Chemistry World Blog

— Philip Ball

The introduction of graphical abstracts in just about all the leading chemistry journals has been one of the most useful innovations in the recent chemical literature. If you’re like me, you look at the pictures before the titles to get an instant impression of what the papers contain. What’s striking is how effective that system is for communicating the message – something that just doesn’t seem to work in physics, which generally uses no such system.

— Gas by Julie Newdoll

This should remind us of just how visual chemistry is, and what an amazing visual language it has cultivated. As Roald Hoffmann has said, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how a community of people who are not talented at drawing, nor trained to do so, manages to communicate faultlessly so much three-dimensional information.’ Yet he goes on to express puzzlement at why ‘people who have learned to communicate visually in such a variety of artistic styles [that’s you] are not more tolerant of expressionist and abstract ways of communicating knowledge and emotion.’

— Crystalline formations by Allan Wray

Well, let’s see if this is a fair complaint. On this blog you’ll be able to see several of the images selected for the 13^th exhibition of digitally generated art organised by the Art & Science Collaborations in New York, US, prints of which will be displayed in the New York Hall of Science from 3 September 2011 until 5 February 2012. One could today call ASCI almost a venerable institution: it was one of the first organisations to explore the now-fashionable interface of art and science (and notice that art comes first). This year’s exhibition has the theme of chemistry, in recognition of the International Year of Chemistry. The title is ‘The alchemy of change’, and the citation reads as follows:

 

— The four elements by David Hylton

Humans, animals, insects, trees, plants, oceans, and air – indeed, all that we see, taste, smell, touch, and breathe, contain molecular processes of physical transformation; a dynamic dance of change.  This magic of transition, called alchemy by our earliest scientists, became the science of chemistry. It describes both the physical structure and characteristic actions of matter. It allows for all organic and inorganic change to take place – brain synapses to fire, oxygen to be formed from carbon dioxide and water during photosynthesis; the transformation of gases in our solar system; along with the ability of proteins to turn our genes on/off. If you extend your imagination beyond the epithelial surface of your body, or into the ether that carries cosmic dust, or even into your kitchen, chemistry can inspire wonder. Like a fabulous menu of concocted primordial soups, when exposed to changes in temperature, pressure, or speed, chemistry can create a stick of dynamite or a magnificent souffle!

For this exhibition, we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry by inviting artists and scientists to show us their vision of this deeply fundamental, magical enabler of life called chemistry.

— Magma 19 by Mark Stock

So what do you think? Do these images capture a flavour of what chemistry is about? Do they raise interesting questions about the discipline? Are they good art? Do you like them? Maybe before you decide that, consider the words of philosopher David Rothenberg, whose forthcoming book Survival of the Beautiful (Bloomsbury) has a lot of interesting things to say about the art/science interaction:

‘Abstract art sometimes celebrates the aleatory [random] as a principle of making good work. This doesn’t mean art made by filling a canvas with out-of-control paint splatters… It means freeing oneself from common constraints to let loose new ideas, which then surprise with what comes out.’

(Not all of these images are abstract by any means, but many are.)

— RNA: bricks of life by Davide Angheleddu

Adding alchemy into the mix – not as a lazy metaphor for chemistry, but as a historical tradition – introduces another element, which several of the entries to the ASCI exhibition drew on explicitly, perhaps sometimes for better and sometimes not. Alchemical imagery often sought to locate chemical transformation in a cosmic perspective, making the unfolding of all creation a chemical process couched as allegory. Alchemy’s schematic symbolism of the elements became John Dalton’s atoms – it supplies part of the visual as well as the intellectual heritage of chemistry.

— 1.48,m2 by Hariclia Michailidou

What appeals to me both in alchemical art and in art generally is the attempt to visualise that which can’t quite be understood or expressed or precisely depicted. Chemistry could do with more of that today. It’s a common and valid criticism of computer graphics that they are too good: too alluring, pyrotechnic, precise, definitive. Yes, we know that atoms don’t have hard edges, shiny surfaces and bright colours – but non-scientists can be forgiven for thinking that they do, especially when our images of molecules strive for such spurious photo-realism. That’s why pen and paper sketches are still perhaps more honest, much as black and white reproductions of great paintings avoided the danger of persuading us that the colours seen in reproduction were those in the original. Yet we seem to demand that our molecules look pretty, as they sometimes do here. Why is that? Some of the entries to this exhibition would not have looked out of place in the graphical abstracts of JACS or Angewandte Chemie. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it is interesting.

— The redox bar: shaken not stirred by Andrew Krasnow

What I liked best in this exhibition, then, were the images that seem to transcend the knowable, the boundaried, the certain and familiar – that hark back to the alchemists’ need for allegory, for a hidden code that tries to intimate what we don’t yet fully understand. For me, these come closest to showing chemistry as it is: not a finished or a fully comprehended science, but an enterprise that still depends heavily on metaphor and analogy, and whose fundamental rules continue to evade precise description.

Philip Ball

Read Philip Ball’s The Crucible column on SciArt