Post Conceptual Art, Art & Science, and Art & Technology from Doug Czor
Presently (6/11/20) reading two books, “Art & Science”, by Eliane Strosberg, and “Colliding Worlds”, by Arthur Miller. Both are excellent histories of Art & Science and Art & Technology movements. Some highlights from Strosberg follow:
“Scientists search for convergence from an inclination to create coherent models to explain the world. The artist tries to stir emotions while the scientist has to convince.”
“Leonardo and Albrecht Durer were also scientists. Nikolaus Copernicus and Louis Pasteur were also artists. Euler, Schweitzer, and Einstein were both mathematician and musicians.”
“Renaissance artists and scientists analogous concerns, functioning in parallel, by advancing a logical explanation of the world rather than a spiritual one, science would slowly erode religious dogma. 19th century scientific developments were heavily dependent upon industry and economics, thus linked to power. Artists became society’s conscience. However, there is no Nobel Prize for artists, yet we have freedom to create.”
“In order to create in art and also science, visualization either mentally, or on paper, or through measurement are essential. Gutenberg reportedly said that his idea for the 1st printing press struck him like a ray of light while observing the operation of a wine press at a festival. Researchers of the past were interested in the mysterious functioning of the eye. Now days they are understanding how the brain decodes images received in the eye.”
“Picasso said: ‘To me, there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present, it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was’.”
From Arthur L. Miller, “Colliding Worlds”:
“Artist seldom defined symmetry as beauty, but this was not the case for scientists. In science, an equation has symmetry and is considered beautiful when it remains unchanged in form even if certain of it’s components are altered. If they are, for example, flipped from left to right, it is said that the equation exhibits mirror symmetry. A major symmetry occurs when a equation is unchanged in form even when it’s space and time coordinates are altered, as prescribed by Einstein’s Relativity Theory. Such an equation is valid throughout the universe; there is a democracy between every laboratory, be it on Earth or in a star system a trillion miles away. In art, on the other hand, symmetry is a balance that is pleasing to the eye between different elements on canvas or in a sculpture. Artists have long understood the use of asymmetry.”
Confucius taught that the intellectuals of a nation are responsible to educate the nation’s leaders. How can this be successful when internet-based social media websites and large high tech companies choose to block one point of view, or one set of theories? So, I say to them, consider Aristotle where he wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, one of his most influential works. “Men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
“Fortune favors the prepared mind”, Louis Pasteur