<scp>OASIS</scp>: On art–science in symbiosis

Art is often seen as a way to bring science to a broader audience. Here we suggest a very different way for artists and scientists to join forces, an interactive open-ended setting catalyzing a mutual search for elements and mechanisms that shape our world. Unlike art-as-illustration, such a symbiotic relationship where both partners gain insights in unpredictable ways cannot be designed or planned upfront. Instead, such shared serendipity may unexpectedly emerge when conditions are right. Here we ask what those conditions might be, reflecting on what worked for us, a visual artist and a natural scientist working happily together for over a decade. Using examples, we reconstruct in hindsight what may have been key factors making our cooperation productive and rewarding. We suggest that, not unlike cross-disciplinary scientific projects, art-science collaborations are unlikely to thrive without shared fascinations and a deep interest in each other’s work. Those conditions were certainly met in our case, both captivated by the wonders of nature and the intricacies of the human mind. And both admiring the way the other’s work explores those themes. It probably helped that each of us had been primed early on to value both science and art as tools to explore the world. But leadership by others, bringing science to the art academy and art into the science realm helped us get together. As our story illustrates, we never had a masterplan. One thing simply led to the other. All our projects emerged from bouncing ideas back and forth, culminating into something new from which both the art and the science benefitted in their own right. A symbiosis from which the emergent outcomes keep surprising both of us. The front-cover of this first issue of a new journal is just one example. Much has been written about art–science cooperation and how it may contribute to sustainability research. A special issue of the journal Ecology and Society provides a wealth of examples (Westley et al., 2019). Also, in other places we have argued that, surprisingly, successful scientists and artists share common approaches, habits, and tools (Scheffer et al., 2017) and that scientists may benefit from approaches that are explicitly used in the arts for stimulating creative production (Scheffer, 2014; Scheffer, Bascompte, et al., 2015). Others have suggested that “thinking like an artist” is what sets Nobel laureates and the like apart from average scientists (Root-Bernstein et al., 2008). Here, instead of aiming for another systematic overview, we invite you for a look behind the screen of how the two of us have worked together over the years to produce art videos, theater performances, essays, and other common projects, including the cover art and the opening article for this first issue of a new journal. Asked to reflect on the way we cooperate, the words oasis and symbiosis came to our associative minds. Oasis for a safe space where things can flourish. Symbiosis for a cooperation that produces fundamentally new things, like the emergent properties of lichens that go far beyond those of their components, or the fusion between different kinds of microorganisms that put the evolution of life on a fundamentally different track (Margulis, 1981). That is how we feel about our collaboration as an artist and a scientist: Tone Bjordam is a Norwegian artist who specializes in projects related to nature, perceptions, and science. She works with video, animation films, nature photography, abstract and nature-inspired paintings, intricate, detailed drawings, and sculpture installations. After finishing art academy in Oslo, she won a range of prestigious grants and awards, and her work appears in books, public spaces, and movies such as the Oscar award-winning “Poor Things.” Marten Scheffer is a scientist from the Netherlands, studying the stability of complex systems such as the brain, the climate, and ecosystems. He is a member of the Dutch and the American Academies of Arts and Science and won a range of awards including the highest scientific recognition in his country, the Spinoza Prize. Each of us is easy to find in cyberspace for more background. What follows is a flavor of how we have worked but also a reflection on how the things we learned may be useful for others attracted to the adventure of combining science and arts for exploring the world. Both arts and sciences are ways to search for the essence of things. Yet the results are strikingly different. Science aims to give an answer. Art remains open-ended. A catalyzer of interaction between the audience and the art piece that can unfold in a myriad of unforeseen ways. Art speaks to the soul, science to the mind. Arts and sciences may thus seem opposing ends of a spectrum, but in many ways, they are also related. First of all, both need inspiration and hard work: intuition for which way to go and skills to create an end product. That may be more obvious for art than for science. Yet, the most powerful thinking combines such complementary modes. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman framed it, the best result is obtained by alternating between “thinking fast and slow” (Kahneman, 2011). By combining the strengths of intuition with those of reasoning, scientists sometimes think that their business is about the rational side of things alone, but it is not. It requires an intuitive side that is more often associated with art. Indeed, it is probably not a coincidence that scientists who received the highest awards are actively practicing arts much more often than “average scientists” (Root-Bernstein et al., 2008). A keen eye for potentially powerful intuitions is what characterizes many of the leading scientists, yet that is not what we teach at universities (Scheffer et al., 2017; Scheffer, Bascompte, et al., 2015). Art schools are entirely different in that sense with their emphasis on intuition and finding your own “voice.” Clearly, art and science both need the two elements: thinking fast and slow, and using intuition and skills. They are also