Van Gogh Museum, Prints in Paris 1900, explores another very successful way of dealing with the sheer popularity of art and the celebrity of individual artists.

The fad for prints at the end of the 19th century not only decorated the hoardings and walls of Paris with colourful public art in the form of adverts, it also let everyone with a half-decent salary own an “original”. No two prints were identical – the imprimatur of the artist was visible and even, depending on the inks used, tangible. And the private nature of collections meant darker, more intimate themes could be explored by artist and collector.

Producing art ordinary people could own was a cultural as well as a technological breakthrough. But there is a snag, felt more sharply now than at the time these prints were produced. The low lighting at the Prints show reveals the vulnerability of works on paper. Unless these pieces are endlessly reproduced, dissolving their connection with the artist, they will have to spend almost all their life in storage, out of the public gaze.

The original is the gallery-goer’s holy grail. When Mark Rothko’s badly faded murals, painted for a Harvard University dining room, were rehung in 2014, an expensive lighting system was used to restore their colour. Over-painting them would have been an act of sacrilege. No one thinks this way about buildings. St John’s Cathedral, in the Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, for example, had whole pinnacles reinstalled and some statues recarved from scratch. This process began in the 19th century, using easily weathered limestone, which means some of the most recently reinstalled figures are actually copies of copies.

Gallery-goers are less forgiving. “I think it should always be very clear for the audience what you are looking at,” says Halbesma. “That is why we shall never show copies in our museum – because this is the moment when you meet Vincent and his work.”

“Unless artworks on paper are endlessly reproduced, they spend their life in storage, out of public gaze”

And the posters and prints upstairs? “They are all originals,” Halbesma says. “But we have big problems because of the light and their vulnerability. A lot of museums are already working with facsimile.” The implication is clear: catch this while you can.

Perhaps we should leave it to artists to determine what role provenance plays in their work. Van Gogh, desperate for that elusive sale, embraced the idea of reproduction. A letter to his brother Theo in December 1882 reads: “What I wrote to you in my last letter about a plan for making prints for the people is something to which I hope you’ll give some thought one day. I don’t have a fixed plan about this myself as yet… But I don’t doubt the possibility of doing something like this, nor its usefulness.”

The nearby Stedelijk Museum’s recent show of kinetic sculpture by 20th-century Swiss artist, showman and mischief-maker Jean Tinguely shows a rather different attitude. Tinguely was no ordinary mechanic, and some of his work, such as Homage to New York, was designed to burst apart in showers of sparks. His less self-destructive work is hardly more stable; the Stedelijk show had 42 moving pieces, rigged to timers to eke out the fun between the inevitable repairs.

It reminded me of a story told by Midas Dekkers in his book The Way of All Flesh – and an important part of the story of provenance. The Stedelijk once had a piece of Tinguely’s called Gismo. Tinguely insisted it should run constantly so the noise would lead people to it from wherever they were. A curator took him at his word, and for a brief, happy while, everyone got to see Gismo.

That’s the trouble with art: if you want it to live, you may have to let it die.

Marine life is rubbish

Posted on by

“The aim of my work is to create a visually attractive image that draws the viewer in, then shocks them with what is represented,” artist Mandy Barker explains. “This contradiction between beauty and fact is intended to make people question how their shoe, computer, or ink cartridge ended up in the sea.”

A short feature for New Scientist, 22 April 2017

Art, Science and the Truth

Posted on by

Here’s something for the evening of Thursday 27 April 7-10 pm.

Designer and trouble-maker Leila Johnston has invited me to join Katharine Vega (chroma.space) and Dr Sean Power (Trinity College, Dublin) at the Site Gallery in Sheffield to ask whether art, science and belief are “branches of the same tree” as Albert Einstein once said, and what happens when some of those branches begin to crack?

Full details here.

 

Hot photography

Posted on by

Previewing an exhibition of photographs by Richard Mosse for New Scientist, 11 February 2017

Irish photographer Richard Mosse has come up with a novel way to inspire compassion for refugees. He presents them as drones might see them – as detailed heat maps, often shorn of expression, skin tone, and even clues to age and sex. Mosse’s subjects, captured in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, don’t look back at us: the infrared camera renders their eyes as uniform black spaces.

Mosse has made a career out of repurposing photographic kit meant for military use. The images here show his subjects as seen, mostly at night, by a super-telephoto device designed for border and battlefield surveillance. Able to zoom in from 6 kilometres away, the camera anonymises them, making them strangely faceless even while their sweat, breath and sometimes blood circulation patterns are visible.

