When does science become art?

After watching the numerous presentations about genomic art it seemed that for many of them there was a blurred line between what was science and what was art. I presented Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography photo of DNA. This picture was the first photo of DNA and it lead to the discovery of its double helix structure. When this picture was taken it was purely for scientific reasons. Genomic art didn’t even exist, especially since up until that point no one knew what DNA even looked like, most people didn’t know what it was. Without that picture, most of the art that we saw in class would not exist. This picture portrays that backbone of life, and even thought it was not intentionally created as art in its own way it is beautiful.

In Ami’s presentation on the music composed using DNA, the composers are intentionally creating art, however I don’t believe that it is actually art. They are simply translating something that already exists using scientific formulas and algorithms. There is no creativity involved, the “artist” isn’t creating anything original.

It’s a difficult question to answer, but when does science become art? I don’t think there actually is an answer. Each person has to make that distinction on his or her own about each piece.