The Wisconsin Science Festival is taking place in Madison and elsewhere around the state this weekend, and this year’s theme is “curiosity unleashed.”
One of the key presentations will come from Nobel Prize-winning chemist, poet and playwright Roald Hoffman, along with artist Vivian Torrence, who will be holding talks during the festival about their “Chemistry Imagined” project, a science and art collaboration.
The pair met at a resident artists program founded by another renowned chemist, Carl Djerassi, who liked to bring different kinds of artists together -- from choreographers and musicians to writers and painters. Hoffman said he immediately recognized narrative images concerning science in Torrance’s collages, and asked that she create pieces to represent his poetry and prose on chemistry.
Hoffman said feels there is art in chemistry in several different ways.
“There is the skill, ingenuity, and imagination of making molecules, but there is also simple beauty in the molecules themselves -- both in their external appearance, the colors of substances, and crystals, but even in the smokes, bangs, and stinks of chemical transformations,” he said. “Perhaps, the most interesting thing about chemistry, it’s about the change, and that is something that’s inherently artistic.”
When asked about why scientists don’t talk about beauty and art in their research papers, Hoffman laments that it was not always the case.
“The language of science for what were good reasons when they were developed in 19th Century dealt out expressions of emotion, quality, opinions, and tried to report all the facts that could be verified by other people, but it lost something in the process because it’s human beings who deal with those facts,” explained Hoffman. “And now 200 years down the line, we have a dry subject whose insensitivity to human emotion makes people think that the people who do it have to emotion.”
Perhaps through continued collaborations between scientists and artists, like the one between Hoffman and Terrence, this won’t continue to be the norm.
“I have been in science for almost fifty years, and yet when I open up a journal and see a new molecule, it’s still wonderful,” said Hoffman.
The collages that emerged between Torrence and Hoffman, "Chemistry Imagined: Correlations", are currently on display at the Gallery 1308 in Union South on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus until Oct. 1.
