When Growing an Ear on Your Arm is Art

TIME Ideas Innovation When Growing an Ear on Your Arm is Art Getty Images Model reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci's design for an aerial screw.

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In 2007, the Australian performance artist Stelarc started growing an extra ear on his left arm through a series of operations that are still ongoing. The ear is actually made up of his own stem cells woven into a biodegradable frame. Eventually a Bluetooth device will be inserted and Stelarc will be able to hear and communicate through it.

Stelarcs work focuses on body enhancement, exploring the radical changes our bodies will undergo in the 21st century. He also created Exoskeleton, a 1,300-pound prosthetic machine with six legs driven by 18 pneumatic actuators. Stelarc climbs into the middle of this huge device and pilots it with arm gestures. It is a harbinger of how technology and humans will increasingly mergea future in which cyborgs (or robotic machines) will be operated by our brains, while the rest of our bodies will become obsolete.

In these experiments, Stelarc creates a brand new art form using science and technology in ways that are artistically pleasing, or aesthetic. Our notions of science and aesthetics are two concepts that have been undergoing redefinition for centuries.

Ive studied the connections between art and science for 30 years, a passion first sparked while I was growing up in New York City as a kid interested in science in a city with some of the greatest art museums in the world. A few years after earning a doctorate in physics, I decided to focus on a question I was constantly asking myself: What is the nature of creativity in science? In studying the original German-language papers in relativity and quantum theory by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and others, I was struck by the importance of visual imagery and aesthetics in scientists creativity.

In the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci made no distinction between art and science. The imaginative submarines and helicopters he designed and drew were as much art to him as the Mona Lisa. A century later, in 1687, Isaac Newtons magisterial laws of motion led to the Age of Reason, in which the search for truth resided in science and art was relegated to mere ornamentation. It was not for another 300 years that art and science began to move closer again. The rise of industries fueled by spectacular developments in science and technologythe electrical dynamo, photography, and cinematographyplus scientific discoveries such as x-rays, radioactivity, and mathematicians explorations of multi-dimensional spaces inspired scientists and artists to new heights of abstraction.

Einstein was inspired to discover special relativity in 1905 by his desire to remove the asymmetries in nature implied by how scientists interpreted equations in the physics of that era. He found these asymmetries unbearable because he believed passionately in a pristine beauty in nature that he thought ought to be reflected in the mathematics of a scientific theory. In fact, Einstein introduced beauty simplicity in explanations, a sense of proportion in equations as a guideline in scientific research.

Developments in technology, science, and mathematics were also of central importance to artists. Pablo Picassos breakthrough 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles dAvignon, contained the seeds of Cubism. Picasso interpreted X-rays, discovered in 1895, as revealing that what you see is not necessarily what you get, a keynote of Cubism in which forms are reduced to geometry.

Picassos Cubism led to Futurism and then to Surrealism. Yet these art movements used only the ideas of science and technology, not the media like actual X-rays or actual cinematography. All this changed in the second half of the 20th century when electronics became readily available. But artists could not use this material without help from scientists, which led to collaboration. The first major collaboration took place in 1966 when the scientist Billy Klver brought together 30 colleagues from Bell Labs and 10 artists from the East Village, among them Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. This combustible mixture exploded in a series of performances called 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering. Rauschenbergs performance started with a tennis match in which the lights automatically dimmed when each player hit the ball, while Cage filled the auditorium with a cacophony of sounds collected from various sources such as hotel kitchens and police and marine radio bands piped in from around the city through telephone lines.

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When Growing an Ear on Your Arm is Art