By Ngai Kuo Xian
“What is Art to Us? Aesthetics in Theory and Practice.” That is one of USP’s newest courses, which looks at answering the question, “What is Art?”, and aims to provide its students with an understanding of the nature of art and beauty in the humanities. Essentially, it’s an introduction to Aesthetics. The course will also look into the relationship between beauty and creativity. In the first few weeks, we looked at how different disciplines investigate the same problem but from different perspectives; and more often than not, this investigation requires an interdisciplinary approach to achieve a creative and innovative answer.
In order to further understand this, we made visits to the Art Science Museum where the class considered the amalgamation of art and science, disciplines that people often view as polar opposites. The ArtScience Late event, Resonance, and the Collider exhibition both presented by the Art Science Museum were the two events where we witnessed the outcomes of these two fields.
Resonance, performed by Randolf Arriola, makes use of Live Looping, a unique music-making method. Using dedicated hardware devices such as loopers, the artist’s voice and guitar were recorded in loops and played back in real time to form compositions of harmony and melody. When questioned about the relation of technology to his performance, Mr. Arriola commented about how the guitar itself “is a piece of technology made of wood and six strings”, which demonstrated to me how technology, the practical application of science, has always been used to expand the limits of music creation and of course, was a key component to the awe-inspiring performance that the class had the opportunity to enjoy.
The Collider exhibition at the Art Science Museum presents the results of the work of 10,000 men and women from across the globe, as well as the journey to unveil the fundamental building blocks of our universe.
The exhibition began with explaining the workings of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where particles are hurtled at unimaginable speeds around the LHC’s 27km ring tunnel and gradually accelerate towards the speed of light. When the particles converge at one of the four detector sites positioned along the LHC, a collision occurs. New particles will then be formed from the energy created by this collision, the Higgs boson being one of them. This particle is explained to be the final puzzle piece in the Standard Model, a theory that scientists have proposed to define and explain the fundamental particles that make the universe.
“Gift of Mass” installation showing a visual projection of the interaction of particles (the students) in the Higgs field (Photo: Ariel Quek)
The art in this exhibition really comes in when one sees how the science was presented and explained to the general audience. The use of an audio visual projection and the “Gift of Mass” art installation were some examples which captivated and deepened our interests during the exhibition.
Image of the LHC’s interior
While the discovery of the Higgs boson is likely to be more significant than I could comprehend, what really stood out during the exhibition was the sheer scale of the experiment required to discover something so contrastingly small. Beyond that, it was the leap of faith that 10,000 people took and the pure inquisitiveness that drove them to go onboard with this experiment, especially since most of them were unsure of what to expect when operating the LHC.
So, art and science really can come together to bring spectacular results. More than that, this reminds me of what USP embodies – the programme seeks to bring students from various disciplines together to bring out the greater in us.
