![\"der-lauf-der-dinge\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/files\/2015\/10\/der-lauf-der-dinge.jpg\")
<\/a>I was not at a science exhibition, but at the Turner Contemporary<\/a> Gallery\u2019s new show, Risk<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 The piece I was looking at was called The Way Things Go<\/a><\/em> (German: Der Lauf der Dinge), a film made in 1987 by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss.<\/p>\nThis film, made in a warehouse, is a sort of mash-up between Blue Peter and Heath Robinson and Wallace and Gromit.\u00a0 It is a continuous stream of actions, each one triggering the next in the chain.\u00a0 Bin bags swing until they stroke tyres to roll; delicately poised and weighted cardboard rings progress up a slope; balloons fill and drop onto levers.\u00a0 Some triggers exploit physical processes \u2013 the conservation of energy \u2013 while others are chemical: burning, explosion, melting.\u00a0 The whole thing is 30 minutes of cartoonish, breath-holding, audacious inventiveness.<\/p>\n
I went with my own children.\u00a0 We joined the video, which was shown on a loop, about 10 minutes in.\u00a0 We watched it to the end, then we watched the first tem minutes to join up to when we started.\u00a0 Then we watched it all the way to the end again.\u00a0 After we\u2019d been round the rest of the show, we came and watched it again.\u00a0 Nor were my children unusual in their attentiveness to the feat which, let\u2019s face it, is not paced like contemporary media.\u00a0 It is slow, and there is no commentary, no music: no sound at all except the drips and clops and fizzings.\u00a0 There was a whole crown of them around the screen and they couldn\u2019t hold their questions back. \u00a0Some, I\u2019m afraid, were being shushed. \u00a0The parents were coming back as best they could with fragments of physics and chemistry; the children were filling in with knowledge and hypothesis.<\/p>\n
However, despite the science chat the\u00a0show, and this piece in particular, did not purport to be science; it was art. \u00a0Moreover, I had the feeling that its success pointed to a very profound asymmetry between science and art in public.\u00a0 When we see science on display \u2013 at science museums and expos \u2013 there are heaps of explanations: panels to tell us the principles we see on display.\u00a0 Often, we read the panel, then press the button to see the theory demonstrated for us in some clever model.\u00a0 Art is different.\u00a0 Art in galleries is presented with very little explanation.\u00a0 It\u2019s a high risk strategy, with the risk that the audience will write it off with the clich\u00e9, \u2018my 5-year-old could have made that\u2019.\u00a0 But when it works, it works brilliantly.\u00a0 The audience must do the work of figuring out why it matters; what research underpins it.\u00a0 The audience meets the art in a raw and mostly unmediated encounter.\u00a0 They are not told the answers, but left to figure them out for themselves; indeed, they are left to figure out the questions.\u00a0 In science galleries, by contrast, the encounter is highly mediated; the process or direct results of science are not shown; and the learning outcomes are predetermined.\u00a0 You can either take them, or leave them and proceed straight to the giftshop.<\/p>\n
Of course there is <\/em>always trickery behind the scenes.\u00a0 If you look closely at Fischli and Weiss\u2019s film, there are some cuts, just as there are in science.\u00a0 The results always take a little cleaning up.\u00a0 But somehow seeing that work done in an artistic context changed the way I felt about it.<\/p>\n What I saw at The Way Things Go<\/em> was, ironically, the best example of science communication I have ever seen \u2013 in the specific sense that it got its audience asking questions.\u00a0 I can\u2019t think of any better outcome for a show, whether science or art.<\/p>\n Postscript: You can watch a bit of The Way Things Go<\/em> on Youtube; better yet, see it in its entirety, and the rest of the exhibition, in Margate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I heard more spontaneous conversations today about science than I have ever heard in any exhibition anywhere. \u2018Why are those rings rolling uphill?\u2019 \u2018Why is that water burning?\u2019 \u2018What will happen when the balloon fills?\u2019 I was not at a science exhibition, but at the Turner Contemporary Gallery\u2019s new show, Risk.\u00a0 The piece I was … <\/p>\n