Fusing arts and sciences for a new future

Is this Art or Science? An image of a smoke-infused perception of a train in PEARL

“The artist is the person in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of their actions and of new knowledge in their own time. They are the person of integral awareness”. 

So wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1964 in his influential book ‘Understanding Media’. Whereas the Sciences are based on past knowledge and a sense of explaining the present, the Arts are about taking the present and creating the future. To progress towards a world which is mutually beneficial, safe, equitable and healthy in which people and environment can thrive together, we need to join these two ways of perceiving the world. And we need to make this join seamless, so fusing the Arts and the Sciences to create that seamless join is the way to understand the world and create that future.

The fundamental fact is that everything we do is driven by the brain’s need to survive. How a musician hears, a painter sees, a sculptor observes, are examples of each making use of capabilities intended for survival, but honed to a high level of performance and put to another use. By understanding how artists achieve their art, we can begin to understand how people in general can thrive in the world. But to understand what that world really is, we need the scientist to explain the biology, chemistry and physics that go together to render the universe as it is. Neither the Arts nor the Sciences on their own can deliver enough for the future. But as noted earlier, it is not enough just to have both. We need to fuse them so that there is no separation between them. Just as the past fuses into the present and into the future, the sciences and the arts must fuse together in order to enable us to create the future world in which we can not only survive, but thrive.

Since the Industrial Revolution, and in particular in the last 100 or so years, humans have concentrated on generating the technology to deliver a world. In parallel, humans have also been delivering the artistic interpretation of that world. But they have been doing this in isolation of each other. True, the technology available to the Arts is certainly greater now than it was 100 years ago, and the sciences involved in the world of perception are digging more deeply than they did a century ago. But this is perhaps a construction of two functions in parallel rather than a true coming together or fusion. They might be joined but they are not fused. This has brought us to our present understanding of the world and how to move forward. But we can see that this is not showing a viable pathway to a sustainable or even viable future. For this we need a new approach.

At PEARL we fuse the Arts and Sciences so that we can understand better both what the sciences are telling us and how the creative opportunities point to a new way of perceiving. One example might be how we created an alert sound for e-scooters, where understanding the evolution of hearing showed us how we could reduce the surprise of seeing an e-scooter appear ‘from nowhere’ to the level of an observation rather than a shock, by enabling the brain’s own alert systems to do their job, rather than simply rely on the presence of a loud sound. The sound we created stimulates the vision system to be prepared for the presence of the e-scooter. Another is understanding how to stimulate the sense of thermal comfort on a bus rather than just set the outcomes of heating and cooling mechanics. Or how, by stimulating hearing, smell and vision, a work of art can become whole. Each of these examples means that we are working with the preconscious brain. This is where the Arts and Sciences fuse. The preconscious brain does not know whether something is a Science or an Art, it just knows what it needs to do to survive.

Understanding the drive to survive is important when we come to the problems and challenges in the world we inhabit. And this means changing the way we perceive them. Instead of just studying what happened last time, we need to see how and why that happened. Why did people react in the way they did? Not just how many people travelled from A to B, or how many people tripped when boarding a train, but ask the question why did the brain make the decisions it made to lead to that outcome, what were the stimuli that drove it to do that? Artists are great for this because they make their decisions very explicit in their art and performance. By understanding how artists make their decisions we can begin to see the processes that drive decisions in the more mundane daily world, and from there work out what we might be able to do to avoid mistakes and create more opportunities for successful survival.

Undoubtedly, the coming together of art and science can really help us rethink how we perceive the world and we can now address problems and challenges in a totally different way from the past ways that have brought them into being. It means completely rethinking the challenge. For example, in this ‘new’ world, a ‘standard’ is no longer a question of numbers of millimetres, Herz, or decibels, but becomes instead what enables the brain to respond in the particular circumstances of the combination of an individual and the world around them. This kind of detailed understanding comes from the fusion of Arts and Sciences, and to reach that we have to bring these challenges into environments that can be created and controlled and in which people can respond and react. And that is PEARL!

So how should you make use of this opportunity?

First, you need to be open to the thought that a different perspective on your challenge might be necessary.

Secondly, you should come and talk to us. We can help you with reframing the challenge so that together we can seek out new opportunities for solutions.

Thirdly, we can work together on how to move forward. If that requires actual experiments in PEARL, we can design these so that they provide answers to the questions of interest.

What you don’t need to do is to worry about whether you would be invoking Arts, or Sciences, or a fusion of the two – that is our job. PEARL is not just a big space, it is really the thinking and idea creation that the combination of the space, Arts and Sciences stimulates. So whether you see your challenges as being something to do with the Arts, or the Sciences, or anything else, you may find that the fresh approach engendered by PEARL will help you to thrive in the future.

Everything we do in PEARL is a fusion of the Arts and Sciences and this is how we are carving out a new understanding of the future for that better world that we want to create.