The results are almost closer to the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch than the work of a documentary photographer. Making sense of them requires imagination and empathy: after all, this is how a smart weapon might see us.

Mosse came across his heat-mapping camera via a friend who worked on the BBC series Planet Earth. Legally classified as an advanced weapons system, the device is unwieldy and – with no user interface or handbook – difficult to use. But, working with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, Mosse has managed to use it to make a 52-minute video. Incoming will wrap itself around visitors to the Curve Gallery at the Barbican arts centre in London from 15 February until 23 April.

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the man who shaped biology and art

Posted on by

Biomorphic portrait of D'Arcy Thompson

For New Scientist, 1 February 2017

In a small, windowless corner of the University of Dundee, UK, Caroline Erolin of the Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification is ironing a fossilised pterodactyl.

At least, that’s what she appears to be doing. In fact, Erolin’s “iron” is a handheld 3D scanner, and her digitised animals are now being used as teaching aids worldwide. Her enthusiasm for the work (which she has to squeeze between research into medical visualisation and haptics) is palpable. She is not just bringing animals back from the dead, but helping to bring a great collection back to life.

In 1884, the biologist and classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson began assembling a teaching and research museum in Dundee. An energetic philanthropist and a natural diplomat, Thompson had a broad network of friends and contacts – among them members of Dundee’s own whaling community, who provided him with extraordinary, then-unique specimens of Arctic fauna.

In 1956, the building that housed the University of Dundee’s natural history department was scheduled for demolition and Thompson’s collection, created as part of his work there, was dispersed. Scholars have been scrambling to recover its treasures ever since. Asked whether it can in fact be reassembled, Erolin laughs and gestures at the confines in which the surviving items are (rather artfully) squeezed. “It’s a question of space. We’re already sitting on an entire elephant skeleton. Where on earth would we put that?”

ADVERTISING

inRead invented by Teads
It’s largely not a genuine problem though, in part because advances in digitisation are changing the priorities of collections worldwide. Even more importantly, it is generally acknowledged that Thompson has outgrown Dundee: he belongs to the world. Together with Charles Darwin, Thompson, who died in 1948, is the most culturally influential English-speaking biologist in history.

We have one book to thank for that: On Growth and Form, first published in 1917 – an event commemorated by an exhibition, A Sketch of the Universe: Art, science and the influence of D’Arcy Thompson, at the Edinburgh City Art Centre.

“Thompson described his landmark book as all preface”

In neither the first edition nor the revised and expanded 1942 version does Thompson talk much about Darwin, and even in the 1940s he considered genetics hardly more than a distraction. Thompson was pursuing an entirely different line: the way in which physical constraints and the initial conditions of life shape the development of plants and animals.

Thompson was fascinated by tiny, single-celled shelled organisms such as foraminifera and radiolaria. He was convinced (rightly) that their wildly diverse shell shapes play no evolutionary role: they arise at random, their beauty emerging from the self-organising properties of matter, not from any biological code.

Even as geneticists like Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky were revealing the genetic mechanisms that constrain how living things evolve, Thompson was revealing the constraints and opportunities afforded to living things by physics and chemistry. Crudely put, genetics explains why dogs, say, look like other dogs. Thompson did something different: he glimpsed why dogs look the way they do.

Most of Thompson’s contemporaries were caught up in a genetic revolution, synthesising the seemingly incompatible demands of chromosomal genetics and Darwinian selection theory. No one ever seriously doubted Thompson’s importance – his book has always been a classic text – but at the same time, few have ever quite known what to do with him.

Portrait of D'Arcy Thompson by Darren McFarlane
Darren McFarlane, Scarus, Pomacanthus, 2012, oil on canvas. (University of Dundee Museum Services © the artist)

Thompson himself (pictured above as morphed by artist Darren McFarlane) understood the problem; he described his landmark book as “all preface”: the sketch of a territory he lacked the mathematical skill to penetrate. What the arguments in On Growth and Form really needed is a computer, and a big one at that (which makes Thompson a character who might have dropped straight out of the pages of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia).

Artists, on the other hand, from Henry Moore to Richard Hamilton to Eduardo Paolozzi, knew exactly what to do – and the Edinburgh exhibition combines the University of Dundee’s own collection of biomorphic, Thompsonesque art with new commissions. Several stand-out pieces are by artists who were students at Dundee’s own Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

To its credit, Thompson’s alma mater has not been slow to exploit the way his meticulous and beautiful work straddles art and science: it supports a dedicated art-science crossover gallery called LifeSpace, as well as offering degrees in animation, medical art and medical imaging, connecting digital processes with traditional illustration. They are making the most of On Growth and Form‘s centenary, but the influence of Thompson on the university is deep and abiding.

