Although he’s one of the leading contenders to win a Nobel Prize for his path-breaking stem cell research, MIT Professor Bob Langer puzzles about the meaning of innovation. And though he’s one of Paris’ best known and most successful graphic artists, Fabrice Hyber trained as a theoretical mathematician. Hyber often collaborates with scientists, yet he worries about being isolated and cut off from the world.

This winter, the two men’s perspectives converged at one of the most peculiar addresses in Paris, a building that doubles as a gallery and a research lab just behind the Louvre. The place is called Le Laboratoire, and its objective is modest: to heal the irrational wound wrought when, during the birth of the Enlightenment some 300 years ago, the methodology of modern science divorced itself from the technique of making art. 

Langer’s work at MIT, considered anti-intuitive and revolutionary a generation ago, formed a new kind of reparative tissue between human and plastic cells, creating special physical niches in which stem cells could be “fed” to generate replacement body parts. At Le Laboratoire, that process led Hyber to depict and build a series of giant plastic hourglass figures through which objects could pass on their way to being transformed into organs. Hyber’s intention—nixed by the lawyers—was to allow visitors to slide from one level down to the next through a mass of soft, white plastic beads in the neck of the soft hourglass.

Just in front of the hourglasses runs a 50-foot, V-shaped double wall of paintings, lashed together by ropes intended to suggest the myriad linkages visible and invisible within the body. On the other side of the paintings a soft, pink, rope-like column hangs between floor and ceiling, representing a gargantuan neuron, or nerve cell. Hyber and his team spent the better part of a day—depicted in a video—chewing several pounds of Malabar bubble gum to form the neuron.

Le Laboratoire was the brainchild of David Edwards, the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University. This current show is the culmination of 25 to 30 years of creative work that ranges from stem cell research to theater lighting and reflects a deep frustration he and many others at Harvard felt with the school’s institutional culture. The sort of scientist who likes complicated projects full of uncertainty, Edwards says he has always felt like a weird outsider. 

“Complex problems today tend to require collaboration,” he says, as we stand on a steel balcony in the middle of the three-level exhibit, where Hyber had originally hoped that visitors could hop into one of the hourglasses. “At a place like Harvard where there are very strong departments and expertise within those departments there’s a sort of instinct not to collaborate.

Edwards has been writing fiction for years and has been involved in the theater as a personal passion. “It has always been a stimulus to my work and to my creativity, [so] I began to look for others at Harvard who were not only not frightened by that interface but who were actually catalyzed by it,” he says. “That led me to the music and medicine and architecture departments, and it also led to several conversations among us. We had this sense of finding your lost brother or sister.”

The story that linked them all—elaborated in Edwards’ new book, ArtScience: Creativity in the Post Google Generation—is how innovators engage in the process of creativity by pressing deeper into uncertainty until an actual moment of insight arrives. Fuzzy stuff, conventional researchers might say, but vital. The keyword is “ArtScience.”

Science, by convention, concerns itself with setting out clear, concrete problems that must be solved through rational, deductive reasoning, while art relies classically on sensual, inductive perception leading to creation of objects (paintings, sculptures, sometimes buildings) or experiences (plays, symphonies) that cannot be fully known in advance. Obviously, the results of new science experiments can’t be known in advance, either. And recent work on Bach and Picasso explores how painstakingly deliberate and incremental their music and paintings were. But what happens when the two forms of exploration meet or “dance” with each other? Edwards says that everyone, whether businesspeople, lawyers, artists, or scientists, develops ideas. And when they realize they’re wrong, they need a new hypothesis. “We spend time thinking and come up with some new idea and those moments are what I think of as nodes in an idea process,” he says. “They are fundamentally art-science moments.” Art-science because it’s the same kind of mental, imaginative moment that brings about innovation, whether it’s in art or science. 

