‘Art of the Invisible’

The Whitemare Project

Art and Science have often been presented as distinctly different enterprises with very different values and aims. Consequently when art is created with science as an inspiration or a subject it often fails to inform about the science, while attempts by artists to engage more directly with science also often leads to a work of art without much artistic merit or originality. On the other hand when science communicators engage a population educated in art and aesthetics, there is a failure to recognise that science has much in common artistic practice, so such outreach and communication miss an opportunity to convey scientific ideas artistically, or worse the perceived cryptic activities of scientists and scientific researchers are greeted with silent indifference by large sections of the artistic community who feel excluded from the practice or education about science. In a sense science is still alchemy to many of those in the arts, unaware of the guiding principles behind the often far-reaching mathematical theories that inform scientific practice.

The aim of Whitemare is to bring about the simultaneous education of both science and artistic concepts by viewing art as an experiment and analysing science as a practice that seeks to reveal the invisible. In order to achieve this, Whitemare is a collaboration between a cognitive science theoretician trained in philosophy, and an artist who has engaged with scientific ideas directly in his art for over two decades. This collaboration is therefore unique and offers a genuinely innovative and fresh look at the relationship between art and science.

In the ‘Philosophy of Science’ great store has been set (perhaps too much) on viewing science as effectively a theory of all that is not visible to the naked eye. Whitemare aims to explore this idea of how the invisible becomes visible through analysis and control of experimental conditions. James White’s art is an integral part of such a process, whereby the control of conditions enables small physical interactions to reveal themselves in his art. James’s art functions as an experiment in which the ordinary large physical effects that usually make the smaller ones invisible are ‘controlled’ (i.e. removed or counter-acted) by the artist. Therefore James’ work works on the edge of art and experiment, making physical processes that were otherwise invisible, visible.