Science Poem Manifesto in the Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Jaakko Pietiläinen.

Science fiction is art.

Science fiction is science poetics.

Science fiction is more honest about our hell and heaven, the compassion and the monstrous failings of our species, than any other form of art. Science fiction is real counterculture. Science fiction has legs and arms, fire and brimstone, void and aether, bellows and pickaxe. It creates the world and then it walks among it, knowing it, loving it before it plunders the truth from difference.

We, the science poets, have the stars – inherited from your apathy – and the future; you, the rest, have our common past, and this slovenly Earth. Science fiction trammels the past, sows its bones into the soil. Science fiction looks into the abyss and sees life, builds life out of death.

Science fiction is not a canon of equivalence (Dick our Pynchon, Delany our Derrida, Butler, Tiptree, and Russ our de Beauvoir, Cixous, and Dworkin), but a canon of its own. The science poets have always known this. In our secret utopia where the kings and queens are those with stars in their teeth and dark chasms on their shoulders, the science poets honor one another. From their gates, the science poets will never turn you away, because cold pangs of fearful yearning for the alien live within us all.

No man is an island,
And no planet is in turn;
And that in six billion years,
We’ll stand and watch it burn.

Science fiction doesn’t tell the future, it builds it. Science fiction is a living tradition that informs the very world it critiques, inventing new myths, words, and realities just as we catch up to its old ones. Science fiction does not obey; it does not consume. It presents the path, so we can walk it without fear.

Science fiction is a tender, holographic tunnel reaching all the way back to us from the distant future, from beyond the stars, broadcasting comfort despite difference, hope among despair, and teaching us the importance of our moment in the face of the impassive monument of time.

Science poems are not abstract, they are not separate from the world: the future is a poem, for it doesn’t yet exist. And those things which don’t yet exist are like the breath on the tongue, a gesture yet to be made – they are sheer potentiality. They have the kinetics of real art.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction “comes from a whorehouse but…wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.” Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: “up, up, and away”.

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

Some days the poets burn out,
They drink deep from the cup,
They look all around them,
And they think, “Beam me up!”

Claire L. Evans is an artist and writer living and working in Portland, Oregon. We love both her blog Universe and her band YACHT. The Science Poem Manifesto was written for the Science Poems book.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #02, 2005, C-Type Print.

As a kid, my favourite thing to do was to visit The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki with my big sister. And my favourite thing inside was a baby cow with two heads, four ears and four eyes. The Siamese twins, that were actually an oddity in a building for wild organisms, made me wonder: if they were boys or girls, what would their life have been like had they survived? What could they possibly think now, if anything? And above all, why did they have to stay in a box of glass? Were they still alive, I would have wanted to touch them.

I have a friend, Johanna Laitanen, who makes art about natural history museums. She photographs them to pose questions about how our culture observes, conceptualises and represents nature. My big sister bought a piece from Johanna last year, a photograph of, not the calves, but bears in a diorama of the same Helsinki museum. Looking at this “observation of the observation” of nature, as Johanna describes her work, makes me amused about the idea that living in a small town, surrounded by wild nature, as a child, the climax of my visit to the capital was to observe nature in glass displays.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #01, 2005, C-Type Print.

Johanna’s photography deals with the human desire to experience and examine nature through romanticised depictions. She explores how the scientific and taxonomic representations are, in fact, originally developed to meet mainly dramatic needs and aesthetic aspirations.  In the end, my awe of the museumised nature was not only based on the fact that you don’t meet a bear in the forest everyday, if ever, but also on the cultural ideas; the fiction it offered. “Today’s museum displays have roots in Wunderkammers [or cabinets of curiosities, collections of disparate objects, gathered by wealthy and at their height of popularity in the Renaissance] that were assembled with little or no care for scientific categorisation,” Johanna explains. “They were much more about story-telling through objects and about ideas related to pre-Darwinian spiritual natural history, where nature was understood in symbolic meanings.”

Scientists strive for objectivity, but is there such a thing? Johanna tells me about her artist friend who sculpts animal figures and whose biologist father is unable to understand this. “I think that they are both doing the same thing, trying to understand the relationship between humans and nature,” she says. “It’s sometimes forgotten that scientific presentations are never objective, but, as with any human creation, they always reflect the ideas and desires of their time.”

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #03, 2005, C-Type Print.

A month ago, I visited a natural science shop, Deyrolle, in Paris. Carrying objects like old teaching apparatus as well as collections of preserved and mounted animals of all kinds, I was dazed by the simultaneous beauty and oddity of the shop. It would have been possible to buy a polar bear from Deyrolle. But looking at the gigantic, beaming creature on the shop floor with a hanging price tag, I felt scared. It made me miss the dioramas that present scientific objects, animals, as we often wish to see them: in a seemingly natural, yet magical setting, isolated by a glass pane.

Inspired by two of my favourite thinkers, artist Yoko Ono and physicist Richard Feynman, this article is an experiment in physics and event scores. It quotes Feynman’s enchanting stories about a teeming nano-world for a 1983 BBC interview Physics is fun to imagine, recontextualising some of his thoughts as proposal pieces in the spirit of Grapefruit, an artist’s book by Ono.



In the BBC footage, Feynman wonders how some people find sience so easy, and others find it dull and difficult – like children, for instance. “In the case of science, I think one of the things that makes it very difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination,” he says. “It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like. Nothing’s really as it seems. [...] But I find myself trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time. And I get a kick out of it.”

Exploring our place in the cosmos, the following transcripts and performance instructions aim to create an experience of science.

Water drop piece

Richard Feynman: “You see a little drop of water, a tiny drop. [...] The atoms in it attract each other. They like to be next to each other. They want as many partners as they can get. Now, the guys that are on the surface of the drop have only partners on one side, so they’re trying to get in. You can imagine this team of people all moving very fast, all wanting to get as many partners as possible, and the guys at the edge are very unhappy and nervous, and they keep on pounding in. And that’s what makes the drop a tight ball instead of flat – surface tension.”

Take a mannerism from an atom in a drop of water.
Gather a group of people in the same room for an hour.
Remain surrounded by a person on each side of you at all times.

Rubber band piece

“Most elastic things like steel springs and so on are nothing but this electrical thing pulling the atoms a little bit apart when you bend something, and then they try to come back together again. But rubber bands work on a different principle. There are some long molecules like chains that are kind of kinky and knocked about in shape. When you pull open the rubber band, the chains get straighter but they are being bombarded on the side by other little atoms trying to shorten them by kinking them, so they’re trying to pull back. [...] I’ve always found it fascinating to think, that when rubber bands are sitting on an old package of papers for a long time, holding them together, it’s done by a perpetual pounding, pounding, pounding of the atoms against these chains, trying to kink them for a long time, trying to hold this thing together.”

Wear a rubber band on your waist.
Eat a sandwich.
Think about the atoms that are pounding on your stomach.

Mirror Piece

“You look in a mirror, and let’s say you part your hair on the right side, but the image has its hair parted on the left side. So, the image is left and right mixed up. It’s not top and bottom mixed up because the top of the head in the image is still up there at the top, and the bottom of the feet are on the bottom. But how does the mirror know how to get the left and right mixed up but not the up and down? [...] It takes a lot of fiddling to describe what a mirror does. If you wave this hand, the waving hand in the mirror is right opposite it. The hand in the East is the hand in the East and the hand in the West is the hand in the West, and the head that’s up is up and the feet that are down are down. Everything’s really alright. But what’s wrong is that if this is North, your nose is to the North of the back of your head but in the image, the nose remains to the south of the back of the head. So, what actually happens in the image is neither mixing up the left and the right, nor the top and the bottom, but the front and back have been reversed. The nose of the image is on the wrong side of the head. Now, when we think of the image, we think of it as another person. And if we think of the normal way that a person would get into that condition over there, we don’t think of the idea that the person has been squashed and pushed backwards forwards with his nose and his head, because that’s not what ordinarily happens to people.”

Mirror all photographs of yourself on Photoshop.
Destroy the originals.