That’s what led to this season’s main show at Le Laboratoire between Langer and Hyber. The show, or “experiment” as Edwards prefers to describe it, began when Edwards met Hyber in a café down the street from Le Laboratoire in autumn 2006. Hyber took Edwards to his studio and showed him a 4-foot by 4-foot oil canvas featuring an apple tree where apples fall to the ground and become cherries and, ultimately, cherry trees. Hyber asked Edwards if he could create that and he replied that there was one condition. “He needed to accept that the apples would be stem cells and the cherries would be neurons,” Edwards says. “He said that seemed reasonable to him. It became a metaphor of environment and genetics but also the cutting edge of medical science today.” Langer, Edwards adds, does that kind of transformational work in his lab at MIT for repairing back problems. Deal made, Hyber flew to Boston, where he spent a week hanging out in Langer’s lab.

“I asked him a question about stem cells,” Hyber tells me a few days later in his rambling studio in the Goutte d’Or district of northeast Paris. Langer explains the different moments of stem cells: “One moment it’s information, the second is context, and the third is food for stem cells. Everything is linked. What I show is that Bob Langer works on the food and the context, and me for information. Voilà.”

Back at Le Laboratoire, Edwards walks through the exhibit, where each week new elements are added or modified, as they would be in an actual lab. “As we move over here, you can see apples falling, apples falling, and suddenly you see apples falling through bottle necks, so [Hyber] got this idea of fermentation as happens with wine and champagne, which is very much related to cellular division and cellular transformation,” Edwards says. “If you move a little further you see the apples become the ends of an hourglass and ultimately you see the hourglass showing up, and a brain imposed on this, and this is where he’s getting this idea of falling through an hourglass.” 

To complete the basic show, Hyber shipped bare diagrammatic paintings of human skeletons to Langer’s lab and asked the team there to write notes on them about cellular processes and the kind of nutrients or foods those cells needed. “Langer’s students collected lots of images and then there was a day in my apartment in Boston when all this was on the floor,” Edwards recalls. “Bob was there, there was this big group association with the paintings. It was fun, refreshing, stepping out of his normal arena. Innovative people like Bob enjoy dialoguing and creating with other innovators.”

“I remember going over to David’s,” Langer tells me one day over the phone. “It’s not science but communicating science. I’d never done anything like that. We need new things all the time.”

Lastly, Hyber asked Langer’s lab to diagram an array of fruits and vegetables important to different parts of the body that could be formed into a human sculpture, rather like a full-size Alcimboldo mannequin—cauliflower for the brain, sweet potatoes for the shoulders, bananas representing hands, and other dangling body parts. 

For Hyber, however, it wasn’t all that new. “When you do art,” he says, “you are in between things. In between. A lot of things. You don’t have [a fixed] objective. When you do art, you think it’s possible to make a new world, but you don’t know which world. We invent part by part the new world. When you are an artist you are in between all this and it’s important this different way to work.”

Bending, blending, fusing those two worlds is what Edwards and his team aim to do with Le Laboratoire—as well as making it commercially successful. The Langer-Hyber exhibit cost about 50,000 euros ($75,000) to mount. Hyber retains rights to the objects and will earn back his and the Le Laboratoire’s investment by selling the pieces to collectors—not including the rotting fruit mannequin. 

In another, smaller show, Edwards directly collaborated with French designer Mathieu Lehanneur to create sleek glass and plastic decorator objects that draw on NASA research for purifying toxic elements in the air of space capsules. Inside each piece are leafy plants, earth, a pool of water, and a fan that sucks in air from the room and uses the roots and leaves to absorb toxic gasses given off by many of today’s household fabrics and objects. The idea, in Edwards’ words, is to “make the plants more intelligent” as ecological air scrubbers—and to invent aesthetic objects for the household market.

He likes to think of Le Laboratoire as “an off-Broadway” operation where scientists and artists alike can perform with each other free of the presumptions and limitations of their conventional traditions—a place where museum curators might lose themselves in the procedures of lab life and where neurochemists might discover the sensual satisfaction of the visual sublime. Or to recast the question in historico-philosophic terms, to create a laboratory where the rationalist children of René Descartes can mix it up with the sensualist followers of William Wordsworth.