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The
human species is different from other species by virtue of its awareness
of its own unique and priceless power of creation. Although words like
“branch,” “field,” “specialty,” and many
others besides, are employed in an effort to categorize the various
activities of research, the great discoveries of human history still
clearly show the openness that characterizes the search for knowledge.
For many years, the Canada Council has supported those who fulfil our
collective need to explore and who, with unbridled imagination, move
beyond the limits of reality.
Ero's Gauntlet, by Lily Yung, hand
ornament in coated copper wire, glass beads and ribbon. Photo: Lily Yung.
Discovering Collaborators
 
From left: Les bacchantes II - lecture
vidéographique, conceived and staged by Robert Faguy. Produced
by ARBO CYBER, model by Lucie Fradet, video by Mario Villeneuve. Pictured
are Réjean Vallée and Jean Bélanger. Re:Positioning
Fear, Relational Architecture 3, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, shown in
Austria. Photo: Jeorg Mohr.
The arts and the sciences decidedly share a common interest in research.
In the 1970s, the Council's Explorations program was wide open to interdisciplinarity.
In 1980, in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology,
the Council offered its first residency program for artists. Now, 24 years
later, the Council is offering artists in all disciplines key programs
that give them direct access to scientific research centres. And the scientific
community has joined forces with the Council in this decompartmentalization
of the arts and sciences. In the process, the National Research Council
Canada (NRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
and the Canada Council for the Arts have become leading international
players in the creation of innovative programs developed within the vast
boundaries of the arts and sciences. These unique joint projects have
attracted the attention of other organizations: the Research Council of
National Academies in the United States, for example, has praised the
exemplary and visionary character of the Council's programs. This mutual
enrichment of the arts and sciences enhances the creative and intellectual
power of individuals and makes a not insignificant contribution to the
development of our societies.
 
From left: Out of Thin Air,
by Alan Storey. Installation detail: panel of copper, refrigerant tubing,
melting frost forming the word dream in six languages. Surrey Arts Centre,
B.C. Eros and Wonder (still), by Bruce Elder. Shot on 16 mm film,
each image was transferred onto digital video, subjected to random digital
image processing (program designed by the artist), modifying the colours,
reshot on 16 mm film, and developed by hand at very high temperature to
create effect called reticulation.
The Art of Research
In 2002, the Canada Council signed a five-year partnership agreement
with the NRC, designed to nurture artistic and scientific culture. The
first program stemming from this collaboration, Artists-in-Residence for
Research (AIRes), received proposals touching on astrophysics, plant biology,
chemical processes, integrated manufacturing systems, smart materials,
immersible technology and marine science. The $150,000 fellowships awarded
under this program give artists the opportunity to spend two-year research
residencies in one of the NRC's 19 research institutes throughout Canada.
One of the fellowship recipients in the first competition, visual artist
Alan Storey from Vancouver, has joined researchers at the NRC's Innovation
Centre to create a work portraying NRC's innovative research in the field
of fuel cells. Media artist Catherine Richards of Ottawa began a residency
in 2003 at the Institute for Information Technology, where she and other
researchers will explore the “willing suspension of disbelief”
while developing and evaluating new modes of interaction in virtual reality
and collaborative virtual environments.
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| Charged Hearts (detail), by
Catherine Richards. Cathode ray tube, glass jar, heart made of transparent
material. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. |
In 2003, two other fellowship recipients - multidisciplinary artist Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer of Montreal and visual artist Lily Yung of London, Ontario
- took up residence, respectively, at the Institute for Research in Construction
(IRC) and the Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute (IMTI).
These host institutions enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of these
resident artists. IMTI Executive Director Georges Salloum says that the
research program proposed by Lily Yung “poses a challenge for researchers
to think beyond the normal confines of individual disciplines, and to
seek new opportunities.” The deadline for the next competition is
June 1, 2004 and both the artistic and scientific communities are eagerly
looking forward to the announcement of the results.
On the Cutting
Edge of Art
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| Ogaki City (Dec. 5, 2002),
by Luc Courchesne, excerpt from Journal panoscopique (Oct.
2000 - March 2001), digital image, collection of the artist. |
For some people, and they're not necessarily wrong, technology equates
with science. For others, and they're not wrong either, technology means
working tools. Seeing all the potentially rich implications in both these
statements, the Canada Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada (NSERC) launched a program that aims to bring
together those who develop technology with those who use it to create.
The New Media Initiative (a component of the Research and Production Grants
to New Media and Audio Artists Program) supports joint projects undertaken
by media artists and scientists or engineers. The projects funded to date
combine design and creativity with new technology, and provide an eloquent
glimpse into the program's creative potential.
Artists Luc Courchesne and Nicholas Reeves, along with scientist Sébastien
Roy, plan to create an immersible, interactive installation that will
focus on the evolving dialogue that develops in an inflatable sphere between
human visitors and robots capable of perception, communication and independent
action. The project's hypothesis is that, in such circumstances, complex
behaviour patterns emerge not from simple exchanges but as a result of
interrelations between individuals from worlds that are as different as
possible from each other - worlds both real and virtual. With the participation
of artists and researchers in three countries (the Société
des arts technologiques in Montreal, the Centre national de la recherche
scientifique in Toulouse, France and the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico, U.S.), this project promises to have a major and original
impact on our understanding of human behaviour. The same goes for a project
by multimedia artist Bruce Elder and researcher Dr. Ling Guan, both of
Toronto, which will explore the sometimes elusive logic, or intuition,
by which film and video makers choose certain processing methods they
see as appropriate to particular images.
The interaction between arts and science is evolving at a frenetic pace,
manifesting itself in the widest range of forms. Since 1999, the Canada
Council's Inter-Arts program has offered a “New Artistic Practices”
category for projects that disrupt established conceptions of art and
also open up vast new areas for exploration. The Council has also set
up an ArtScience task force to observe such emerging practices and nurture
their explosively creative mixtures . . . and remain in the arts-science
vanguard.
Banner (above): Body Movies, Relational
Architecture 6, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Large-scale interactive installation
featuring over 1,200 giant portraits revealed inside the shadows of passers-by.
Installed in Rotterdam, Lisbon, Linz, Liverpool, Duisburg; to be seen in
New York and at the Athens Olympics. Photo: Lozano-Hemmer. |