The city of Melilla recently held its first International Festival of Cultures. This included a colloquium on Science and Art, which took place in Melilla on July 18-20, as well as an art exposition, and nightly concerts on the beach. It was sponsored by the City of Melilla together with Leonardo and the Al Andalus Foundation. Melilla is a surprising town. It is located on the north coast of Morocco but has belonged to Spain since 1497. It features the most spectacular display of modernist architecture outside Barcelona, along with an ancient fortress and a lovely seafront. Perhaps its main distinction is the fact that many cultures live there in harmony: Moslems, Jews, Christians, Hindu and Gypsies walk through its streets with no apparent tension. The conference reflected this diversity and was, therefore, unusual. In addition to the colloquium the festival featured an exposition of art and concerts on the beach, representing the various local cultures.

The subject of the colloquium was science, art and Mediterranean culture. Participants varied accordingly; rarely have I seen such a variegated set of people, and the remarkable experience of the conference was in getting to know people from areas both geographic and professional with whom I would never otherwise have come into contact. In addition, we were from very different cultural and religious backgrounds, and thus meeting on neutral ground provided a rare opportunity to begin to understand the different cultures and world-pictures. After all, the main theme behind the varied subject matter was the world-picture, how we grasp the universe and our place in it, be it as scientists, artists, people of various faiths and disciplines.

The moving spirits behind the conference were Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni of Morocco; Roger Malina of Marseille, astrophysicist and editor of Leonardo; and Julien Knebusch of Leonardo/OLATS in Paris. Participants at the conference included scientists, artists, and scholars from India, France, Spain, the UK and the US, Jordan and Egypt . Our Israeli contingent was large as it was thought this would help in bridging between the cultures. It included Prof. Eshel Ben Jacob, physicist and President of the Israel Physical Society; Yael Katzir, former student who now works with bacterial art; Neora, digital artist; and I, a theatre lighting designer and physics student who have one foot in each world, so to speak.

We did not know quite what to expect when we were invited, and were impressed and surprised by the experience. For us, as for many of the others, it was a rare opportunity to meet people from very different cultures and viewpoints. This situation involved a certain amount of strain at times and was not always an easy experience. However, the festival activities smoothed out this strain in many ways. Strolling together through the art exposition and listening together under the stars to a thrilling flamenco performance - all these helped in bridging barriers that were not at all trivial. The warm and special atmosphere of the city contributed a great deal. Melilla is a relaxed place. Drivers don't honk their horns. Women in full Moslem dress stroll side by side with girls in strapless tops, and nobody seems disturbed by this sight. People smile easily and are friendly to strangers.

The conference included four sessions: The first dealt with the relationship between art and science, and the second with the role of computer software in future culture. The third focused on Islam, and on art and science within the Arabian-Spanish world. The fourth centered around the influence of cultural background on approaches to art and science. A few examples of the lectures may offer some idea of the content. This brief survey necessarily omits other interesting presentations, but I have tried to give some idea of the variety offered.

Roger Malina's lecture dealt with the tension between the different cultures of art and science as well as those of engineering and technology, of different views and religions, and of regionalism. Other lecturers embraced technology as embodied by the internet: Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni together with American Harold Brokaw described their "Virtual Geodesy", an interactive computer program which attempts to create relationships between scientific data and cultural content. Karla Schuch-Brunet of Brazil gave a survey of the use of the Internet as a vehicle for social reform in Brazil. Dr. Fathi Saleh of Egypt described the website he has set up of Egyptian heritage (http://www.cultnat.org).

Some lectures focused on arts and literature. Leila Khalifa of France spoke of the concepts of time and space in the work of Ibn 'Arabi. Neora (neora.com) of Israel described her experimental theater production of "Medea_Ex." This piece used a virtual 3D mythological universe projected around the audience, and the audience, represented as the chorus, influenced the action using SMS messages. Dr. Sangeetha Menon of India spoke of consciousness research in light of Indian dance drama.

