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Keith Tyson was born in Cumbria in 1969. He left college at 15 and worked for four years as an engineer in a shipyard. He then studied fine art at Carlisle College of Art before turning to art full-time. Of his interest in science, he says: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 count myself as having a particularly in-depth knowledge of anything, but I have a very wide range of knowledge of everything.鈥� This has inspired works such as Galactic Central Pointer, a finger pointed at the centre of the Milky Way, and The Thinker, a column of computers he calls 鈥渁 comatose god running its own universe鈥�.

Why does science inspire you?

I see my work much more as a relationship between me and nature than between me and science per se. But science is the language by which I can understand all those different aspects of nature. Science is the medium through which I can be inspired. It鈥檚 not just science. I am also interested in literary models, and economic situations. But science is such a dominant influence on our lives now. It wasn鈥檛 this way 15 years ago when I started working, when people would say, 鈥渢hat doesn鈥檛 make any sense as art, what are you doing?鈥� I was lucky that the things I happened to be interested in came to have a huge effect on the economy and the way we live.

Are you trying to illustrate or explain science through your art?

No, that is not my job. Art can only illustrate itself, just as science can only illustrate itself. What I do is illustrate the way in which the scientific paradigm has become the dominant way in which we view the world. I鈥檓 trying to navigate through that field of information. There鈥檚 such a mass of scientific information out there, and you鈥檙e supposed to take it all on board and at the same time you have to live your life and deal with all your psychological and emotional needs. I see my role as an artist as trying to marry the scientific and the irrational.

Is there a role for art in science?

Yes. Most scientists can visualise alternative ways of thinking about their ideas, which is ostensibly what happens in art. You might want to visualise something that cannot be explained solely in terms of logic, such as space-time. I think mathematics has the closest link with art as it has so much abstraction in it. The best definition of mathematics I鈥檝e heard is that it is the study of pattern, and that seems a very artistic endeavour. I have a big interest in mathematics as it seems to be about something fundamental that breeds these incredible patterns, and the idea that we exist somewhere between nothing and infinity, whether in terms of your lifespan or in terms of the universe. Somehow there is a mathematical boundary to everything, and I can relate that to the world I find myself in.

Do you feel those boundaries when you are creating?

Yes. I remember as a boy being very influenced by the 1968 Charles and Ray Eames short film Powers of Ten. This starts with a picnic in Chicago and zooms out to the edge of the Universe, covering 10 times as much space every 10 seconds, then returns to the picnicker, zooming in on his hand by powers of 10 until it ends up inside one of his cells. I remember seeing that and thinking that these are the limits of my existence and isn鈥檛 it incredible that the human mind can comprehend that distance. I have been fascinated by the boundaries that are around you as an artist. I find it curious that some artists purport to have complete control over their work when they didn鈥檛 ask for their parents, their position in history, the laws of physics, or all those coincidences and forces that are around them and that they haven鈥檛 any control over. So the idea of the artistic will seems a little nonsensical. There is a lot of serendipity involved.

A lot of your work seems to be about possibility, chance and freedom. How free do you think we are as human beings in choosing how to live our lives?

One good thing about being an artist is that I can hold two contradictory ideas in my head and believe them both. I don鈥檛 have to put my money where my mouth is and say this is my hypothesis and I鈥檝e got to prove it. I can believe two ideas simultaneously because some days it鈥檚 true for one and some days it鈥檚 true for another, just like one day I鈥檓 a sophisticated guy and read highbrow books and the next day I鈥檓 eating crisps and watching EastEnders. So, I believe we are chained to the dog of habit but at the same time in each moment I sense that there must be free will.

For example, I look at my children and I think they are the inevitable consequence of me and my wife meeting, and then you multiply that by every generation and you get this sense of a fatalistic determinism. Yet as an artist I sense that this is just a paradox that we deal with every day and that somehow there is free will. And as an artist, I believe that whichever of those two ideas you decide to focus on becomes true for you. A scientist would look at it differently, because they would see it as a set of behaviours that they could analyse. But I鈥檓 speaking from the inside out, not from the outside in.

