Meet The Artists Working At The Intersection Of Art And Science

We live in an era where commercial flights to the moon are a real possibility, and evolutionary scientists at American company Colossal Biosciences are hoping to pluck the Dodo from extinction after extracting mitochondrial DNA from a 17th Century Dodo preserved by the Natural History Museum (a fascinating story that is told in The Hunt for the Oldest DNA, a documentary which premiered recently at the Science Museum).

It isn’t only scientists and NASA technicians who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible, there is also a growing number of artists creating and innovating at the frontier between art, science and tech. The evolving conversation between art and science is happening 65 years since British scientist and writer CP Snow lectured on ‘The Two Cultures’ at Cambridge University, stressing the huge divide between the humanities and sciences, and lamenting that there was “…to be no place where the cultures meet.”

This September a month-long exhibition programme funded by the Getty foundation took place in Los Angeles—’PST Art: Art & Science Collide’ featured more than 70 galleries exploring the intersection between art and science. There hasn’t been such a close relationship between art and science since Leonardo Da Vinci excelled at both during the Renaissance. Legend has it that, to produce Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile in his most infamous painting, Da Vinci dissected bodies and studied muscles in the basement of the hospital Santa Maria Nuova.

I spoke to Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen, known for his scientific collaborations, British artist innovators Rob and Nick Carter and Dr. Bettina Kames, CEO and Co-Founder of the LAS Art Foundation in Berlin, about the work they are doing at the interface of art, science and new technology.

I spoke to Koen Vanmechelen over a zoom call from his studio in Genk, Belgium. A Belgian artist with an international profile, Vanmechelen has exhibited frequently at the Venice Biennale and his work has been shown at the Uffizi in Florence, Biennials of Moscow, Havana, Dakar and Poznan and he has addressed the World Economic Forum and various TED conferences. Koen Vanmechelen (b. 1965) is situated at the confluence of art, science, philosophy and community.

Vanmechelen travels the world looking for answers to fundamental questions that touch on issues which are both timeless and capture the zeitgeist including diversity, globalisation and human rights, and weaves those answers into enigmatic artworks. His exhibition at the Kunsthall 3,14 in Norway is the latest phases of his ongoing ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken Project’. Over the last 20 years, the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project has been presented in renowned art institutions around the world, and through it Vanmechelen explores the boundless potential hidden in biocultural diversity and the richness that springs from difference.

Vanmechelen’s fascination with chickens began at an early age. He explains: “When I was five years old, I had an incubator in my room. And I got two chickens from my parents. The incubator was a gift from my godfather, who was a biologist. So as a young kid, I was looking at how a little chick was struggling to come out of the egg. I saw that one third of the egg is air, and two thirds of the egg is chick. Then there is a division between the air and the chick, so it has to take the air, break the shell and come out. Then I saw on TV the space shuttle going to the moon. And I thought, this is the same action. You have to break the scale of the atmosphere, and then you have to find the right corner to get in. Otherwise you get burnt and game over. And I thought in life it’s like this—you have to find the right corner to exist. The rebirthing of your ID, and that’s the way you become an artist.”

Vanmechelen’s art is an antidote to the commercialism and capitalism of Warhol–he embraces diversity and hybridity as opposed to conformity. His art succeeds and multiplies through collaboration. So when the Mayor of Genk Wim Dries offered Vanmechelen the site of the city’s former zoo where he went as a child with his biologist Godfather, he jumped at the chance to revive the abandoned site and fill it with art and nature, naming it LABIOMISTA during lunch with long-term collaborator, architect Mario Botta: “I was eating an Insalata Mista and came up with the name LABIOMISTA–which covered the idea of life and mixing.”

He invited Botta to design the entrance to LABIOMISTA and a giant aviary and studio known as ‘The Battery’ and spent the past few years introducing rare species of animals and birds to the site, as well as a new science lab and ‘Tapir Temple’ called ‘Future Garden’. Vanmechelen sees nature as a library of knowledge, and his aim is to share this knowledge through LABIOMISTA.