Swimming Pool piece

“If I’m sitting next to a swimming pool and somebody dives in [...], I think of the waves that are formed in the water. When lots of people have dived in the pool, there’s a great choppiness of all these waves all over the water. And to think that it might be possible that in those waves there are clues to what’s happening in the pool. [...] Someone with sufficient cleverness could just sit by the pool and figure out who jumped in; where, and when, by the nature of the irregularities and the bumping of the waves. [...] When we’re looking at something, the light that comes out is waves – just like in the swimming pool. It’s just that it’s in three dimensions.”

Look at the waves in a swimming pool.
Imagine what caused them.
Reconstruct that movement.

Portrait of Paola Antonelli.

How does curating design differ from curating art?

There are a lot of differences. My art colleagues tend to do more monographic shows that have a different approach than the thematic shows that I favour. The reason for the thematic focus might be that I have more to prove and explain. Design is currently not treated as an art in its own right and it has to fight for its own presence and relevance in culture. Another important difference is that art curators often have a lot of reverence for artists – what they say and do is considered almost a religion. Designers, on the other hand, are usually working for a client and used to being questioned and negotiated with. That makes the curating different.

Working at the intersection of design, art and science, we’d like to hear how you see the future relationship between the three.

At the time of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition we were not the first ones to make design and science meet but maybe the first ones to make a full-fledged show about it. The Royal College of Art and Wellcome Trust in London have been exploring the intersection for a long time and the interesting and beautiful thing about their approach is that nobody makes a distinction between art and design in this context. One of the things I learned when making Design and the Elastic Mind was that the disctinctions between design, art and science become insignificant when you try to come up with new ideas that haven’t been proven or that don’t have a functionality yet.

The role of art – as it is generally seen – is to question our beliefs and habits. When you want to do that with design you need to use the means of art, like many pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind did. However, at the same time, every single work in the show had a design intention and soul to it. It’s hard to say what’s the difference between art and design – and it certainly cannot be built on form. You rather have to go back to the intent of the artist or designer. An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better. Overall, I think that one of the main roles of MoMA and myself is to give people who are doing meaningful things a platform and a sense of validation.

“An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better.”

In our interview with Anthony Dunne, he said that art shouldn’t need to exist. His reason was that in an ideal, utopian world; everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need a separate category called art. “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed,” he noted. What are your thoughts on this argument?

Haha, it’s a very extreme argument which I love and completely understand! It comes from the same militant spirit that I have here at MoMA – as representatives of design we have so much to prove. I’m very glad that Tony [Anthony Dunne] is taking this stance because we need to make more outrageous statements to make people think.

Like you write in Seed magazine, as the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products. How will this effect the role of designers?

I think this phenomenon expands the field of action for designers. Instead of being hired to manufacture products, designers might be hired to help the company think. I feel that Tony and Fiona [Dunne and Raby] are sometimes commissioned to be a thorn in the company’s side; to make them more aware of the consequences of their actions. I hope more designers will do that in the future, when people start understanding that design is not only about chairs and lamps. Designers can also work with politicians and policy-makers – many of them have the ability to be thinkers on a general level.

“I hope that more designers wiIl be hired by companies to be thorns in their sides; to make them think and be more responsible.”

We feel that the university didn’t exactly prepare us for what we’re doing now with OK Do. How do you think designers as general thinkers should be educated?

This is an interesting question because education is the most important moment for designers these days and the geography of design is completely defined by where the good design schools are and nothing else. Nowadays, many succesful design schools already lead a more holistic approach offering studies in subjects like anthropology, and sociology.

When I studied architecture in Politecnico di Milano I loved a course in technology by Professor Guido Nardi. On Tuesdays, he would talk with us about how steel, wood and other materials behave, but Fridays were dedicated to Jung, Heidegger and Adorno. In a way, there was a balance between cold and hot showers; between teachings in pure application of materials and pure abstraction of theory. I found this balance extremely important and would use the course as a model for schools today.

Nowadays, many design schools are actually focusing a lot on the theoretical side and there are so many academic design courses coming up, like design cricism, interaction design, transdisciplinary design, etc. This is great, but I also wonder if any of these students ever go to workshops and cut themselves while carving wood.

You have stated that design is a bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of real life, and that designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. Could you mention examples of projects in which you feel design has functioned particularly well as a bridge?

There are many, of course. Designers can satisfy our human needs by making a technological innovation usable and exciting for us. The next exhibition I’m going to do at MoMA is about the communication between people and objects – it’s called Talk to Me. The first time I personally understood this concept was when I bought my first Macintosh. It was the first time I felt that I had a pet. And this is what designers really do: they make objects into something that is part of your life. In fact, nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks. That makes the interfaces of objects and the ways they interact even more important.

“Nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks.”

What kind of roles do functionality and aesthetics play in the process of translating scientific revolutions into approachable objects? What about in the end results?

Aesthetics is important as a means of communication but never by itself. There’s scientific research that says that handsome people get higher wages. It’s kind of unfair, but there is a role in our natural evolution played by beauty. On the other hand, we know very well that beauty is completely subjective and if you look at examples like Almodóvar’s movies or punk aesthetics, they might not be pretty in an obvious way, yet they are beautiful because of the personality inside.

Designers can help scientists master complexity and take advantage of new building blocks like nanotechnology for instance, but what about their ability to dream – do you think designers’ fantasies can and should get involved in scientific processes and, later, the reality?

Sometimes artists and designers and other creative professionals like science fiction writers or filmmakers inspire scientists big time and push them further, even if they don’t admit to it that much. I’m currently collaborating with a sci-fi director on a symposium about science fiction, architecture and design. We feel that almost everything that has been imagined by architects, designers and science-fiction writers in the past has actually been realised, and the question is: what could we imagine next?

What do you think is the designers’ role and responsibility in thinking about the (sometimes negative) consequences of scientific discoveries?

There’s a lot of morality in design. Sometimes moralism also, but often constructive criticism. Scientists are also very concerned with ethics and what their accomplishments are used for. I think that the more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on. Many scientists today are so different from the scientists we used to know in the past. They listen to music, they make mistakes and they think in terms of ethical responsibility.

“The more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on.”

The Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition was not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are engaged in the act of design. Could you give us your favourite example of the latter kind of cases? And do you think it’s necessary to draw lines between professional designers and other people who practice design?

Certainly different people have different expertise and I would never put a designer in the lead of cancer research just as I wouldn’t let scientists design my mobile. It’s the communication between different fields and professionals that counts. One of my favourite works in the exhibition, ‘Colloidal Alphabet Soup’ was a new protein marker by two biologists from UCLA, Thomas Mason and Carlos Hernandez. Usually protein markers just feature different colours, but they also used the alphabet to mark the proteins in more detail. In the exhibition, they showed their work through a poster where an image of this colourful ‘alphabet soup’ was magnified. Next to their work, we exhibited a fictional piece, ‘Typosperma’ by designer Oded Ezer who had imagined that each spermatozoon of a man would have a letter attached to it with each ejaculation resulting in a new poem. The scientists were so happy to exhibit next to the designer, to not to be considered dull scientists but rather people who are creative too!

Science poems, literally speaking [haha]. So, you would say that design can produce culture, or experiences, around scientific discoveries?

Yes. A good example at Design and the Elastic Mind was a living coat called “Victimless Leather” by SymbioticA. It was made of living stem cells from mice and it had to be fed to be kept alive. It was constantly growing, finally to an extent at which I had to kill it by blocking the nutrient. I was so disturbed by having to do this and the act resulted in a big debate about killing the completely artificial yet living coat. This example demonstrates how art can take a stand in innovation and transform it into a project, it can really make you feel insecure about everything you thought we were steady and neutral about.

Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body", 2004. Image courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr).

In our Science Poems exhibition, we have given designers and artists the brief to explore and interpret natural sciences. What do you think is the meaning and value of letting creative professionals interpret scientific questions, processes and results?

Do you have scientists checking out your work and making sure it’s exact?

The scientists will be more in the background, giving information and starting points, rather than actually getting involved in the art work which is based on interpretation and imagination.