essentially after the same thing: searching for an essence and bringing it out in a powerful way. In our experience, this common goal linked to complementary techniques for thinking fast and slow is what can make art–science collaboration so rewarding. So, how to do that in practice? Are there any tips and tricks? If arts and science are the two giants of the human mind, how can we make them dance together? We do not pretend to have universal answers but thoroughly enjoyed our fruitful collaborative experience. What we have to offer in this essay is a reflection on how that emerged. We first take you through four examples, four stories that unveil “the making of,” and reflect on the question of what enabled our collaboration to fly. Starting with the most recent example, here is how the heart model of social change on the front cover of the first issue of this journal was born. After Marten had been exposed to presentations by environmental humanities scholars for a full day, he tried to sketch the position of science in the greater scheme of things, leading to the heart model reproduced in the first article in the first issue of Earth Stewardship. The ideas in that article were shaped by discussions with a diverse set of co-authors over the years, including Tone. When she was asked to go over the draft text, she immediately felt that stylized illustration (Figure 1a) could also be morphed into a positive and emotional version. In one single night, she drew the version of the heart model now on the cover (Figure 1b), and going back between the two of us, we reframed the words in the artwork. Something powerful and new emerged. An emblem for the new journal, with a version printed on stickers handed out at the 2024 conference of the Ecological Society of America to promote the initiative. Going back in time, a common interest in how creative processes work made us write the article “Dual Thinking for Scientists” with a broad group of scientists and artists (Scheffer, Bascompte, et al., 2015). The core idea was that thinking fast and slow are both needed, but they do not go together at the same moment very well. When you are in a rational mode, novel ideas rarely emerge. Instead, after a day's work behind the computer, when you finally cycle home, take a shower, peel potatoes, or go to sleep, you may suddenly get the “aha” moment. Thus, for the best result, one should cycle between the two modes, creating optimum conditions for the one and the other over and over again. Triggered by Escher's works with the lemniscate infinity symbol, and by C.S. Holling's use of that “lazy eight curve” to depict the process of change in nature and society (Gunderson & Holling, 2001; Holling, 1986), Marten came to Tone with a clumsily scribbled way to visualize alternation between the two phases of creative production (Figure 2a). Talking it over and going back and forth, it exploded into a series of artworks by Tone, starting with the version published with our Dual Thinking article (Figure 2b). But it didn't stop there. The idea of the creative production and lemniscate came back to us in different forms. This is probably because both of us are fascinated by the theme: often wondering how our minds work, how that could be optimized to produce even better art and science, how to make our work routines as effective as possible, and how to alternate free flow and hard-focused work for the best result. It resulted in a booklet “How to Think what Nobody Thought” that will be published in the coming year. It tells the story illustrated by examples of the ways in which a broad range of well-known writers, architects, composers, visual artists, and scientists worked. But in the book, that story is told in two parallel ways. Tone's artwork runs through the pages in an independent but connected flow, and not just linearly. That is revealed when you expose all the pages of the book together in a grid: pages 1–12 in a row, followed by 13–24 below, then 25–36, etc., up until the end of the book. It then turns out that illustrations connect both horizontally and vertically and also that a huge lemniscate emerges across the pages. As you can imagine, that was quite a puzzle, but often constraints bring out the best when it comes to creativity. While sometimes science invited the art, collaborations were also triggered the other way around. For instance, Julia Bentz, an organizer of the 2019 European Climate Change Adaptation Conference (ECCA), invited Tone to do a performance as the opening act of the conference, and then Tone invited Marten to be part of that. A few months before Marten had shared a new scientific paper with Tone: “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” (Steffen et al., 2018). The article sketched how the benign climate in which civilizations emerged is an exceptional and fragile state of the Earth system. It could easily have slipped into a next ice age, but that didn't happen. Instead, the Earth is now more likely to slip into a dangerous “hothouse” state without icecaps. Still, it remains possible to stabilize the lush but precarious climate that we have had for the past 10,000 years and that allowed human civilizations to emerge. Marten had designed the original figures for the paper (see the sketch from Marten's notebook: Figure 3a), and those images and ideas suddenly gave Tone the idea to create the three parallel worlds live on stage (Figure 3b). She would make evolving, colored structures in water, like landscape paintings in motion, gradually unfolding, and projected those in real time onto a large screen. And those visuals would be accompanied in synchrony with live music by Marten playing a variety of instruments. It was a lot of preparation and rehearsals but worked out spectacularly in the end. Instead of having the usual introductory talk, the attendees of the conference were taken by surprise as we kicked off the conference with dazzling images and a swirling violin solo (Bjordam, 2019) (https://vimeo.com/344427463). A few years later, we found ourselves in a completely different setting, the