| Future Climate Dialogues- Nine Enthralling Hours |
Public Event |
| Arts Centre, Institute of Geography & Earth Sciences, School of Art , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , June 18, 2013 |
The lives of scientists and artists have their points of over-lap. The funding applications grow longer, more regular, and more onerous. A lava-hot row erupted in the arts in Scotland last year, when fatly salaried and pensioned managers proposed to remove revenue funding altogether from many of their nation’s most acclaimed creators. Both artist and scientist have to mark time as timescales inexorably lengthen. Venues and galleries juggle availability and space along with their own financial projections. The editors of the most prestigious science journals prevaricate over commitment to publish, in case something more exciting turns up. For a small minority, laboratory, studio and gallery offer a life of greater ease and bigger money in the US. A generation back C P Snow provided the standard quotation for a presumed arts and science chasm. Lord Snow has been proven wrong on one count. While it is an uncommon artist who can tell a standard deviation from a chi square, the Second Law of Thermodynamics has become a commonplace. The metaphor of entropy is a regular in theatre and novel. C P Snow’s equivalent today is Lewis Wolpert who provides a quotation on the gap between the two domains. Wolpert needs his defence. His “Unnatural Nature of Science” of 1994 is a very good popular book. The universe is made in a way that not just eludes human perception but goes against it. He asks which of two bullets will hit the ground first, the one that is dropped from a hand or the one fired from a gun held at the same height. The answer should not require thought at all, but the average mind wrestles with it. Mark Macklin, Professor of Physical Geography, illuminates another area held in common. His presentation has put photographs of river basins- he is a fluvial geomorpologist- next to abstractly patterned linoprints. He is asked from the floor whether the core languages of science and art do not diverge. The scientific method is underpinned by concern with method, number and validity. Not so, he answers, he has statisticians and others on the team, but his research is fuelled by recognition of pattern, conceptualisation, and a capacity to envisage a site three-dimensionally. This sense of powerful vision has a noble tradition in science. August Kekule grasped the structure of the benzene ring while daydreaming. Leo Szilard conceived the notion of the chain reaction from the switch of colour on a Bloomsbury Square traffic light. The day’s programme encompasses twenty-six presentations, papers or introductions to the posters that have been specially made for display on the Arts Centre’s Upper Floor. Rachel Howell’s subject is the communication of climate change via film. She discusses “An Inconvenient Truth”, “the Age of Stupid” and, less respectfully, “the Day after Tomorrow”. That film has one unmentioned note of distinction. A classical actor from Britain for once does not get to play a character steeped in treachery and villainy but instead a role of nobility and sacrifice. Hers is the eighth presentation of the morning. A questioner notes that there has been a tendency for the presenters to couple attitudes and behaviour together. However, an early classic of social psychology, Lapierre in 1934, demonstrated a loose to non-existent connection. Rachel Howell is powerfully well-equipped on psychology’s research methodology. Modern approaches favour a field approach in that behaviours are embedded within a social nexus. It is experimentally more accurate to turn the process around, to observe behaviours, and infer attitudes from the observation. But the design is complex and the process time-consuming, so attitude-gathering is likely to prevail. With polling’s inherent weakness expect Scotland’s referendum to become a cliff-hanger this time next year. The presentations take in the indebtedness of art to science and vice versa. Doctors have gazed into the canvases of Hans Memling, a large number of which are appropriately housed in a hospital. The piercing sharpness of the artist’s fifteenth century eye has revealed pathologies that would go undiagnosed and unclassified for half a millennium. In the natural world glaciers speak eloquently of climate change. Glaciolologist Mike Hambrey is present to speak on the landscape paintings of Thomas Fearnley. The artist died in 1842 and his paintings of the Grindelwald and other glaciers are superbly accurate in their detail and colouring. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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