Artist / scientist

Today I heard yet another talk at a research symposium in which the speaker, when asked about the difficulty of doing research involving both aesthetic invention and technological invention, responded by saying that artists and scientists need to collaborate.

I hate this answer. It suggests that there are two different species of being: “the artist” and “the scientist”.

Fortunately, another speaker later in the day pointed out that the artist and the scientist can be the same person. And I completely agree.

In fact, when it comes to research, it is far better if they are the same person. In industry the value proposition may be different, but in research, combining these two complementary forms of problem solving within a single brain is a huge win.

Yet I realize, thinking about it now, that we don’t have a good word for the person who is both an artist and a scientist. Maybe we should come up with such a word.

I’m open to suggestions!

6 thoughts on “Artist / scientist”

  1. I believe the term “Hacker” encompasses this nicely. A hacker has a passion for technology and an appreciation for beauty, and a good hack contains both in equal measure.

    I run into this sort of dichotomy in the field of live sound all the time. I spend a lot of my time learning how things work so I can fix them if they break, I carry a lot of tools around with me so that I can fix things when they break, I spend a lot of effort laying a solid technical groundwork for my gig, so that I can then proceed to focus entirely on the artistic matter of taking a musician’s performance and conveying it to their audience. You run into folks who are competent technicians but don’t have the creativity to be a good mixer, or you run into folks who are great mixers but you have to step in and bail them out of any technical issues. The guys that really succeed are the guys who sit at the intersection of the two.

  2. I’m going to follow a formula.
    If an alchemist combines the roles of doctor + pharmacist then using the old english ars meaning art we could use arscientist to describe a person that blends art and science.

  3. The gap between a technician/technical person (?) and artist has closed considerably in the last couple of decades. Not enough, but plenty. There is no reason to assume this trend will slow down or stop.

    My hope is that in the future, the terms artist and scientist may become synonymous. Heck, maybe even highly regarded. But that may still be far off. (Reminds me of the Asimov short story where Generals would defer to a Programmer First Class.)

    I think a truly great scientist is always an artist. The problem comes in lack of familiarity with the medium he creates his ‘art’ in on the viewing public’s part. Like the mathematical beauty of the Mandelbrot Set, for example.

    I think trying to directly marry the terms ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ is too convoluted, as the origins seem to be based specifically on the separation of the two. The stigma associated with each word would work against the new term as well.

    “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.” [William Whewell, “The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,” London, 1840]

    My Latin is horrible, but I think maybe something along lines of ambisentencia, implying that such a person thinks across the divides of the traditional mindset.

  4. I remembers a presentation from you, where you put on a quadrant the Scientist / Artist, Ingineer / Designer archetypes within both the research / applicative and abstract / concrete sides of the spectrum. I really liked the image and believe that, somehow, both creation and communication is facilitated when you reach a center, balancing each of this skills.

    In a way this merge of Art & Science, or maybe more this non demarcation between the two as disctinct entities, is the lost trade of the “Renaissance Man”.

    Inspired by Inigo Quilez I’ll say the word “mathemagician” might do the trick, it has a strong folk-cabaret aspect to it, full of stardusts and mysteries, yet a little funny. It shed out the rational we tends to clings toward too much this days.

  5. I don’t think that we need a word, artists will just gradually come to be trained with those capabilities and ways of thinking (and this has obviously already been happening). As a computer science prof said to me when I was getting my Master’s in composition — it’s far easier for the artists to be taught the ways of science than the other way around.

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