What is important, I think, is to have scientists criticising the work in the end, to give their opinion about the direction the interpretation is taking. A beautiful example of an artist and a scientist collaborating this way is that of the artist Matthew Ritchie and physicist Paul Steinhard. I think it’s important to show people working together and not apart. But if the artists are free to do whatever they want, this should be explained clearly on the label.

To sum it up, could you name the 3 the most interesting or meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design/art and science meet?

1. Synthetic biology is important. The idea that you can make organisms out of composing bricks.
2. Nanotechnology – designers are paramount there.
3. Visualisation design – designers helping scientists to make sense of their data.

André Breton, an autoportrait (ca. 1929) | Still image from Alphaville by Jean Luc Godard, 1965

AM: Firstly, I would like to ask how you came up with the idea to curate an exhibition that deals with natural sciences in relation to art and design and vice versa? What kind of inspirations and motivations are behind the exhibition?

JS: We’ve both been operating somewhere in the borderlands of design, touching on both art and science in our work. For instance, interaction and communications design, information visualisation or design research all call for transdisciplinary interest. We’re curious about exploring different systems and theories, and things like electromagnetics, or the brain – a bigger picture beyond one discipline. I think that design or art, for us, is about trying to develop strategies of understanding and showing. A lot like science. And it’s interesting to mix the different ways of looking at things, the ways of an artist and a scientist. Like André Breton [a surrealist theorist] said: “To change ways of being, one has to first change ways of seeing.” Or, we could also look at seeing from a Steinerian perspective and say that just like the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Rudolf Steiner considered this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations – looking at ideas as “objects of experience” and thinking as an organ of perception. I think we need design, art and science, and both the real and the imaginary, in the same stream of thought to understand the world better.

“We need design, art and science, and both the real and the imaginary, in the same stream of thought to understand the world better.”

AP: We think that the theme of mixing science with visual disciplines is definitely in the air right now and one of the reasons for this could be that you don’t need to be a scientist to have access to a profusion of information nowadays – as well as to tools to handle it. Different professionals are also very open for co-operation these days: it’s an adventure to jump outside your own field. The idea of Science Poems was very much inspired by existing design and art that deals with the topic of natural sciences. In addition to the contemporary examples, like designer and professor duo Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby and Marc-Olivier Wahler, the director of Palais de Tokyo – whom we’ve interviewed for the Science Poems book – we have many idols who have operated in the borderlands of design, art and science in the past. Having previously discussed the topic with Jenna, I got really into it after seeing Alphaville, a 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard . Like Alphaville, in James Monaco’s words, “prefers to see the poetry of science rather than its mathematical logic”, we also wish to dig into the lyrical and visual sphere of science, making subjective interpretations and questions about it.

AM: Talking about the big picture and interdisciplinary thinking, Jenna, I remember that your MA thesis at the University of Art and Design Helsinki was inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication from the 60s and 70s. Stewart Brand’s catalogue aimed to give people the tools to better understand the world through different ways of affecting one’s environment. Has it had an effect on Science Poems, too?

JS: The Whole Earth Catalog has been inspirational to me when it comes to understanding what and how to design. It presents a lot of narratives of design in everyday life and provides means for the readers to find their own inspiration, shape their own environment and share their experience with whoever is interested. In practice, the catalogue contains information on different means for making things, listing artefacts from special-purpose utensils to informative books and courses, as well as early synthesisers and personal computers. So, instead of showing the end results – ready-made objects or products, like catalogues often do – it rather presents tools to spark ideas. Like my former boss at Arki research group would say, Brand’s catalogue is a classic example of “design for designability”. As a matter of fact, the Whole Earth Catalog has been described as a conceptual forerunner of web search engines. It blurs the boundaries of expertise and everyday, bringing information about different fields of activity closer to people of various disciplines. And this is what the Science Poems project aims to do, too – to function as a common point of reference (a boundary object) for interdisciplinary conversations about natural sciences, in this case.

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 | A Wikipedia Reader by Mylinh Trieu and David Horvitz (eds.), 2008

AM: Being a graphic designer, I have noticed a tendency towards interdisciplinary thinking also in my own field. Glossaries creating connections between subjects from different sources have been a widely used approach in editing content to inspire people to look at things from a different perspective and to question certain “truths” or divisions into rigid categories. I assume that this linking of things partly derives from online practices, and using Wikipedia in particular. A publication called A Wikipedia Reader, edited by Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz, deals with this phenomenon by linking topics from different fields and hierarchy levels together. Wikipedia links subjects to each other in a way that breaks down certain traditional divisions and hierarchies – subjects with typically different value levels might appear on the same level… The ways to present information surely affect on how we perceive and use it. Operating mainly online, have you been thinking about these kinds of things now that you’re presenting something offline?

JS: Yes, the question about perceiving information and different value levels online, where everything is miscellaneous, is really interesting. There’s a risk that some bits of important information go unnoticed and, in time, vanish in the process of searching, copying and pasting. Or their original meaning might change when they travel through different contexts. For example, when someone googles ‘cosmology’ and finds our publication, or the stories about Cosmic Wonder art organisation and artist Yayoi Kusama, uninformed about the field of science, could they consider cosmology an art movement and write about it on their blog? The life of information is, definitely, one of the things we’ve considered during the Science Poems process – also from the point of view of us learning about natural sciences online. Another interesting issue to think about is the change of context from the online environment to a gallery space with limited access to Wikipedia, Google and other tools for interpretation. In the physical exhibition, we, together with the artists, can decide what kind of information to display next to each piece of work – and what to leave out. And making this publication, for us, is about linking the exhibition to a wider frame of reference and extending the show beyond the gallery. Umberto Eco recently used the expressions ‘the poetics of everything included’ and the ‘poetics of the etcetera’ when talking about lists, and I think we can easily say that Science Poems falls into the latter category. Our idea is to continue exploring the topic after the exhibition, too.

AM: Extending a show outside the gallery reminds me of Exhibition Prosthetics, a recent publication by Joseph Grigely which deals with the relationship of an exhibition and its catalogue. It argues that a catalogue can, in fact, be seen as part of the exhibition – instead of a mere extension.

JS: Last December, I met with artist Simon Starling who had done some research on the relationship between an exhibition and its catalogue for the MAC/VAL exhibition Thereherethenthere. He drew a parallel between putting up an exhibition and producing an exhibition catalogue, seeing the two activities equally important and integrally linked. He stated that books often carry research material, a sense of time and place, and/or a network of connectivity into the presentation of a work. He also said that in some instances the exhibition itself serves as an intermediary editorial process in the production of a book. I think this was a particularly interesting thought, and one that could be applied to the making of the Science Poems publication as well.

“We use both the print and web publication as symbiotic companions of the exhibition.”

AP: In our case, we use both the print and web publication as symbiotic companions of the exhibition. The website is a great tool for, as we suggested earlier, providing the audience with convenient access to the links related to the Science Poems project. We hope that people will come to see the exhibition because they read about it at www.ok-do.eu, and that they will go back to the website and read the book after seeing the exhibition, in order to go deeper.

Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely, edited by Zak Kyes, Bedford Press 2010 | www.ok-do.eu

AM: Simon Starling’s work is indeed an intriguing example of looking at ways to open up processes behind art and design. His project brings to my mind a show, Archiving the Catalogue, that recently took place in Berlin. In fact, it was an open project space by artists Nicolas Y Galeazzi and Joël Verwimp. They had put up an experimental editing-laboratorium where the process of editing a publication was physically on display – exhibited as an ongoing and evolving work. This reminded me of the fact that editing is all about choices, and that there is in a sense no definitive truth.

JS: I remember there was a similar performance by Dexter Sinister at Proforma last autumn, where they organised a team to write, edit, print and distribute a newspaper twice a week during the event. The project was partly about how the news creates what we believe is true, yet its main idea was to show that the activity of editing a newspaper is as much about process as it is about product. And this is totally the case in our work with Science Poems, and the fact that it is our first publication makes the process even more interesting. There are so many things to consider and learn about: management, tone of voice, working with other writers, editing our own text, copyrights, physics, biology, astronomy. Equally, when making a publication out of personal interest, with no external guides or restrictions (other than not being able to afford more than 144 pages and having to get it ready for the exhibition in June) many things are based on our intuition. The book reflects the interests of Anni and myself, and is the sum of all the people involved.

