full interview_ariane koek_1.mp4
Ariane Koek [00:00:00] My name is Ariane Koek. I'm a producer, curator and writer who specializes in art, science and technology.
Speaker 2 [00:00:11] So you have this vision of mixing art and science, joining them together. So tell us about that vision.
Ariane Koek [00:00:20] Art and science are absolutely magical. They are cultural expressions of what we are in this world. They're one of the greatest achievements of human beings. And to mix them together, to create creative collisions, is recreating the magic of existence, I think. It takes you further, it brings you new imaginative possibilities and it creates new ways of understanding and encountering our world. So in 21, when was it, in yeah, I can't even remember when it was now, in 2009 I had this dream of going to CERN to create an arts and science program. Because I couldn't think of anything more perfect than the world's most famous particle physics laboratory engaging with art. Because where you've got frontiers of knowledge, you have the places where you can create new things and go even further than the science. So for me it's a kind of dream really to do that kind of work. CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. It's situated just outside Geneva, Switzerland. And it's extraordinary because it's focused on the 28-kilometer ring, known as the Large Hadron Collider, which spans both France and Switzerland in a giant circle. And that is the largest machine, man-made machine, on Earth. And I wanted to bring art to that because I can't think of anything more perfect than the world's biggest machine, the place which is at the forefront of examining our existence on the planet, engaging with art. Because I think it's when you've got two different things, like art and science, they are the same but they're also different. If you have them colliding, if you have opposites colliding then new and amazing things can happen.
Speaker 2 [00:02:46] You said before, when you started things off, you used the word magic, which is not a word I would think about with either science or art particularly, but certainly not with science.
Ariane Koek [00:02:58] Well, science is actually based on magic, so the beauty of science is, if you look at the whole history of science, alchemy is at its root. And alchemia was at its route, but within the European tradition, alchemie got replaced by scientific methodology during the Enlightenment. And so the magic, if we like, of science was banished and replaced by pure methodology. And what I think is the beauty of some of the great art-science collisions today is you see that magic happen, that pure alchemy, because alchemic in the eighteenth century was also, in a way, a form of art, because it was about observation and inquiry, and also thinking beyond things. And for me art and science is actually to a certain degree is returning. To the origins of science as an alchemic art science form.
Speaker 2 [00:04:03] So what happened when you brought artists and scientists together? Tell us some stories.
Ariane Koek [00:04:10] Hmm, yes, I'm trying to think that.
Speaker 2 [00:04:15] I mean is it easy? I mean, do artists and scientists, are they natural allies, are they sort of circling each other because they have different ways of thinking and doing? What are the differences, what are the similarities? Just riff a little bit on that.
Ariane Koek [00:04:29] Oh, you must know this off by heart now. Artists and scientists are both inquirers about who and why we exist in this world, but they just do it in different ways. Scientists do it through logic, inquiry and methodology. Artists do it though their senses, touch, sight, smell and also intuition as well. So they're different, but they're united at the same time. They're both discoverers and explorers of what and how we're in this world.
Speaker 2 [00:05:05] So I'm a scientist, and I've studied maybe, I don't know, how many, 15 years, whatever, in college, university, and post-doc, and then working on quarks and the Large Hadron Collider. What does an artist have to say to me? How can that artist help me?
