Metamethod. mNactec 2016

Exhibition at the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia. Terrassa, from March 17 to June 5, 2016

The exhibition shows the results of a series of meetings, dialogues and collaborations between artists and scientists, within the framework of the research project “MetaMethod2: Shared methodologies and artistic processes in the knowledge society”, by the Imarte research group.

The exhibition contains nine projects by different artists who have worked to find methodological strategies for artistic research based on the interrelation with other disciplines. All the artists address in different ways the issues that directly affect our ways of life and sociability. To do so, some artists use scientific experiences to develop their discourse, questioning key notions such as ethics, temporality, matter or technological processes; while others have chosen to explore the interaction of technologies as multimedia installation devices or collective creation as a form of resistance to cultural and social models based on the mechanics of the current economy.

Today, artistic research is a confluence of different languages and it is an open field of exploration in which different knowledge and perspectives dialogue. The Imarte research group at the University of Barcelona analyses the changes that have occurred in the conception of art in the knowledge society and emphasises the process of transformation of artistic practice through new forms of production. Some artists use scientific experiences to develop their discourse and question issues such as matter, time, ethics or technological processes. Others explore the interaction of technologies with multimedia installations.

Some projects raise differences and limits between scientific and artistic observation and others have shared software or worked on data visualisation; there are also those that have applied printing technologies on hard and three-dimensional supports, or that examine the conceptual scope of reproducibility. All of them deal with issues that affect our way of life.

The nature of the work of art does not have a single centre, it is open and multidisciplinary, which is why the MetaMètode2 project wants to reflect the sense of processes in motion, of displacements between methods and concepts, of changes and of plurality.

According to David Casacuberta, professor of Philosophy of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, “MetaMètode2 is a special project because it seeks to have an impact beyond the work and the work of the artist in question. Thus, the works are not just another piece in the curriculum of its artists, but rather seek to reflect on the relationships between science and art and to better understand what it means to carry out artistic research, crossing the boundaries of the discipline itself.”

Museo de la Ciencia y de la Tecnica de Catalunya (mNACTEC)
Rambla d’Ègara 270 TERRASSA
Tel. 93 736 89 66 www.mnactec.cat

Schedule: Tuesday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Mercè Casanovas

MetaPared

The work MetaPared consists of a wall that does not serve to close a space, but goes beyond its purpose to become a support in which fiction-reality transports us to another dimension. By definition, the word meta is the line that indicates the place where the course of a race ends. If we take this definition and apply it to the word metamethod, we could say that we are reaching the goal or the end of the search for a search method. And in this literal sense, MetaPared would be the point of arrival of a set of investigations that are based on high-resolution digital printing on non-conventional supports. The work I present is inscribed in this game of meanings that the title of the project can adopt. A work that is the result of the evolutionary process of research carried out over all these years and that now introduces the incision as a novel element, closely linked to my training as an engraver. With this piece, I have taken a further step in the reversal of the roles between the matrix and the support. The plaster, where I have engraved part of the image, stops being a matrix and becomes a support itself, and the digital print will not be the ink that is transferred onto paper, as occurs in the print, but will remain in the same matrix, in the incised plaster, as the final state.

Eloi Puig

Alignments Series

This project aims to evaluate the relationship between the forms of knowledge or languages of the two cultures, science and humanities, using the Sequence Alignment method (typical of bioinformatics) as a Peer Review, to visualize approximations to John Brockman's concept of Third Culture. A Sequence Alignment is a way of representing and comparing DNA sequences to highlight areas of similarity, difference or disappearance that could indicate evolutionary relationships between genes. The texts that are not aligned in this notebook come from two reference authors from each culture: Matt Ridley and William Gibson. They have been selected, respectively, by the molecular biologist David Torrents and by the professor of philosophy of science, David Casacuberta.

Cristina Pastó

The skin of the skin

The skin of the skin begins through contact with Dr. Antonio Gómez Bolea, professor of the Department of Botany of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona, expert in lichen bioindicators and biodeterioration. Dr. Bolea participates in a research project on biological concrete, designed to build living facades, with lichens, mosses and other organisms, patented by the Structures Technology Group of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. During a series of meetings in the laboratory, his explanations allow me to learn the basic characteristics of these plants, whose extraordinary variety of forms is revealed to me by the use of the microscope. On field trips I see how they locate species, take samples and how they work afterwards in the laboratory with magnifying glasses and high-precision microscopes. I also learn the importance of reagents to know the chemical elements and distinguish the species and their components.

I appreciate the importance of using chromatography to determine the chemical substances that make up each type of lichen. Chromatography consists of a glass (20x20 cm) with a white silicon layer attached to it.

Dissolved samples of lichen are deposited on this very thin layer and, thanks to a reagent, these substances move at different speeds and produce characteristic colours, which can be seen in daylight (yellow, ochre, brown) or in ultraviolet light (blue, phosphorescent green) on top of the white layer. These chromatography images, reviewed and highlighted by scientists, constitute the subject of my work.

Eugènia Agustí and Antònia Vilà

Your color memory

Your colour memory consists of the use of an ideal circle of 137 cm in diameter with graphic characters. These act as signs of understanding, and are a geometric formalisation resulting from the typographic and discursive intersection of the factors involved in this research. The dialectic established between the various readings on colour, visits to the laboratory, viewing and interpretation of muscle biopsies according to the scientific canon, become signs of the artists' seeing as an interpretation of the microscopic observations made with the support of scientists Dr. Eduardo Gallardo and Dr. Ricardo Rojas.

This fabric of typographic characters is understood as a sequence of metalanguages that are linked together, the result of the different scenarios and theories that speak about light and colour. During the course of the research, they end up becoming the patterns with which we encode the combinations of the components involved in the study, which become monograms: of the chromatic references, of the scientists from Sant Pau and of the artists involved. These are the particles that interact and float in this delimited circular space, just as the wavelength does when it draws the pathology of the cellular tissue in green or red.

Alicia Vela / Jo Milne / Eloi Puig / Marta San Gregorio

DOMPOAC

This collective project emerged from several meetings with researchers Jordi Duran and Isabel Sáez, from the laboratories of Metabolic Engineering and Diabetes Therapy, directed by Joan J. Guinovart, from the Institute for Biomedical Research (IRB) of the Barcelona Science Park.

DOMPOAC arose from conversations, questions and answers, between two scientists in their workplace and four artists interested in discovering affinities or differences between their respective methods. During this experience we saw parallels between the work processes and their different stages when starting research, both in science and in art. The difference lies in the purpose and, in turn, in the freedom to reinterpret results by conceptualizing them in the language of art. However, the methodological stages of both disciplines present similarities that deserve to be treated as an object of analysis; for this reason we have focused on the coincidences that we discovered between the creative process and the laboratory protocols and we have used them as research material to achieve an artistic result. We developed an interview focused on the following statements: Color, Hippocampus, Genetically modified mouse models, Work processes. Based on the answers, we decided to focus on the seven stages expressed in the Work processes: 1_Documentation on the topic, 2_Determining the objective of the research, 3_Choosing the study model, 4_Planning the experiment, 5_Obtaining the sample, 6_Analysis of the marker of interest, 7_Obtaining a conclusion.

For the collaborative development of the project, we distributed each stage among the four components of the group, each of them modified the previous one, finally generating a successive interpretation of the 7 methodological stages of the scientific method.