AM: Are you interested in exhibiting the artworks connected to the scientific context where they derive from, or do you rather want to keep the connection more ambiguous, poetic? I was recently working for Extra-City, a Belgian museum arranging an exhibition dealing with Animism, an idea according to which animals, plants, rocks and so on have a soul.

The curators looked at the term from a contemporary point of view in order to question the dichotomies that modernism had associated with it. Glossaries with historical references presented next to the art works directed the visitor’s perception to a certain mindset but the curation still left space for different interpretations of the works. How did you find a balance between opening up the backgrounds of the works and leaving certain things open for people to interpret?

AP: The Science Poems exhibition aims to present artists’ and designers’ ideas about natural sciences. Some of them, like Miska Knapek, use scientific data very strictly in the actual production of the piece, whereas others have taken scientific ideas and made their own interpretation of them, like Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg. I guess the main principle of the exhibition is that it’s acceptable and justifiable to interpret, explore and discuss science with artistic tools and intuition. Our chat with Tomi Kokkonen, a philosopher of science (the interview is also included in the book) made us feel a whole lot more comfortable about it. With him we discussed how art could be used to bring new aspects of science and its subject matters within the reach of different kinds of people; by offering alternative perspectives to it and its relation to everyday reality.

“Some of the artists and designers in the Science Poems exhibition use scientific data very strictly in the actual production of the piece, whereas others have taken scientific ideas and made their own interpretation of them.”

The book contains additional information on the exhibition and the pieces as well as ideas OK Do has about science at the moment. I don’t think we believe casting light on the background of a work of art or an exhibition would create barriers to interpretation. Therefore, we interviewed all the artists and asked them to tell us where they are coming from with their work. In that sense, we are very much designers as well – instead of keeping the backgrounds and messages a mystery we like to dig them out and show them to the rest of the world. And when dealing with visual language, there will always be space for interpretation no matter how much you talk about it.

Dexter Sinister's The First/Last Newspaper, 2009 | Étienne-Jules Marey: Buse volant avec l’appareil qui signale les mouvements décrits par l’extrémité de son aile, 1873

AM: Anni, you mentioned that you have been inspired by existing design and art that finds itself on the borderlines of design, art, and science. Could you give an example of this and how it changed your thinking, especially in relation to Science Poems?

AP: One moment of revelation for me was when I first discovered the thinking of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. To be honest, at the university, I had been pretty much educated to find solutions for other people’s problems. Dunne and Raby turn things around by saying that designers should find problems instead of solving them. This kind of design attitude connects with art that practices social criticism, and since scientific development affects our society, art and design, they all go hand in hand. Dunne and Raby have written a book called Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. It’s a good example of a project which explores all of these disciplines at once.

AM: It would definitely be a shame if the abilities of designers were used only for commercial needs. Asking questions through design is something that I learned when studying in the Netherlands. There is a lot to learn from Dutch designers’ abilities to tackle social issues!

 How did you come up with curating an exhibition instead of, for example, writing articles or conducting interviews around the topic of Science Poems? What kinds of insights do you think that an exhibition as a means of distributing content can bring about?

JS: We think organising events like exhibitions or talks establishes a nice dialogue with writing about things. We like to learn by doing, documenting, and building something new on top of it. Sometimes, we also like to come out of our medium and meet people offline (haha), and exhibitions are great places to do that. The works of art on display stimulate discussion.

“We like to learn by doing, documenting, and building something new on top of it.”

While the digital world rearranges itself for each person and their current task, a physical exhibition is presented to everyone in the same way, through someone else’s lense, under a predefined topic. Of course, the interpretations may vary and people pick up things according to their own interests, but the starting point is the same – and it includes an element of surprise. The experience is also tied to a certain time and place, which makes it unique. Exhibitions can bring about interesting reactions and encounters.

Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Birkhäuser 2001 | Logo of the natural history museum of Paris

AM: How did you end up locating the exhibition in Paris?

AP: Paris was chosen because this year it has become one of our favourite places on earth. There are many reasons for that: Jenna was there for an artist residency, I fell for a French guy, we saw inspiring movies like those of Jean-Luc Godard and were also inspired by the aesthetics of science in France. I think our fascination is based on the poetic nature of French aesthetics and how it reflects classical ideas and history in which all new knowledge finds its roots. The graphic design of the Science Poems book has also drawn inspiration from that, as Åh, the designers of this book, also share our fascination.

Spread from an old French science book | Deyrolle magazine, 46 rue du Bac, Paris

AM: I noticed that most of the works in the exhibition are created by designers. Was it a conscious choice from you? And is this perhaps related to your interdiscplinary thinking – that it is not necessary to separate art and design that strongly from each other?

AP: It’s all about friends! We chose the exhibitors by intuition and the decisions took place very naturally, based on the pool of talented people we are so lucky to have around us. We are designers by training and have actually met many of the people more or less through our university. Having said that, we also believe in messing about with categories, roles and definitions – we think that renaissance spirit is good for both individual people and the whole world. Many people have multiple talents and interests and it’s interesting to take these to unusual contexts and see what happens.

Art vs. design is a topic that we’re generally very much into, perhaps because we are keen on doing art in a designer way and vice versa. We’ve had some good discussions about the topic with, for example, Paola Antonelli (article to be published soon). Right now, our aim is to explore this issue by doing and experimenting, and the Science Poems exhibition is one the first steps. The main thing for us, whether it’s about a commissioned or an independent project, is to mix analytical investigation with intuitivity and self-expression with social and critical activity.

JS: We like to think of art instructing design through presenting wild ideas that might seem utopian to begin with but, at their best, can lead into cultural production of new forms of practice. Dunne and Raby call it critical design. The interesting thing about art is that it enables displaying experimental artefacts to audiences without the need to put effort into production or marketing. Art materialises fantasies that keep on developing over time within the artworld – and outside it in various different hands and minds – never striving for definitive products so common to the design field. Like Duchamp said, “art is a game among all men of all eras”, and we take part in it with some Science Poems.

Science through Art I: Botany. The illustration is based on Juan van der Hamen y León's work Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, 1629.

The reason we wanted to meet you is that we’ve so far mainly discussed the topic of aesthetics in science with artists and designers. We think it’s important to involve someone who knows more about the meaning, objectives and processes of science in the discourse. What is it that first comes to your mind when looking at aesthetics in the scientific context?

In the everyday life of science, aesthetics is an important cognitive tool that is used to, for example, visualise complex information.

All the artworks in the Science Poems exhibition deal with natural sciences – for example, through  pictorial essays about the functions of the brain, clothing for retreating from electromagnetic radiation or sounds deriving from protein chains. How would you compare these approaches to the usual ways of examining science from a philosophical point of view?

Philosophy of science is mainly interested in describing and systematising the logic of scientific theories and practices, and sometimes participating in scientific process on a theoretical level. Another philosophical aim is to explicate what the scientific findings mean in a broader context. This is where art can overlap philosophy. For example, science fiction often involves highly abstract theories and explores what these might mean in practice, materialised in new technology or yet unknown phenomena. Science fiction aims to make science more perceivable, closer to subjective experience, through a story. I think the exhibition pieces work in very similar ways. The difference, however, is, that all the exhibition works seem to somehow deal with ‘doing’ science – they are about the research subject or the process of doing research – in contrast to theoretical knowledge, which is the end-product of the scientific process. This, I think, is both new and very important. This kind of art makes the process of science experienced and better understood. Understanding scientific practices and the research process is a crucial part of understanding science, and I think this kind of art is a welcome supplement for popularising science.

What do you think is the meaning and value of exploring science outside the scientific context?

Scientific knowledge and results are often taken as brute facts or simple “truths” by the public. But it is important to understand where these truths come from, how the facts about the observable phenomena are transferred into interpretations about the reality. By tracing the scientific processes and taking different perspectives to the results, including an artist’s perspective, it is possible to make science more approachable – and perhaps more useful for the lay people.

