Announcing the Good Animated Science Project
Two artists join the Good Science Project this month, Litza Jansz and Esther Neslen. Their task is to make an animated film, or series of animated films, about the research life at Imperial. They won’t be on their own: for Litza and Esther plan a participatory project, one where staff and students are involved from the beginning. Our first workshop is Wednesday 29th January, in the afternoon.
Would you like to join up? Do you have an interest in art and in animation? Are you looking for innovative forms of science communication, that might help you think deeper about your research? No special artistic talent is required. More, it is your ideas and your interest in thinking ‘laterally’ about your science that will makes the difference here. And as people like to say, when it comes to scientific creativity, fresh perspectives always help. We plan six more workshops, following the one in January, stretching till July, always on a Wednesday afternoon, always with lunch included. You’ll learn animation skills and you’ll develop novel ways of seeing and communicating your work. And you’ll have a lot of fun along the way. Your time commitment can vary greatly, according to your own work timetable and deadlines: we deliberately plan the project to be flexible and responsive to the professional commitments of the participants.
Why work with artists?
From the beginning the Good Science Project has wanted to work with artists. At our first conference, The Day of Doubt, artist Daksha Patel was an important voice through the day. And a little later Daksha helped us run a workshop looking at the ways artists and scientists are united by their interest in research.
Our founding artist-in-residence Ella Miodownik, based at the London Interdisciplinary School, has just finished work on The Tapestry of Science. You can see this splendid artwork on the fourth floor of the main stairwell of the Abdus Salaam library, where it now is installed permanently and looks down over our toiling students, and perhaps inspires them. Over ten weeks, and eight workshops, Ella and around a dozen scientists, humanities scholars and research managers met regularly for lunch and discussion, working with various media. They tried stuff out, played and experimented, returning to artistic leanings, and seeing how art and the research life can speak to each other. Towards the end of the programme our participants looked to themselves, and each created a small artistic representation of their life in science, with Ella finally making of their work a whole.
Why is The Good Science Project so interested in artistic expressions of research culture? One answer is that, like good scientists, artists are skilled at avoiding simple answers. Artists may encourage us to see something we rarely teach our science students: that there are many styles of doing science. Ever since Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1621) founded modern European science by developing the basic methodology, it has been hard to see how personal style, or local influence, can become part of scientific knowledge. Bacon was motivated by a wish to keep the classical Greeks, the Church, and personal influence, out of the deliberations of science. And he was successful in his project: over the years there have been many attempts by scientists, philosophers and schoolteachers to simplify science and find the style and method that will infallibly guide the work, to map out what we might call ‘the royal road to truth’. At times you can detect almost a mythical aspect to this quest for clear guidelines. Speed and efficiency are often the signposts on the quest. And why not? For with the fruits of science so enticing – a vaccine, a new fuel cell – why wouldn’t we hurry up? Why wouldn’t we, in a favourite expression of research institutions, ‘accelerate’?
Whether or not we can speed up science is not the point here. And if the word is understood to signify ‘guiding principles’, rather than falsity, no research institution can live without myth. The important thing is whether, along with the myth-making, we can find realistic, truthful descriptions of research culture, its hopes and its problems. Such descriptions will help us. And, to go back to our artists, being realistic and truthful are as important to the artistic project as they are to the scientific world. For sure, artists find their realism, and find their truth, in ways that differ from those of the scientist. Moreover, artists disagree amongst themselves on how to do this: compare Braque with Van Gogh. This brings something good to Imperial. For the Good Science Project, one of the values of artists is that they understand so well that ‘final truth’ is not a reasonable ambition.
Scientists’ experience
It always is interesting, and important, when scientists discuss what they like about their work. In public representations of science, and very likely too in departmental culture, the contentments of the scientific life are not much talked about. This is not because such contentments do not exist – they clearly do. Rather it is because such mundane aspects of ordinary work seem outclassed by the coming glories and salvations we so much like to point to. That’s a pity, because if we can’t ponder the small moments of science, then there will be no glories.
Nature magazine often surveys its readers to see what they like and do not like about being a researcher. There are few surprises, but still such surveys are worth perusing, and are quite thought-provoking. For example, when post-docs are asked about what they favour in the research life, three controlling factors are: ‘interest in the work’; ‘degree of independence’; and ‘relationships with colleagues’. Conversely, when asked about the downsides of the life scientific, post-docs mention ‘salary/compensation’, ‘availability of funding’ and ‘job security’. Those three profound categories in the list of scientific pleasures need to be noticed more. For example, when a scientist finds their work interesting, we might suspect that a ‘good’ like this, even a scientific ‘good’, is quite personal, linking to the emotional aspects of simply being in a laboratory. Moments of personal commitment to an ‘interesting problem’, fruitful conversations with colleagues, and growing skills and knowledge, together produce something of importance to the actual scientist. At the Good Science Project we have never found the best word for this daily, common-yet-profound aspect of the research life. Philosophers call it ‘practice’; theologians call it ‘spirit’; managers mention ‘values’; the eminent historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), credited with getting philosophers of science to take the naturalistic turn, and to look at laboratories themselves, called it ‘normal science’. And scientists call it ‘the scientific method’.
We have no word that properly captures the combination of values and skills that animates the scientist and helps them flourish. Ironically, the Greek philosopher and biologist Aristotle, who Bacon warned us against, did have a concept, ‘virtue’, actually the topic of a recent Friday Forum ‘Measuring Science, Seeing Virtue‘. At that enjoyable meeting we discussed how it is easier to stress the significance of the final product, rather than to elaborate the virtues of ordinary daily science. Re-establishing the balance on this is one of the aims of The Good Science Project, and in this the contribution of our artists is vital. They look at the constellation of action and feeling that constitutes good science, and with their artistic mix of freedom and discipline, they find the right expression.