prestigious Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, doing another version of our live creation at the art and science conference “Imagine Earth,” moving from art to science and back. In fact, the ideas for those live shows were built upon our very first cooperation, which brings us to the way we got together in the first place. Marten was at a science conference organized by Stockholm Resilience Centre and Carl Folke, who had the idea to organize dinner amidst an exhibition in Sweden of the Carnegie Art Award project. It represented winning contributions from a diverse range of Nordic artists. In one room, Tone's video artwork “Corals” was projected (https://youtu.be/LcWkRMecPF8?si=a3XPUQy_LHpKZG5C). It looked like a landscape gradually transforming from one state to another. That left Marten mesmerized, and the idea to do something with this magic kind of art kept coming back to him over the next year. Would it be possible to combine Tone's visual art with his musical compositions somehow? Eventually, Marten contacted Tone, and the rest is history. Our conversations turned to Marten's interest in early warning signals for critical transitions (Scheffer et al., 2009), and we decided to try and do a liquid-landscape-style art video for which Tone would do the visual art and Marten would compose the soundtrack. Interestingly, the art as it evolved led us away from the original idea of early warning, presenting us to an entirely new insight: It can be near impossible to realize that you are in the middle of something that in the hindsight turned out to be a critical transition that entirely changed the world (https://vimeo.com/51029828). This is simply what Tone's experiments revealing the dazzling dynamics of inks and other fluids in water made us realize. That eye-opener from the art–science collaboration then further inspired a range of new directions for Marten's scientific work in progress, searching for data-driven detection of accelerating big change as it happens (Dakos et al., 2015; Kéfi et al., 2013; Scheffer, Carpenter, et al., 2015; van der Bolt et al., 2021), thus, in this case, moving from science to art and back. As you may realize by now, much of our collaboration grew organically without much of a master plan. Instead, one idea led to the other, and occasional invitations triggered further bursts of work and inspiration. An important aspect of our specific collaboration is feeling balanced. This is not art serving science as a communicator. When Marten co-created the SARAS institute as a place in South America where scientists and artists work together on visions of sustainable futures (Scheffer & Mazzeo, 2019), it quickly became clear that the artists had frustrating experiences with processes led by scientists to “integrate” art and science. Unequal settings where scientists were in the lead and artists were expected to deliver. For a true symbiosis that simply will not work. In our cooperation, the equal footing is unquestioned. An idea pops up, and from there, we create something together that wouldn't appear if it wasn't for what each of us can contribute with in art, science, text, visuals, and music. Also, we have found, after collaborating for years, that confidence in our mutual admiration allows space to critique elements in each other's contributions that could be improved. Such confidence builds over time. A friendship on a more personal level also adds to this, as meeting in different places, hiking, biking, dining, and talking freely about any topic create the possibility to suddenly burst into new branches of ideas or sow the seeds for ideas that might develop later on. We send each other sketches, ideas, visuals, music, poetry, and scientific articles that might develop into something. In our experience, new ideas cannot be forced, they just appear out of the blue, and that is a part of the magic. But why did science and art integrate so naturally in our case? We never gave it much thought, but stimulated by the invitation to write this essay, here are a few reflections. First of all, we think it helped that we were both primed to see both art and science as natural ways to reflect on the world. Tone grew up with geologists visiting the house while Marten ventured into the workshop of his sculptor uncle Ubbo Scheffer. Later, Tone's art academy invited scientists to reflect on the phenomenon of perception, while Marten went to the music conservatory in parallel to his biology studies. But even if you are primed, it doesn't mean that your interests resonate enough to have the patience for the enormously time-consuming kinds of cooperation we went into. The intuition that something could come out of this was sparked at the Carnegie exhibition where Marten saw Tone's work. That would never have happened were it not for the visionary idea of Carl Folke to have the science dinner at night in the middle of an art exhibition. Such acts require courage: the courage to risk being taken less seriously as a scientist if you immerse your respected colleagues into an art exhibition; the courage of the curators of the respected Louisiana Art Museum to invite our science–art experiment; and the courage of leaders in the Ecological Society of America to launch the journal Earth Stewardship. Inviting artists, alongside humanity scholars and scientists, to shed new light on the world is an unprecedented initiative for this prestigious centennial organization determined to make the world a better place for humans and all other species. Tone Bjordam: Conceptualization; supervision; validation; visualization; writing – original draft; writing – review and editing. Marten Scheffer: Conceptualization; supervision; validation; visualization; writing – original draft; writing – review and editing. We are grateful to the visionary leaders in the ESA who created this new journal, and to the editor-in-chief, Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald, for her whirling enthusiasm and warm encouragement. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The author has read, agreed to, and by the of on from the