Reflections on Public Art + Science Reasoning

The art/science nexus has historically been approached through a challenge of aesthetics versus mathematics, and processes of knowledge production. Notably absent in this debate are the social sciences that explore human experience and perception. In particular, what has not been addressed clearly in the literature is how reasoning about the human experience can be provoked when people encounter content that does not assert itself as neatly defined in either an art or science discourse. By reflecting on one case study of a public art/science installation, we explore new fields of knowledge production. Our exploration found that the broader function of memory, metaphor, juxtaposition, and hypothesis generation were key to advancing public reasoning with science information. This study of the lived experience with an ambiguous installation that did not declare itself as either art or science provoked reasoning processes that required viewers to consider their relationship to the parts and the whole, to both question what they knew and understood from the work, and to question how science information is part of their lives. In doing so, we uncovered distinct paths of science reasoning once the viewer defined the stimulus as art. We were also led to reflect on the history of informal science learning pedagogy.

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