This article was published in Varoom January 2011.
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Varoom Lab
Relationships
The Illustrator and the Scientist – The future of the future
By Thomas Barwick
Uncharted Oceans of the Future
Recently I have become interested in the relationship between Illustration and science, in particular predictive illustration, visualizations of the future based on scientific research. I started to ask what it would mean if I worked closely with a scientist from the start of a research project rather than being asked to develop imagery based on conclusions reached at the end of the process. Wandering around the campus at the university where I work, speaking to scientists in passing and latterly in greater depth I began to consider, how can this relationship lead me towards an effective interaction that is more stimulating than the typical transposition of hard data into visual form.
What is the nature of the relationship between the scientist and the illustrator?
Scientists can use illustrators to help form new ideas to give malleable shape to a conceptual model that can be modified. They can use them to help enlist other scientists and experimental technicians in designing experiments. They can use illustrators for garnering support for new directions for their research and finally they can use them for public diffusion.1 My position is that all these types of collaboration can be enriched if the collaborators step forward in time into a creative space where the balance between factual data and imaginative speculation is becomes closer, interlinked.
At first I assumed that when working with scientists the relationship would be different to the others I have had with collaborators in my working past, fashion designers, musicians, film-makers, designers, etc, that scientists would work within narrow boundaries, be less willing to extend their work towards this type of capricious space. But Latours’ criticism of scientific practice, designed to disavow science of its association with the miraculous struck me as remarkable because my other collaborators might be described in just this way.
“ We neither think nor reason. Rather, we work on fragile materials –texts,
inscriptions, traces, or paints—with other people … However,
certain trades claim that they are able to extend themselves potentially
or “in theory” beyond the networks in which they practice.” 2
They are also 'tradesmen' whose work contains a broader resonance than one might suppose could be contained within a dress design, a CD cover or a movie poster, kindred spirits for the Illustrator. All entranced by the search for the creative spark that catches like straw and burns like wildfire. The big idea, right here right now that changes everything.
The silent servant
The relationship between science and illustration when concerned with research and discoveries in the here and now is service based. The illustrator acting as a servant to her master the scientist, there is freedom in the means of expression but not in the details themselves. The substance of the research must be adhered to in order to validate the images or diagrams that she makes. Taken as a given, this makes the beauty and visual delight that many illustrators bring to a scientific brief even more of an unforeseen pleasure. There are countless examples of this, and here2 Jean Lhuer takes a simple brief to illustrate methods of driving oil to oil wells using water injection using it to create an amorphous tour de force, extracting information, to inform an abstracted vision of the layers and forms that lie hidden beneath the earth. Scientific facts are not just visualised but become transcendent.
Re-formatting
But when the illustrator and the scientist step together into the future their relationship changes, everything altering incrementally, evidence flutters and becomes elastic. As they project their ideas forward, through time, facts begin to lose their grip and their shared reality becomes relative and conceptual. As research dissolves becoming intangible, their relationship changes, becoming more equitable. The master and servant relationship altering incrementally the farther forward in time the partners choose to project.
This is not a switching of roles the illustrator does not move from acolyte to adept and the scientist is not in counter-point diminished. Both professions are liberated. The scientist’s role as master of the facts when working in a contemporary setting is itself a limit to her thinking the trip forward in time offers her an equal sense of release. Similarly the illustrators’ sense that things they draw must predictably look like the things that they represent becomes inarticulate.
‘This Lovely Blind Work 2’ - The Cloud of Unknowing
‘Like the past, the future is not entirely unknown. The future is not magically always materialising, nor unimagined on the temporal horizon. Like the past, the future is made of stuff, of materials, landscapes, and people. Durability and heritage are as much a matter of the future, as a matter of the past. Things endure from past into future. It takes ongoing, unceasing work to conserve, to make things for the world to come. The future is hard work.’watts 2009. 3
The process of making illustration must aim towards solidity despite the stratified foundations spread out across the past on which these disprovable truths must grow. It hardly seems surprising that the relationship to facts weakens so readily as the collaborators move their thinking forward given such an unstable foundation on which to build. Scientific illustration does not tend to work its way backwards in time, murking through layers of ideas and conclusions now felt to be anachronistic and not needing to be illustrated. However in order to create the type of illustration I have described the collaborators must broadly straddle time, the present becoming a far smaller part of their thinking.
Last year I did a little research for a possible book about medieval mystics in Yorkshire, reading Laura Watts work and gaining a better understanding of the futures relationship to the past I dug this work out wondering if it might offer any insights. What I found was a set of ideas that proved inspiring offering a way for me to actually go about the process of drawing the future.