Ariane Koek [00:05:24] So artists, when they came to the Large Hadron Collider on the Arts at CERN program, I think they really shook it up a bit. For example, Bill Fontana, the American sound artist, I took him down to the large hadron collider and we actually used accelerometers on the large hadrum collider, the most treasured, precious machine in the world, and you could hear. Through the accelerometers, the sound of the, well, the resonance of what had happened when the machine was switched on. Obviously we weren't there when the machine was switched, otherwise we would be dead, but we went when it was in switch off. And it was quite extraordinary just listening to that. Bill Fontana and I also went to the source. I'll start that again. So the American sound artist, Bill Fontana, was the second artist in residence at CERN under the Collide program. And I took him to the place, the source, where the protons come out of a bottle literally that big, the size of a Coke bottle, before they go on their epic journey around the Large Hadron Collider, which is 28 kilometers. And Bill used his accelerometers on the little Coke bottle, and the scientist who'd been the guardian of the protons literally cried, stood there and cried. And he just said, oh my goodness, I'd never related or even thought about protons in that way, in the kind of audio dimension. And somehow he said he never felt closer to them. So I think art brings a different perspective into scientists' work, into the way they perceive things. Another example is when, one example of an intervention at CERN is when Julius von Bismarck, who was the first artist in residence I worked with, he and I kidnapped 12 scientists. We blindfolded them. And we took them underground, into underground passages in CERN where they'd never been before, which he and I had mapped out ourselves for a whole day in the dark. Anyway, we took down there and then placed them in a room and said, okay, so you are the people who investigate the invisible in the world. So now you can't see anything at all. What are you seeing in your mind's eye now? Relate it and so they told us these extraordinary fantastical visions they saw which we recorded but that recording's never been released but that was an incredibly special moment because it forced them to perceive things in a different way and the whole experience had been taken out of their own comfort zone which is exactly what art does. Really transformed them, all those participants in that artistic experiment. Science is such a monastic discipline. Scientists are incredibly focused, incredibly directed. So when an artist comes along, it really disrupts that focus. It brings them a touch of magic, as well as the outside world, and really transforms their perceptions of the world around them.
Speaker 2 [00:09:24] And was that always successful or was it sometimes some scientists just couldn't be moved?
Ariane Koek [00:09:34] There are always scientists who don't get moved by a piece of art, who have a different way of looking at the world as well. I mean, you know, everybody's different. But what really always strikes me is how sometimes scientists realize that they have such a strange perception of art. One day, one of the scientists said to me, where is the artist's work of art? I don't understand why it's not here. And I said, oh, but he's only been here for a week. And he went, but where is art? And I say, but how long did your experiment take to make? And he said, 15 years. I said precisely. So why should an artist create something within a week? You're both discoverers, you're both explorers, and you both do it at your own time scales.
Speaker 2 [00:10:34] So what's the ultimate benefit about bringing art and science together? Besides for the individual or scientist who happens to be there, if there's something large, I think you're going for something bigger, right, in the world.
Ariane Koek [00:10:51] Oh, hmm, really? Oh, I don't know.
Speaker 2 [00:10:53] But maybe it's a way, it's maybe a model for, you know, for bringing people together.
Ariane Koek [00:10:59] Um, I think, yeah. For me I suppose what is so important about art and science coming together is they are both ways of humans exploring the world and they're both the basis of what it is to be a human. So when you get down to that basics and you crash and collide it together, you create new dimensions of thinking, being and of the imagination. And you get down to the source of creativity as well. Because science is just as creative as art. It's just we've basically pushed. We're looking at science as creative out of the window. That came with the European Enlightenment, with the denigration of alchemy, which was the founding principle of the natural sciences. And I think when you bring art and science together, again, you return to that magic. You return to the transcendent possibility of going even further into the mysteries of existence.
Speaker 2 [00:12:18] You've talked about, I'd like to double down on that because you talked about imagination and you've related to science that there's been kind of a hiving off of keeping imagination in bay a bit.
Speaker 3 [00:12:33] Hmm
Speaker 2 [00:12:33] if you kind of want to talk about that a little bit more.
Ariane Koek [00:12:40] So the role of the imagination of science is something which is a kind of hidden secret. It's been pushed into a box and locked up. Although we've had people like Richard Feynman, for example, talking about how he used the bongo drums to really accelerate his thinking, or Albert Einstein often went into his dreams to think about the theory of relativity, was known for playing the violin as a break. Break in his working process. But we've kind of pushed our understanding of imagination having a crucial role in science. And it does have a crucial roll in science because it's the way we go further than where we are at the moment. I mean it's that thing we have as humans. Imagination is the key of what it is to be human. And you can't really push it out of the way. And science does dream further through imagination, and then enacts it and tests it down on Earth.
Speaker 2 [00:13:49] And do you think that artists, hold on a second, do you see Watermelon? No, no, it's okay. I think we're okay, but I wanted to break.
Speaker 3 [00:14:05] Mm, mm, mm.
