ARTFULLY SCIENCE
Science matters in life, and it gains traction in our collective consciousness through art.
Art and science are usually viewed as worlds apart, knowledge domains quite distinct from each other. The arts and humanities are seen as intuitive and subjective and employ a language that delights in ambiguity. The sciences, on the other, are perceived to be logical and objective and keep an eye on certainty or an approximation of it. Such an antithetical view–reified in many platforms–continues to inform the mindset of many of us.
Although trudging different routes in ways of knowing, art and science thrive in the arena of discovery, wonderment, and imagination. It is in this sense that both knowledge domains bring us to what Alan Lightman refers to as “unsettled joy”. Such joy brings both scientists and artists to experience creative tension, the wellspring of creative praxis.
UPLB’s year-ender exhibit loops in artists attempting to explore the nexus of art and science by rendering artfully in various mediums and techniques certain scientific concepts, laws, and principles. The result is not only a softening of the rigidity of science but also fluidity in rendering a subject.
Hopefully, “Artfully Science” would succeed not only in making us better understand the science disciplines but also in appreciating art as the medium through which we have a more textured perception of reality. (jryapo)
New World is an image that I created to fulfill my curiosity about us, the Universe, and what exactly lies out there, using an eight-photo panorama of the Milky Way Galaxy and a single photo of the foreground, taken at Mt. Pulag Summit, Kabayan, Benguet. I hope to arouse the mind of the viewers as well, and show how insignificant the Earth is compared to the entirety of the Universe. We are merely a speck of dust in our Galaxy, let alone the entire Observable Universe.
To quote Carl Sagan, "On it, everyone you ever heard of... The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust."
Being able to capture the night sky and our Galaxy in its full glory is one of the most fulfilling things as a photographer, as an artist, and as a human being searching for an answer.