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Conversations that led to Living Data began in Antarctica. As veteran Antarctic expeditioner Jack Wardexplains, this is a place where you can imagine yourself interacting with a "...spirit of tremendous force". With new technologies and methods now available for sensing, expressing, and communicating global climate changes, understanding Antarctica is key to understanding the health of the whole ecosystem, including us. Antarctic forces drive global wind and sea currents.

Conversations that began in the ice continue as scientists and artists explore places closer to home.

Underwater life beside the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS), Feb 2016.
Photo: William Gladstone

Insights arise spontaneously and unexpectedly

From: DeirdreCobbin
To: Lisa Roberts
Subject: science and art are the same
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2016 04:05:25 +0000

I've been doing my one hour 'walk' each day for exercise..back and forth along the veranda rail and like little Obelia in snugglepot and cuddlepie (who when she wanted to think, actually went down to the bottom of the sea and counted her pearls in a big clam shell) I use the time to think about all sorts of mindless things.

One of which that gradually emerged

(after I failed to sort out the unanswered one of why do leaves flutter on the branches all the time...what is the function of this...so why are they evolutionarily designed to do this....)

That is ..... wondering about Art and Science and their differences

While they appear to be doing quite disparate things.

This really is not the case

Science and art are in fact doing the same thing,

they are using the same concepts

(don't call them the same thing of course)

however they even have the same core goal/aim/motive whatever we call it... no matter which science branch you take or art direction.

and I think it is ...well I don't like to put this word on it because it sounds so concrete and that is not what I mean

I think it is reality

or making sense of our experience

or of the world

But whatever it is it is based on our personal experience somewhere at the core of it all.

even with the most fanciful abstract or 'fantasy like' drawing, sculpture, carving, music, song, something as wildly removed from reality and this world as the person can imagine..... if the aim is to produce something that is so abstract etc etc ... well that obviously requires the person's concept of what IS reality and draws on some of the things the person is trying to NOT portray.

And their take on the what IS depends on their own experience with the world or their corner of it and the present or previously recorded IS,

(if you are confused IS means IS REALITY)

and of course there is with a myriad of shades in between....those art works and attempts to as painstakingly as possible capture the essence of reality...as something, some view, some sound, some feel some touch IS.

the concepts are still the same

Okay that's a quick blob re art from a non artist to probably now a highly irritated artist

well ... how about science

it is doing the same thing too except what it typically is attempting to figure out is what actually IS reality by finding...observing...stuff in the world that supports (or equally importantly...does not support a present or former guess (hypothesis) of what the IS and IS not are.

and science for all those who say it can't look at this or that or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin... puts a huge effort into somehow getting a way to count, observe, measure, record or correlate with the invisible or unseeable and the like

the way psychology goes about sorting out thoughts and other invisible cognitive events/processes depends upon our ability to dream up (now there's an invisible approach!) some method.

I could go on but if you've read this far you get my drift.

and it's time for my next walk.....