Speaker 2 [00:14:09] Okay, I mean, just fine. Good? Yeah. Um, I'm going to talk about, oh, I know what it was, my namesake, Luis Alvarez Gomez. There's a quote that turned up in one of our research things, and I haven't seen anybody else say it. I don't know if you agree. Talking about art and science, our objectives are very different. Our paths are similar. We experience inspiration, passion, and frustration. But science is inevitable. Art is fragile. Without Einstein, it may have taken many, many years and many people working on it. We still have come up with these theories. If Beethoven had died at age five, we would not have the synopsis. Art is not repeatable.
Ariane Koek [00:14:54] Art is not repeatable.
Speaker 2 [00:14:55] In the sense that like without Beethoven it's like nobody would have come necessarily. You wouldn't put Beethoven together with 12 different composers. It's not based on an inexorable law of the universe which presumably... Hmm, oh yeah.
Ariane Koek [00:15:08] Hmm. Oh yeah. Oh yes, it's that. Yeah, I know where he's coming from.
Speaker 2 [00:15:13] Do you want to talk about it? Because we find it really interesting, and nobody else has said it quite the same way.
Ariane Koek [00:15:20] Hmm, yes, I know what he's saying there, okay, yes. Yes, there's an inevitability about science because what science is doing is going out and discovering what nature is actually choosing to reveal to scientists. So it's inevitable at some point that that knowledge will be shown or that a scientist will discover something in nature. And what always strikes me is how humble scientists are about that. That they always say that nature is just choosing to reveal us something. However, art is different because it's so driven by the ego and the individual that you can't trace that. You can't say that an artist is necessarily going to be standing on giants' shoulders like Newton. Newton said about science. It could go in any direction. So it's erratic, it's fragile. It's not, yeah it's spontaneous, it's much more spontaneous.
Speaker 2 [00:16:39] So what does that tell us about the artist's role in the world?
Ariane Koek [00:16:43] I think artists' role in the world is to be disruptors, to be reflectors as well of society, to be magicians as well, to bring that touch of magic back into logic and intellect and to disrupt that so we don't become too head-bound, that we become heart-body-bound as well. And also, they're there to connect us as well, connect us with each other through the senses and sensibilities. And for a scientist, what they are doing is looking for knowledge and ways of knowing and connecting those pieces of intellect together. So they're two very different trajectories.
Speaker 2 [00:17:36] Do you feel that in our Western culture, you know, advisedly, but there's a feeling that science is important and art is somewhat, you now, extra frivolous?
Speaker 3 [00:17:49] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [00:17:50] And certainly in terms of the educational system and how people are raised as it were.
Ariane Koek [00:17:59] In the 21st century, science really has become the dominant form. It's got economic power. It's also got the power of apparent certainty of finding out the truth of things, even though as we know that truth is replaceable infinitely by new truths which come along. But it's dominating things to the point that art is being pushed out. And I think that's partly why art and science collisions are happening, because art has gone towards science because it's powerful in terms of economics, but also because it is forging new ways of knowing. So art is feeding off that. So that's one of the sources of this kind of acceleration of art science engagements which have been accelerating even further. I mean in the last two years there have been six hundred new art science initiatives alone and equally there are big science laboratories are now increasingly engaging with art and creating their own contemporary art programs. So they see value in that, in terms of the way they can engage with society as a whole. And they're moving much more towards thinking about a holistic way of looking at the world than a reduced way of look at the worlds. So they're actually expanding and becoming what I have called cultural generators. So they are really changing. So science laboratories are not just science anymore.
Speaker 2 [00:19:52] Art seems to have the ability, it really feeds off of new stuff, I mean that seems to be, if somebody, and tell me if you're wrong, tell me I'm wrong, but you know, if somebody develops something new, there's a new discovery, there is an artist right there ready to work into their hearts.
Ariane Koek [00:20:12] Yes, I mean science offers so many possibilities to artists and such great feeding material. It's incredible in terms of what it offers and the technologies which come out of the science. So for example Iris van Herpen, she came to CERN and learnt about quantum foam. Was really fascinated by that, about these tiny, tiny little fluctuations in space-time. And out of that she created a whole series of dresses which turn space inside out and that was part of her Aeroform collection. And she's somebody who really does feed off the new thinking within science as well as the new think in technology and even pushing technology. So for example, Iris van Herpen was told, oh no, you cannot make a dress out of water, which looks like a water splash, that's beyond us. All the technologists said to her, that is beyond us, and she went, right, we're going to do it. We're going push that extra mile and we will do it, and she did, and she created this incredible dress which looks a splash of water going across a woman's body.
