Editorial: The Case for Tract

 

As an idea, Tract sprung from shared frustration with the inability to reconcile two independent intellectual interests. We felt, at times, an almost formulaic opposition between natural science and the arts, fueled by token preconceptions of the former as cold and obscure and of the latter as irrelevant or indulgent. The magazine was launched with the goal of fostering discourse that would, at very least, make both disciplines more accessible to their would-be detractors. In this regard we hope to place particular emphasis on science, so often viewed warily by the public eye, and its position within the canon of cultural necessity.

Yet Tract is meant as more than an intellectual olive branch. A second objective of the project is to examine whether work in either field may be meaningfully influenced by the other’s context. Therefore we ask: how might a deliberately aesthetic framework promote scientific understanding? How might scientific content shape the way a piece of art is received? What sort of novel insight is afforded by, say, a poem about HeLa cells?

In asking and attempting to answer these questions, we know we must tread carefully. A cursory search will reveal a surprising abundance of existing work that consciously straddles the art-science rift; the degree to which such straddling is warranted, however, varies from piece to piece. Precedence has been set, of course, by several collaborations of exceptional quality (for instance, the quarterly Leonardo, established in 1968.) In general, however, engaging in an exercise like Tract generates a natural temptation to produce hybrid work for its own sake, that is, to frame science as art or vice versa simply because the option is available. We take care to avoid this risk. In doing so, we hope that Tract will transcend the level of gimmick to function as a sincere and dynamic experiment in interdisciplinary discourse.