Supernatural | Abraham George
at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai
Aug 10 - Sept 09 2023
Text by Thomas George
The earliest images made by humans served both artistic and scientific ends. And, for the longest time, there were significant overlaps between the two approaches. Famously, many renaissance artists had scientific interests and scientists artistic training. This easy fellowship was disrupted by the emergence of a mechanistic view of nature in the 17th century.
Not so coincidentally, this momentous shift in the relations between the arts and the sciences was accompanied by advancements in the science of optics. The development of new lens-based observational tools such as microscopes and telescopes expanded the visible universe for the first time in history and made new insights available to science. But while they revolutionized our understanding of the universe, they also played a significant role in painting human subjectivity as suspect, encouraging the privileging of the scientific worldview that continues to this day.
However, it wasn’t only scientists who were fascinated by the new optical devices. Some claim such tools paved the way for the rediscovery of perspective by European artists during the Renaissance. Artists have had to cope with constantly changing visual technologies ever since.
Today scientific enterprises continue to churn out thrilling insights and images at an impressive rate. At the same time, new challenges have emerged raising questions over their ability to keep doing so. On the one hand, scientists confront absolute biological limits to what can be made visible that pose unique challenges in rendering individual images.
Simultaneously, over the past century, the coherence of scientific description as a total explanation of nature has been undermined by the development of incommensurable scientific paradigms.
Finally, the opacity of more recent data-driven approaches to technology has undermined the idea of theory itself, threatening to make science indistinguishable from magic.