Text: Ingrid Hoepel | Section: About w/k
Abstract: The new editor introduces herself and explains the focus areas she wants to establish.
How did you learn about the online journal w/k – Between Science and Art?
It was quite by chance at the end of August 2024 – during an online search about an article by Rolf Bossart about John Berger. Suddenly, a reference to an online journal from the University of Düsseldorf appeared on my PC, dedicated to the relationship between science and art! How sometimes windows open that you haven’t consciously navigated to, but they pop up and suddenly provide unexpected hints that you’ve long waited for … I immediately wanted to know if there were more of these curious border-crossers like myself who can’t decide between science and art but want both and pursue both seriously. I found the articles extraordinarily good. That’s why I wrote to the publisher Peter Tepe, briefly introduced myself, and he immediately asked me to submit a concept for a contribution.
What sparked your interest in the relationship between art and science?
There are actually two explanations independent of each other – or perhaps they are connected after all? On one hand, my interest stems from my research topics, and the other explanation is biographical.
Perhaps the biographical one first: I loved art as a subject even during my school years, and I had very good teachers! So I studied art education at the Art Academy, but simultaneously studied art history and literary history at the university, both with equal enthusiasm, and both always ran parallel in my life – there were phases where practical art dominated and phases of stronger scientific orientation.
Now to the second explanation from my research interest; the separation between the two worlds of science and art is relatively new from a historical long-term perspective. In the Renaissance and early modern period, it wasn’t unusual for intensive study of, for example, mathematics, physics, biology, and art – from drawing to painting to architecture – to be united in one individual. This is demonstrated by the truly great artists and inventors like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, or the biologist and graphic artist Maria Sibylla Merian. In further development, there was also relatively frequently the combination of art historian and artist in one person – for example, in Giorgio Vasari, Joachim von Sandrart, Carel van Mander, or Roger de Piles. They all published artist biographies but were also painters themselves. I have worked extensively with these art historian-artists. The same applies to the authors of emblem books, who in their main professions were often doctors, lawyers, natural scientists, diplomats, or clergy. Many not only wrote the texts but drew the images for their emblems themselves and worked with engravers and publishers for publication.
I could elaborate much further on this, but I’ll make a temporal jump to the turn of the millennium. Since 2000, I became specifically interested in the revival of the art form of emblems and emblematic thinking in the 20th century.[1] This led to a book project in 2005 with English colleagues about contemporary art’s connections to the emblematics of the 16th and 17th centuries. We examined, among other things, the work of Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who consciously drew on emblematics, but we also looked at relationships between comics and emblematics and found emblematic structures in certain forms of digital media art, for example in Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, and Agnes Hegedüs.[2] Agnes Hegedüs, for instance, reflects on the theme of attributing meaning to things in The Language of Things, an approach that in a different way also applies to the emblem, the emblematic res. Current emblem research sees itself as part of visual studies, which encompasses all images in the world beyond art images in the narrower sense – in historical and current media as well as in everyday life.[3] This includes, for example, medical imaging techniques.
Which forms of collaboration/relationships between science and art interest you particularly? What focus areas do you want to establish in the w/k editorial team?
First and foremost, I want to seek out and approach artists who fit w/k’s profile, motivate them to contribute to the journal, and provide editorial support for their contributions. I’m particularly interested in the motivation of people who unite art and science in one person. This includes, for example, the mutual influence of scientific research and artistic production, related to the respective themes and formal aspects. I’m interested in how image perception and knowledge about it is reflected in art – in my own work and in that of others. I’m thinking, for example, of the connection between image and text in comics and picture stories or memes. I also want to examine the decision-making processes in the course of making art.
Another aspect that interests me is the forms of collaboration between scientists and artists. This question also has roots in emblem research for me – some of the emblem authors needed the support of professional copper engravers and printers for the print-graphic implementation of their text and image ideas. This often raises the question of what the communication process might have looked like and how the contributions were distributed among the participants. When emblems were adopted into architecture, additional people were involved in the execution and implementation. The same question can arise in contemporary art, for example in digital media art, where collaboration between artists and computer scientists is necessary. I can imagine examining such relationships in theoretical contributions as well, from a historical perspective or using contemporary examples.
Header image: Ingrid Hoepel (2024). Photo: Ingrid Hoepel.
[1] On emblematics, see Ingrid Hoepel (2024): Emblems – Emblem Research – Emblem Art. w/k – Between Science & Art. https://doi.org/10.55597/d19521
[2] Emblematic Tendencies in the Art and Literature of the Twentieth Century, ed. by Anthony J. Harper, Ingrid Hoepel and Susan Sirc, Glasgow Emblem Studies 10, Glasgow 2005.
[3] An example of this is the renaming and reorientation of the “Center for Emblem Studies” at the University of Glasgow to the “Center for Text and Image Studies”.
How to cite this article
Ingrid Hoepel (2025): Introducing Ingrid Hoepel. w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. https://doi.org/10.55597/e10220
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