Month: August 2022

1. Proteus touches upon various topics throughout its hour long duration. The film highlights the life of Haekel and shares an assortment of interesting facts about him. An aspect of his personal life that fascinated me was him feeling torn by science and his family’s spiritual beliefs. He was raised as a Christian, but always felt conflicted by the world of spirit and the world of matter. This sort of philosophical issue is one I have struggled with as well. I appreciate what I can see more than what I can feel, and so I empathize with the inner conflict that Haeckel faced as a young man. Haeckel’s obsession with scientific matter perfectly aligned with his life long work with radiolarians, however, and inevitably led to him prioritize science over all else. Radiolarians are creatures that are found at the bottom of the sea and are astonishingly over 500 million years old. When Haekel began studying these organisms, he quickly viewed them as an artistic masterpieces. Their intricacy and complexity revealed the relationship between art and science – something he became so passionate about that at certain points in his life, art became his first priority. The film urges its viewers to consider how art and science coincide. After viewing Proteus, I wonder that since art takes form in nature, and nature is science, then is science considered art? For me, it certainly is. In the classroom, the conceptual implication of creating radiolarians is to change our perspective on how we view the smallest forms of life. If we can appreciate the art in microscopic creatures, we learn to view the world with a newfound lens – a lens that identifies beauty in even the tiniest complexities around us. The film is certainly thought provoking, as I now ask myself, what micro-organisms are there floating around me as I write that would be just as astonishing as radiolarians if discovered?

From the documentary, I learned that there are 5000 known species of Radiolarians. Haeckel, who was one of the most widely read authors of the 19th century was the first to name and draw them.They are microscopic beings part of the oceanic plankton family who absorb their prey.

They all have a unique form, and are a species that is over 500 million years old. Haeckel’s life and work interested me because he took risks in tying together art and science during a period of order and logic. Since the time of Aristotle, people have viewed the world with order. Animals were seen in fixed forms made by God. By the 18th century the Enlightenment philosophers had come to see the natural world as a vast and orderly museum created by God and science. By the 19th century Romanticism came in, and saw the outer world as beautiful and changing. There was conflict and hidden meanings. Haeckle was born between the Enlightenment and Romantic period. Art and science were considered widely different. Art was seen as beautiful and science logical. His drawings were able to convince society that they were related. I thought differently about the relationship of art and science through him because he regarded the chief task of the scientist as important as the artist, to depict the world around them with both the precision of a researcher. This explanation helped me see how both subjects help to understand the unknown natural aspects of the world. Art can help people understand things more scientifically, such as the drawings Haeckel made helped people understand how they looked. The conceptual implications of creating radiolarian sculptures based on Haeckel’s drawings are that we are trying to recreate something real, natural, and living into a lifeless sculpture that looks exactly like what we are trying to depict.