Speaker 2 [00:21:34] No, we have lots of opportunity to interview and film artists who use science in their practice. Much harder to find scientists who use art in their work. We talked about this on the Zoom. It seems very imbalanced.
Speaker 3 [00:21:56] Hmm
Ariane Koek [00:21:59] Hmm. The imbalance between art and science, the number of artists who engage with science. Oh, God, no, that's not.
Speaker 2 [00:22:14] What you talked about was that basically it's the impossibility because of the, how do you measure? You don't have to have an incredible longitudinal experiment, but I have to tell you we took a lot of comfort from you telling us that because we've been looking for scientists who use art in their scientific practice, you know.
Ariane Koek [00:22:34] Yeah, they don't.
Speaker 2 [00:22:35] They don't, okay, so just tell us why they don't. It's not an even-steven exchange.
Ariane Koek [00:22:42] Yes, it's fascinating how still there are not many scientists who engage really fully with art and obviously that's all changed because of the European Enlightenment, it was very different before then when art and science were much more muddled up and you could be either or and swim between them. Now, to find a scientist who is also... Practicing well-known artists is still incredibly different, difficult, but as those barriers break down, which they are in the 21st century, I think we'll see more of that. Though it's kind of ironic because if you look at history, if you looked at the history of art, there have been, yeah, there have been scientists who have been artists too. So if you look at, for example, the founder of Neuroscience, Santiago, I knew I was going to forget his name.
Speaker 2 [00:23:47] Santiago Ramon y Cajal, I believe is his name.
Ariane Koek [00:23:54] Yes, it is. It's on my phone.
Speaker 2 [00:23:55] Okay.
Ariane Koek [00:23:56] That's why I put it down there. You can't look down. I know.
Speaker 2 [00:23:59] So just pick it up, for example, if you take the founder note.
Ariane Koek [00:24:05] So, for example, you take the founder of neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Quijal. He was extraordinary because he was actually an incredibly gifted artist. He drew the neurons and all the different cells which he had observed through the microscope and drew them out into thousands and thousands of very detailed drawings, which inspire artists and everyone to this day because of their delicacy and their extraordinary visual connectiveness. When you look at them and you can see tributaries, you can tree, you can resonate so strongly.
Speaker 2 [00:24:45] And if you go back centuries, you can see artists informing science, right, and medical illustrations and things like that. I mean, you know, we are interested in how they were intertwined for so long.
Ariane Koek [00:25:02] Yeah, well, one of the basic roots of art and science is art has been handmade into science. It's always been the illustrator of science. It's a very, very, old tradition. So, for example, you get these incredible anatomical women which were used for anatomy lessons. They were huge waxwork figures, life-size waxworks figures, which you can... Unpack and unpeel the intestines and heart. And they were used as props and illustrations about the human body when it was actually against religious laws to use them in Italy, for example. So there's this very, very long tradition and that thread goes all the way up until the present day. It's also the source of many misconceptions between scientists thinking about art. They think it's only... For illustrating their science or being the handmaiden, but artists so much more.
Speaker 2 [00:26:08] I'm Why is, I'm going to go on to just a little bit of a different topic here, why is work between art and science, artists and science is so important today? And I'm thinking about things like ecological calamity out there and to what extent are collaborations between art and science going to, you know, can they save us? Can these collaborations save us or at point in that point in a direction that gives us some hope.
Ariane Koek [00:26:46] God, I can hear my cat. Can you hear it? Ha ha ha ha!
Speaker 2 [00:26:53] Ha, ha, ha.
Ariane Koek [00:26:55] I can hear him meowing, he's just trying to join in.
Speaker 2 [00:27:01] Will it be quiet if it was out?
Ariane Koek [00:27:04] No, no, if he comes out here he will take over the place.
Speaker 2 [00:27:10] Okay, we're going to shut the door.
Ariane Koek [00:27:13] Ha ha ha ha
Speaker 2 [00:27:16] No, it should make a difference. It will make a...
Ariane Koek [00:27:17] It will make a difference, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:27:19] Sound-wise, it should make a difference. Hopefully that doesn't change the light.
