I used to be really cynical about science/art collaborations. It all seemed a bit pretentious. But the last decade or so has seen a flowering in the field, and I'm happy to admit I was wrong. There is some truly innovative, clever and inspiring work out there (current favourite: a castle made from milk teeth). Still, the basic criticism that sci-art can seem a bit elitist is important. If the public feels turned off by the esoteric nature of modern science, is adding modern art really going to help?
Whenever I voice this concern, no matter where in the world – from Dublin to DC – the same project gets used as a rebuttal: the hyperbolic crochet reef. Why? Because this project involves people other than scientists and artists, thousands of them, and not just as an audience, but in the production of the final piece: a 'coral reef' made hundreds of bits of mathematically-inspired crochet. If this is all sounding a little crazy, I can recommend the TED talk from the project's leader, Margaret Wertheim or there's a lovely gallery of images from when it was in London in 2008. If you can, see it for yourself: it's about to open in the National Design Museum in New York.
This is not the only public engagement with science project to tap into the power of craft. For several years now the Newcastle Science Festival has housed the UK Maker Fair, featuring everything from pinhole cameras fashioned from beer cans, to 'Guerrilla' knitters who make jackets for the town's trees. There was the NASA/Etsy competition last year, asking for handicraft inspired by the space shuttle, or the regular science-themed cookie roundups from baking-blogger 'Not So Humble Pie'. I think we can also include physics-themed lolcats as part of the increasingly rich ecosystem of crafting and re-crafting science in public.
One of my favourite characters in the emerging field of sci-craft is Lauren O'Farrell, of the giant knitters' meet-up group, Stitch London. O'Farrell has organised several events at London science museums. Here, people sit around knitting, but they end up talking about the exhibits around them, and the bitch of the 'stitch and bitch' takes on a scientific hue. If art is for display, crafts are very much about the processes of making and doing. Moreover, as media studies professor David Gauntlett notes in his new book Making is Connecting, contemporary craft cultures are highly social activities, often enacted for social activism. Crafting brings people together, and can help people think through ideas and problems.
When I helped teach knitting at a 'Stitch a Squid' night at the Natural History Museum, I met people who hadn't knitted before, or at least not for years. Similarly, most hadn't thought about biology since school. But they were all drawn in by the odd juxtaposition of yarn and ecology. As we struggled with casting on and mastering a few rows of knitting, we talked about yarn and needles, but also ecology and plastics, inspired by a giant squid O'Farrell had knitted from bright orange shopping bags, unveiled that evening.
O'Farrell's latest project invites people to knit anything science-y for display in the Science Museum later this summer. This might seem superficial: there's a big difference between knitting a model spaceship, and engaging with scientific ideas. However, public engagement with science is a large and diffuse field. Not all work can, or should, have an obvious political or scientific outcome. Playing with a bit of yarn might seem unambitious, but arguably the social interaction and reflection that comes with it can have more meaning than over-ambitious projects that fail in their lofty promises to democratise science in more radical ways.
At a knitting evening held at Hunterian Museum a few years back, I ended up sitting next to a homeopath. As well as swapping tips on the best way to bind off for socks, we discussed our own research projects, including the ways in which they might be seen to clash, and some of the items of the history of surgery that surrounded us. Other people listened and joined in, before we all moved on to complaining about estate agents. It was polite, humorous and thoughtful. It was also pleasingly mundane; something that we'd all do well to remember a lot of science is.
Alice Bell blogs at Through The Looking Glass and tweets at alicebell