‘Among the writings of the fourteenth-century English mystics, The Cloud of Unknowing and its corpus enjoy a special position. The originality of these texts derives first from the Dionysian tradition of “Knowing through unknowing” to which they belong.’ This series of spiritual instructions written directly to an anonymous twenty four year old explains that to reach the cloud of unknowing will mean a journey through the cloud of forgetting. A beautiful image, a metaphor for the process I feel that the illustrator and the scientist must undertake. Later in the text the unknown author advises
“Search more after feeling then after cunning, for cunning oft-tymes deceives with pride, but meek lovely feeling may not beguile.” 4
To suggest that the collaborative relationship between arts & science might be a fruitful one if it is anti-intellectual and essentially characterised as “lovely” and “meek” in a contemporary research setting would seem absurd. But when working in a futuristic setting when it is hard to rely on scientific evidence, ideas lose phenomenological clarity and shift into a transcendental meditative space a type of mystical amnesia. Forcing the illustrator and the scientist into a new equivalency of forgetfulness that removes the orthodoxy of scientific fact and replaces it with newfound modest. The collaborators are now both naked and blind, naked, without the facts and research that they might clothe their ideas with and blind, having no knowledge of whether what they have made can be said to be true. In this state, from out of this glaring darkness comes new imagery and new ideas that could inform more conventional illustration/research in any of the modes of practice outlined at the beginning of this article.
Notes.
1. I am grateful to Prof. Michael Punt for his comments on the draft stage of
this article.
2. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action : How to follow scientists and engineers through
society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
3. Laura Watts – Future Archaeologies – Method & Story. www.sand14.com 2009
4. The Cloude of Unknowyng/The Cloud of Unknowing – Anon. Though thought to be written by a member of a Carthusian order– 1375
' Perspective view of the interior of a Metropolitan Church 1780/1781'
Tom employs two divergent approaches for image making, digital (vector & bit-map), traditional pen & Ink examples can be seen on his website
b.1969 Beverley, East Riding, Yorkshire.
I have been a free-lance illustrator since 1995 working on editorial, fashion and music industry commissions for a long-list of clients, there are several examples of this work in the commission section of this site and it can also be tracked down in various anthologies that the work has been selected for over the years.
In 2006 i completed the Masters program Illustration : Authorial Practice at University College Falmouth and through that experience began to work with experimental drawn narratives, really trying to explore and push my drawing farther and harder then commercial briefs had allowed. This type of work can be by turns energizing and frustrating, often its two steps forward and one step back but always there is a feeling of experimentation and an unpredictability to the process that is very rewarding. I don't see this new work as non-commercial and actively seek out collaborators, art directors and publishers and researchers that are willing to go with something a little different.
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Current Research
A call for collaboration with researcher from other faculties to assist research on illustration through collaboration
A definition of collaborative illustration practice
Fiction or Non-Fiction texts and data contain the beliefs, implied imagery, concepts and narratives that fuel collaborative illustrative practice. Though the degree of collaboration varies between projects, typically the illustrator receives this material once it has been written and begins to create a visual response to it.
Research Question – Can close collaboration with the originators of research material enable the illustrator to create imagery that reinforces and intensifies the understanding of the research output, aiding its effective dissemination.
Tom seeks to collaborate with a researcher(s) at The University of Plymouth with whom he can work closely throughout the course of a clearly defined research project, creating a series of illustrations that communicate the shared vision of the researcher(s) to a specific audience.
Face to face collaboration with the originators of research from inception, allows tropes to be explored as they grow in the mind of the researcher(s), potentially allowing the illustrators visualization abilities to become part of the way the researcher(s) reflect upon the final dissemination of the output they are in the process of generating.
This methodology might employ any of a number of visualization techniques, allegory, synecdoche, metaphor and similar devices offer symbolic approaches for informative image-making.
Alternatively literal depictions, of situations real or imagined employ more emotive approaches that descriptively visualize, humor, tragedy, satire and pathos, to powerfully affect the viewer.
Once the illustration have been created Tom they would then be used as the foundation for further research.
Student involvement
The amount of research time Tom is willing to commit to the collaboration in order for the illustrations created to be successful is significant. And careful consideration will be given to each research project but it is unlikely to be possible to work with more than one project at the same time. However moving around the University and meeting with other faculties is in itself immensely useful potentially creating other opportunities for collaboration with students in the communication arts subject area ( BA (hons) Illustration and BA (Hons) Graphic Communications with Typography, MA Communication Design & MA publishing )
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Toms' work has appeared in several juried anthologies of illustration and text-books on the subject of illustration.
The Illustrated Ape – Issue 8 (UK) pub illustrated ape publications – 1999
LAB – issue 9 (UK) Lawrence King - 1999
100% Cotton by Helen Walters & Tim Fletcher (UK) pub Lawrence King
Ubersee editor - R. Klanten - (GER) Pub DGV 2003
Clin D'oeil: A New Look Of Modern Illustration (Netherlands/Taiwan) – 2003
CD ART (UK) – pub Rotovision - 2003
Fashion Illustration Next by Laird Borrelli (UK) pub Thames & Hudson 2004
Sonic-Visuals for Music - R. Klanten, H. Hellige, T. Hulan (GER) pub DGV2004
The Fundamentals of Illustration by Lawrence Zeegan – pub Rotovision (UK) 2004
Illusive – Illustration and its context – by R. Klanten, H. Hellige (GER) pub DGV - 2004
Wonderland by S. Ehmann, B. Meyer (GER) pub DGV- 2005
Into the Nature – Of creatures and Wilderness by R. Klanten,(GER) pub DGV - 2006
The Visual Dictionary of Illustration by Mark Wigan (UK) pub AVA – 2009
Basics Illustration: Global Contexts by Mark Wigan (UK) pub Ava - 2010
Retro Design (Ger) pub Hachta– by Sara Haussman- 2009
CD art/design (working title) (Spain) pub Monza tbc 2011
