Less about appearances: art and science: visual art throughout history has given form and shape to fictional spaces—habitats to the gods, myths, and legends. But art has changed, slowly moving from fictional space into physical space—leading some artists to an interest in science and the untamed complexity of the real

Along with the development of supernatural beliefs, humans long ago invented fictional spaces--extra dimensions of the imagination that augment physical reality. Fictional spaces are ubiquitous throughout social and cultural history as the habitat for gods, spirits, mythologies, and legends, as well as for art and literature. For thousands of years visual art has given form and shape to fictional spaces, using the tools of pictorialism and vanishing-point perspective to build a convincing illusory world, full of meanings that resonate back in physical reality. However in the middle of the nineteenth century visual art began a slow process of flattening illusionist perspective, ultimately opening the door to works of art that were neither fictional nor illusory. In the twenty-first century this history of objectification has combined with new technologies to lead some artists toward an interest in science, and in combination art and science can forge a kind of nonsupernatural spirituality--a deep appreciation for the beauty and untamed complexity of the real.

In 1960, the French artist Jean Tinguely's self-destructing kinetic sculpture Homage to New York was installed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. A bizarre assortment of wheels, levers, pulleys, and sciencey-looking gizmos, the work symbolized the apocalyptic momentum of over-industrialization. In creating his sculpture, Tinguely benefited from technical assistance by Swedish-born Bell Laboratories engineer Billy Kluver, a clever and visionary scientist who went on to work with the celebrated New York artists Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Together, Rauschenberg and Kluver developed an initiative called Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) which would have a profound impact on the art of successive decades. EAT was an endeavor that Rauschenberg hoped would "develop an effective collaboration between engineer and artist. The raison d'etre of EAT is the possibility of a work which is not the preconception of either the engineer or the artist, but is the result of the exploration of the human interaction between them."

Recently, a younger generation of artists emerged to continue the investigations of EAT, this time using tools of the twenty-first century. A series of exhibitions have appeared at various museums, reflecting a growing interest in the new expressive potential revealed by combining art, science, and technology. Shows such as BitStreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001) and 010101." Art in Technological Times at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001) surveyed new expressions being forged via the use of digital media, while Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Art Gallery (2002), NEURO at Art Center College of Design's Williamson Gallery (2003), and Signatures of the Invisible at PS1 in New York (2003) focus even more specifically on the intersection of art and science.

Avant-garde as it may sound to some, the modulation of art and science is not something particularly new to history. As early as the first known cave paintings more than 30,000 years ago, the study of mammalian anatomy and the art of representation were integrated and infused with a sense of magic. The architects and sculptors who built places like England's Stonehenge 25,000 years later were also some of history's first scientists (as well as high priests), contributing to our early understanding of astronomy and structural engineering. A few millennia later Leonardo da Vinci thought of himself in equal parts as artist and engineer. Throughout human history, social and cultural evolution have been threaded together by the integration of art and science, and this collaboration has been tightly interwoven with the evolution of spiritual beliefs and theories.

To house the deities of those beliefs, fictional spaces were invented and then elaborated upon over the eons. Humans of all sorts, beliefs, and persuasions appear to enjoy their fictional spaces, even those understood to be no more than products of imagination (witness the always popular Hollywood movie, not to mention the ubiquitous TV drama and sitcom!). But the spaces where gods and spirits live are considered not to be imaginary, but actual. These are the serious fictional spaces--the ones inextricably tied to operations within our own common reality. Judged to be as genuine as the one we occupy, these fictional spaces and our own are believed to have borders that are open and porous.

Explanations for how the universe works, even if dubious and ultimately untrue, can be made to seem more convincing if the medium used to communicate them is itself convincingly structured. So, as a kind of architecture of fictional space, two-dimensional pictorialism and, in particular, vanishing-point perspective from the middle of the fifteenth century on, infused painting with an authority that likewise imbued its subjects with a sense of reality, no matter how fantastic or imaginative those subjects might be. In fictional space the supernatural could be revealed and constructed to appear as if it were an equal partner with physical reality, even though it existed only as an illusion on a flat plane. Even the artists' extraordinary skills in accomplishing feats of painting and sculpture seemed to lend credibility to the reality of fictional content, for who but God could bestow such talent? As a tool for constructing pictorial realism, perspective enabled artists to give fictional space factual credibility, through which viewers could seemingly confirm their magical beliefs. In the last few hundred years, while science trudged along methodically explaining physical phenomena, art leveraged perspective's authority to illustrate the human desire for enigma, spirituality, and deeper meaning.