Crossing over : art and science at caltech, 1920-2020
Peter Sachs Collopy
Bok · Engelsk · 2024
| Omfang | sider
|
|---|---|
| Opplysninger | "Crossing Over is the catalog for a Caltech exhibition of the same title, part of Getty's initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide. How, we have asked in this exhibition and book, have scientists and engineers used images and collaborated with artists to discover, invent, and communicate? How have science and engineering institutions used visual culture to construct their built environments and shape the identities of those who occupy them? Crossing Over probes the rich pictorial record of a single institution, over a century of tremendous change, to propose some answers to these questions. The exhibition draws extensively from the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, augmenting those holdings with images from other repositories and contemporary artworks. In addition to representing the exhibition, the catalog features 14 essays by scholars of art, science, and visual culture: Both the exhibition Crossing Over and this book begin with pictorial hybrids in astronomy and planetary science. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Voyager spacecraft produced new data on Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s, writes Lois Rosson, astronomical illustrators merged these findings with their artistic knowledge of Earth's landscapes to produce images of alien worlds for the wide audiences of both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and astronomer Carl Sagan's nonfiction television series Cosmos. During the same period, David Zierler writes, astronomers at Palomar Observatory and JPL adopted the electronic charge-coupled device, or CCD, as a new technology for astrophotography, facilitating new forms of computational analysis. Time Stream continues to gaze to the heavens as it looks back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through Caltech's collection of rare first-edition books in the history of astronomy, juxtaposing them with more recent ways of imagining the universe. This second section also includes artist Lita Albuquerque's ephemeral installation A Moment in Time, covering a bridge across Caltech Hall's reflecting pool with small sheets of fluttering gold leaf, a precious material of profound significance in both science and the arts. Beginning in the 1930s, writes Soraya de Chadarevian, chemist Linus Pauling formed a close collaboration with architect Roger Hayward to translate the three-dimensional molecular models that he and colleagues developed into two-dimensional "architecture of molecules." In the 1960s, his successor Richard Dickerson formed a similar collaboration with artist Irving Geis. Biologist George Beadle's own 1948 collaboration with Hayward, writes Charles Kollmer, shows how life scientists-in this case using the bread mold Neurospora to study heredity-used drawings and photographs to convey their findings to both colleagues and the general public. Brian Jacobson turns our attention to Caltech physicist Carl Anderson's 1932 discovery and photograph of the positron and 1957 collaboration with filmmaker Frank Capra, a Throop alumnus, to bring this "image tradition" of physics to television. Talia Shabtay Filip takes us back to JPL to visit The Studio, where visual strategists have brought the skills of art and design to space exploration missions for the last twenty years. Among The Studio's creations is Visions of the Future, a 2016 series of posters visualizing travel to moons and exoplanets which, Anne Sullivan explains, take their inspiration from associations between space exploration and the American frontier. In 1969, writes Peter Collopy, Caltech invited artists to campus to teach and make art in new media, but the goals of the artists and their host institution seldom aligned. Caltech's experiments in art and technology evolved into Baxter Art Gallery, which, as Jennifer Watts writes, hosted dozens of innovative exhibitions from 1971 to 1985 and persistently raised questions about the role of art at a technical institute. Even as Caltech embraced coeducation in the early 1970s, writes Claudia Bohn-Spector, the relationship between art and science was shaped by firm disciplinary boundaries and the patriarchal legacies of single-sex education and "Bachelordom," reflected in artist Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic and allegorical Large Glass, shown in an exhibition just blocks away from the campus in 1963. J. V. Decemvirale directs our gaze to Caltech's built environment, writing that the architects of Caltech's early campus used Spanish Colonial Revival architecture both to present a narrative of European progress and to incorporate iconography from other parts of the world. Christopher Hawthorne traces how architect Bertram Goodhue, chemist and donor Arnold Beckman, and biologist and Caltech president David Baltimore each expressed ideas about the role of science in society through campus buildings. Tim Durfee, the architect of Crossing Over as an exhibition, closes our catalog with a visual essay on the philosophy of its presentation"--
|
| ISBN | 9781606069424
|