Ariane Koek [00:27:29] Mm-hmm. Mm. Oh, yes. What were you doing?
Speaker 2 [00:27:32] Well, collaboration. Is it going to save us? Is it relevant? Or is it just a clever artist exploring their own egotistical, in the best sense, interests?
Ariane Koek [00:27:50] I think what we're seeing now in the 21st century is art becoming much more purposeful. It's being challenged and because it hasn't been as powerful as science, it's being challenged and it's becoming much purposeful and actually now is merging with design. So it's become less ego driven and much more solution driven. It's looking at the world, looking at a world which is full of emergencies, whether it's climate emergency. Whether it's Black Lives Matters, whether it is inequality for resources, for example, and it's now coming up with solutions. So artists are coming in as people who are looking for solutions with scientists. So I think you are seeing a very major shift in art and science because of the emergency, the state of emergency the world is now in. And it will become even more accelerated over the next few years.
Speaker 2 [00:28:51] And I guess there's another kind of the devil's advocate view is that, well, this is all very nice, but Arnold artists just sort of slapping on a kind of a creative, a scientific aura to their work to give it some sort of what appears to be gravitas or higher purpose in the same way that, you know, they might go to India and come back and put Ayurveda All right, baby, smooth it out. You know, precepts on your work. It gives it some tone, but it's not really scientific. I don't know if you've had any of that complaint.
Ariane Koek [00:29:28] Hmm. I haven't actually. No, I haven t had that complaint. But what I do think is, yeah, no, I havent had that complain.
Speaker 2 [00:29:39] I have to tell you, we have somebody who, he's an engineer, but he was like, oh, sir, they just like bring a bunch of dancers in and have them dance around, you know? I mean, it's an exaggeration, but it's just this belief of like, what do I need this, what do we need these artists coming in here for, they're just kind of using science as a, you know, it is kind of the aura of science. Let's service it a way. Yeah, because the science is, because it's somewhat ineffable and... Worthy of our awe that they're sort of leeching off of that, and it's not really, it's not really scientific. It's kind of like, yes, you can say it's scientific or it takes scientific data, you know, to generate the art, but it's like, so what? It's still art that nobody, that nobody who didn't go to art school understands.
Ariane Koek [00:30:28] Hmm. Yeah, hmm. That's the way it goes everybody's different as I said so they're different ways it's like anything yeah I would say that's like anything I mean yeah there are some people who yeah
Speaker 2 [00:30:56] It's just, I have to say that sometimes it's quite beautiful or I think they raise interesting questions and sometimes, and we have to evaluate this and we're not always the best people to do that, that it really is. The link between that the fact that they can take some scientific data and apply it to their music or their painting or whatever that's using some algorithm that got generated by the Mars rover it's like okay but what are you what are you telling me what's this about other than just another another source of something that you can use in your art and it sort of sounds better than saying i just did something, you know, random.
Ariane Koek [00:31:41] Yes, I can see that criticism, and it depends on the artist, doesn't it? Some artists. So the artist Ryoji Akida, for example, is extraordinary in what he does, in that he engaged with the data at CERN. In fact, he found it un-engageable because it was so huge, even he couldn't deal with it. So he created pieces which were kind of spin-offs from it. But yeah, I think there are examples of that, I think, of what you're saying. But... Ha ha ha.
Speaker 2 [00:32:30] It's funny because, yes, it's like art, people have their own opinions and they can't...
Ariane Koek [00:32:36] Yeah, and there are people who do go along and go on a shopping list with it.
Speaker 2 [00:32:41] Well, some people want very literal art. They want to understand what he's doing. So they understand how it's going to motivate people, which is not always true. The most obvious art doesn't always motivate people. Yes. You know, as you know. No, it's always a question.
Ariane Koek [00:32:57] It is a question and certainly when I was at CERN there was a Nobel Prize winning scientist who said art is just mediumatics, that's all it is and I don't see why we should be doing it. Which I could understand.
Speaker 2 [00:33:13] Because you want to put him in the collider. I mean, I guess it worked for him, you know? Actually, let's get to this, because you talked about playfulness as part of human imagination. Where does playfulness fall into all this creativity?
