Page 24 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ART–SCIENCE INTERFACE

of these two cultures was productive and necessary. Meanwhile,
engineering vied with artistic movements to define the era. This
applied equally to spectacular, fatal constructions such as bridges and
skyscrapers, airships and ocean liners, and to mundane, banal machines
from railways to jumbo jets, automobiles to kitchenware. Indeed,
engineering (steel-frame buildings) combined with artistic movements
(art-deco) in an art–science interface to build the icon of modernity
itself, NewYork City.
Modern communications media combine technology with artistic
and aesthetic content. Such media include cinema, radio, television,
publishing, computer software and games, recorded music and
photography. Like architecture and engineering, but in forms that
compete directly with more traditional arts, these are true art–science
interfaces, since they cannot exist without scientific inventions but
would find no public without their artistic content.
Popular aesthetics was always an art–science interface. The idea that
truth could be revealed by technological means, rather than by a
shaping artistic vision that was always in the end ideological or
manipulative, was inherent in the popularity of aestheticisations of
science itself, whether via photos from outer space, wildlife
documentaries on TV or the entire dinosaur industry (see Mitchell,
1998). The human condition (previously the domain of literature,
painting and the pursuit of ‘beauty’) became a province of science.
Beauty was found in truth, not imagination.
On the other hand, some popularisations of scientific advance
displayed nostalgic sentimentality about the human condition
amounting to serious bad faith. A paradigm example of this was the
Steven Spielberg movie ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. This fable used the
latest hi-tech scientific cinematic equipment to propose a world where
technology (in the form of government agencies on the lookout for
ET) was the enemy of the values embodied in the human child
(equipped with a heart and sentiment). The movie used science to
condemn it.
Recently, the art–science interface has extended the challenge,
moving from architecture, engineering and media to scarier territory,
notably that of biotechnology. Cultivated, organic, self-reproducing
objects have been produced for non-utilitarian purposes: for example,
skin-graft technology applied to artistic ends. But the biosciences
didn’t really need to commission specialist artists. Sometimes they
appeared to be enacting the darker nightmares of modern art entirely
by themselves, for instance via the widely circulated photograph of a
rodent with a human ear grafted on its back in a ghoulish reminder of

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