Less about appearances: art and science: visual art throughout history has given form and shape to fictional spaces--habitats to the gods, myths, and legends. But art has changed, slowly moving from fictional space into physical space--leading some artists to an interest in science and the untamed complexity of the real.

Along with the development of supernatural beliefs, humans long ago invented fictional spaces--extra dimensions of the imagination that augment physical reality. Fictional spaces are ubiquitous throughout social and cultural history as the habitat for gods, spirits, mythologies, and legends, as well as for art and literature. For thousands of years visual art has given form and shape to fictional spaces, using the tools of pictorialism and vanishing-point perspective to build a convincing illusory world, full of meanings that resonate back in physical reality. However in the middle of the nineteenth century visual art began a slow process of flattening illusionist perspective, ultimately opening the door to works of art that were neither fictional nor illusory. In the twenty-first century this history of objectification has combined with new technologies to lead some artists toward an interest in science, and in combination art and science can forge a kind of nonsupernatural spirituality--a deep appreciation for the beauty and untamed complexity of the real.

In 1960, the French artist Jean Tinguely's self-destructing kinetic sculpture Homage to New York was installed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. A bizarre assortment of wheels, levers, pulleys, and sciencey-looking gizmos, the work symbolized the apocalyptic momentum of over-industrialization. In creating his sculpture, Tinguely benefited from technical assistance by Swedish-born Bell Laboratories engineer Billy Kluver, a clever and visionary scientist who went on to work with the celebrated New York artists Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Together, Rauschenberg and Kluver developed an initiative called Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) which would have a profound impact on the art of successive decades. EAT was an endeavor that Rauschenberg hoped would "develop an effective collaboration between engineer and artist. The raison d'etre of EAT is the possibility of a work which is not the preconception of either the engineer or the artist, but is the result of the exploration of the human interaction between them."

Recently, a younger generation of artists emerged to continue the investigations of EAT, this time using tools of the twenty-first century. A series of exhibitions have appeared at various museums, reflecting a growing …