A big idea that blurs boundaries

Artscience

Creativity in the Post-Google Generation

David Edwards

Harvard University Press: 196 pp., $19.95

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SeVERAL years ago, in a collection of her fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Lynne Sharon Schwartz made a vivid argument against specialization in the arts.

“I had never planned to be a novelist in the first place,” she declared. “I had planned, from the age of seven, to be a writer. A writer writes anything and everything, just as a composer composes anything -- not only sonatas or only nocturnes or only symphonies.”

She’s right, of course, for specialization offers a progressive narrowing of vision, rather than the expansion upon which discovery depends. And yet, we live in a culture that prizes specialization, that distrusts serendipity or the blurring of boundaries, that tells us it is better to be an expert than a generalist.

Such a notion -- or, more accurately, its refutation -- resides at the center of David Edwards’ “Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation,” a book that seeks to bridge perhaps the widest of the specialization gaps, the one separating science and art.

“Among the sources of administrative inertia that weigh heavily on our educational and culture institutions,” Edwards writes, “is the famous divide between art and science cultures. . . . That chasm still cuts through our cultural institutions and universities.”

For Edwards, this is not an intellectual conceit. A professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University, he also is the founder of Le Laboratoire, an art and science center in Paris, and he’s passionate that these areas of inquiry can overlap.

The key is to rethink the traditional roles of art and science, to find a middle ground where we might frame aesthetic solutions to scientific questions, or apply a scientific rigor to the challenges of art.

“[T]he fused method that results,” he argues, “at once aesthetic and scientific -- intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, embracing nature in its complexity and able to simplify to nature in its essence -- is what I call artscience.”

Edwards is hardly the first observer to identify a confluence between art and science. The most interesting science always relies on leaps of the imagination: “[W]here gaps exist among the facts of geology,” John McPhee noted in his 1981 book “Basin and Range,” “the space between is often filled with things ‘geopoetical.’ ”

The same is increasingly true of art, which in the digital age has become fluid, technological in content and form.

“Today,” Edwards reminds us, “we encounter in theaters, museums, cinemas, opera houses, city streets, our own living rooms, and just about anywhere we can imagine, artists of dizzying varieties integrating into their work the science and technology that change cultural expression as fast as it is changing lives.”

Here, we have the idea behind the book’s subtitle, “Creativity in the Post-Google Generation.” Yet as “Artscience” progresses, that turns out to be a misnomer, for Edwards is less interested in art or science than in -- irony of ironies -- a highly specialized sub-category in which scientists who are also artists apply both methodologies to their work.

This, it turns out, is the fundamental flaw of “Artscience” -- not the concept but the book. In the name of raising broad philosophical questions, Edwards focuses on a small group of individuals, many of whom are his colleagues, which is troublesome in itself.

More problematic is his insistence on framing these people as universal symbols of the process, when in fact they work almost entirely in rarefied realms.

There’s Peter Rose, a Canadian architect now at Harvard, who pioneered a kinetic design style based on the intersection of “space, form, and light.” Or Don Ingber, who adapted Buckminster Fuller’s notion of “tensegrity” (in which a form retains, rather than loses, its structural integrity when compressed) to the study of cancer, developing a new model of cellular mechanics, a “cellular tensegrity.”

These are fascinating people, and their work is profound and often beautiful. Still, Edwards never makes the case for them as pioneers whose efforts illustrate a wider set of connections, the latticework of interdisciplinary nuance upon which, or so he tells us, artscience depends.

Part of the problem may be Edwards’ narrowness of vision, his tendency to accept ideas that seem questionable to say the least.

“A product sells. . . . [But the] recognition of a sale, and the media coverage that attends that sale, is frequently not enough,” he suggests, describing the frustrations of economic success, as opposed to aesthetic success. “Creators, whoever and wherever they are, wish to be understood not for what they sell but for what they value.”

The implication is that the concerns of creativity and of the marketplace are inherently similar, but is that really true?

Then, there’s his faith in academia as a center of culture: “The research university,” he avows, “may be the most powerful current engine for social engagement through artscience.”

Maybe so, but with its encoded bureaucratic structures, its dependence on peer review and tenure, the university more often has been an engine of stasis, of the status quo.

Edwards admits as much, acknowledging that “over the last half century the business of science, perhaps of academia in general, had created a standardized format that misled you, misled you as a scientist and as a non-scientist, and you never stopped to question what science really was, or what it could be, because it seemed too thoroughly agreed on.”

But this suggests a number of questions that Edwards does not raise. How many groundbreaking cultural ideas have come from universities? And how many from independent artists and thinkers, operating in some unbound territory of their own?

In the arts, the most profound academic movement of the last 30 years has been the rise of theory, which is the creative equivalent of an autopsy, less about culture than about the dissection of culture -- and as such, a kind of cultural death.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely where “Artscience” leaves us, with a theory that never quite comes to life.

Edwards is a smart, dedicated thinker, and he’s definitely tapped into something; art and science are coming closer, and technology has transformed not just our aesthetics but the very ways in which we create.

It’s a big idea, and Edwards deserves credit for having seen it, for recognizing that specialization represents its own slow death. But in the end, the territory is too big for him to master, and his argument too small to measure up.

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david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is The Times’ book editor.