“By applying different, or artistic, perspectives to scientific processes and results, it is possible to make science more approachable – and perhaps more useful for the lay people.”

We chose natural sciences as our topic for the Science Poems exhibition by intuition, but thinking about it now, the recent general interest around this branch of science by many artists and designers must have had an influence, too. What makes natural sciences special?

Natural sciences differ from human sciences in a sense that they explore the world independent from human beings: our actions don’t constitute this world the way they constitute society or culture – its regularities and phenomena are independent from us. Then again, the scientific theories reflecting this reality are man-made and therefore are not independent from human perspective. 

In human sciences, the research focuses on things that don’t exist without human perspective and action in the first place. This does not mean that we have direct knowledge about them – we still have to do scientific research – but the phenomena are still more directly within the reach of our subjective experience. Natural sciences often explore things and phenomena that are beyond our normal abilities to sense or even conceptualise. But it is worth realising that the research subjects are still physically present in our everyday lives.

Science through Art II: Geometry. The illustration is based on Piet Mondrian's work from 1936.

We suppose that these alternative perspectives could bring out elements of science that are normally hidden – like stories behind science-making. Art can also produce new interpretations of research questions as well as the results.

Yes, science aims at accuracy: clearly analysable arguments, numerical data and so on. In this process, certain kinds of subjective meanings are disregarded – meanings that, in my view, art deals with. I believe art can enrich the scientific sphere with subjective meanings and questions regarding its processes and outcomes.

“I believe art can enrich the scientific sphere with subjective meanings and questions regarding its processes and outcomes.”

We agree, science is an intriguing field also for people not working in the area. Could you think of examples of how bringing science within the reach of people might benefit them and the society in general?

I think that trying to demonstrate both scientific results and processes is useful because it helps people to really understand them. Climate change is a good example. When sceptics have brought up inadequacies in the theory and some of the data, many people have thought that climate change does not exist after all, because they don’t understand how the theory is constructed from the data and strongly justified background assumptions. They might also think that one cold winter is an anomaly for the theory – which it isn’t – without seeing the bigger picture. Stating the facts is not sufficient when trying to communicate what the data and results really mean.

Going back to the relationship between science and art – how do you see the general state of it at the moment?

The humanistic culture has somehow taken on an idea about separating natural sciences from art, literature and so on. Even in the academy, human scientists and natural scientists have formed their own ghettos with little understanding of what the others are doing in the first place. This unfortunate situation is known as the Two Cultures -problem, according to C.P. Snow, who himself was both a novelist and a physicist. I strongly feel that knowledge of natural sciences should be a part of the cultural common knowledge just in the same way as the social theories etc. I think it is alarming that at the same time as humanistic psychology (e.g. Freudian psychoanalysis) is considered to be a part of intellectual common knowledge, the staggering discoveries of natural science oriented psychology are virtually unheard of or rejected, and the cultural elite seems to be uninterested in them in the first place. This is obviously a problem for both scientists and humanists.

 However, there are signs of things getting better. A good example of scientists popularising scientific knowledge and taking a part of a traditional cultural intellectual is the Third Culture movement that deals with the work of scientists who are communicating their (sometimes provocative) ideas directly to the general public. As the name suggests, the Third Culture tries to overcome the gap between the Two Cultures.

[Editor's note! Third Culture, as defined by the founder of the movement, John Brockman, a cultural impresario and one of Andy Warhol's backers: "Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. By contrast, the Third Culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."]

We are, in the end, humans but also physical and biological beings!

“We are, in the end, humans but also physical and biological beings!”

Somehow, it feels like an amateur can show interest in art without knowing too much about it but interest in, for example, chemistry might seem weird if one doesn’t have any skills for it or understanding about it. But perhaps science could also be experienced in different ways – not just through thorough understanding, but through other kinds of perceptions.

I agree. Science should be introduced to people in different ways – not just through scientific approaches. Many people might also be interested in natural sciences without acknowledging it. It just needs to be pointed out for them somehow, like for example in chemistry through cooking. Everything that happens in the kitchen is chemistry.

You mentioned that it would be good to shed more light on the processes of producing scientific knowledge, instead of merely focusing on the results. We read about Thomas Kuhn who was one of the most significant philosophers of science in the 20th century and who explored how science develops. Could you open up his ideas for us a bit?

I just gave a 1,5-hour lecture about him this morning, but I’ll try to make it short!

Kuhn argued against the idea that science develops only through random discoveries, accumulation of knowledge and gradual improvement of theories. This happens only within a temporary framework of theories and principles he calls “paradigms”. Instead, he thought that science undergoes periodic “paradigm shifts” in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In his opinion, our view on how the world functions is based on temporary theories entailing hypotheses about things that we can’t perceive. These theories are constantly tested against our perceptions and experimental data. If the two don’t match and the theories cannot be tinkered superficially to make a match, science strives to maintain its harmony by assigning them as deviations, anomalies. If they accumulate, the scientific discipline in question is in a state of crisis.

Kuhn believes that it is these crises, typically caused by the inability to explain one’s observations according to the dominant theory, that lead to transformations of the fundamental theories and assumptions. His opinion is that, in fact, science and theories do not evolve towards the true picture of reality – the paradigms just change.

Science Through Art III: Meteorology. The illustration is based on Caspar David Friedrich's work Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.

So the scientific “truth” is, in fact, quite fragile – and in the end, there are many ways of seeing.

Yes, there are many ways of seeing the same thing, and many of them can be correct at the same time. It depends on both the objective facts and the perspective you take. To use Kuhn’s terminology, a research subject might appear very different when looked at through two different paradigms. When we are looking at, for example, the Sun rise and set, we perceive the Sun moving, but we can alternatively think that the Sun stays still while the Earth moves about. However, the observation of the movement itself, be it the Sun or the Earth that is moving, is an objective empirical fact. It is real. One should not confuse perspectivism, the theory that knowledge is limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed, with relativism – the idea that knowledge exists in relation to culture, society, or historical context. Furthermore, the choice of perspective is not arbitrary, it depends on the context. In the astronomical context, the Earth moves, and this is unambiguous. But from a subjective point of view, it is still perfectly correct to say that it’s the Sun that goes up and down. Science is only one way to look at reality. Science aims to tell about the world as accurately and objectively as possible. But then again, there are many ways to perceive the world to begin with! Even if a new phenomenon is discovered through science, the purely scientific perspective is not necessarily the best way to understand what this phenomenon is for us, from our living human perspective.

In other words, the truth could be seen, for example, from an accurate point of view of science or from the point of view of art which aims to stimulate experiences.

Exactly. In one sense, at least in some cases, art can speak to us more about reality than science, even if science contains more information about the subject at hand. Yet it would be wrong to speak about different “truths”, the “truth of science” and the “truth of art”, for example, since even if the perspective changes, it is the same old world out there that determines what is true in a given perspective. But it is possible to try and look at the world from different perspectives – from one that is based on knowledge or from others that are based on emotion, etc. Science tries to describe the world as accurately as possible and philosophy tries to see what all this information means. But art is the medium which is best suited to bring all that as part of the way we experience the reality. They are complementary.

“Science tries to describe the world accurately and philosophy to see what all this information means. But art is the medium best suited to bring that all together as part of the way we experience the reality.”

To go back to the core topic of science and aesthetics, let’s discuss visuality in science. Visual aids that are used to communicate results to the outside world are also utilised within the science world.

Yes, very much so. Science doesn’t take place just inside the scientist’s mind or in the calculations of a computer. Scientists ‘externalise’ part of their cognition with external aids, such as diagrams and visual models. Sometimes it is easier to think about things through visuality – although the research subject would not even deal with spatial dimensions, it might be easier to think about them as some kinds of layers or shapes. Scientists might use visual metaphors even in their private thinking. For example, some mathematicians visualise the problems in their minds while others process them mechanically or through intuition. But there are many drawings done by scientists in the world, used for thinking and communication – and, I’m sure, for aesthetic self-expression!

It’s also quite interesting that in science an ingenious scientific result is called ‘elegant’.

