A Centenary of On Growth and Form: Celebrating connections between
art and science
Catherine Jolivette
Missouri State University
2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy
Wentworth Thompson’s celebrated book, On Growth and Form, a text that has stimulated and enthralled
artists for a century with its sophisticated writing and elegant illustrations. This groundbreaking volume
draws upon mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, and philosophy to explore the geometrical
transformations, physical mechanisms, and dynamic patterns of growth in plants and animals.
Over the last 100 years, Thompson’s study of morphology has inspired an eclectic range of pioneering
thinkers, including scientists (for example Stephen Jay Gould), architects (like Mies van der Rohe), and
mathematicians (such as Alan Turing), and artists ranging from Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, to Richard Hamilton and Nigel Henderson, who staged their own ‘Growth and
Form’ exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. More recently, historians, such as Lynn
Gamwell, have investigated the intertwining relationships between art, mathematics, science, and
philosophy, while contemporary artists, including British sculptor Ian Kiaer and Venezuelan artist Gego,
continue to respond to Thompson’s work.
In the spirit of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, this session explores connections between the visual arts and
science across the span of the last 100 years. Papers in this session address both the discursive context in
which Thompson wrote On Growth and Form and the reception and influence of the book from the time of
its publication to the present day, as scholars employ cross-disciplinary approaches to engage with
exchanges of ideas across Europe, Japan, and North America.
Brandon Taylor (University of Southampton / Oxford University)
On Vitalism, Growth and Form
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form was published at a time of intense interest among biologists in
growth-patterns and the cycles of life. Influential writings by Otto Lehmann, Hans Driesch, Ernst Haeckel
and others had recently attempted to define natural shape, but also nature-in-motion, that is, life itself.
Meanwhile, so-called ‘vitalist’ philosophies of experience were revealing significant differences between
quantitative and qualitative descriptions of the world – still evident in the divide between ‘science’ and
‘art’. What is the relation between D’Arcy Thompson’s physics of the natural world and contemporaneous
philosophies of the organism – his focus on lifeless rather than living matter, on nature measured rather
than apprehended? Where does D’Arcy Thompson’s celebrated claim that ‘the harmony of the world is
made manifest in Form and Number’ stand with those for whom ‘form’ is never still, for whom ‘number’
cannot measure the experience of change, and for whom ‘harmony’ was unlikely to capture the facts of
violence, monstrosity or war?
Kelly Freeman (University College London)
Growing Bones – D’Arcy Thompson and the formation of the skeleton concept
In 1917 the polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published his compendious monograph On Growth and
Form, a comprehensive and influential contribution to the study of 20th-century zoological morphology. In
his eighth chapter titled ‘On Form and Mechanical Efficiency’, a curious series of illustrations appear: the
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schematics for several iron bridges flanked by the skeletons of a fossilised bison and a stegosaurus. Taken
together, these images invite a comparison between the materials of iron and bone with regards to their
‘form’ and ‘mechanical efficiency’, as addressed in the chapter’s title. The grouping visually aligns the two
materials, an association that is supported by the chapter’s accompanying text and the numerous analogies
made between the various architectural skeletons of bone and iron.
The mechanical correlation between ‘skeleton’ and ‘bridge’ is continued in the subsequent ten illustrations,
presented in abridged levels of abstracted detail, which lead the reader from a bone-like-iron simile to a
bone-as-iron perspective. These illustrations are an attempt at converging morphology, with its descriptive
approach to the visual appearance of organic entities, with a more mathematical and mechanical method.
In light of D’Arcy Thompson’s metaphorical and material skeletons, and his reduction of the morphological
to the diagrammatical, this paper presents the skeleton as a conceptual model of thought from which new
abstract forms were generated. Through the transformation of material skeletons into an abstracted
framework, D’Arcy Thompson laid the foundations for a ‘skeleton concept’ that would permeate the fields
of art, architecture and digital-image processing for the next 100 years.
Pat Simpson (School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire)
1917: Revolution, Art, and Darwinism
1917 was undoubtedly a significant year regarding the relationship between art and bio-science in both
Britain and Russia. It was marked not only by the publication of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth
and Form, but also by the transformation of the Moscow ‘Museum of Evolutionary History’ into the ‘State
Darwin Museum’, a change necessitated by the successful Bolshevik Revolution, October 1917.
The museum was founded in 1907 at the Women’s Higher Courses Institute of Moscow University, by the
ornithologist and amateur taxidermist, Professor Aleksandr Kots. It was initially based on his own collection
of specimens, augmented by taxidermy works by Fedor Fedulov and art works by the otherwise avantgarde painter/sculptor Vasilii Vatagin. These objects were all used as teaching aids before and after the
Revolution, much as Wentworth had done with his own collection. Another marginal connection with
Wentworth was Kots’ initial inclination towards a quasi-Lamarckian approach to evolution, something that
was shared with many contemporary Russian/Soviet Darwinists.
Kot’s vision for the museum’s growth, expressed in 1914, was that art – particularly painting and sculpture
(including taxidermy), should provide exciting visual, and largely text-free contexts for visitor’s experience
of the collection and its explication. The post-Revolutionary re-designation of the museum as state
property, potentially offered opportunities to expand, not only spatially, but in terms of the use of art, as
defined above.
This paper sets out to explore and celebrate the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on the artistic
aspirations of the nascent Soviet State Darwin Museum in the 1920s.
Yang Chen (Central Saint Martins, UAL)
Staging the Integration of Art and Machine: The 5th Experimental Workshop Presentation by Jikken Kobo
Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) was officially established in 1951 and active until 1958 in Tokyo
under the guidance of poet and art critic Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–79). The 14 members of Jikken Kobo
reflected the interdisciplinarity of humanity and science disciplines, including painting, music composition,
photography, poetry, lighting design and engineering.
