A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH: Visual Documents and Creative Investigation Methods
Posted on June 20 2025
For centuries now, the close relationship between art and science has offered new ways to explore and understand reality, through a dialogue that merges observation, analysis, reflection, and the expression of human experience — a dialogue that encourages creative and experimental approaches to investigation.
In the era of technical reproducibility, the use of photography, video, and new technologies has become essential in the development of artistic practices: from Dadaist experiments to Pop Art, all the way to contemporary artistic phenomena, we find crucial examples that confirm an increasingly inextricable bond between art, technology, and science.
A major turning point in research came with the invention of photography, which radically changed approaches to scientific, historical, geographical, and anthropological documentation. Systematic methods of cataloguing emerged, shaping new visual and informational aesthetics that continue to influence contemporary artists.
The exhibition “A Scientific Approach: Visual Documents and Creative investigation Methods” gather projects that show a clear interest in observation, documentation, the collection and representation of data, and the pursuit of an aesthetic harmony that nurtures curiosity for science.
- A. M.
All these images — most of them using techniques of photographic and video magnification, but not only — bring into focus populations from other worlds, hidden universes, or simply smaller ones. Room after room, the works mirror the title of the exhibition, immediately revealing its scientific approach. Before us unfold processes of deterioration, birth, and metamorphosis — transformations from one state to another, like that of the butterfly.
But the visual investigation doesn’t stop at the small or the invisible: some works go further, transforming real-world data into poetic narratives. One example is the exploration of the Cervo Torrent — Saarv in the Piedmontese dialect — which has shaped the landscape of Biella. Through collected materials and direct observations, these projects tell stories of water resources, of changing environments, of territories marked by time and human intervention.
While some projects focus on a sharper, more analytic reading of the world, others venture into speculative territories: using artificial intelligence to create fictional identities and imagine their behaviors and cognitive abilities, in a creative short-circuit between science and science fiction.
There are also those who turn their gaze upwards, interrogating satellite imagery, uncovering the hidden stories of borders, compromises, conflicts, and exchanges between cultures and peoples.
Finally, there are the more organic experiments, where artists study the interactions between materials, colors, and surfaces. Processes of fermentation, crystallization, and mold growth are just some of the details that will catch the visitor’s eye — visible signs of that endless transformation that runs through all living matter.
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