Towards the Third Culture: The Co‑existince of Art, Science and Technology

The “Third Culture” category refers to a seminal John Brockman book from 1995, in which the author examines the work of several renowned scientists who were communicating their new ideas directly to the general public (Brockman in return refers to Charles Percy Snow’s book from 1959 entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, which illustrates conflict between humanities and science). This book contains the proceedings of the homonymous conference that was held in May 2011 at the Artus Court in Gdańsk (Poland) and organized by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński. He affirms in the introduction that “art can be, and frequently is, a domain and method of scientific research,” and he fosters the role of media art as one of the main interlocutors with science, for its proven research attitudes. The conference itself focused on the mutual relations between the three indicated domains of human creativity. The mutual roles of art and science (diverting sense and rigorously proving it at the same time) are constantly explored in the selected essays. They address a wide range of scientific disciplines (from engineering to biology, from mathematics to optics) and what they have in common is somehow hinted at in the introduction, in that they all establish a dialogue between disciplines, either by connecting diverse artworks by different artists or by digging brightly into media archaeology. These dialogues constitute an essential selection, illustrating art as embracing science in its pure (diverted, further innovated or re‑engineered) processes.