The Visceral show at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is in its final days. Billed as science meets art, and transplanted from SymbioticA in Perth,Australia, it made me ponder on what's the best way to fuse the two, but I'll get onto that later.
The Science Gallery itself is like a mini Wellcome, in a corner of the campus but separated by the elevated DART train that crosses the city, it has a glass wall onto the street and two levels. One euro for the brochure – essential for getting the gist of the show and then the exhibits.
A mocked up lab which the public weren't allowed in but could be stared into like a cluttered vitrine. This was where the Semi Living Worry Dolls are incubated, based on the dolls that are given to Guatemalan children to whisper their worries to. These tiny dolls are hand crafted out of degradable polymer and seeded with living cells that eventually take over. Visitors are encouraged to whisper their thoughts into the dolls' “digital ears” .
Afterlife: Immortalisation of Kira and Rama which uses foetal calf cells to recreate some kind of Egyptian inspired reliquary.
Proto-animate which uses non coding DNA to produce images in Petri dishes, set up in a darkened version of an old fashioned school room complete with desks.
The Cryobook Archives is a series of handmade books combining human and pig tissue and other cells. They're in a freezer, so they don't go off and spark ideas of information storage and the the old fashioned idea of binding real books with human skin – particularly those of executed convicts.
Transjuicer which takes recorded songs about bones and cows, turns them into vibrations which pass through cow bones and then turns it back into music via a laser interferometer so you can listen on headphones.
Latent Figure Protocol is an installation which uses cut up DNA sequences' bar code to produce patterns such as the international copyright symbol ©. The whole fuss about patents and who owns what in bioengineering is the thing that springs to mind here.
Host – an installation of 200 live crickets (not that they seemed very lively) each in a glass jar, while a heavily pixelated video about the sex life of insects plays on one wall. On the other is an oscilloscope with a crackling recording of the activity of the aural nerve of a cricket listening to the lecture.
Silent Barrage is possibly the most technically complex installation, so I hope I'm describing it correctly. In a space about four metres square there are rows of poles in which the public move about, those movements are detected and translated into signals that are sent to stimulate a bunch of nerve cells in a dish in Atlanta, Georgia. All this is recorded on graphs which surround the poles. Scientists hope that if they can understand how to quieten the activity in the nerve cells, that will help them understand how to treat epilepsy more efficiently. It seems to me that this a rare case of a work which not only uses science to create art but potentially offers some real scientific benefit in return.
Talking to one of the explainers who were on hand to demystify the science, he thought it was scientifically the most interesting piece but didn't appreciate it as art. I thought it was the most artistically successful – or would have been if it weren't so technically sophisticated that the internet link kept breaking and it was out of action every other day.
There are other pieces too.
So what to make of it all? Going by the visitors' book, people enjoyed it. Someone had even travelled over from England especially to see it.
Over the past month there have been a series of talks and discussions about the science, ethics and technologies involved. In the past, SymbiotcA have described their shows as provocations, and if they get people thinking that's good. What troubles me is that I felt rather underwhelmed. The radio pieces I'd heard before seeing Visceral seemed rather unclear and now I can see why. It's possible that in confronting complicated science you can over think your response or get too involved in the minutiae.
Art is best at tackling emotion and big questions about existence. Make the metaphor too detailed and cram too many ideas into a piece and it can become unfocussed. It might still be entertaining, but then so are the push button exhibits at the Science Museum or the NASA website. Scientific images have a beauty of their own, if we're going to intervene artistically we have to add inspiration, not get in the way. Trying to explain science through art isn't possible, we can't describe the universe precisely through words and pictures - that's why we use maths – but we can express how we feel about it. That's what I would have told the worry dolls.
Guy Morgan
