In his SciLogs blog, Matt Shipman asks for our help: Art as a Science Communication Tool: I Need Your Help
He says:
Visual art has the power to inspire, provoke and fascinate. I know some incredibly talented artists that focus on scientific subjects, and I think their work is a beautiful and valuable science communication tool – but I'm having a hard time quantifying that value.
First off, I think it is worth distinguishing art inspired by science from artistic science communication. In my own work I do each – make art, and communicate science – and I have found that is important to be clear in my own mind which mode I’m working in, even when I employ the same techniques in both. Art (even art that is not inspired by science) has a significant role to play in science communication, but its role can't really be compared with that of ‘pedagogical science communication’ (communication that sets out to explain science).
The difference between sciencey art and artistic sci-com
One way to decide if something is art or artistic sci-com is to ask of it, 'how much scope is there to make this meaningful?'. Consider, for instance, an installation in a science museum. How could we decide if it is art or sci-com? A sci-com exhibit will generally set out to isolate an individual phenomenon and display it as clearly as possible, anchoring it to the ‘correct’ interpretation. Also, when designing a science exhibit you want its purpose to be unambiguous, because ambiguity would get in the way of viewers/users making sense of the phenomenon.
On the other hand, if the exhibit is ‘art’ then the need to anchor and constrain its purpose and interpretation is far less pressing. Indeed the opposite imperative applies: in general, the aim is to keep it ‘open’, not close it down. You want to leave plenty of room for viewers to make it meaningful for themselves. In pedagogic science communication you usually don’t want to give viewers this freedom, because it increases the risk of confusion.
Here’s an example: in the past week I have been working on an interactive exhibit for a science centre that explains transits and eclipses. It’s a subject that causes a lot of confusion and I’ve been working hard to ensure that what a visitor gets from the exhibit is precisely what I want them to get from it, because scope for interpretation is also scope for confusion. In another context I designed a kinetic sculpture called ‘Sun/Moon/Tide’ that addresses some of the same issues of the Sun, Earth, Moon system but not didactically (It includes a pair of divider callipers that indicate the positions of the Sun and the Moon and the angle between them). I would expect Sun/Moon/Tide to help viewers to understand the Moon’s orbit, but I wouldn’t count on it. The motivation for the sculpture is to draw attention to the astronomical rhythms in a way that viewers can make sense of them for themselves.
Scientific accounts are impoverished in the sense that they are silent about many of the things about the Sun, Moon and the tides that are important to us, for instance the way a landscape feels different in moonlight compared to daylight. (Nevertheless, accounts of the Sun, Moon and tides that are devoid of science are even more impoverished.) The sculpture may inspire some viewers to seek accessible accounts of celestial dynamics – it would be nice if it does – but its main job is foster an authentic relationship with astronomical phenomena, not merely to understand the science.
I have written more about the difference between art and sci-com and described an early version of Sun/Moon/Tide in an article in Leonardo: Oct. 2005 ‘Belonging to the Universe’ Leonardo Vol. 38, No. 5. The general point is this: the question, 'how much scope is there to make this meaningful?' can help distinguish art from sci-com. The example of an installation in a science museum applies to any other science related communication.
Here’s where the gets tricky from a semantic point of view. I’m making a distinction between art and sci-com (and suggesting a way of telling one from the other) but I would also argue that art has a role in science communication. Sometimes it is less important to get a message across and more important to open a subject up. From the point of view of the target audience, sometimes it is less important to ‘understand’ and more important to find a new perspective. I could make a point about ‘engagement’ here and how an artistic ethos may be more appropriate when attempting to foster genuine dialogue, but that’s rather more complex point to argue.
Quantifying the value of art to sci-com
So how should we respond to the problem raised by Matt Shipman: how can we quantify the value of art to sci-com? My answer is: don’t try to quantify it, find another way to assess it. Art does not lend itself to the kind of analysis that seems to work well for pedagogical science communication. It sometimes comes as a shock to sciencey types (a category in which I include myself) that it is possible at all to assess value without measuring anything. Nevertheless, it is possible and important, because unless you can find a way to assess it, the value of art and many other things besides will remain invisible to the sci-com community.
At this point science communication professionals may be wondering, ‘how do you assess the value of something when there is nothing to be measured?’ I’m not going to answer that question here other than to point out that it will be difficult for some people in the sci-com community because the way they conceive communication is so limiting. (I discussed the limitations of the ‘dominant view’ of popular science in the introduction to my PhD thesis, though that feels like a long time ago now.)
Matt Shipman says,
I began by going through the literature, with the goal of getting some numbers about how effective art can be when it comes to science communication. Why? Because good art isn’t free. You need solid numbers to make an argument for an art budget.
If that’s true it’s a shame, because anything you find to measure relating to an audience’s engagement with art (anything that gives you ‘solid numbers’) is not going to tell you a whole lot about it, and it’s sure to miss the most important aspects of it. It’s not epidemiology!
There are two main schools of thought in communication theory: one conceives communication as the way in which messages are transmitted, the other as the way in which meaning is created. Discussion within the sci-com community draws pretty much without exception on the first way of conceiving communication, which is much more amenable to quantitative analysis. The bias is understandable (studying the transmission of messages and their effects seems more ‘scientific’) but it is unfortunate because it misses much if not most of what happens when an audience engages with a ‘text’. When the text is an artwork, analysis of the first type is so strained it is practically meaningless. (Again, there is more discussion of communication theory as it applies to science communication in the introduction to my PhD thesis.)
In conclusion: if you want to understand the value of art in science communication, first think about the way you assess its value. The very idea of 'effective communication' may not be (analytically) up to scratch.