He explains: “I wanted to draw the intention of how we humans are going to live together with animals and nature. Llamas, Dromaderies and installations I’ve made for Biennials around the world are all together in one place–LABIOMISTA. One of the big things in ‘Future Thinking’ is bringing different minds together–immunologists, fertility specialists. People from different universities around the world. I think it’s necessary for the world that we step out of mono-thinking.”

Vanmechelen was exploring the intersection between humanity, nature, art and science decades before they were buzzwords. How did those worlds collide for him?

“When I asked my father, why do we put something that we really like in a cage? Later I understood it’s about domestication, shaping spaces and how to live together. The nature of my work brought me to science. Because when I was a kid, I was making cages to put the chickens in, with the question ‘why do we do this, is this freedom?’ But then, when I was about 16 years old, I started to make sculptures that looked like chickens or birds walking with their cages. Then, at a certain moment, at the beginning of my 30’s, I saw the domesticated chicken as a cage. Because humans translate their idea in a living object, so my conclusion was ‘how cruel is this’?”

And so Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken Project was hatched in 1999. When Vanmechelen met the world-famous geneticist Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Cassiman told him the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project was an important one, and his work has brought him into contact and dialogue with geneticists, biologists and immunologists.

This entire journey started during Vanmechelen’s childhood when his Biologist Godfather took him to a foundation in Germany and showed him the first Primal Chicken. “If you follow humanity, and the developing of humanity, you can follow the path of the chicken. First it becomes a ‘cultural’ product, then industrial and then a consumer product. Then it went to America and then it becomes an industrial product. The Chicken is a kind of fortune teller. That’s why a lot of journalists came to me during Covid and asked ‘how is it that 20 years ago you said that something like Covid would happen?’ If you go back into history, the Chicken was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the cruelest animal on the planet. A lot of Scientists are scared that a virus living in a chicken can jump to a human, and then you have another pandemic. In one way the chicken is like ‘Arte Povera’ because it comes from something very simple. But in another way it’s much more.”

What role does Vanmechelen think AI plays in the marriage of art and science? “AI can look to all these ideas that are in the world. If we use AI in the right way. It’s always about the critical mind. And art is a critical mind.”

Artists Rob and Nick Carter are embracing AI in their artistic practice and have been incorporating new technologies into their art for over 20 years, from digital photography to 3D printing and even robot arms.

I sat down with Rob and Nick Carter at their Hyde Park Mews house-turned studio and gallery space before Frieze Week, to talk about a group show they recently curated titled THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST, their new exhibition Chroma-Viscosity II, and to delve into their continued fascination with merging new technologies into their artistic practice.

Husband and wife artist duo Rob and Nick Carter have been collaborating for more than two decades. Their work can be found in the collections of The Mauritshuis, The Hague; The Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; The Frick, Pittsburgh; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The David Roberts Foundation, London; The Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and The Fondation Custodia, Paris; and they are the first contemporary living artists to show a work at the Frick Museum, New York.

In the last five years they have been working with a robotic arm named Heidi. Using AI and robotics, they taught Heidi, a six-axis Robot, to paint with exact precision. Heidi has since produced numerous series that mimic the works of old masters and artistic icons, as well as portraiture.

With Chroma-Viscosity II, Rob and Nick Carter rupture the boundaries of materiality, time, and technology, and THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST was inspired by a website that uses AI to create photo-realistic portraits of people that don’t actually exist.

Rob Carter: “The basic idea we had for this show was based around the website THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST, which uses AI to create photo-realistic head and shoulders pictures of people that don’t exist. It’s in the arena in which we’re working, and we thought it would be a fun idea to ask 24 contemporary artists to respond to the website in any way they deemed fit. Obviously, portrait artists are used to dealing with living, breathing, actual people, so they’re out of their comfort zone. But I think underlyingly, we’re trying to get people to engage with AI rather than be frightened of it. So to use and embrace it, rather than be scared of AI replacing artists, to work with it.”