Yes, a scientific result or solution is considered elegant when it expresses only the essential, the core of the discovery, explaining as much as possible with as little as possible. In mathematics, this might mean the most simplified or symmetrical result or solution.

The simplicity also serves to achieve applicability and a simple explanation that can be applied to many problems is also more likely to be true. But aesthetic preferences are definitely related to this also – a simple, elegant research result can also be seen as simply beautiful.

Lou YongQi, Aalto & Tongji Design Factory

Having spent 6 years studying in the US, Zhang Ke doesn’t have time to work too much outside China where there’s a lot of demand for urbanism. The same goes for almost all the other local architects we met. Wang Shu, the principal of Amateur Architecture Studio and the head of the architecture department at CAFA in Hangzhou, travelled outside China for the first time in 2001 when presenting his work at the Venice Biennale. “My work has its roots here, it entails a Chinese philosophy,” Wang Shu explains his thoroughly local architecture known for experimental building processes and indigenous use of materials.

Meng Yan and Lou YongQi are also overseas-educated architects who have decided to stay in China. Meng Yan is one of the founders of URBANUS, a think tank operating in Beijing and Shenzhen to provide strategies for urbanism and architecture, and Lou YongQi is the vice dean and associate professor at the department of architecture at Tongji University as well as the coordinator for DESIS-China network. In addition, he is the representative of the Sino-Finnish Aalto & Tongji Design Factory project, which sets out to combine design, business and technology education in Shanghai. Meng Yan and Lou YongQi share their views on the changing role of an architect today. “Design is changing from design doing to design thinking, and architecture needs to contribute to the new ways of development,” Lou YongQi says. “Many aspects of our lives should be re-evaluated, and architects should push the boundaries of their traditional role in order to act as a progressive force in the society,” Meng Yan continues. “For me, any building activity without comprehensive thoughtfulness will be insignificant,” Wang Shu adds.

“Many aspects of our lives should be re-evaluated, and architects should push the boundaries of their traditional role in order to act as a progressive force in the society.” – Meng Yan, URBANUS

The discussion with the foursome revolved around topical design methods such as anthropology, spontaneity and crossing disciplines.

Anthropology

China has many different cultures within it. “When designing to a new area, it’s important to go and stay there for at least a couple of weeks with no preconceptions; get to know the agriculture and talk with people,” says Zhang Ke. “One should neither look up to a culture too much nor look down on it. It’s important to be neutral and not to imitate, yet do something that the locals will accept.” standardarchitecture’s projects, like the Beijing Wuyi Elementary School Auditorium, the CRLand French-Chinese Art Centre in Wuhan or the Qingcheng Mountain Teahouse in Chengdu, often show both a comprehension of the past and a provocative approach in the modern context. “Our projects always include a degree of intellectual debate,” Zhang Ke continues. “They often explore and experiment with new means of construction in and for various cultural or historical urban settings in China.”

Meng Yan, URBANUS & Zhang Ke, standardarchitecture

Taking agriculture as a device for urbanisation seems to be a common approach among the new generation of Chinese architects. Wang Shu’s Amateur Architecture Studio has, for instance, shown an interest in adapting the rural Chinese recycling-based construction methods to the mass creation of new buildings. “Modern buildings are often considered at their best when they have just been finished, when they are shiny and clean, but with historical buildings it’s just the opposite: their value increases over time,” Wang Shu says. “Why not adopt a similar approach to new buildings through the use of recycled materials, for instance? I like materials that have a history and buildings that live, like animals.”

“I like materials that have a history and buildings that live, like animals.” – Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio

Many of Amateur Architecture Studio’s projects, such as the Ningbo Historic Museum or the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, explore a building’s relationship to nature and its human environments, and Wang Shu likes to take a stand on keeping up with traditional modes of living in a rapidly changing context. “In 20 years, almost 90% of the Chinese landscape, and the Chinese culture with it, has been demolished,” he says. “Every year, I visit the countryside, and it’s like a dream. But there’s no way of going back to the old traditions, so we should come up with new ways to return to the beautiful dream. For instance, not every citizen can have a big house because the population is too large – therefore, that’s not the right dream anymore.”

Meng Yan’s practice, URBANUS, explored traditional Chinese Hakka architecture in their spatial layout for Tulou affordable housing in Guangdong. Drawing on a collective way of living in between the city and the countryside, the idea behind the project was to find inexpensive ways of living together. “Unlike rich people, people with less income need to collaborate and share information in order to find jobs and maintain a nice living,” Meng Yan explains the thinking behind their round-shaped housing blocks. “Besides, their rooms are so small that they need to extend their lives outside them.” Having done a lot of research on low-income housing, studying how much the inhabitants pay for living, how much room do they need, what kind of functionality they find most important and how their safety needs to be ensured, URBANUS came up with design solutions such as a safety door but was surprised about many things that took place in reality. “Luckily, the client didn’t want the safety door because it was too expensive,” Meng Yan says. “As it happens, the people living in Tulou keep their doors open. The housing area is very safe because of the social interaction. People look after each other, and many of them even share cooking during the weekends.” Having had the possibility to continue their anthropological studies thanks to the far reaching thinking of their client, the real estate developer Vanke, URBANUS has learned a lot by observing the life in their building, and even lodging in them for some time.

Spontaneity

Wang Shu speaks for “infinitely spontaneous order” when it comes to designing new buildings. He thinks that modern architecture is often too clean to really resonate with the real life. “I like my buildings bazars rather than sculptures,” he says. “I want to involve people in the process of making places. To me, what makes buildings interesting is the way their inhabitants have repaired or redone them.” Lou YongQi agrees: “We as architects and designers need to learn to give up things. The most beautiful cities are not designed by us, they’ve been built over the years by many different people.”

“We as architects and designers need to learn to give up things. The most beautiful cities are not designed by us, they’ve been built over the years by many different people.” – Lou YongQi, Tongji University

Wang Shu has applied an open and collaborative approach to his architecture from the very beginning. “In 1991, a friend of mine wanted to put up a small temporary theatre in Hangzhou,” he explains. “He didn’t have much money, so we decided to use all of it for buying timber. See, my friend had worked as a stage designer and I knew that stage designers would never leave building material unused. Then, we started a spontaneous process of construction based on my preliminary design. I sat at the construction site smoking and drinking tea, observing carefully and telling the construction workers what to do on the spot – changing the idea of design from concept to action.”

Having worked in close collaboration with construction workers (and mostly with the same ones) for a long time now, Wang Shu knows that rather than practicing abstract thinking, craftmen think by hands. “They always surprise me,” he says. “For example, I designed the facade of the Ningbo Historic Museum using almost forty different materials, carefully planning how they should be placed and how the wall should look. Then, I gave my plan to the construction men and something totally unexpected happened. Due to safety structures, they couldn’t see the whole building at once but rather looked worked on small areas at a time, placing all the materials randomly and thus very differently from what I had planned.” Wang Shu ended up prefering the design of the construction workers over his own and enjoying the feeling of not being able to control everything in the building process. “My work is to give guidelines, a direction for the craftsmen who will then think by hands and come up with new things,” he notes.

Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio

Talking with Wang Shu, it appeared that he saw spontaneity the most interesting thing about Chinese culture in general. And there were similar thoughts in the air with other architects, too. Zhang Ke, for instance, has experimented with visible flooding pipes in standardarchitecture’s French-Chinese Cultural Exchange Center project. “Let it happen in China,” he states, referring not only to the flooding pipes quite randomly cutting a building but also to things like interior design projects changing the functions of buildings overnight, or the overall fast speed and short timeframe of projects.

“Let it happen in China.” – Zhang Ke, standardarchitecture

Crossing disciplines

“In China, young creative practitioners don’t feel a need to define whether they are architects, designers or whatever,” Zhang Ke says. “It’s interesting to work with people from different fields. The Sino-Finnish Aalto & Tongji Design Factory project also aims to combine design, technology and business in the education of future creative professionals. “We want to create an interdisciplinary platform where people can meet and start thinking differently,” Lou YongQi explains. Inspired by IDEO, the project focuses on new ways of development through social innovation. “I have realised a lot of architecture, 30 000 sqm of public building, during my career, but understanding people has turned out the most challenging task,” Lou YongQi says. “And how to make people with different ideas and skills to communicate? Instead of thinking about apples, oranges and bananas, one needs to think about mixing ice cream to get new flavours.”

