Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A dazzling look at the artists working on the frontiers of science.

In recent decades, an exciting new art movement has emerged in which artists utilize and illuminate the latest advances in science. Some of their provocative creations--a live rabbit implanted with the fluorescent gene of a jellyfish, a gigantic glass-and-chrome sculpture of the Big Bang (pictured on the cover)--can be seen in traditional art museums and magazines, while others are being made by leading designers at Pixar, Google's Creative Lab, and the MIT Media Lab. In Colliding Worlds , Arthur I. Miller takes readers on a wild journey to explore this new frontier.

Miller, the author of Einstein, Picasso and other celebrated books on science and creativity, traces the movement from its seeds a century ago--when Einstein's theory of relativity helped shape the thinking of the Cubists--to its flowering today. Through interviews with innovative thinkers and artists across disciplines, Miller shows with verve and clarity how discoveries in biotechnology, cosmology, quantum physics, and beyond are animating the work of designers like Neri Oxman, musicians like David Toop, and the artists-in-residence at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

From NanoArt to Big Data, Miller reveals the extraordinary possibilities when art and science collide.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. xi)
• Acknowledgments (p. xv)
• Preface (p. xix)
• 1 In Search of the invisible (p. 3)
• 2 Montmartre in New York (p. 33)
• 3 The Computer Meets Art (p. 66)
• 4 Computer Art morphs into Media Art (p. 90)
• 5 Visualizing the Invisible (p. 116)
• 6 Intermezzo: How Science Helped Resolve the World's Greatest Art Scandal (p. 168)
• 7 Imagining and Designing Life (p. 189)
• 8 Hearing as Seeing (p. 228)
• 9 The Art of Visualizing Data (p. 265)
• 10 Comrades-in-Arms: Encouraging, Funding, and Housing Artsci (p. 305)
• 11 In the Eye of the Beholder? (p. 329)
• 12 The Coming of a Third Culture (p. 340)
• Notes (p. 349)
• Bibliography (p. 379)
• Illustration Credits (p. 393)
• Index (p. 397)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Since at least the 18th-century, Western culture has consigned art and science to separate realms, seldom exploring their intersections and using each as discrete explanations of reality. Yet, as historian and philosopher of science Miller so deftly demonstrates in this survey of what he calls "artsci," both artists and scientists-since at least Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-have probed the porous border between art and science, creating aesthetic objects that incorporate scientific ideas-such as Suzanne Anker's Zoosemiotics, "tiny chromosomal sculptures laid out in identical pairs"-or engaging in the type of process-driven "interdisciplinarity" found at the MIT Media Lab. Miller eloquently chronicles the story of artsci in brief vignettes of the lives and works of the individuals working at the intersections of these disciplines. For example, "semi-living sculptures" like the Pig Wings of Australian husband-and-wife team Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr took shape while reflecting on pigs actually flying. They used "stem cells from a pig's bone marrow" to create a sculpture from living tissue that "provide a platform to study ethical issues around life." Through these works and many others, Miller declares confidently that art and science will merge into a long-overdue third culture, opening the door to the "next, as yet unimaginable, avant-garde." Illus. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Miller (emer., Univ. College London, UK), author of Einstein, Picasso (CH, Nov'01, 39-1334), examines that part of the contemporary art world in which discoveries in biotechnology, physics, mathematics, and computer science animate the work of designers, musicians, and artists, forcing the recalibration of the concepts of art, beauty, and even science. The author provides an exciting, interesting tour of topics such as 3-D mutating computer graphics, Joe Davis's bacterial radio, harmonic resonators, image choreography, and Eduardo Kac's transgenic art, including the rabbit genetically implanted with a jellyfish's green fluorescent protein. Miller also discusses data landscapes, acoustic botany, neuroaesthetics, engineered skin tissue, and Orlan's notion of "the body as canvas." Though Miller wants to focus on those artists who use science to illustrate their themes and those whose works actually illuminate science and contribute to scientific research, it is apparent that it is far more common for advances in science and technology to alter the concepts and tools of art than for new directions in art to encourage revisions of scientific thinking or technique. This very readable, meticulously researched, highly anecdotal work is certainly the best in the field to date and belongs in every library collection in art or science. Summing Up: Essential. All library collections. --Ralph M. Davis, Albion College

Booklist Review

Science historian Miller coins the term artsci to describe the growing realm of creativity that merges art, science, and technology. Beginning his exploration in the early twentieth-century artistic engagements with X-rays and radio waves, Miller goes on to map a wide-ranging contemporary field of practice that encompasses computer-based art, robotics, data visualization, and biotechnology. This well-illustrated and accessible text is refreshingly short on academic theory, instead surveying the vast landscape of artsci through profiles of individual artists, projects, and institutions. Tracing collaborations at the CERN Supercollider, Pixar Studios, and the MIT Media Lab, Miller finds particular inspiration in artworks that go beyond the illustration of scientific principles and actually contribute to real-world scientific advances. Miller's anecdotes of bioluminescent brains, emotive interfaces, and climate-change mappings trace an exciting new avant-garde of creative research with the potential to realign aesthetics toward an appreciation of information. The author's comprehensive text not only codifies an important contemporary cultural movement, it also marks the rise of an interdisciplinary third culture that fuses the disciplines of art and science.--Bosch, Lindsay Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Miller (Emeritus, History and Philosophy of Science/Univ. Coll. London; Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, 2009, etc.) suggests that we are "witnessing the birth[of] a third culture in which art, science, and technology will fuse."As the author explains in this review of current trends in avant-garde art, he does not mean this to be taken metaphorically. He believes there to be an actual convergence that extends beyond the use of animation and holography in film. In the future, he writes, "art, science, and technology as we know them today will disappear, fused into a third cultureleaving the door open for the next, as yet unimaginable, avant-garde." The possibilities inherent in digital technology are one part of the story of how advances in technology can be transformative, but the author focuses on the fusion of cutting-edge science and art to form a new discipline, "artsci." A good example is the collaboration of artists and scientists at CERN, a collaboration organized in 1997 by Ken McMullen, a professor at the London Institute (an umbrella organization of area art schools.) This led to a London exhibition called "Signatures of the Invisible," which included a depiction of a particle accelerator using plaster and plastic bags from a supermarket, and another "creat[ing] three-dimensional illusions which seem to move as you walk in front of them" to illustrate paradoxes rooted in perceptions. Miller introduces readers to artistic works that translate sound into light displays and a proposal for bioengineered bones for use in displays and biojewelry. The author suggests that shocking as some of these examples may seem, so too were the cubist paintings of Picasso and the atonal music of John Cage before becoming mainstream.Intriguing, especially for aficionados of the avant-garde. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.