ArtScience Prize Overview Artscience Prize theme the artscience prize jury 2009-2010 program TIMELINe Piloting the ArtScience Prize
Culture Lab: Catalyzing Innovation Through ArtScience
David Edwards speaks at TEDx Boston, July 2009
Art is outcome and process. Art can hang on our walls. It can also fill our lives. As process, art is a way of creative thought that is intuitive, driven by images, comfortable with uncertainty, thriving in ambiguity. Science is also outcome and process. Science is discovery and invention. It is theorem and proof. But science is also the scientific method, a way of creative thought that is analytical and deductive, able to frame a problem and solve it.
As spectators we know art and science as outcome. As artists and scientists we know art and science as ways of life.
Artists, scientists, all of us, combine these two ways of life whenever we develop new ideas, or create. We dream, and we analyze, we induce and we deduce, we embrace a complex world, and we simplify it to make decisions. This fused way of thinking, which we’re all familiar with from childhood, is what we call artscience.
Artscience is the soul of creativity. It is hard to learn about it in a traditional education. We tend to separate teaching of art and science. We encourage dream and imagination, or analysis and deduction, but rarely do we encourage both at once.
Artists and scientists provoke the artscience process, whether they know it or not, by searching out places, ideas, and people that surprise them. Surprise often makes us listen better. We watch more closely. We think new thoughts. We are very sensitive and curious. We provoke this surprise by entering new cultures. One way to do this is to mix worlds of art with worlds of science. That is what we do with the ArtScience Prize.
The ArtScience Prize encourages young people to dream at a frontier of science. To make art where we are making science. Here is where many of the most celebrated artists in history have created, from Leonardo DaVinci to John Cage.
