Seeing Is Forgetting

The artist as scientist. To be perfectly honest, it is a concept that I have never considered before, but one I find to be completely correct. As Robert Irwin explains the similarity of an artist’s work to that of a scientist’s, especially in how they both work with hypotheses, I came to the startling realization that this is how I have personally worked throughout my entire life.
In regarding my own work, I have in the past worked on “experimental” projects. These have been anything from class assignments to my own ideas. Each of these ideas began with a question: “Can this work?” Sometimes, through either the development or execution of the idea, I find that either it can or cannot function. If the later, I try an edited “experiment” of the same idea. If that edit doesn’t make the idea work, then it becomes a hopefully finite “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of the scientific method. In this way, I can identify with Robert Irwin’s idea of artistic hypotheses.

I am astounded by the brilliance of Robert Irwin’s work as an artist. His ideas of how we as human beings perceive the world around us are theories I would have never considered. I was especially impressed by the experiment that he conducted with Wortz and Turrell when they were using the anechoic chamber. To be locked in a space in which your senses have nothing to focus on besides the life of your own body is fascinating to me. I am also really interested in what happens after one leaves the chamber. To have your senses so acutely attuned to the world after such an experience would be overwhelming to me. I would actually like to try that experiment myself one day, just to see how I would react to such a sensory overload.

Irwin’s other experiments such as the symposium he created using the different environments is also interesting to me, but not nearly in the same way as his experiment with the anechoic chamber. In the past I have designed projects to portray a mood in which the viewer would be forced to react in a particular way. In studying and experimenting how to do this correctly, I have already been able to observe what makes people react to their surroundings. The idea just does not seem that original to me.

The overall concept of an Art and Technology project struck me as I began reading the article. It stood out for a one key reason. Why have we not seen more combinations of artists and technological corporations and companies joining forces in the worlds of art and technology? With the many similarities in how artists execute their own artistic experiments, I am surprised to not see more alliances between the two. Maybe artists can shed a different light on technological questions or add a new flavor to technological experiments. Maybe scientists can help in return by supplying the technology needed as well as the technical knowledge to make an artistic experiment function. In a way, it is like the left half of the brain uniting with the right half. Both halves are needed to function properly.