That is as well. For all our anxious predictions about genetic engineering, for all the hype surrounding synthetic biology, and all the many hundreds of graduate design shows stuffed with “imaginary animals”, we have barely begun to explore let alone exploit the spaces Thompson’s vision revealed to us.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120057-darcy-wentworth-thompson-the-man-who-shaped-biology-and-art/#ixzz63gNDj1gc

Flying machines and chickens

Posted on by

screen-shot-2016-11-18-at-10-50-20

for New Scientist, 21 November 2016

Artist Nick Laessing has been learning more than is entirely healthy about the internal workings of motor vehicles. He has been spurred on by the myths surrounding water-powered cars, a notion first cooked up in Dallas in 1935 that has powered conspiracy theories and investment frauds ever since.

Laessing insists I climb in among the boxes and dials that half-fill the front passenger seat of his humble VW Golf. We’re in Liverpool, where his Water Gas Car is being exhibited in No Such Thing as Gravity, an art show that curator Rob La Frenais says reveals the shape of science by mapping “where the relation between data and knowledge is uncertain”.

There’s mischief here: Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s 2010 video Studies in Applied Falling makes a seamless and hard-to-spot nonsense of astronaut David Scott’s famous experiment, in which he dropped a hammer and a feather together in the airless environment of the moon.

Nevertheless, La Frenais, who used to curate for the London-based art-science organisation Arts Catalyst, is adamant that his show is not about pseudoscience: “It is about those areas where science is still a developing body of knowledge,” he explains. “It lets people ask naive questions about science and not feel embarrassed.”

Science for the future?
Laessing’s car is a case in point. No one, however well-informed, really knows whether water-gas cars have a future. Laessing’s on-board technology isn’t going to set the markets alight, but it does work, harvesting hydrogen fuel from water through solar-powered electrolysis.

Tania Candiani’s lovingly recreated 17th-century flying machine also works – up to a point. At least, she has ridden it through the hull of a jumbo jet in free fall, and lived to film the tale. What was, centuries ago, a serious technical effort becomes, in light of subsequent knowledge, a touching and amusing entertainment.

Nearby, an installation called Heirloom stands this formula on its head. Artist Gina Czarnecki and John Hunt at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease have produced an extraordinary living artwork that promises one day to become a useful technology.

Living portraits of Gina’s two daughters are being grown on glass casts from cells collected from inside their mouths. Over time, the cells will grow to the thickness of tissue paper. The surgical possibilities for custom-shaped grafts are considerable, if still far off. A correctly curved graft means a more natural fit for the client, with less scarring and less disfigurement.

Meanwhile, as we wait for the technology to improve, Czarnecki’s haunting portraits raise natural (though perhaps too obvious) questions about biological ownership and identity.

Artful answers
Sometimes, scientific advances throw up questions that only art can answer. Two artists in the show explore near-death experiences. Sarah Sparkes is interested in the psychology of the phenomenon, recreating a classic experiment in generating uncanny sensations. Push a lever, and a rod pokes you in the back. Fair enough. Now push the lever again, and the rod pokes you in the back a split-second later. An irresistible suspicion arises that you are communicating with a hidden presence.

Helen Pynor, by contrast, explores the way in which advances in resuscitation medicine have increased the frequency of near-death experiences. This has led her to make artworks that challenge the tricky notion of a “moment of death”.

Two pig hearts from an abattoir, kept alive by an artificially maintained flow of oxygenated blood, dominated her 2013 installation The Body is a Big Place. Her work displayed at FACT, The End is a Distant Memory, was inspired by a casual conversation with regeneration biologist Jochen Rink of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. During this exchange, Rink remarked that individual cells long outlive whole bodies — and that supermarket chicken would surely still contain healthy cells.

Pynor’s photographic and videographic installation runs with this notion, tracing the processes that turn a live chicken into food. Plucked chickens are dignified through portraiture, while successive images of a chicken being plucked are subtly choreographed to suggest that the animal’s life is being rewound. Once fully plucked, it resembles a fetus in an egg.

