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Remember
how you once had to choose between the science
and arts streams in secondary school, as though
one had nothing to do with the other?
For too long, we’ve kept these two disciplines
apart, like a house divided.
The mistaken belief, then and now, is that the
humanities, in dealing with the vanity of human
wishes, is necessarily chaotic whereas scientific
inquiry, in seizing and sizing up the world
at large, is necessarily organised.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Just as artists need method in their madness,
scientists need madness in their method.
Look at how method actors like Robert de Niro
systematically breaks his performance down into
bite-size insights into the character. Or how
scientists, like Isaac Newton discovering gravity
when an apple fell on him, often rely on an
“eureka!” moment, a stroke of inspiration, to
make their breakthrough.
Indeed, the artistic temperament is the flipside
of the scientific inclination.
Science is about form, about crunching nature
down to formulas at once universal and complete.
And the arts are about substance, about crunching
human nature down to themes that cut across
similar human experiences.
And that’s the focus in this issue of art-e.
We examine how the two disciplines interact
and interlock with each other; how science and
technology have changed the way we write, make
art and sell it.
Read on. Decide for yourself if the sciences
and the arts are really from the same family
tree.
Felix Cheong
Chief Editor
September 2005
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