The Experience of Knowing: Special Classes in Art and Science

The author explores art and science as experiential epistemologies, that is, as experiences of knowing and expression. The author’s courses on “Topics of Art and Science” become explorations and introspections into art-like and science-like attitudes. The experiences of artistic process and of scientific knowing are ‘illumined’ together and used to set up tensions that become the subject of a student’s work. A class on Newton’s and Goethe’s approaches to light and color provided most of the examples discussed here. While a credited science class, this course culminated in a gallery installation.