Visual science: The legacy

When we consider scientific imagery, it is clear that representations of science have always been, and indeed still are, influenced and enriched by an aesthetic input. Few now doubt that this was the case in the Renaissance, when artists and scientists could be one and the same person, and this state of affairs continued thereafter, when training in drawing and seeing played an important part in many areas of scientific education. And while visual skills are far less a requisite for contemporary scientists, notable exceptions persist, especially in the biological and medical sciences.

Here, many of the most innovative scientific data recently produced have arrived dressed up in radically new techniques of visualising and picturing – electron microscopy, for example, crystallography and colour-enhanced NMR and fMRI images. One of the significant things about these images is that their colour and definition is frequently 'artificially' added to the raw data, often at computer terminals, in a manner that cannot be considered purely 'scientific'.

The scientists who produce these often stunning pictures tend not, however, to consider themselves as in any way fundamentally different from other scientists. Most see their pictures simply as tools to further specific areas of research, in just the way that others might view a graph or set of statistics. Some might concede that conventions have become established so that images are created in a particular 'style', while others will admit that their images may be open to interpretation, comments typically made about 'artistic' images. And certainly this tendency towards the notion of an 'aesthetic' science is further highlighted by the fact that some images have been put on show as if they were artworks – framed and captioned in conventional art-gallery fashion.

However, within the scientific communities, there is no doubt that an unbridgeable and enduring gap exists between image makers in science and those in the arts. The aims of scientific image makers are entirely coterminous with the rest of their professional colleagues who use different methods of presenting data. And though the images they produce are undoubtedly aesthetically charmed, the scientists who make them view them principally as data and tools rather than prized objects in themselves.

It is also worth noting that the images created by 'visual scientists' never stand simply as literal registers of what they see. Not so much visual records of what is there, these pictures are better understood as diagrams containing encoded information, which, either explicitly or implicitly, draw on visual conventions adopted by both creator and user. This is important, because the scientific content of an image can only successfully be transmitted if creators and viewers share the same interpretation of what they are looking at. In fact, scientific images inevitably carry with them a series of contexts, from the technical apparatus of captions, scales and codes which guide the viewers 'reading' and understanding of them, to the broader cultural and social contexts which constitute a framework of belief.

Another point about the role of images in science is crucial to grasp. Many of the pictures that were so crucial to at least the early development of various disciplines were far from being merely 'illustrative'. The significance and weight of 'visual thought' within them can be gauged by the number of instances in certain branches of science where a set of images derived from the world of sense perception has been replaced by 'artificial' visual images, and even more so by models, which go on to generate their own reality. Thus geological maps, at a macroscopic level, and models of the atom, at the opposite end of the scale, have come to exert extraordinary explanatory power precisely because they are easier to deal with than the complexities of nature itself.

However, it is important not to forget that the use of images to understand reality co-exists with an equally strong tradition based on measurements, numbers and quantities, all of which are presented in the aesthetically emaciated form of statistics and graphs. Thus for example, nineteenth-century German and French laboratory-based research in organic chemistry and physiology effectively turned a variety of the body's activities into systems of measurements. Within medicine in particular, but also throughout the observational sciences, a range of new instruments were introduced in the late nineteenth century which allowed individual phenomena to be automatically recorded in a form seemingly more truthful and trustworthy than traditional descriptions which were seen to be bound up with the fallibility of human observers. The role of an observer's personal understanding, intuition and memory, so fundamental to much pre-twentieth-century scientific practice, was thus gradually replaced by the more focused technical skills of reading and interpreting figures. Science, it seemed, would be stronger the more it rested on the certainty of machines and the less it was supported by the frailty of hand–eye–brain coordination in human observers.

This essay is adapted from his chapter 'Between explanation and inspiration: images in science', in Strange and charmed: new science and the contemporary visual arts edited by Sian Ede (Gulbenkian Foundation, London, 2000) pp. 68–83.

Related links

• Exhibitions at the Wellcome Trust