Pynor dignifies and personalises the meat on our plate without hysteria, and sends a shiver of memento mori down the back of all but the most insensitive visitor. It is the emotional highlight of a show that, though driven by the high purpose of getting non-scientists thinking scientifically, will probably be more remembered for its cleverness and its wit.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2113412-flying-machines-and-chickens-the-art-of-thinking-about-science/#ixzz63gNvkEEM

An enormous shape-shifting artwork – run by bacteria

Posted on by

anywhen_tate_its_nice_that_4

for New Scientist, 19 October 2016

IN STANISLAW LEM’S bitterly utopian novel Return from the Stars, astronaut Hal Bregg comes back to Earth from a 10-year mission to find that 127 years have passed during his absence. The world that greets him is very different from the one he remembers. For one thing, its architecture absolutely refuses to stay put. Platforms slide past and around each other, walls and columns spring up out of nowhere, or fall precipitately away: the solid environment has liquefied. He worries – and is right to worry – that he will never find his feet in this new place.

The Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno is kinder than Lem. Visitors to his vast installation at London’s Tate Modern, Anywhen, get a carpet to lie on while the vast Turbine Hall shimmies and pulses around them. Let there be no doubt here: Parreno’s awful grey machine is triumphally futuristic, an interior so smart it has outgrown any need for occupants. Anywhen is thunderous, sulphurous, awful in its full archaic sense.

Visitors find themselves in a sort of aquarium, in which sound and light obey a claustrophobic new physics. Speakers descend from and ascend to the ceiling, relaying captured outside noise from nearby teenagers, a fragment of song, a passing aeroplane. Banks of lights flash. In a sudden hiatus, bits of colour drop down from somewhere on to a giant mobile screen and float off. Some are murky projections, but there are solid objects, too, in the shape inflatable fish. These seem a lot more at home in this shifting space than we do. Huge, white, architectonic panels reconfigure the dimensions of the gallery, moving up and down with more than random malevolence. Is this malevolence an illusion? Of course, but it’s an utterly convincing one – so much so that one wonders what the artist means by it.

Alas, Parreno is not here to answer. He has, it seems, ceded control of his installation to a colony of yeast, fed and watered in a small lab visible in an out-of-the-way corner. Changes in the colony’s temperature, growth and movement are variables in a biocomputed algorithm that will enrich the installation’s behaviour during its six-month run. It still remains to be seen whether those initial conditions are rich and complex enough to generate a significant creative work.

Right now, as you lie there, hands scrabbling for purchase on the thin carpet, it seems as if the Turbine Hall has been invested with a terrible, alien intentionality. Is this another illusion? It must be. And yet, how can we be sure?

The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz once came up with a thrilling but flawed argument for the existence of God. In one of his best-known works, Monadology, Leibniz invites readers to imagine that they are visiting “a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions”. There would be plenty to see: innumerable cogs, wheels, belts and gears.

But that, says Leibniz, is precisely the problem – “we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception”. The same issue arises when we explore the brain: no amount of mapping, no amount of analogy, brings us any closer to the subjective “is-ness” of conscious experience.

Leibniz used his thinking mill to assert that the world is more than material, and that thinking must occur on another (divine) plane of existence. He was a glass-half-full sort of thinker, whose rambunctious belief in the essential goodness of the universe – all is for the best in the “best of all possible worlds” – drove an exasperated Voltaire to pen his savage satire Candide.

Anywhen is Leibniz’s mill made flesh in glass, wire and panelling. Lying on the grey Turbine Hall carpet, I couldn’t help but wonder with Voltaire how on earth Leibniz took comfort from his own story. Something is using the Turbine Hall to think with, but we can bet the farm it is not God. Imagine wandering into the toils of some vast, cool and unsympathetic intellect. Imagine the Martian has landed…

When art and technology pull each other to bits

Posted on by

ars-electronica

Visiting Ars Electronica for New Scientist, 21 September 2016

In a disused mail sorting office in Linz, Austria, an industrial robot twice my height has got hold of Serbian-born artist Dragan Ilic and is wiping him over a canvas-covered wall. Ilic is clutching pencils, and as the robot twirls and dabs him against the wall, the artist makes his own frantic marks – a sort of sentient brush head. These performances are billed as a collaboration between artist and machine. All I see is the user getting used.

Every September in Linz, the Ars Electronica festival tries to marry technology and art. Andy Warhol took up screen-printing in the 1960s, and a whole generation of gallery-goers have since grown up with the notion that this match is easy.

Indeed, the coupling of art and technology has become a solid pillar of art education, especially now that so much funding comes from IT big hitters such as Sony and private institutions like the Wellcome Trust.

