Introduction

Monet is said to have remarked to a young artist that he wished he had been born blind and suddenly regained his sight so that he could paint without knowing what objects he was looking at, allowing the eye to take in color and shape without cognitive prejudice. Would this also be good advice for a young scientist? Or is seeing in science a kind of seeing-as, wherein perception is brought under some category or conception?

Science and art are united in showing the results of "intense seeing," the "wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information." So says Edward Tufte, a leader in the new field of information design, which brings together data presentation, information technology, and aesthetics. You can see what he means by looking at the illustrations by Galileo and Matisse here (pages 40-41) reprinted from Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence.

Intensity is not the same thing as accuracy, of course. Consider the famous line by Dutch modernist painter Willem De Kooning: "When I'm falling, I'm doing all right; when I'm slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting! It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me: I'm not doing so good; I'm stiff. As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping, most of the time into that glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser."

According to Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and her coauthor Bevil Conway, De Kooning and a surprising number of other visual artists quite literally may have seen the world differently than most of us. In "View Masters," the authors look at painting through the neurobiology of vision.

Livingstone and Conway are engaged in what could be called the science of art, scientific examination of art as a natural phenomenon. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker presents a broad rationale for this kind of examination: it will reenergize the humanities by plugging them into the dynamism of the natural sciences, in particular "the sciences of human nature." Do English professors need to get in touch with their inner human beings? Lisa Zunshine makes the case by way of the cognitive psychology of fiction.

The counterpart to science of art is art of science, in which the content of the work presents or takes inspiration from scientific themes, as in our collection of poems by contemporary poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Roald Hoffmann, and Forrest Gander.

Sometimes science not only informs the content of art but transforms the very process of creation or the concept of the artwork itself. Call this science in art. We see it in the work of Joshua Fineberg, a rising classical composer whose instrument of choice is the electronic sonogram, not the piano. In an interview with SKEPTICAL INQUIRER he discusses an influential and radically new form of music that has its roots in acoustical science and computer technology.

While computer-assisted compositions take Carnegie Hall, robots are heading for the Met. Galleries around the world are now selling paintings by robots, like the latest creation by the Portuguese artist Leonel Moura. His Robotic Action Painter runs an algorithm incorporating initial randomness, positive feedback, and a set of "color as pheromone" sensors. It decides when the work is ready and signs in the bottom right corner. See several examples on this issue's cover. (The paintbots aren't demanding a cut of the gallery sales--yet.)

Finally, we find art in science, perhaps the most elusive species. Clifford Pickover, whose latest book is on the Mobius strip, discusses how artistic and computer visualizations can assist in conceptualization and model construction in science. Meanwhile, an instructor at the Parsons School of Design in New York City named Julia Wargawski has been assigning the redesign of the Periodic Table as a studio project for her students. Art shows up nature.

On the back cover, Ray Villard of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins explains that the astronomical objects published there for some time by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, which have delighted readers with their spectacular pink and blue hues, have all along been outfitted with a palette of pleasing but "false" colors. The real things don't look like much at all, to our eyes anyway. What's wrong with taking a little artistic license with the universe?

In a provocative closing piece, the distinguished neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran offers a portrait of the scientist as a young artist--passionate about the pursuit for its own sake, a risk-taker, and an enemy of conformity, professionalism, and "respectability." Can too much skepticism kill this spirit?

This special section of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER on the intersection of science and art provides only a glimpse of the terrain, touching on visual art, poetry, literature, music, and design, while slipping past architecture, film, drama, and dance. For a more intense (and interactive) look, visit www.scienceartfestival.com/gallery.