Dr. Ahmed Moustafa, renowned Islamic researcher and artist, discussed the geometric form of Arabic script and its implicit significance. Dr. Moustafa's talk focused on the square shaped dot and its relationship with the shapes of letters. In accordance with the system of Arabic script devised by Abbasid Wazir Ibn Mugla in the 9th century, this reflects images of Islamic mystical thought. Dr. Moustafa also spoke of the cube, and, indeed, his own artwork, a multicolored structure of cubes on cubes, was on view in the exposition. Professor Eshel Ben Jacob's lecture involved a link between science and art. He described self-organization among bacteria, as evidenced by the beautiful artistic patterns they produce. This lecture had unexpected drama: The computer that was to project the Power Point presentation would not function, and Professor Ben Jacob finally decided not to wait for its repair, placed one slide that he had prepared in an overhead projector and improvised a beautifully clear presentation around the single slide, which may even have proved more effective than his original carefully prepared lecture.

An interesting insight into the relationship of art and culture was provided on the last day. In the morning Indian physicist C.S. Unnikrishnan gave a talk which basically dealt with general relativity in terms accessible to the layman.. Professor Unnikrishnan's current work involves measurements of the Casimir effect. He prefaced his lecture with talk about his own background and the personal spiritual motivation behind his scientific career. I contrasted this with two lectures later in the day, which were given by western artists. Philippe Boissonnet of Montreal described his work with holograms in technical detail. (The lecture and pictures were interesting but it would have been nice to see the holograms themselves!) Roy Ascott, a British artist with an impressive record of academic positions who has spent years of work on digital art, spoke of the new vistas opening up to the artist inspired by biophysics and biophotonics. This talk too had a distinct analytic and technical flavor.

In the two days preceding the event, there had been several comments about the opposition or dichotomy of art and science. These three lectures seemed to contradict that. I doubt very strongly whether Western scientists would have prefaced a description of their work with talk about their personal spiritual motivations, and yet clearly there is strong personal motivation behind any such work; otherwise one wouldn't engage in something so difficult! Similarly the Western background of the two artists probably contributed to the clearly articulated conceptual framework and methodology they described; yet surely few artists of any culture create without a conceptual framework and methodology. One could see that, in fact, art and science are not inherently different activities but that the cultural background of the speaker influences the way he describes his work to others.

Many of the participants seemed to find new food for thought in the meeting with people of such different backgrounds and fields. Artists don't usually attend conferences together with scientists; Moslems don't often talk about the Qur'an with Jews. There was much private discussion of the various issues.

I asked my Israeli companions their impressions of the conference and the festival. All agreed that a major part of the experience was the variety of people and ideas we met. This multiplicity of cultures and religions were reflected in the city of Melilla itself with its multicultural harmony, and lent significance to the choice of this particular venue for the conference. Eshel Ben Jacob pointed out that in most scientific conferences the audience outnumbers significantly the lecturers: Each session includes a few presentations before the public, followed by questions. In this case the participants of the conference were themselves the audience, and often were not of the same field as the lecturer. This situation provided an opportunity for widening horizons and for more immediate discussion than is usual in more formal public situations. It was thus possible to create a much stronger relationship between the various participants. In addition, the formal structure of the conference included much time together aside from the lecture sessions. The informal discussions at the two-hour mealtimes customary in that country provided a rare chance to get to know each other.

The material presented at the conference was interesting and valuable, enabling a profound examination of values, of the relationship of art and science, and of man's place in the universe. But perhaps the most valuable and unusual aspect for all the participants, I think, was the opportunity to form relationships of friendship and respect with people from significantly different backgrounds and thus gain some insight into extremely different visions of our world. It must be stressed that this is just the beginning: This first Melilla conference has shown that such a meeting of different and even conflicting elements can succeed, and it seems of first importance to continue such events on an annual basis.