ABSTRACT
If artists borrow from science, they do not refer only to the life sciences, although this is often the case for those artists attracted to ecology. Many artists will seize tools and the vocabulary of local development, dealing with the space sciences. The development tools, such as the use of the map, are how the artists utilise knowledge of an environment woven with materials, shapes and linguistic representations. They involve the landscape and the romantic garden as ‘schools of vision’, but also with the ideal of reconciliation of art and science, theory and practice. This reconciliation is precisely the slogan of artistic engagement in the nineteenth century, under what in France was in the form of ‘social art’ as opposed to ‘pure art’. This movement, engaging art towards a social critique in the nineteenth century, was worldwide from Mexico to Russia, as political systems were broken down and changing.
