Chapter Sixteen - How to Succeed in Art and Science: The Observatory Observed

Summary

The Observatory Observed was one of seven CO-OPs projects – cooperation between artists and scientists or scholars – that took place over the year of 2007. As the name of the project suggests, its aim was to investigate observatories, places where astronomers observe heavenly bodies. We were the artist and scholar involved. Jeroen Werner came to the project because of his previous artwork, which consists of optical installations creating spaces of light beams and image projections that explore the geometry of seeing. Geert Somsen was involved as a historian of science interested in the shifting cultural meanings and social functions of observational practices. These intersecting interests were brought together in a common workplace: the nineteenth-century observatory “De Sonnenborgh” in Utrecht, whose scientific staff more or less acted as a third party in the project.

Although we had a common interest, the project was very open-ended, exploring not only our subject matter, but also what it meant for an artist and historian of science to cooperate. Even as our activities became more concrete, these aspects continued to be exploratory. But despite this tentative character, it was often said that The Observatory Observed was “successful” as a project, both while it was still going on and afterwards. Such appreciation was nice, of course, and it did reflect our own pleasure in working together. But at the same time it was never really spelled out what the alleged success consisted of. Now, more than two years later, it seems like a good moment to look back and reflect on this issue. What was successful about our project? What was not? And more generally: what does “success” mean in art-science collaborations? In these pages, we will answer these questions for ourselves, and also consider what they might have meant for others.

Scholarly success

What drew both of us to this cooperation and what we shared from the beginning was an interest in observatories as special kinds of places. For Jeroen Werner the fascination was mainly with the geometry of their architecture and optical installations that reflect lines of seeing and the orientation of the earth in the universe (more about this below). For Geert Somsen, the attraction lay in the combination of locality and universality in observatories. On the one hand, they are very particular – even peculiar – kinds of places.