Art meets science at Dublin's newest cultural centre, the Science Gallery at Trinity College. It's about getting people to think about science in a different way, its young director, Michael John Gorman, tells Helen Meany.
Michael John Gorman's brain surely glows in the dark. On a monochrome January morning he is speeding around Trinity College's new Science Gallery, talking about light. With just over two weeks to go to the opening of the gallery's inaugural event, LIGHTWAVE, the rooms were still bare, a blank white space filled by the fizzing enthusiasm of its founding director.
Bringing together artists and scientists, lighting designers, film-makers and engineers, the nine-day festival exploring light (see panel) indicates Gorman's high ambitions for the new gallery, which he hopes will capture the public's imagination. This is something the 36-year-old Dubliner has succeeded in doing before: at the Ark, Children's Cultural Centre, in Temple Bar, where his programme of events including Save The Robots, an exhibition about robotic art, brought the arts and science together for young audiences; through Nanoquest, his interactive 3-D guide to nanotechnology for schools, and the catalogue he co-authored for last summer's exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library of the Codex of that ultimate artist-cum-scientist, Leonardo da Vinci.
He's well aware that imagination isn't always associated with scientific work. The necessity to test hypotheses and proceed through empirical verification is often perceived as mitigating against the kind of subjective creativity that's taken for granted in making art.
"There's certainly a perception gap about science and creativity, which we need to address," Gorman says. "People don't see science as a creative activity, or as something playful. What we're going to do in the gallery is bring people from different disciplines together and allow them to spark off each other in unexpected ways, to see what happens when ideas meet. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and that's what we want to foster."
The creative spark for the Science Gallery came from Prof Mike Coey of Trinity's CRANN research centre, and was supported - and heavily funded - by the college as an innovative way of exploring the interface between science and culture. The funding (€10 million to date) has come from Trinity College, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and private funders. Ulster Bank and Google have come in as sponsors, and Gorman is in discussion with the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism.
"We want people to think about science in a different way, to take it out of its science box and look at its cultural role," he says. "Ireland has a huge problem in terms of finding top talent in science, and addressing that is one of our core objectives."
Both CRANN and the Science Gallery are housed in the new Naughton Institute on the Pearse Street/Westland Row corner of the college's grounds. Designed by Wilson Architects, a practice based in Boston that specialises in buildings for scientific and technological research, in conjunction with the Dublin firm RKD, it has a glass facade running along the traffic-clogged street, inviting drivers to look in as they crawl past. At the moment the title LIGHTWAVE is spelled out in huge white lettering on the glass wall; in the future it will be a shop window for public experiments, deliberately engaging with the flow of street life. In architectural terms, it's porous.
"This location is hugely important, at a crossroads between different cultural and business routes through the city," Gorman says. "We've got the art galleries nearby like Green on Red, the National Gallery, but also the IFSC, Docklands, and Google. The new entrance also offers a social circuit through Trinity College. We want to bring all these worlds together. This will redefine the role of the university and its relationship with the city. It's about as far from an 'ivory tower' as you can get."
Having studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, followed by doctoral research at the European University Institute in Fiesole, just outside Florence, and a three-year stint lecturing at Stanford University, Gorman is now concerned to link the academy with the wider public domain. He hopes that the 15-25 year-old age group the Science Gallery is targeting will form the habit of dropping in regularly - encouraged by free admission and free membership - with their engagement deepening as they gain confidence. "We're starting with Transition Year students from nearby inner-city schools, who have top-level researchers as mentors, working with them to create an interactive installation. We want this to be where young innovators are discovered, and where science meets experience."
For Gorman this experiential aspect is crucial: the Science Gallery is neither a museum nor a research centre, but more of a cultural centre. Events, workshops, installations and exhibitions will be the core activities, along with discussions and film presentations. The 144-seat multi-media lecture theatre - from which "bullet points are banned" - will double as an arthouse cinema space. Among the models for the Science Gallery were Harvard's Idea Translation Lab, where students learn how to turn their ideas into prototypes quickly. Other influences were events-driven spaces such as the DANA centre in London, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), also in London, which has an impressive tradition of provocative public debate about cultural issues and ideas.
Through a series of public discussions called RAW, Gorman hopes to bridge the gap between scientists and non-scientists - the "two cultures" famously identified by British novelist and scientist CP Snow in the late 1950s.
The talks series might also help dispel any notion that science is somehow ethically and politically neutral. With so many pressing social and political issues needing to be addressed - nuclear power, embryology, biofuels, climate change - the more airing of ideas across the disciplines of science, technology and arts, the better. Will the open forum also allow for questioning, even of a sponsor of the Science Gallery such as Google, a company whose irresistible rise provokes scepticism as well as approbation? "Absolutely," says Gorman. "All these questions will be discussed. From stem cell research to the energy crisis, we need to get everyone involved. So we'll be addressing big themes, such as the future of food. Food, fear, fashion . ."