After some initial reticence, the artists (including Gavin Turk, Geraldine Swayne, Jonathan Yeo, Marcus Harvey, Nettie Wakefield, James White and Will Ayres) responded enthusiastically to Rob and Nick Carter’s brief, resulting in a visually rich and stimulating exhibition. Perhaps this was because identity is at the root of much figurative art, and often exists at the boundary between real and imaginary visualisations.

Artist Annie Kevans exhibited in THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST with a portrait titled ‘Sex Bot Ashley’. The portrait was in her signature style but based on a fictional person and inspired by online dating agency ‘Ashley Madison’. After a data leak it was revealed that the 37 million subscribers were unknowingly paying to have online relationships with bots.

Many people are afraid of the capabilities of AI and the dangers of online interaction, which was proven by the Ashley Madison case. However, Nick Carter thinks AI is a tool that artists shouldn’t be scared of trying out. In a highly META use of AI, Rob and Nick created a film for the exhibition by taking 1,000 people from the website, and using another AI generator morphed them from one person to another, slowly over 7 seconds. Portrait artist Jonathan Yeo, famous for his painting of the newly Coronated King Charles, created a portrait for the exhibition in his signature style but using AI. Rob Carter explained: “He fed a person from the website into an algorithm that has a data set of 200 of his paintings. To turn that painting into a picture of that person ‘in the style of’ Jonathan Yeo.”

Rob and Nick Carter aren’t afraid of using AI in their work. For their latest exhibition, Chroma-Viscosity II, which opened during Frieze Week, they created a film of living, breathing paint, slowly morphing and changing, capturing a moment in time through close-up photography, then enlarged it 60 times. The exhibition features an AI-generated film that reimagines the captured fluidity and movement of paint in the Painting Photographs. Rob and Nick Carter’s use of AI moves the dialogue between painting and photography into the realm of machine learning and the digital age, and they continue to bridge the gap between analogue and digital ways of working.

The duo has always embraced new technologies in their art. Nick Carter looks back to earlier work that incorporated new tech: “Back in 2008 we were using 3D print. We’d read about it in the field of science, and the fact that people were using it in medicine, and that if someone smashed their face, they could do a scan of one side of the jaw, then build the other side in 3D print. So we thought ‘why can’t we use 3D print in the realm of art?’ So we made our ‘Van Gogh Sunflowers’ using 3D printing made in bronze. We’ve always looked forward then looked at the past.” The work was shown at the Maastricht art fair and drew big crowds and was something of a catalyst for artists merging old with new. Rob and Nick Carter even used robots in their work with the ‘Robot Paintings’ and have been working with robotics for seven years.

Navigating the wild west of new technologies and working with artist, thinkers and institutions to develop innovative projects, is arts organisation LAS Foundation. LAS Foundation investigates topics ranging from AI and quantum computing to ecology and biotechnology.

The foundation’s CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Bettina Kames told me when we met at Frieze Art Fair: “LAS Art Foundation commissions and presents interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, science and technology. Through working with visionary artists, we explore the technologies and scientific developments set to transform our society. 2025 is being marked as 100 years since quantum mechanics was established as a theory and today quantum computing is set to transform the world. In 2025 the UN celebrates the International Year of Quantum and LAS launches its Quantum Programme, which includes large scale artist commissions, a publication and symposium. Quantum computing is set to overtake AI in its impact and applications in society and we find it vital to look at such implications with artists and scientists alike.”

Also during Frieze London I spoke to Albion Jeune director Lucca Hue-Williams, who will be exhibiting artist Tim Si-Qin from 21st November 2024 until 12th January 2025. Timur Si-Qin creates CISTANCHE sculptures that capture the essence of the mysterious Cistanche plant, native to the Al Ula region. Si-Qin (b. 1984, Berlin) is a New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent whose work investigates the evolution of culture, dynamics of cognition and contemporary philosophy. Si-Qin has created a new kind of environmental art comprising installations of 3D printed sculptures, light-boxes, websites, texts, and virtual reality.

So what is the future for art and science? It seems this is a constantly evolving frontier that more and more artists will begin to explore and engage with, and I’m intrigued to know what collaborations between artist and science will happen next.