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In this paper, I present ‘The 5th Experimental Workshop Presentation’ as an outstanding example for a
discussion of the possibility of using the machine in both artistic and curatorial creation, and that an
exhibition is not only an experiment in combining humanities disciplines but also scientific ones.
In September 1953, Jikken Kobo organised ‘The 5th Experimental Workshop Presentation’ at Daiichi Seimei
Hall, Tokyo. In this exhibition/presentation, members initially used the prototype of automatic slide
projectors as the primary medium for their artistic practices, showing that machines could also be a part of
artworks. Jikken Kobo’s members cleverly combined those projectors with experimental music to form the
presentation on the stage. Following the music compositions, four projections were presented,
accompanying by sound played by the tape recorders. The significance of this presentation is that it
became a laboratory for both art and science: it was the artistic laboratory to experiment with the
integration of art and technology, and the scientific laboratory to detect the newest technological samples.
Cliona O’Dunlaing (University of Essex/Anglia Ruskin University)
The dialectics of entropy and the crystalline in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson’s sculpture, Spiral Jetty (1970) is arguably the most familiar piece of the Earthwork
movement. The sculpture, located at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, shares its name with a film and an essay.
Smithson documented its construction and incorporated sequences in the video and, two years later, his
essay immortalised the making of that film. Since then, images of the earthwork are found on the cover of
several books and collectively the works form the subject of numerous texts.
The black basalt coil is subject to the fluctuating environmental conditions of its site. Jennifer L Roberts’
2004 catalogue essay ‘The Taste of Time: Salt and the Spiral Jetty’ celebrated the spiral’s re-emergence
from below water level after a period of about 30 years. Her essay was illustrated with captivating images
of its rocks entirely encrusted with glistening salt crystals, a consequence of its submersion. These images
could not be further removed from today’s reality of the Spiral Jetty.
In light of this, this paper seeks to look afresh at Spiral Jetty. It will examine the artist’s intentions and posit
two possible opposing scenarios. One that explores entropy and the other which embraces the crystalline,
while considering how these may be synthesised in the context of Smithson’s work.
John R Blakinger (University of Southern California)
Images for Extraterrestrials: Carl Sagan’s Voyager Interstellar Record and Trevor Paglen’s EchoStar XVI
Artefact
In 1977, the scientist Carl Sagan prepared a gleaming, gold-plated copper record for NASA’s two Voyager
spacecraft. The purpose of this interstellar LP was to communicate with intelligent life beyond our solar
system. It contained cheerful greetings and music from Earth, but also a portrait of human civilization in
116 images. The images included everything from photographs of supermarkets to diagrams of mitosis.
They now hurtle through space at incredible speeds; they have travelled further and faster than any other
artefacts of human-made visual culture. In 2012, the artist Trevor Paglen re-created Sagan’s project. He
prepared a gold-plated micro-etched disc for the EchoStar XVI satellite that contained 100 images, most of
which were deeply disturbing: atomic blasts, natural disasters, and depictions of warfare. Paglen’s disc
circles Earth in a lonely geosynchronous orbit, waiting to be discovered by space travellers – or advanced
humans – in a few billion years.
This paper uses new archives, interviews, and original image sources to explore both the science and art of
extraterrestrial communication. Are these projects about aliens, or about us? While Sagan’s image archive
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celebrates a positive vision of enlightenment, Paglen’s artistic intervention negatively critiques the false
hopes of modernity. But I argue that both projects nonetheless reflect an almost religious faith in the
poetics of science and the power of images to cross profound distances – the spans that divide disciplines
but also forms of life, galaxies in space, and the long arc of time between our present and a remote future.
Lucy Winnington (University of Auckland)
Recoding the Stars: The art and science of contemporary cosmography
This paper examines the ways in which contemporary artists have created new forms of cosmography;
blending subjective, artistic interpretation, cartographic methods and astronomical research. Through
direct collaboration and interaction with astronomical institutions, the artworks discussed in the paper
enable an important interchange between astronomy and contemporary visual art, mediated through
mapping. Through processes of translating and recoding astronomical data, this work suggests the capacity
of art to reveal new and interesting ways of conveying and perceiving scientific data; in addition, it
examines the relationships between astronomers and artists, mathematical data and visual cartography,
and processes of communication and interpretation. Furthermore, through the consideration of theoretical
and historical implications of cartography, theories of power, knowledge and subjectivity are addressed in
relation to mapping the universe. Focusing on multimodal examples of stellar cartography, this research
examines how contemporary cosmography attempts to visualise the known, the visible and the luminous
features within the darkness of the unknown and potentially unknowable universe. By depicting the known
within the unknowable through processes of cartography, this work suggests that information can be
delimited and contained, offering more comprehensible perspectives of the immensity of the universe.
Camilla Mørk Røstvik (University of St Andrews)
Contemporary SciArt and Old Power Dynamics
In 2015 a group of women working in SciArt started the campaign #KissMyArs to protest against the maledominated structures in their field. They utilised social media to debate why nine out of 10 of the
important SciArt institution Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica award winners were men. At other contemporary
SciArt events women are also under-represented, despite SciArt being a relatively new institutionalised
field with the potential to break barriers rather than rely on old demographic trends. This paper explores
the campaign #KissMyArs as it relates to contemporary SciArt, comparing and contrasting it to case studies
of SciArt projects such as those at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The paper argues that despite the institutional attempt at
claiming SciArt as a new and refreshing art scene, it is more often than not reinforcing old power dynamics
in both the arts and sciences.
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