Ariane Koek [00:33:33] I think playfulness is absolutely essential to creativity. To play, to push things to their limits, to laugh, to have joy, to almost dance in your mind and your body with something creates a whole different realm of imaginative possibilities. So... Getting Bill Fontaner to play with the Large Hadron Collider and turn it into the world's largest musical instrument. That shows you the joy of playfulness and creativity. I think creativity is working and playing with lots of different possibilities, chasing lots of differing avenues, whether they're in terms of materials or whether they are in terms ideas. And then mushing them all up together and just following your instincts and intuition to make something out of all that mushiness, that crazy mushiness.
Speaker 2 [00:34:47] When you talk about mushing it all together, it's a wonderful visual of imagining Play-Doh or something like that. And Play-doh brings me to like four-year-olds sitting around making things out of clay and not caring about the rules, you know, just doing stuff. And something seems to happen that when we're children, there seems to be a certain amount of just natural creativity that somehow slowly, and most people, not all, sort of drips away a bit.
Ariane Koek [00:35:21] So I always say that when we're children we learn to walk by falling down and by getting lost we learn where we are and as adults we lose that ability to be easy with falling down or getting lost and that's precisely what we should do and that is the source of creativity.
Speaker 2 [00:35:44] And failure, the role of failure.
Ariane Koek [00:35:47] Failure is completely... Ugh, starlight!
Speaker 3 [00:35:55] It's the cat.
Ariane Koek [00:35:57] Um... Failure is absolutely critical to human existence. It's how we go further, it's how we learn to walk, for example, by falling and failing to walk properly as kids. So failure can never be underestimated. I created, actually, Arts at CERN on the principle that take an artist and take them totally out of their comfort zone. Get them lost. Within a science they know nothing about which they do not understand and then they have to go back to the basis of what it is to be a child again, to fail, to fall down, to encounter the new and the impossible and that is the source of creativity.
Speaker 2 [00:36:55] What about the idea of
Ariane Koek [00:36:56] I've forgotten all of that.
Speaker 2 [00:36:57] Well, yeah, that was good. That was great. I'd forgotten my belief in it. Oh, you'd forgotten? Oh, oh, oh. Sorry, I was just like, oh yeah. Yes, we got it. Oh my God, we've got it! I forgot it. This is wonderful. It's a very good way for us to end our staining with a really solid issue, I have to tell you. The blank slate. We've asked a lot of people about the blank slate, so talk about the black slate. Everybody thinks, wow, the black slate! I would love to have a black slate for my creativity, but it doesn't quite work.
Ariane Koek [00:37:35] The blank slate always is held up as the kind of ultimate joy for a creative person, but is it really? I would argue that you have to have a balance of freedoms and constraints. You have the ultimate freedom, for example, to create something, but the constraint of time, for example, materials in order to make something. Otherwise you could be chasing dreams forever. I actually created Arts at CERN as a balance between freedom and constraints. I said the artists could do anything they liked, so there was a big blank slate, but equally I knew if that blank slate was there they would just chase dreams forever, so I put in constraints. They had to give public lectures for example. They had to describe their creative process during the time they were making work. They had meet the scientist for a set number of times during the week, for example. And those constraints actually build in then the generative possibilities of actually making work So, yeah, the blank slate looks great, but it could go on forever. Art and science are basically two forms of human creativity. One, they're both founded on the principle of exploring what is in the world and why we exist. But they do them in completely different ways. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this.
Speaker 2 [00:39:24] That's good. You said it already. We were just trying to get a restake. One other thing which has to do with music.
Ariane Koek [00:39:33] Music.
Speaker 2 [00:39:34] Yeah, we have another, we keep finding physicists who are attracted to jazz and jazz musicians who are attractive to physics. Have you, I don't know if you've ever noticed any of those kind of, um,
Ariane Koek [00:39:47] Yeah, no, there's a complete synergy between physics, for example, and music because they're used to looking for patterns. So you will often find a lot of physicists like Luis Alvarez-Gome, for example. He's a very good musician. He taught himself the piano. Or you look at Fabiola Gennotti, who's the director-general of CERN. She was a pianist at concert level and had to choose between piano and physics. So there's a complete kind of marriage between the two because they're both pattern seeking.