Interdisciplinarity is currently highly favoured in the humanities, too, with academic funding increasingly directed towards its development. For Gorman it represents "a key shift". "There's a movement taking place towards 'systems thinking', holistic thinking, which is seen as the most productive approach. So you're obliged to pull together a motley crew drawn from different disciplines - architects, policy makers, planners. Narrow specialism is no longer the flavour of the day."
It's no surprise that intellectual restlessness and lateralism appeals to Gorman: he has written a book about the extraordinary 20th-century American innovator, Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer, inventor and life-long defier of categories, whose prescient ideas and designs for mobility - geodesic domes, mobile houses, three-wheeled cars - are finally coming into their own now. But is this magpie-on-speed mode for everyone?
"The world is changing very fast and we need people who can learn quickly, take risks, use new media, and dip into things. People who are flexible and creative. It's an exciting time. There's a requirement to adapt . . ."
Or?
"Or die," Gorman says with equanimity. It's an appropriately Darwinian conclusion.
www.sciencegallery.org (01-8964091)
COFFEE - AN ART AND A SCIENCE?
Far from being "an ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached", as London's V&A Museum used to promote itself, the cafe in the Science Gallery will be "at the heart of what we're doing", Gorman says. "It's not an add-on." Visible from Pearse Street through the glass facade, the intention is for it to be the equivalent of an 18th-century coffee house, part of the international Café Scientifique movement, where conversations spark, patrons scribble drawings on napkins, swap original ideas and generally behave like colliding atoms. And even for those of us content to stare into space in cafes, the good news is that this one will be run by Il Caffe di Napoli from neighbouring Westland Row, which makes the best espresso this side of Naples. (I can't prove that.)
TRIP THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
LIGHTWAVE seems an inspired choice for the Science Gallery's opening festival, as the theme of light has the capacity to unite poets, physicists, painters and philosophers. Anyone who saw the crowds lying on the ground of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall four years ago, basking in the light of Olafur Eliasson's vast sun installation, will have no doubt about the powerful metaphorical and mystical aspects of light. These have fascinated thinkers and artists, from Plato's Allegory of the Cave to Bill Viola's contemplative video pieces, in which figures emerge into light from primordial darkness.
LIGHTWAVE is an interactive exhibition, with an accompanying programme of events, exploring how light works and feels, devised by a team of curators combining the disciplines of science, technology, art, performance and design.
Spectacle will be provided by U2's lighting designer Willie Williams, who will create graffiti using LED light, in an installation called Lumia Domestica; Light Tracer, an installation by designer Karl Willis allows users to draw with light in 3-D; Benjamini Gaulon's light projection, De Pong Game III, will bounce a ball of light on the Academy building across the road on Pearse Street. Bee Matrix, created by the Californian founder of Lottolab, Beau Lotto, will trace the flight patterns of bumblebees in 3-D, observing and recording their responses to colour. In The Heliosphere, created by artist Anita Hill and physicist Peter Gallagher, viewers will be able to feel the effect of solar flares while watching close-up videos of the sun's surface.
Camera Lucida, by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitri Gelfand, creates a transparent chamber that looks like an Antony Gormley sculpture. Inside, ultrasound waves pass through gas-enriched fluid creating tiny bubbles that create emissions of light. As this fascinating process, called sonoluminescence, involves intensely high temperatures, it usually takes place in a laboratory. Claims that it has produced fusion reactions will be discussed by the installations two creators on Saturday February 9th. Many of the exhibitors will stay for the duration of the festival, leading workshops, and taking part in lectures and discussions.
And for anyone who feels the need for a bit of extra illumination in the form of light therapy, the Daylight Lounge will provide solace (or solas) during short February days. Discussions about the best ways of alleviating Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) will take place in this restorative, light-filled space. (Pre-booking required.)
LIGHTWAVE runs from February 2nd-9th; 4.30-8.30pm. Admission free.
MAGNETIC ATTRACTION
"There's a real thirst to engage from the arts community," Michael John Gorman says. And it's true that artists from all disciplines seem increasingly drawn to science and the possibilities of technology. As well as influential and well-established figures such as Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sachs - inevitably described as Renaissance men - many visual artists, theatre-makers and writers are now at ease with media and materials that investigate aspects of our world where the abstract and the concrete intersect. These include sculptors working with light installation such as Dan Flavin, Anish Kapoor and James Turrell; composer John Adams's riveting opera, Dr Atomic, portraying the development of the atomic bomb; multi-media theatre artists Robert Lepage, Heiner Goebbels, and most recently, the London-based Theatre de Complicité, whose latest production, A Disappearing Number, incorporates a maths lesson, complete with chalk and blackboard on stage.
A new wave of writers is impelled to explore the place of humans in the earth's ecology, combining naturalism with landscape and wildlife studies: among the best are Richard Mabey, the late Roger Deacon and Robert McFarlane, while Rebecca Solnit, one of the most original contemporary US essayists, has a breadth of interest incorporating art history, technology, landscape and politics. Closer to home we've had John Banville, Tim Robinson, Sean Lysaght and Neil Belton, among others, bringing maths, physics, biology and botany into literature. Before all of them, of course, was Flann O'Brien, who put it all down to "the molecules".