A collaboration with Robert Root-Bernstein

“The aim of art is not to show how or why an effect is produced (that would be science) but literally to produce it.” – E. O. Wilson

This art installation appropriates the 1953 Miller-Urey work on origins-of-life to draw attention to the artifice and aesthetics of experimentation.  The sensual experience of a scientific experiment, the apparatus making it possible, the imagination that gave rise to it, the visualization of the results, can all be viewed as art. Such synaesthetic science challenges distinctions between artistic and scientific methods. Is attempting to create life using artificial means different from attempting to portray life using artificial means?  Might arts and sciences be complementary, integral ways of understanding? Can we “reboot” our views of the art-science relationship by “rebooting” the Miller-Urey experiment itself?

Watch the video