“Understanding people is the most challenging task.” – Lou YongQi, with the experience of 30 000 sqm of public architecture

URBANUS collaborates with an artist, a multimedia designer and a graphic design office on a daily basis, organising workshops for sharing ideas at the office. They also run a space for contemporary art shows on the other side of the street from their Shenzhen office. Space e-6 involves different curators who put together exhibitions from architecture to photography, film and sculpture. Instead of calling themself an architecture office, URBANUS is a think tank. “We’re not different from typical architectural practices – all of them work hard and do more things that they’re capable of,” Meng Yan laughs. “No, seriously, when we started our office, coming back to China from our studies in the US ten years ago, we found that urbanisation was in a critical point here. And we saw new problems coming with it; problems that we hadn’t experienced before. So, we started thinking how we could define the problems and positioned ourselves as progressive architects asking questions and improving urban life. And not only the harware like buildings and spaces but the software, too – the life that would take place in these containers. It’s been quite time consuming to run an office like this, but we never once questioned our goal yet.”

Both Meng Yan, Lou YongQi, Wang Shu and Zhang Ke seem to agree that architects need to search for contemporary ideas through working beyond their typical boundaries and with different people. They all see the role of an architect as a progressive force in the society, emphasising the importance of research and questioning things in designing buildings or cities. “There are so many issues that are impossible to solve, so, instead, we need to start raising questions,” says Zhang Ke. “Naturally, clients aren’t always open for discussion and inquiry is often out of the question. Luckily, however, this seems to be changing as the clients get younger.” “Faced with continuous renewal, is it possible for architecture to be more flexible and participate in shaping new values?,” Wang Shu asks. “For me, architecture is only part time work. Humanity is more important.”

Marina, Esther and Florence on the construction site of a multicultural kitchen in Kalasatama.

Helsinki inhabits tens of thousands of immigrants who have all brought their memories, habits and delicacies with them. However, for some reason, this barely shows in the cityscape. Ahmet Aslan, the owner of the only Kurdish restaurant in Helsinki, Café Caisa, explains how difficult it is for a foreigner to open a decent eatery in the city. “Already when I came to Finland in the nineties, I wanted to open an à la carte restaurant serving food from my home country,” Ahmet says. “However, I didn’t have a Finnish education at that point, so I wasn’t able to get a license for serving wine – so, I ended up opening a lunch place first. When I finally received a local diploma, I returned to my original plans and put up a proper Kurdish à la carte restaurant in Kaisaniemi.” Café Caisa serves oriental home food including meze plates and fresh salads. “On the side, I also try to provide the customers with some insights to Kurdish culture,” Ahmet adds. He hopes that the Finnish government would learn from the likes of France and give more support to entrepreneurship within the restaurant industry. “This way, we might soon be known for our rich food culture, too,” he notes.

“It’s difficult for a foreigner to open a decent eatery in Helsinki.”

Opening an ethnic kitchen in Helsinki wasn’t easy for half Israeli and half Ukrainian Alexander Bitsak, either. Alexander moved to Finland a couple of years ago because he considered the country, in his own words, the best place in the world. He found a perfect space on Kustaankatu in Kallio for his Ukrainian pelmeni restaurant but, coming from Israeli at the time, was denied entrance to the country by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “So, I left my beautiful space, went to Kiova, and decided to try again,” Alexander explains. “Finally, I returned to Kustaankatu with a Ukrainian passport. Then, I renovated my restaurant and tried to make it special for customers and Finnish friends.” Alexander used to have a pizza place in Israel, but didn’t want to found one in Finland as he believes we have enough pizza already. “As a matter of fact, in addition to Ukrainian food like pelmenis and soups, my menu consists of traditional Finnish delicacies such as Karelian roast (karjalanpaisti) and Finnish fish pasty (kalakukko). It is easy to feel at home at Pelmenit, Alexander’s restaurant – and not just because of the familiar food. “The customers don’t come here only to eat, but rather to meet me,” Alexander says. “I ask how they are, how their family and health is. Unfortunately, now I’ve become so popular that I don’t have time to speak that much anymore.”

Like Alexander, Ahmet and us, also Marina Lindström from the multicultural co-operative Q-Coop thinks that Helsinki needs more ethnic kitchens. That’s why she’s planning to open a big restaurant and central kitchen in Kalasatama, a harbour area freed for residential construction only a few years ago. Her idea is to bring together people and cuisines from all over the world (e.g. West African, Iranian, Ethiopian, Indian and Kurdish) under the same roof, organise lunches, dinners and events as well as prepare food to be sold in smaller kiosks around the city. As her co-workers, the Finnish-born Marina has two Nigerian women, Esther Ademosu and Florence Awoyemi with whom she used to run the Yoruban Kimito Kitchen in Sörnäinen. Like many old harbour areas worldwide, food might help bring interesting people and activities to Kalasatama, too. But more than city planning in its traditional sense, Marina is interested in helping immigrants integrate and making Helsinki’s food culture – and through that, the whole atmosphere of the city – more international and open. After all, in the end, it is the cultural aspects that make a true city.

The article also appears on We Are Helsinki magazine’s food issue, 3/2010.

Light mandalas from the Light Garden exhibition. Photo by the courtesy of Cosmic Wonder.

Cosmology often manifests as the creation of myths or religions that seek to explain existence and the nature of reality. What does Cosmic Wonder believe in?

We believe in Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science.

The Austrian philosopher (1861-1925), social thinker, architect and esotericist attempted to find a synthesis between science and and mysticism, seeking for a connection between the cognitive path of Western philosophy and the spiritual needs of the human being. He was also a defender of Goethe’s theory of colours arising from the polarity of light and darkness. Like for Steiner, Goethe and colours, light is central to COSMIC WONDER, too?

Yes, we explore light and love in everyday life through our art and fashion. For example, the concept of COSMIC WONDER Light Source fashion project is to dress people with light and, in doing so, produce an environmental effect. And when we say light, we mean many kinds of light – the human body, spirit and soul can also be seen as light. This idea is weaved into COSMIC WONDER Light Source, composed of positive spirit and materials reverberating the light of the natural world.

“We explore light and love in everyday life through our art and fashion.”

Our most recent project with COSMIC WONDER Light Source is The Solar Garden. It is an ecological lifestyle project inspired by the harmonious energy of the Earth and its plants, resulting as a collection of daily and dance clothing made of organic cotton. All products are hand-dyed with herbs such as akane, gardenia, pomegranate, mulberry leaf, rose bengal, catechu, and natural indigo. With The Solar Garden, we want to promote environmental preservation and sustainable ways of making things.

The Solar Garden daily and dance clothing and a COSMIC WONDER FREE PRESS publication. Images by the courtesy of Cosmic Wonder.

The dance wear collection sounds interesting. And Steiner was into dancing, too! Would you say that his and Marie von Sivers’ expressive movement art, eurythmy (or harmonious rhythm), inspired you, or why did you decide to make clothes for dancing?

Dance wear is a tool for opening up one’s spiritual mind and freedom in daily life. All the pieces in the collection are both for men and women because the spiritual mind and freedom do not differ in sex. Moreover, the clothes can be worn in different ways depending on the climate and the mood of the person dancing.

Can you tell me something about the light art?

We have done numerous art projects about light ever since we started the Centers for COSMIC WONDER, the stages for our open-ended activities in Tokyo and Osaka.

For example, Light Construction was a group exhibition presenting installation, video and music, while Light Streams project focused on photography. We’ve also invited artists to organise events. Kim Gordon, for instance, held a meditative Mind/Body Training session with us. Next, we will have an exhibition called Light Garden. It is based on an installation of two mandalas that can be seen as portraits of light, representing the outward-rippling light waves caused by the inward resonances through which the universe exists within us.

Kim Gordon's Mind/Body Training event at the Center for COSMIC WONDER. Photo by the courtesy of Cosmic Wonder.

