Willamette Week: I feel like we are coming out of a number of years, especially thinking about the Bush Administration years where there was a very suspicious attitude towards science and technology and many people taking an anti-intellectualist stance…do you think that we have recovered from that in some sense? Are we working towards that or are there still people standing in the way of that kind of progress?

Claire L. Evans: It depends on the “we” you are talking about. If you’re talking about America, I think there’s still a great deal of fear and paranoia about science and what that represents. But if you’re talking about artists and younger generations of people, I think there’s a moment now where people are really starting to embrace science and realize the fact that we as intellectuals don’t have the comfort of being able to stand divided any more. There’s the famous C.P. Snow lecture about the two cultures, this division between the scientific culture of intellectualism and the humanistic culture of intellectualism causing this rift. Maybe it was easy to take sides before there was a completely anti-intellectual culture in our country. Now it seems more petty when there’s so much more to fight against. I think that it just seems silly to separate anymore. I think people are coming to realize that science and technology aren’t the bad guy, they are limiting. They’re actually valid tools for understanding the world around us. I think if you define science as a method for trying to make sense of the world around you both on a small scale and on a universal scale, there’s really no difference between science and art at all. That’s what art is about as well. It’s about trying to parse and explain and explore the vaster chaotic forces of the universe. They definitely share a language if you take a step back. It seems kind of ridiculous to try to ghettoize those two things. 

Read More: YACHT’s Claire Evans Helps Write Book on Current Connections Between Art and Science

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