I spent Saturday at the Subtle Technologies Festival, a conference about combining art and science.

The speakers showed all sorts of weird biological things, ranging from cells forming words to a baby elephant in an MRI machine. (Mostly they were making art using lab techniques or scientific research, but a few were using artists\’ ideas to inspire or improve scientific or medical work.)

My art practice involves the other end of the scientific spectrum, but I did get a whole bunch of ideas for new artworks while my brain wandered in the lecture hall.

Some good quotes and ideas from the presenters and commenters:

• \”Artists are trying to see the unseen\”
• \”To access and give visual form to internal states\”
• This bio-art is \”moving beyond spectacle\”
• \”Sight is privileged as a mode of understanding the world\”
• Converting medical data into sounds could \”bring intuition back into diagnosis\”
• Many artists go to science labs, but few scientists go to artists\’ studios
• Artists want to show the scientific process that scientists find tedious
• The replication method in art resembles the scientific process
• Data creates distance from pain. The scientist \”deeply immersed in complexity\” compartmentalizes their emotions about the subject.
• Planning and mindfulness (in preparing to do art or science) \”allows you to be ready for the happy accidents\”
• The artist is not interested in scientific accuracy, rather in showing the impossibility of accuracy
• \”Is God a mathematician?  Is God a statistician?\” [This was music to my statistician\’s ears!]