Michael Whittle

Biography

Michael Whittle attended art classes after majoring in biomedicine as a university undergraduate. Born in the United Kingdom, he currently lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. His art and science projects arise from not only a great deal of work, but a holistic vision that penetrates life and art itself. Having built his life and art and career by crossing the borders between science and art, and the West and the East, he shows the qualities of a renaissance man in a borderless realm of artistic creation. Under the concept of ‘diagramatology’, he collects images produced by the entire realm of the natural sciences, from cells to space. His collection process spans online and offline, analog and digital, past and present, science, technology, and art. Michael is working on linking scientific understanding to the dimension of emotional understanding by analyzing and interpreting concepts, and then reinterpreting them on a sensory level. Michael Whittle's research is the discovery and archiving of a poetic language in scientific thought. His interests do not remain within natural science, but also reach out in to the humanities such as history and geography. In this context, Michael Whittle's work pursues a holistic art that penetrates through the plane, the three-dimensional, and the image, based on an integrated perception of science. His art is not limited to the basic artistic code of emotional empathy through emotional expression, as is commonly used in the field of art, but works as a mechanism of communication beyond that. Art oriented toward a convergence of science and art is often limited to visual illustrations of science or technical issues that help art. On the other hand, Michael's holistic approach is both sophisticated and enormous in scale, and approaches an overall understanding by analyzing and interpreting objects and events based on their collective perceptions. It is a practical example of solving a new paradigm of scientific art, in that it embodies the totality of cognition across both sides of science and art, and his way of thinking and work process itself already presupposes this totality.