Like OK Do, you work in free pace and format, doing different things by intuition. Is there a certain philosophy behind the freedom of form and content?

We’ve worked without time restraints for over ten years now, choosing the right time to do things by intuition. The same goes for location. And we reevaluate our activities all the time. The periodical COSMIC WONDER FREE PRESS publication works like a diary, expressing the present state of COSMIC WONDER and COSMIC WONDER Light Source projects through certain themes or topics of research at a given time.

“We’ve worked without time restraints for over ten years now, choosing the right time to do things by intuition. The same goes for location. And we reevaluate our activities all the time.”

All this feels like the natural thing to do, and we appreciate the people who understand the concept of our work. We would like to continue conveying positive messages to the world.

Here and there – Satoko and Kok-Meng's office mixes inside and outside spaces.

Thanks for inviting us over! How did you end up in Shanghai?

Satoko Saeki: I first came to China in 2000 for an internship, as a result of studying architecture under the guidance of a Chinese professor in Pennsylvania. Having lived in Tokyo and New York, I immediately felt that China was different. I was not interested in its architectural scene but more the atmosphere. Instead of being established and “ready”, there was an air of dynamism and potential – something was about to happen.

Kok-Meng Tan: I came in the end of 2003 to work on a large conservation project in the former French Concession. Then I met Satoko in a café where we both used to hang out. She had started her own practice a little earlier and asked me to join her.

Which café was that?

SS: It was a small casual café called Le Petite, run by our Japanese friend Noriko. Since then, she has made the place more private and moved it to her home. She used to work as a designer for Muji and has lived in Shanghai for many years. I can call Noriko if you would like to visit her.

We would, thanks (see the interview with Noriko)! Could you tell us about your design approach?

KMT: We are not interested in the kind of design that is currently hyped all over. We rather believe in the genres of “under design” (design that falls below conventional contemporary design as deemed too simple or too banal) “super design” (design that exceeds the conventional because it may be too extreme, too personal or just useless) and “non-design” (functional and straightforward items and ideas that were developed before the advent of “design”).

SS: We are also interested in creating experiences and affecting behaviour in spaces instead of designing expressive buildings.

“We believe in the genres of under design, super design and non-design.”

What kinds of projects do you carry out?

SS: We mainly do interiors and small-scale architecture because, as foreigners, it’s difficult for us to get hold of bigger development projects.

KMT: Lately, we’ve been working on a small housing project for two families based on the ideas of sharing and interconnection.

SS: The project is called Minus K House. In Japan, homes are often described as 3LDK (3 x Living Dining Kitchen rooms) or 4LDK, etc. But for these two houses, the kitchen is shared, and therefore not fully a K. In practice, all the 19 rooms of 3 x 3 square metres also function as passages: to move around the building, you need to pass from one room to another, and there are many ways to experience the house. One of the families uses their part of the building as a weekend house and the other part is used as a regular home. The openness allows each family to be aware of the other.

KMT: In the Minus K House, we also wanted to mix inside and outside spaces – to make the whole concept of ‘inside and outside’ insignificant so that the relationships between this and that, and here and there would become more important. When this happens, the walls become less important, even unnoticed, emphasising a communality in the space.

KUU is working on interiors and small-scale architecture for sharing and interconnection.

We definitely feel that Chinese culture is more inclined to sharing than our own. Could you tell us more about your view on the concept of sharing in Chinese architecture?

SS: After the Communist Liberation in 1949, families typically had to share their bathrooms and kitchens with others. This was not very convenient but people got used to it. Nowadays, Chinese people are wealthier, but through urbanisation, like in most of the other big cities, people have to move to tower blocks which diminish communality. We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.

KMT: We think that sharing, or the presence and recognition of somebody else, makes people more in touch with reality. In our office, a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use, we can smell the cooking of our neighbours, see their underwear drying, and hear them chatting. We really like the setting because it reminds us that we are working in a real context, mixing the inside and outside spaces together.

“We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.”

How do you find clients and collaborators?

KMT: In China, everything happens through the people you know. Satoko just visited a really nice indigo dyeing workshop outside Shanghai which we found through Noriko.

SS: It’s a workshop run by a 75-year-old couple who use natural indigo and cotton and dye everything by hand. In fact, China is a great place for a designer exactly because of this: the craftsmen and manufacturers are near and it’s possible to work with them closely.

KMT: Basically, you can just make a drawing and take it to the product-makers yourself. In Japan and Singapore, we usually use catalogues for picking up construction material for our projects while in China we can work in close collaboration with the makers themselves.

You’ve also taught at the Shenzhen University’s architecture department as guest studio masters.

KMT: Yes, last year, we carried out a design studio called Shenzhen Super Stir with our students who were encouraged to give modern architecture a proper stir through a series of exercises. We asked them to rethink the idea of “clarity” – a common architectural notion that has been inherited from the early European modernists. The idea was to ask if an estrangement from clarity or definition could inspire us to new thinking about privacy, communality and boundaries – and ultimately to new kind of architecture.

What did the students think about the stirring?

KMT: The students seemed resistant at first, they wanted to make new things. In China, traditionally, students are taught to create form – and if the project doesn’t involve creating new form then the results are not considered new. We wanted to make the students see the value in designing new experiences, too.

SS: We also wanted them to experiment how cities might become interesting and more functional through the “misuse” of space. In the end, the students came up with great ideas for an old industrial block where spaces with different functions, such as education or trade, overlapped encouraging sharing and interaction.

Like you’ve discussed in your writing, in the West, people are also obsessed with new forms.

KMT: Yes, according to François Jullien, a French Sinologist (The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting), this has to do with the foundations of Western, in other words Greek, thinking where something conceptual or abstract always has to be manifested as something else – a presence of “this” means the existence of “that”. In traditional non-Greek thinking, such as the Chinese, there is no obsession with presence. Whether something is present or not is never asked, because it’s not part of the question. Presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum. According to the non-Greek logic, we shouldn’t even ask questions about form or non-form – it’s not about one or the other but they come from the same pre-differentiated source.

“In traditional Chinese thinking, presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum.”

How do you see the current mindset of creative professionals in China?

KMT: When we first came to China, there was understandably no layers – no historical thinking or understanding behind architecture and design. The work and discussions were either stuck in Chinese traditions or random references picked from the Western world – and these ideas carried no meaning, they were not progressive. But then things started to change rapidly.

SS: In the last ten years, big money entered China and there was a lot of development, a lot of big projects. But at the same time, more subtle cultural things developed, too. Chinese people started opening cafés with unique local character. Before, people always referred to foreign examples, but the younger generation has gained confidence – they look at their own culture, society and roots and take ideas from them to the modern context.

KMT: I think that many Chinese creative people feel like they don’t need to live in the West anymore. They’re making meaningful things in their own context and recognising their own environment as authentic. This is great because, in the end, people want real things. The fact that people are starting to be their own selves in China is a good starting point for newness.

Kok-Meng and Satoko's office is a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use.

We agree, and it is interesting to see how many contrasting ways of living and working seem to co-exist, for instance, in Shanghai. It’s not so settled yet.

SS: Yes, many people live in a modern way familiar from Western contexts while many neighbourhoods also hold on to the old spirit of sharing and porosity.

KMT: We’re attentive to the behaviour of people in Shanghai – how they behave in different environments, at different times and with different types of people. Things are in a fuzzy and seemingly contradictory state. For example, Shanghainese interact with their family, colleagues, and shopkeepers in a very natural way, but at the same time they formalise their homes into abstract symbols of social status and taste. Our young clients don’t cook, but they still want a designer kitchen. They will move out in three years time, yet they worry about radiation from the marble. We need to understand this phenomenon in order to work with it.

Could you name some other things that interest or inspire you about China at the moment?

SS: Well, we’re interested in traditional Chinese landscape painting: how the use of ink on paper, a single simple medium, can create a world of many things based on gradations of tonalities, densities, dryness and wetness, becoming present and fading away, hazy and distinct, here and there, this and that. In the paintings, we can sense an atmosphere of an all encompassing world before things became differentiated.