The intersection of art and science has often shown the potential not only to spark new avenues of inquiry or production but also to mine a resource that has become increasingly scarce in the information deluge of our day and age. Whether by presenting projects that remove us—if only for the length of a score—from the confines of our realities, reanimating old disciplines with new methods and materials, or finding chinks in the rigid divides between disciplines to trace enlightening connections, the articles of this issue provide this resource in abundance: the magic of the unexpected.
Our Focus section urges us to reconsider how we register and interact with sound. “Lightyears: Auditory Navigation through Coppice’s Draw Agreement” takes us on a thirteen-year journey through a musical duo’s sonic universe and the way it transforms listening into an act of composing. “Into the Here and Now: Explorations within a New Acoustic Virtual Reality” uses sound installations to investigate how real-world objects can be imbued with sound to bring forth a new dimension in sound art that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the virtual. “The Defining Role of Spatial Immersive Technologies in the Creation of the Electroacoustic Compositions Moments of Liberty I–IV” explores how multichannel sound systems and spatial processing techniques play a pivotal role in shaping the listening experience.
Although the projects presented in our Work Bench section span a wide range of practices, each challenges the boundaries of their respective mediums. “Breathing Life into Slime: The Creation of Kinetic Sculptures from Non-Newtonian Fluids” reflects on how a children’s toy inspired an interactive kinetic artwork made from the unconventional material of slime to elicit equally unusual sensory experiences. “The Splendor of Plainness: A Transformation of the Process of Qi as Expressed in the Generative Artwork UKON” presents a similarly experimental project in which cutting-edge software is leveraged to make artwork that both honors and reinterprets the ancient Chinese aesthetic philosophy of plainness. “Mimetic Possibilities: Collaboration through Movement in Multimedia Opera” also explores the revival of aesthetic antiquity by weaving creative coding and lighting design into The Ghost, an opera heavily inspired by ancient Greek theater. Finally, “Porous Embodiment and Poetic Knowledge: An Emergent Dialogue Between a Puppetry Artist and a Neuroscientist” presents a conversation that challenges conventional, anthropocentric views of consciousness.
The Showcase section features the Metabolic Arts Gathering, which hosted a collection of innovative artists exploring the growing interest in metabolic processes as studied and imagined through research and practice. Curators Hannah Star Rogers and Adam Bencard note the connections made in these works between scales of the microbiome and that of civilization, placing social, scientific, and aesthetic issues in new contexts.
Our Contemporary Scholarship section makes surprising connections between seemingly unrelated fields of inquiry. “Musical Color Harmony: Application of the Principles of Musical Harmony to Produce Color Hue Sets” tackles an age-old question: Do music and color share similar underlying aesthetic principles? By drawing on the physics of sound and musical harmony, the author presents a method for generating harmonious color palettes based on the principles of musical resonance. “Sight-×-Site” considers the topic of vision from a different angle by drawing parallels between the Situationist International movement and eye-tracking research. Finally, “Action at a Distance: Did Physicist Thomas Young’s 1807 Lectures Inspire Some of the Earliest Examples of Abstract Art?” explores scientific breakthroughs that may have reached across a century to influence the work of artist Hilma af Klint—only recently shared with the world, as stipulated in her will.