True Art Is Always Pioneering

In The Art World Is Not Art I wrote about why I left: the hype engine, the gatekeeping, the transactional access. That essay was about integrity.

This one is about something I find more interesting, and in the long run more damaging. Not that the art world is corrupt — that argument is made. That art has become small.

Art is always whole. But today’s art, mostly, is not.

Alongside a general trend in humanity toward reductionistic science, I’d argue art has become very reductionistic. It works now like entrepreneurship, where the first thing you’re told is to find a niche. Artists frequently have to find a niche and then stay inside it, commercially. A certain style, a certain medium — the medium almost defines them, instead of them undefining the medium.

There have always been artists who worked across every material they could reach. But mostly it’s the recognizable style that has to be kept, and that makes it very hard to change. Changing costs you the collectors who bought the last thing. Consistency is a financial instrument.

György Kepes is the example I keep returning to, because he didn’t argue that art and science should meet — he built the room. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT put artists inside a technical institute as a standing arrangement, not a visit.¹ That is a structural answer, and it is rarer now than it was in 1967.

I did the interdisciplinary thing properly, once, with institutional backing.

I relocated from New York to Eugene and spent two years embedded on campus at the University of Oregon, working across neuroscience, computer science, psychology, biology and quantum physics — as a visiting scholar in the Alemán Quantum and Nanoscale Physics Lab and artist-in-residence at the Institute of Neuroscience at the same time. That is not a one-semester art project. We presented the research at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities at Virginia Tech, at The Science of Consciousness in Arizona, at SLSA at Rice, and in 2016 at Stanford, where Mindful Technologies: Research and Developments in Science and Art was published through the AAAI Spring Symposium on Well-Being Computing and received the Best Presentation award.²

And afterwards: nothing. No follow-up from the local arts commissions, none from the host institution. The work that came out of it went into patents and interfaces instead, which I don’t regret — but it went there because there was no art-side structure to carry it.

I want to be careful not to make that sound like a personal grievance. It’s a design flaw. Interdisciplinary work produces outputs that no single funding body recognizes as its own, so it falls between them, and what decides whether it continues is who you know. Nepotism and political connection overrule quality on that side of the fence too.

Here is where it stops being an art-world argument.

The reduction doesn’t end at the medium. It goes all the way down into which parts of a human being art is even willing to address — and the answer, overwhelmingly, is the eye.

Western popular culture still talks constantly about “the five senses”: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. That is not a scientific model. It is literally Aristotle’s, from De Anima, around 350 BC. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Neurology, Human senses and sensors from Aristotle to the present, traces how that list stays in general circulation even though it collapses the entire somatosensory system into “touch” and omits systems discovered much later — the vestibular system, which gives us balance and spatial orientation, and proprioception, our sense of where the parts of our body are in space without looking.³ There is still no agreed count. Depending on how you classify, you get nine, or twenty-one, or thirty-three.

Then there is interoception: the nervous system’s sensing of the body’s own internal state — cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, hormonal, thermal. Current neuroscience treats this not as plumbing but as central to cognition, motivation, behavior and emotion.^4,5

And past the body’s interior, there is evidence that human neurophysiology responds to Earth’s physical fields entirely below awareness. In a Caltech study led by Joseph Kirschvink, published in eNeuro in 2019, participants sitting in a shielded Faraday chamber showed automatic alpha-band desynchronization in response to rotations of an Earth-strength magnetic field — a measurable brain response to a stimulus not one of them could consciously report.⁶ The finding is still contested and awaits broader replication. That is precisely why it interests me.

So why would art restrict itself almost entirely to a handful of externally oriented senses, and overwhelmingly to one?

Visuals are spectacular, obviously, and there’s a real biological reason visual art lands so fast. The brain extracts the gist of a scene almost immediately — Thorpe, Fize and Marlot showed in 1996 that category-sensitive neural activity for complex natural images appears roughly 150 milliseconds after the image arrives, and much of that first pass is automatic and feed-forward.⁷

But speed is not depth. A field that optimizes for the fastest channel into a person, and then optimizes that channel for auction legibility, ends up making work that photographs well, catalogues cleanly and resells easily — and does very little else.

This is also why I don’t accept the framing that my patents and interfaces sit at some “intersection of art and technology,” as though two separate things were being introduced to each other. It’s one practice. Building interfaces that respond to breath and physiological state is the same question I was asking in galleries: how does a body actually perceive, and what happens if you address more of it than the eye?

I stay optimistic, and I want to be concrete about it rather than vague.

Art–science collaboration is still tiny next to the commercial art economy, and it is frequently underfunded and badly held. But serious programs exist and are running right now:

• Arts at CERN — since the first residency in 2012, more than 250 artists have worked inside a laboratory of over 17,000 scientists, engineers and staff. Collide, Connect and Resonance are all active into 2026, and the programme won the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Innovative Collaboration.^8,9
• ANAT Synapse (Australia) — since 2004, collaborations between more than 100 artists and researchers placed inside Australian research organisations. The 2026 resident, Elissa Goodrich, is working with a fluid dynamics team at Swinburne on bubble clouds and sound.¹⁰
• Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva — art and science residency tracks run with Campus Biotech Geneva, the University of Geneva and EPFL.
• S+T+ARTS — the European Commission’s standing initiative for science, technology and the arts.
• In June 2026, a NASA Decadal Astrobiology white paper, Collaborating With Artists in the Search for Life, argued that art–science collaboration beyond outreach unlocks ways of seeing that scientific practice alone doesn’t reach — citing Robert Irwin’s role in the 1970 NASA Habitability Symposium and Carl Sagan’s working method — and recommended that research grants carry dedicated budget and space for artists.¹¹

That last recommendation is the one that matters, because it names the actual problem. Not whether artists are welcome in a lab. Whether there is a line in the budget.

I didn’t leave because I couldn’t get in. I left because getting in meant agreeing that the price is the work, and that the eye is the audience.

I kept making things. I went into labs, into code, into breath, because that’s where the questions actually led. I don’t think that’s a departure from art. I think it’s what artists did before we agreed to become a product category.

Art is always whole. The art world is what isn’t.