But if the venerable Ars Electronica has demonstrated anything in its 37-year history – beyond the ability of the arts to remake and rejuvenate a city – it is that technology and art make astonishingly unhappy bedfellows.

This year, for example, Swiss artist Daniel Boschung used an industrial robot controlled by bespoke software to take 900-million-pixel portraits of people – forensic surveys so detailed that they drained all emotion from their subjects’ faces.

Not far away, another robot, Davide Quayola’s Sculpture Factory, chiselled through partially completed life-size stone renditions of Michelangelo’s David. The attention was directed to the pixelated nature of 3D scanning, which smeared, spread and tessellated the biblical giant-killer to the point of incoherence: here a limb, there an eye.

Walking the corridor towards the current sculpture-in-progress, one passed attempt after attempt of clone Davids peeking in more or less agonised fashion from their cuboid stone prisons, in a sort of mineral retread of that infamous scene from Alien: Resurrection.

The provoking thing about Ars Electronica is that it jams together boutique displays of the latest technology, trenchant criticisms of the post-industrial project, jokes and honest failures. It is a gargantuan vessel powered by enthusiasm, but steered by nothing remotely resembling taste.

Eventually, the visitor comes to rest against one of the more obvious wins. Boris Labbé’s film Rhizome, which netted the festival’s annual animation prize, unites watercolour illustration and digital effects to tell an epic tale of evolution, civilisation and cosmic transformation in one steady, heart-stopping reverse zoom.

And then there is Frank Kolkman’s OpenSurgery, which combines 3D printing and laser-cutting with hacked surgical pieces and components bought online. This is a DIY robot that can perform laparoscopic surgery – a terrifying comment on the way that hacking and “making” are increasingly expected to stand in for the real thing.

You’ll need a drink after all that, so head for Max Dovey’s A Hipster Bar. And good luck – this genuine pop-up drinking hole will, in true neo-liberal fashion, keep the gate shut unless its face-recognition system considers you “90 per cent hipster”.

As you sip, ponder this: it was the assertion of the Romantic movement that art makes us appreciate the beauty, richness and sheer size of the world. And technology, used appropriately, brings us closer to that sublime. As the Romantics’ acolyte, the writer and pioneering pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, put it: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

Even if that was true in 1939, it’s not true now: not now our drones do our flying for us; not now our technology has got away from us to the point where large portions of nature are being erased; not now we live mired in media and, indeed, have to make special efforts to escape it.

Naturally, artists want to explore the new technology of their day, but these days the best results seem to come when we misappropriate the machines and kick them into new shapes, or simply point and laugh.

Northern lights

Posted on by

Penelope Umbrico, 30,400,020 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 04/04/16, photographs, machine c-prints, in the Collection of the Artist

The Starry Skies of Art, Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, Finland, to 8 January 2017. For New Scientist, 20 July 2016.

A FEW hours north of Helsinki, Finland, on the shores of a lake, sits an art museum, opened in the 1930s and much expanded since. Now one of its galleries is filled with 200 years’ worth of artistic visions of the skies, the work of Helena Sederholm, an art-education professor, and science writer Markus Hotakainen.

Scientific approaches to the cosmos are affectionately parodied in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus – a breeding project to adapt fruit flies for life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon – and Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar migration bird facility (MGA), which tries to realise, NASA-style, English bishop Francis Godwin’s story The Man in the Moone, whose hero flies to the moon in a chariot towed by “moon geese”.

Reductive approaches to the cosmos reach pathological levels in Marko Vuokola’s Been There, Seen It, Done That, in which the phases of the moon are reduced to a pattern of shadows cast by glass discs resting on a glass shelf.

A more elegaic exploration of the same idea (that we murder to dissect) lies in Petri Eskelinen’s 2016 installation Dying Star. After a few minutes, the viewer’s dark-adapted eye makes out a beautiful and convincing cloud of stars. At regular intervals, lights come on, revealing the cloud for what it is: smeared, worn Perspex sheets stuck with scraps of Post-it note and scrawled over with whiteboard pens: “Yes”; “No”; “No life field”. The night sky is reduced to a bitterly precise, tiresome, anthropocentric hunt for an earthlike planet.

The lights go out. The magic reasserts itself. To comprehend the world, we must reduce it. But as Penelope Umbrico ably reveals in 30,400,020 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, the world is big enough to take our abuse. And in the moonlit landscapes by 19th-century artists Fanny Churberg and Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, it swallows us whole.