I鈥檓 also a very big gambler, or I used to be before I gave up, so in theory I know about predictability. If you look at big statistical groups over the long-term, the world is very predictable. But as soon as you isolate particular events, it is outwardly unpredictable.

You have been described by some critics as holding a strongly reductionist scientific viewpoint. Is that fair?

I don鈥檛 believe in that at all. I think that most of the art world is very reductionist. You鈥檒l find artists that paint blue and white stripes for the rest of their lives because they believe that if they understand this very fundamental, tiny part of painting then somehow the whole lot will become clear. I come from a generation that is much more holistic and that embraces complexity.

Could you explain the thinking behind the Art Machine?

I was interested in the idea of putting something out in the world that didn鈥檛 have an autobiographical residue. So you couldn鈥檛 ask, 鈥淲hat was Keith Tyson trying to say?鈥� You just had a cold reactor base doing the creating. I wasn鈥檛 interested in what the machine was thinking. The experiment for me was how the viewer would react to something that wasn鈥檛 made by the artist in the traditional sense. People tend to look at a piece of art as an object. I am more interested in the process, the things that go into making the object, setting certain rules, and letting it happen.

How did people react to it?

Most people would say, 鈥淚t鈥檚 sausage machine art, what鈥檚 that got to do with anything?鈥� Or they took offence to it in some way, felt threatened by it or felt that it was belittling. Or it was a cynical ploy by me to attract fame, or to provoke reactions. Instead of just looking at what I thought was a fascinating philosophical concept that you could still find something poetic even though it wasn鈥檛 immediately grounded in human experience.

How do people react to your work in general?

People often think it鈥檚 cold, or 鈥� and I think this is quite sexist 鈥� they think it is boys鈥� art. Just because there might be a scientific paradigm, they think that is something boys are interested in, as if there are no female scientists out there. I think that is a great insult.

Can you describe what it feels like when you are creating, or when an idea arises?

As an artist you turn yourself into a 24-hour art developer, so you cannot pinpoint the precise moment. It is like asking when the second world war started. The creative process is just an attitude. The interesting thing about art is that it doesn鈥檛 really have a utilitarian value. Unlike a scientist, you don鈥檛 sit there thinking, what do I want to prove, what do I want to discover. You have to have faith that what you are doing has some intrinsic value. At that point it becomes very hard to describe the creative process because often you are just messing around, thinking, doodling.

Are art and science similar in any way?

Both disciplines are at the mercy of popular interpretations of what they do. The artist is portrayed as a half-mad, half-creative person, and the scientist in a similar vein. One thing that drives the whole practice in the studio 鈥� and also in the lab 鈥� is the effort to remain curious, to remain a 14-year-old. Everything is interesting if you look hard enough.

And in what ways are they different?

Art doesn鈥檛 have a defined language in the way that science has mathematics. In most scientific theory you should be able to find a mathematical model to describe exactly what you are talking about so that other people can test it and marry it to the body of existing knowledge. In philosophy there is language itself and there is logic. If you ask something that is a bit metaphysical like, 鈥渨hat鈥檚 beyond the edge of the physical universe?鈥�, then the answer that always comes back from science and philosophy is, 鈥渨e can鈥檛 know so it is irrelevant鈥�. But artists can go to the irrelevant places and dwell in them. They can indulge those things that are not rigorous. Art can tolerate contradictions.

Where did you get your knowledge of science?

Initially it mainly came through the popular science boom that started when I left college. I didn鈥檛 have any O-levels or A-levels, but I could programme a computer. I devoured all this pop science stuff and then got a bit more specialised as I got into things. I don鈥檛 count myself as having a particularly in-depth knowledge of anything, but I have a very wide range of knowledge of everything. I like to keep an overview of what is going on.

You鈥檝e come from engineering, which is quite well defined, to art, which as you say is a discipline that can go places others cannot. That seems like a long journey鈥�

Either I鈥檝e come a long way or I鈥檝e gone right back to when I was a kid watching sci-fi films or playing in the garden. Most great things have a very playful and imaginative approach. Einstein said that imagination is much more important than knowledge because it is imagination that does the creating.