The Node London media-arts festival in March had among its treats an electronic garden, created by installation artist Je Hyun Oh, in which flowers grew or died as a reflection of your relationships. Then there was the Cybersalon for creative software and the Takeaway Festival that discussed how best to use audio culture, blogging, freeware - anything to do with what was termed DIY media.
There was also Cybersonica, an international festival of music, sound, art and technology. Oh, and the boffins from the MIT Dramashop presented Electronic City, a play by Falk Richter, in June.
Sarah Angliss, a composer interested in infra-sound (sublevel frequencies that may or may not engender emotional responses), is appearing at Dana in July. Get yourself on Dana's mailing list and the amount of activity leaves one breathless.
This restless action has few parallels in the museum world. Created in 2003, the Dana Centre is the product of collaboration between the Science Museum, the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It's a hospitable, adult-only place with a simple brief: to advance the role of art in science.
If this triggers any similarities with the Wellcome Institute, an organisation that's long been friendly to sharing its vast medical archive with artists, you'd be right: the Wellcome is part of the deal, too. The point of Dana is to surprise the public: making links with the arts is, it says, a way to encourage new ways to think about science.
It's also a timely move. While art's involvement with technology is nothing new, it's arguable that the speed of scientific development in the digital age is creating a necessity for new and faster responses as issues about fundamental aspects of humankind become highlighted.
Why? Because there has been what artist and academic Joshua Sofaer refers to 'as an explosion of conventional aesthetics' that has brought to the fore concepts of 'interdisciplinarity, hybridity and convergence'.
Unsurprisingly, it is the area of live art that's picked this up most strongly: artists such as Orlan (catchphrase: 'My Body, My software'), who altered her appearance via radical surgery, and Stellarc, with cyber-extensions to his arms, Both ask the basic questions: Who are we? What is beauty? What are the limits of my perception? These are necessary questions. In the history of knowledge it's only in the past 200 years that science has become so separated from art.
While no one expects a return to the integrated systems of the Renaissance in which the humours of the human body were thought to be ruled by celestial movements and where music and geometry entwined in one harmonious whole, a renaissance in the way we think about science's place in the greater scheme is long overdue.
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist
There was also Cybersonica, an international festival of music, sound, art and technology. Oh, and the boffins from the MIT Dramashop presented Electronic City, a play by Falk Richter, in June.
Sarah Angliss, a composer interested in infra-sound (sublevel frequencies that may or may not engender emotional responses), is appearing at Dana in July. Get yourself on Dana's mailing list and the amount of activity leaves one breathless.
This restless action has few parallels in the museum world. Created in 2003, the Dana Centre is the product of collaboration between the Science Museum, the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It's a hospitable, adult-only place with a simple brief: to advance the role of art in science.
If this triggers any similarities with the Wellcome Institute, an organisation that's long been friendly to sharing its vast medical archive with artists, you'd be right: the Wellcome is part of the deal, too. The point of Dana is to surprise the public: making links with the arts is, it says, a way to encourage new ways to think about science.
It's also a timely move. While art's involvement with technology is nothing new, it's arguable that the speed of scientific development in the digital age is creating a necessity for new and faster responses as issues about fundamental aspects of humankind become highlighted.
Why? Because there has been what artist and academic Joshua Sofaer refers to 'as an explosion of conventional aesthetics' that has brought to the fore concepts of 'interdisciplinarity, hybridity and convergence'.
Unsurprisingly, it is the area of live art that's picked this up most strongly: artists such as Orlan (catchphrase: 'My Body, My software'), who altered her appearance via radical surgery, and Stellarc, with cyber-extensions to his arms, Both ask the basic questions: Who are we? What is beauty? What are the limits of my perception? These are necessary questions. In the history of knowledge it's only in the past 200 years that science has become so separated from art.
While no one expects a return to the integrated systems of the Renaissance in which the humours of the human body were thought to be ruled by celestial movements and where music and geometry entwined in one harmonious whole, a renaissance in the way we think about science's place in the greater scheme is long overdue.
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist
