We used to have some project that discussed these interesting topics. I hope some of you will start this discussion going from your own perspective. How does art connect with science? My husband works in science and I am definitely one of those "mind wanderers" who get so easily distracted because in art we think associatively.
I almost daily have to think why I don't mind how my mind works. What are your thoughts in these two very different styles of cognitive activity?
Some quite good period ,I have expressed my views in the respect which I submit herewith for your perusal
SCIENCE & ARTS are the twin areas where the growth development & culture work in uniforms .With this the development of scientific & technological development including electronic fast moving line which have now our world smaller place & mobility between the fast distance places become the history of the past .
Science as a mission working with the brain & making experiment in laboratory for the research program which is equally useful to the human beings.In this line the ART to move with the footsteps of science become awkward .
ART has sophistication brings all round knowledge of the different areas for the human beings as a hole in the form of literature covering all the subject which human beings are interested ,anxious ,for their growth & development .To add the fragrance for the human beings ,painting ,music ,drama ,& such other related form of activities of her the creation of cultural environment .
With this we do not wish to place the important area of science in the backward seat .Electronic programming activities including computer,mobile ,DVD ,TV ,VIDEO GAME & such other forms make the family as one unit as a program becomes the household entertainment .
Besides Mobile bring young generation to join in proximity with their far distance,friends & associated groups .This is equally one of the most important family & cultural associated group.
In this light we wish SCIENCE & ART should join both hand together.
This is my personal opinion .
Thank you for initiating this question and answers, Mr. Rohit Manilal Parikh,
Do you think that the ways of thinking are quite different?
Are there some practices (exercises, games) that people may do to actual simulate how that "other" kind of mind thinks?
In my study of art theory with the intent to transcend its craft base, I firmly believe there are differences. However, they are inter-related.
There is science in the artistic process, in that art is the creative manipulation of some knowledge base. A painter must know how colours and light interact. They may not always be conscious of the science embedded in their art, yet they rely on it.
At the edge of knowledge, in the experimentation against some vision or other, the scientist tends to think more creatively about the realisation of their vision--an artistic way of working in which the imagination has a part to play.
I will add that we discuss the topic of how ART connects to SCIENCE each month on The Hard-Science Science Fiction Zoom Group.
Just message me for the admission LOGIN and addition to our e-list. Thanks, Gloria
Here is more on this recommended writer Roald Hoffmann:
Entertaining Science
Since the spring of 2001, Hoffmann has been the host of the monthly series Entertaining Science at New York City's Cornelia Street Cafe,[30] which explores the juncture between the arts and science.
Non-fiction
He has published books on the connections between art and science: Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry and Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science.[31]
Poetry
Hoffmann is also a writer of poetry.[32] His collections include The Metamict State (1987, ISBN 0-8130-0869-7),[33] Gaps and Verges (1990, ISBN 0-8130-0943-X),[25] and Chemistry Imagined, co-produced with artist Vivian Torrence.[25][34]
Plays
He co-authored with Carl Djerassi the play Oxygen, about the discovery of oxygen and the experience of being a scientist. Hoffman's play, "Should've" (2006) about ethics in science and art, has been produced in workshops, as has a play based on his experiences in the holocaust, "We Have Something That Belongs to You" (2009), later retitled "Something That Belongs to You.[31][35]
I already knew the work of Hoffmann's co-playwright Carl Djerassi--their play is Oxygen. It is--I just discovered--out on YouTube.
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdsyW3d4XrI
This play is a dramatization of the events leading up to the discovery of oxygen in the 18th C. My husband and I are going to watch it tonight.
Roald Hoffmann won the Chemistry Nobel prize in 1982. Djerassi contributed to oral birth control pills and has a string of awards, including one for his work on environmental hazards.
I wonder if Margot or anybody has a comment about his texts or his play with Djerassi? Tell us, please.
We are always looking for speakers at the Hard-Science Science Fiction Zoom group, as I stated. Nobody has spoken about Djerassi's concept of "science-in-fiction" that distinguishes these works from science fiction.
Dear Readers,
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation aids the visibility of scientists and all facets of their work in society. This foundation will support even risky and controversial films about the lives of those engaged in science and technology. They have a call out to filmmakers.
Be sure to tell any filmmakers about this call:
https://www.filmindependent.org/programs/grants-and-awards/alfred-p-sloan-foundation-grants/
One example might be Dark Matter, which made little money because of the controversy surrounding some of its characteristics and a coincidence of unfortunate timing of release *--I suggest you read the Wikipedia account.
Dark Matter (2007, starring Meryl Streep, dir. by Shi-Zheng Chen), despite the problems, won the Sloan Prize at The Sundance Festival. Dark Matter can be viewed on Amazon and elsewhere.
LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter_(film)
*In my field of Rhetoric, the accidents of timing are called Kairos, which is that wise Greek principle that a speech (film, print or e-text) is not the same forever. The same speech can fall flat of even offend one day, then two years later be very effective or recognized as great and artistic. I think Dark Matter will find an audience for this reason. The film is a good example, too, of how art relates to science that I am eager to discuss with anybody, maybe off RG so as not to bog down the Q here.
As a mathematician, I like to think of math as both an art (imaginative, right-brained) and a science (logical, left-brained). Math seeks imaginative ideas from Art, as it often tries to express its findings in graphic forms. And Science provides numerous pictures of both the micro- and macro- worlds. Art inspires us to create new forms, as it makes associations beyond the logical -- often juxtaposing the illogical with the logical, as it challenges us to "see" anew.
I often use the art of M. C. Escher to illustrate this interaction. Escher offered us the "Impossible" (the up/down staircase) and the "Strange" (circles displaying non-euclidean geometries), which mathematicians appreciate but cannot offer themselves. Such blending of art and science creates new possibilities, which inspire us to create a_New and a_Gain.
This topic is important regarding funding the Arts. We seem eager to fund STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education, often at the expense of the Arts. We must realize that "STEM" without the Arts, lacks the "STEAM" to power a real educational revolution.
Reply to Rohit Manilal Parikh,
Thank you for your detailed reply. You have summarized the different styles of cognitive activity in the arts and sciences. Why are they different? Is it simply that different parts of the brain are more active in the two fields of knowledge or more to it than that?
Dear Gloria Lee Mcmillan ,
At the outset thank you for your expressive mode on Arts & Science . This two are individual faculties for the participant .We all know that knowledge is power & no limitation to our expression & thinking when we refer to our mind , it never gets tired but the faculty of our mind have a direction on individual for the development for his way of passage .
Mind correlates with our faculty of the brain & the power & development of brain may not be same for every individual .Our brain requires a thinking passage depending on every individual with his grasp & knowledge .Every individual are not the same in the line with the passage ,of their brain power which do not remain the same for every individual & as such in our individual passage of mind & brain are not the same .
I have merely express my views in this respect .
Dear David Atkinson,
I agree with your account of the interaction of the cognitive faculties between art and science and can give you an up-to-the-moment example from my own feeble brain. I am much-impressed with the 2007 film Dark Matter, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, who comes out of Beijing Opera background (and accounts for the epic or operatic plot arc.).
I sat watching Dark Matter several times when I was exercising in the living room (because there are so many metaphors both visual and musical in that film) in the film. It carries a powerful theme about how certain kinds of abuse lead to "dark matters" that lie below an apparently tranquil surface and lead to something at micro and macro level.
Others may not be so taken by this film Dark Matter and that is a matter of many factors involved in taste. Since I was so taken by it, and because "string theory" kept coming up, I did this little painting I ma calling "String Theory" to honor that film.
This is a bit touched by the skill of the surreal painter Max Ernst. He came up with semi-aleatory techniques called "decalcomania" to unleash the unconscious. Staring with shapes that come when we lift a paint-covered sheet off another surface, we can look at the shapes until something appears on it and work into the painting. Ernst's are wonder pairings.
Here is the resulting artistic response to the study of Dark Matter (the film) and its motif of String Theory. You don't have to have seen the film (in Amazon) to look at this painting, but it helps. Thanks for your insights on the synergism of the art mind and the science mind. Now we can add kind of a pinball-of-the-mind triad of art-film-science.
Dear Gloria,
I like the painting, and can see it connecting ideas in dark matter and string theory. I also like the idea of its semi-aleatory origin--which is not a term I am overly familiar with. However, thinking about it, semi-aleatory is probably the best way of describing my own feeble attempts at blues improvisation on guitar and ukulele! Long may art build on science, and science develop from art.
Science and art naturally overlap. Both are a means of investigation. Both involve ideas, theories, and hypotheses that are tested in places where mind and hand come together—the laboratory and studio. Artists, like scientists, study—materials, people, culture, history, religion, mythology— and learn to transform information into something else.
Art and science share many connections that are begging for exploration. These intersections include the sub-field of art illustration, scientific communication, and visual neuroanatomy.
So you see, art is an expression, and science is the explanation behind the expression. Art expresses what it sees; science explains it.
Both must be moral and humane. Dear Gloria, I have never seen this film, but I'm impressed with the fabula.To my humble associations, it's a classical triangle- II Dottore and zanni Arlecchino and Brighella/la commedia dell'arte/. They are in the Shakespearean tragedy/to Aristotle, there are the laws of the gods and the laws of men/. Gods always take revenge for wickedness. To the Greek canons of tragedy, all the vicious characters/with envy, meanness and greed/ must be punished under the law of gods. The spectators experience neither fear, nor compassion. There is no katharsis, because evil is punished. It's a real "tragoidia"/tragos- goat, oide- song/. A poet, an actor and a choregos are punished as well as the spectators. "Dark Matter" turns out to be "the triumphant progress of knowledge" that harms and corrupts human beings. It's a tragedy, not a farce. "The great wood snake" by Anna Vinogradova.
https://pulse.mail.ru/article/ozhivshaya-russkaya-narodnaya-kultura-v-kartinah-zvezdy-russkogo-realizma-hudozhnika-anny-germanovny-vinogradovoj-6590847965613996209-5253747914979428472/?ysclid=lh972vblu3509167353
Science is mostly a product of a logical and critical mind that is also creative. Art is mostly a product of a creative mind that can or cannot be also critical and logical.
Art has different forms on a continuum, from purely scientific (following logic and fixed laws) to purely imaginative. I personally like the point where art and science meet; when a person's both left and right brains are fully active at the same time.
I also like very much surreal art too (of course if it is good), where there is no room for logic, and the left brain can get some rest, allowing the right brain to enjoy the immersive experience.
Thanks Vahid Rakshan,
I notice that your are studying mental states in the project below at your RG page.
TITLE
"Can we close the explanatory gap of phenomenal consciousness through quantifying the vividness of qualia felt at different states of consciousness?"
Will differences between the artistic and creative and the more mathematical and scientific also be part of your research?
Hi Gloria, Thanks a lot for your question. I guess yes, sort of. I am currently doing studies on facial beauty. I guess that partly addresses your question, because they try to quantify the subjective matter of beauty (which is closely related to art) into objective mathematical formulas.
However, these are mostly relevant to orthodontics and plastic surgery and dentistry. Besides them, right now, I am tapping into the water of neuroscientific studies on beauty, consciousness, creativity, working memory, attention, etc.
I am curious why you asked.
These are some of my papers on quantifying beauty:
Article Factors associated with the beauty of soft-tissue profile
Article Factors influencing attractiveness of soft tissue profile
Article Psychometric and Perceptometric Comparisons of the Perspecti...
This one also has some psychological aspects to it (for the first time ever):
Article Effects of laterality on esthetic preferences of orthodontis...
Gloria Lee Mcmillan and Irina Mikhailovna Pechonkina were these your own paintings? Very beautiful, especially that snake. Mesmerizing.
The attached one is called "A snapshot of my mind: Coming back to Life." which is literally a snapshot of my mind in a hypomanic episode after a gloomy loss and grief. (I did really see this when looking inward, and painted it; the only tweak is that the supernova in my mental content was in magenta).
Irina Mikhailovna Pechonkina
I quite like that image you provided
- "The great wood snake" by Anna Vinogradova.
especially in this context (being the topic of art and science), and especially as we, globally are still largely steeped in various mythologies, and a good percentage of us are familiar with the idea of a snake enticing Adam and Eve to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge leading to their expulsion from innocence (the Garden of Eden).
As a piece of art this wood snake establishes a pervading sense of mystery and beauty, and has the unique quality (among paintings) of continuing to resolve to greater clarity as the viewer gazes into the painting.
The process of resolving into greater clarity is often considered the domain of scientific investigation, and the hermetic practices of science, being meticulous observation and documentation and reproduce-ability of methods are superficially unrelated to the practices of arts.
However, at least in regard to painting, the document is the work of art, and no shortage of meticulousness has gone into this piece by Anna Vinogradova (who is new to me and quite an accomlished painter in my mind.).
As with all knowledge whether obtained from the fruit of a tree or otherwise discovered by meticulously following the branches that connect the items that knowledge pertains to, once discovered, and known the innocent ignorance of the connections is gone. Also once painted, the document or piece of work has become a thing in itself that can be explored and known and never can be unknown again.
I find that my scientific interests such as Experiment Findings EXPERIMENTAL PERCEPTION PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTING ASSOCIATIVE M...
are complemented by my artistic endeavors such as
https://www.flickr.com/photos/waese/albums/72157688455805794
and
https://www.flickr.com/photos/waese/albums/72157629323289004
And in my opinion all of this creativity is associative, including work in the hermetic sciences, wherein the framework seems to be "logical" while in retrospect, the logical part only resolves in the scientific documentation. The ease of logic-afication is a consequence of the established logical methods that are used, while at each stage in the scientist's progress (and that of the artist as well) the real work is performed reflexively and associatively and then it is reworked and edited associatively as well.
regards Jerry
Nice results Vahid Rakhshan
Although scientific drawings are not art, it does help to be able to draw diagrams well enough so that resemble what you intend them to depict.
Dear Irina,
Inductive ad deductive are two ways of viewing the cosmos. We may assume we know in advance what is good for "humanity" from analogic thinking, but do we?
There is a Ray Bradbury story called Great Balls of Fire episode in The Martian Chronicles. Slide time to 30:10 min into this video.
How different is different? Gloria
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKeABRyNnRM
Gloria Lee Mcmillan , this is where the priests go off wandering to the martian hills where they meet and are saved by martian energy balls.
Is it something they say, or just that they want to find out about a mystery?
I was just using that episode of the priests and the great balls of fire to illustrate that there may be more out there than deductive logic about "what is good for humanity" can predict. I am a science fiction reader and much of what is, or at least used to be, written was started with the stimulus of "What if--?" rather than "It should--"
The quoted phrase "What if . . .?" is inductive and an open system basis for much creative cognitive activity while the second is often less so. But I am easily corrected on that judgment.
My painting "Light Matter" is created half by a controlled accident after I watched the 2007 film (with Meryl Streep) Dark Matter. (Alan M. Clark, science fiction artist, calls his work controlled accidents using decalcomania technique.) Who knows what anyone else will find in that dark and beautifully-created film. I only know what I found.
Dear Friends,
Great discussion! “Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
People are eating fruits from the forbidden tree /greed, corruption, bureaucracy/. The frantic consumerism is dangerous for humanity. Mars is the next frontier of humankind , where artificial intelligence rules supreme. Thus, the balls of independence /the law of progressive differentiation/ symbolize the globe existing within pride. It's a crisis of faith. "Today is August 5, 2026, August 5, 2026, today is..."/There will come soft rains" "Everything is an act of faith, isn't it?"
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1630.Ray_Bradbury?page=2
Irina, that is a lovely quote of Bradbury: "Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.” May we all have the courage to accept/remember it.
That quotation reminds me of Mark Twain's story of the teenager, who at 14, thought his father was the stupidest man, but when he became 21, he was surprised how much his father had learned in only 7 years! May our Pride in our Science or our Art never prevent us from remembering that Knowledge is not Wisdom.
yes, but I am not daunted by Bradbury's "that we can never explain" part, and perhaps we have learned a lot since he wrote that as well, ha!
Well, thank you once again!
These balls separated themselves from the human beings and they turned very nice priests out! Besides, we know that all the Martians died. Why didn't they help them? The priests felt lonely among the AI balls.Bradbury was a great philosopher! "- Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman? - I'd much rather recognize the inhuman in the human."
https://www.livelib.ru/quote/43977442-the-illustrated-man-chelovek-v-kartinkah-rej-bredberi?ysclid=lhc1c8pu4r174690700
Thinking of Pride, I found an amazing image "The Father and Mother" by Boardman Robinson. Psychology and Arts? "Pride is defined by Merriam-Webster as "reasonable self-esteem" or "confidence and satisfaction in oneself".[1] Oxford defines it as "the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's own importance."[2] This may be related to one's own abilities or achievements, positive characteristics of friends or family, or one's country. Richard Taylor defined pride as "the justified love of oneself",[3] as opposed to false pride or narcissism. Similarly, St. Augustine defined it as "the love of one's own excellence",[4] and Meher Baba called it "the specific feeling through which egoism manifests."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride
Irina Mikhailovna Pechonkina
There is one special kind of pride, that creative people know well which occurs when we take pride in what we have done or said, and that is an excellent reward we deserve to give ourselves; as well as being an adaptive benefit for social creatures (potentially significant in evolution).
It is similar to the pleasure we feel when we find a lost thing, or reach a needed refuge.
Aggressive pride or dominance, and aggressive acquisition or greed (hoarding) are largely incompatible with the kind of pride that comes from the creative experience and I do not believe they have social benefits even though evolution reveals a long history of success by those that aggressively dominated their niches, but no species seems to last forever except for cockroaches (who apparently love cuddling or at least squishing into tight places together but only have simple thoughts) and fungus, which does not seem to think at all.
It is kind of funny to think of humans as a temporary phase of social animal population in an extended evolutionary frame of history yet to come. I wonder what follows, and if it will have a compassionate glowing spherical power over the rocks that fall off mountains.
We cannot sum up difference and argue it down. This is the mind's own trick. Here is a story from Ray Bradbury.
LINK:
https://www.cusd80.com/cms/lib/AZ01001175/Centricity/Domain/9924/Dark%20They%20Were%20and%20Golden%20Eyed%20Text.pdf
An essay by an Indigenous writer name Grace Dillon appeared in our collection of essays on Bradbury Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars.
Try as we might, imagination will escape. Difference will persist all regulating tendencies of the authoritarian brain. Grace left untranslated sentences from her Anishinaabe language in final critical essay on our collection on the Bradbury story above.
She made this clear. I am different than you. I exist. I hope people will read both the Bradbury story and Grace's essay.
LINK:
https://web.pdx.edu/~dillong/GraceDillonFinalv1.pdf
“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. ”
― Ray Bradbury. "The Science of Science Fiction" by Arthur Unger "Those were dreams that existed before the fact. And when you solve the problem, the science fiction becomes fact. And then you keep moving on up through science. That whole history of ideas, as ideas alone to start with, and then as they begin to exist in the world and change the world and compete with the world . . . even if you look at, say, the history of castles, the same thing happens. . . ."
Oh, I understand, . . . I think. Is it that science fact has gone beyond science fiction?
"No, not really, because we've only been on the moon for roughly five days out of 5 billion years of existence for Earth. Our life on the moon is only a few days old; our life on Mars hasn't begun to exist yet. It exists only through our machines. So we're still in a very primitive state. From here on, a lot of science fiction is going to be theological -- a combination of theology and science -- because a lot of the same problems attract theologians and writers. We're all up to the same thing."
https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/1113/111356.html
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1630.Ray_Bradbury?page=2
"I refuse to believe that these are bad people. On the contrary, I look at those people going by in the night, and I think, 'They're all beautiful. I must write about them. . . .'" RB, from Christian Science article referenced.
Yes, but the reverberations from colonial genocides have no sooner settled while it seems to be happening again. Yet it is not outer space - we are colonizing other space, the spaces (and interests) occupied by others whom we would prefer to ignore or erase. Meantime global warming has a very clear message, "Curb your colonialism". Put those space rockets back on the drawing boards till after we clean up the oil slicks and microplastics etc.
Us and Them, I and it, or I and Thou.
There are two issues: art and science, and convergent and divergent styles.
Some people are more convergent, which means that they follow standards and established ways to proceed more easily, even when they are creating. And other people need to have their own way and have difficult accommodating to preestablished ways to think and to perform. Is could be associated with cognitive style in other dimensions: centration - widening, and field dependence-independence. Why? Because there could be people that are more comfortable focusing on specific parts, and other people who are more comfortable having broad sights before centring in something more specific. And because there could be people who can easily follow external references, and other who can get more easily their own internal references. Those are fields in the cognitive style study.
By other hand, art and science tend to have specific fields and emphasis, but they have important specific common grounds: creation, exploration and observation, for example.
Can we also note that art and science are processes and so have stages?
In the "inventio"* stage or art or scientific hypothesis making, we are in the neurological mode of "what if?" mind wandering and curiosity (not just the Mars Rover) and the unknown. Into what directions do these terms lead us?
What if? What will this look or sound like? Why do I feel this way when I see--? Why does this happen? When I smell or hear -- it makes me feel ---. Why? Who is speaking when I get up and start typing what random voices say in my head (a Bradbury technique?)
"Inventio" comes from Aristotle in his Rhetorike. Ray Bradbury used this mind wandering state and didn't use his judging and judgmental mind until he allowed his mind to form his thoughts. Aristotle's next stage of creation is arrangement. That is where the mental editor takes over.
Bradbury said he "vomited" his free associations in the morning and cleaned up the mess in the afternoon. In a week, he had a short story by repeating that for five days. Never judge or moralize in the morning, said Bradbury. He also said that we should write because it gives us joy, not to preach ethics or change people's minds. If we cause some change for the better "out there' in the world. then that is secondary. Mainly tell a good story. It works for me, too. I have tried it. (No guarantee how good the result will be.)
To Aristotle, "memory-experience-imagination". "Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.
Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.", V.Nabokov https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov
"Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction." V.Nabokov https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov
And actually, what makes us human? - Social memory! "Blade Runner 2049". To be born a replicant and to die a human. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCcx85zbxz4
"But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
Quoted in dialogue in the movie Blade Runner 2049", V.Nabokov
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov
Examples could be helpful of hybrids of art and science thinking. Anybody?
I just thought of sensory triggers to creativity. Can we now understand these a bit better using MRI scans, do you think? Schiller kept a rotten apple in a desk drawer. He would open that drawer and it helped him to create.
Sounds, visions in our visual periphery, scents.
Here is a link:
https://therumpus.net/2014/04/14/rotten-apples-and-other-writerly-customs/
Also undoing "Hardening of the categories" and judgmental thinking that interferes with that open neural pathway.
I have an exercise from a class in art education. When I find it I will share that, as well.
Let's have some open eyes, ears, and noses...
What we can learn from an 'empty.'
This brief essay on the process of making a meticulous drawing of an empty Heinekens bottle follows the mental process of defamiliarizing oneself from the familiar in order to actually see it and represent it in art. In addition, the general tendency not to draw after after puberty is discussed and ways to overcome this block to creative expression are mentioned. This essay deals with rhetorical strategies re-visioning one's life and surroundings.
…
"Craftwerk", "Radioactivity". Where are you, our greatest scientists, who are able to stop wars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBTn_3DBYo
Dear Irina,
Do you think that it helps to "triangulate?" Can we improve our approach to "scientists" by opening this discussion point to a break down of what works for which audience segment.
What category of scientists
What fields of science
What stage of scientific career security
Income from what sources
What alternatives for a livelihood
We may have some rhetorical success in attempting to help beginning stage scientists see the alternatives to work in war industries. Do you think?
And also we might help scientists at the later part of career to see the advantages for their work in mentoring younger scientists in alternative fields. This is especially useful if we have relatives in scientific work. That way we may be meeting people who are also interested in a viable future.
Think so?
I hope that makes sense.
Dear Gloria,
I'm sure, that Honest and Humane Science and Arts Must be- Must be!- the rulers of destinies. Nowadays, we are standing on the edge, and we have no any wings .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7nh17nqWc0
We have to be both smart and persistent. This is very urgent, but we cannot afford burn-out and just turning inward and watering our gardens, do you agree? A priest at a Greek church here in town said once to me, "It may be that you will not be allowed to see any result from your work, but that doesn't mean that people are not seeing it and that what you do has no effect."
The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.
Henri Matisse https://libquotes.com/henri-matisse
Music from the Hitchcock film Spellbound played on the Theremin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv_f26Aw-As
One musical instrument that uses science (physics) to make art (music) is the theremin. So when we perform on the theremin, we are actually performing art connecting to science. Ant other examples of connecting art and science that readers here can supply?
This is a wonderful gift to a early teen-aged science class. A community group I am in donated a theremin to a junior high school science class. These students are 12-13 years old. That time is a curiosity peak. Too often this age group is when students get "lost" to science, thinking that science is dull and boring.
The theremin (/ˈθɛrəmɪn/; originally known as the ætherphone/etherphone, thereminophone[2] or termenvox/thereminvox) is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer (who is known as a thereminist). It is named after its inventor, Leon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928.
The instrument's controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas which function not as radio antennas but rather as position sensors. Each antennae forms one half of a capacitor with each of the thereminist's hands as the other half of the capacitor. These antennas capacitively sense the relative position of the hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.
The sound of the instrument is often associated with eerie situations. The theremin has been used in movie soundtracks such as Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, Bernard Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Justin Hurwitz's First Man as well as in theme songs for television shows such as the ITV drama Midsomer Murders and the Disney+ series Loki, the latter composed by Natalie Holt. The theremin is also used in concert music (especially avant-garde and 20th- and 21st-century new music) and in popular music genres such as rock.
Photography and movies have been the epitome of synthesis for both art and science for over 100 years
check out this filmography from the Manaki Brothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj9AyEOCTFE
I just did a little crayon sketch of a paused frame of the sultan's entourage
The collective imaginary has many styles, rooms, and directions. Earth is but one planet. But we do need to keep it for our collective use. How we do this may be an inspiration for many, as well as inductive exploration of what we call "reality."
Any examples of people's own artistic creations, please? It is helpful to all of us to have NEW SENSORY INPUT. How are you all over the world creating art today, this minute?
Inquiring minds want to know!
PS: Here in Arizona, I had a birthday and US Mother's Day combination, so now I have a THEREMIN instrument. This instrument was invented by Leon Theremin. It is played by moving one's hands in the air and manipulating the electro-magnetic current when it is connected to power source. In other words, I play it without touching anything but thin air.
You may know some old US films that use this music:
The Day the Earth Stood Still (classic anti-war science fiction film)
Forbidden Planet (not sure if theremin- definitely synethized soundscape there)
Spellbound (Hitchcock film)
The Lost Weekend
I attach a couple links showing this amazing instruments that is a wonderful learning tool in High School Physics classes and also in school music programs.
Katica Illenyi plays a suite from the Hitchcock film Spellbound using the theremin as the solo instrument!
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpzZP4Va8d8
Here is a demonstration of the powerful sound of outer space speaking for PEACE and an explanation of how Bernard Herrman used the theremin in that film.
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCKR6snZx8
I have recently been reading about Wuxing, the Chinese five elements. How does this relate to what we have been discussing here in this question of how ART connects to SCIENCE?
LINK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_(Chinese_philosophy)
I would surprised if there were not some connection here.
I only had information on the full depth of this philosophy pointed because I watched a 2007 feature film called Dark Matter (directed by Chen Shi-Sheng and starring Lui Ye, Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn) . Dark Matter puzzled US audiences because of its incorporation of Wuxing principles, among other elements that have been untranslatable" between cultures, in gaps in society, and within a single mind and heart.
Some random reviewer on an aggregate film rating service like Metacritic said that he didn't understand by the director Chen Shi-Shen was "throwing in all those random Chinese symbols at places in the film." I knew from how careful the plot "beats" and the clever and satirical use of music was that these symbols of Chinese natural elements could not be "randomly" sprinkled into the film.
Basically the film says that Dark Matter makes up most of the universe and this metaphor and its progressive ramifications ripple throughout the film. Understanding that, although things may seem solid and permanent, they are not because the so-called elemental basis of the cosmos to the sub-atomic is more change, transition, dynamic relations and symmetries. We can perceive such a small slice, it is easy to misunderstand and"'essentialize" what is happening. In western philosophy, iron is iron is iron, oxygen is oxygen, etc. They are essences. But in Wuxing so-called "elements' are dances of phases, transtions, changing, and more complex.
Thanks for your comment, Jerry, but according to the film Dark Matter and Wuxing, "the mind" can hardly be taken out of this complicated dance of the elements and spheres so easily as in Western binary brain and thought. Wuxing says--not quite. More to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_(Chinese_philosophy)
How do things connect, Jerry?
I keep cycling around there at RG and see over and over people posting how it seems to them based on principles they learned long ago and cannot examine. They suffer from "hardening of the categories," perhaps.
To circumvent our somehow self-serving (because we are always right) binary categories of mind, can we also share what other questions seem to be trying to extend our knowledge of similar phenomena such as human misery. Who can even deal with this without one's mind and heart running for ready-made answers. I liked the film Dark Matter above because we can see the "island universe" in our own minds, in social relations, and into the gigantic and miniscule scales where these "miseries" hardly register. Is there value in doing these explorations? You tell me.
For instance, someone at RG has created a question trying to understand "misery." This is a scientific question and also has been approached in art. Science. Art. Two island universes, those fields of knowledge.
Link to this discussion below.
Is Wuxing is a valuable tool (among others, of course) for getting beyond western dualism thinking? Or is this not a useful lens? No ready made answer. Comments?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_definition_would_you_give_to_human_misery/85
It depends on how we define the terms art and science. For example does an Elvis impersonator as he improves the act perfect his art? Or, is a laboratory technician filling a test tube from a pipette 100 times a day for 30 years doing science?
At a deeper level, and I believe this is where we ought to investigate the question, I think of science and art as coming from the same source, out of consciousness, the drive to imagine future change, to imagine things new.
Science and art seek emergence in the conscious state, call it hypothesis or conceptualisation, both the scientist and the artist search for what initiates the reifying event. This process suggests to me a deeper question. What is that which brings about the exception to the impersonators art and the test-tube filler’s science?
If the universe, including art and science originated with a singularity; a one-thing, unique individual identity that after universal conception became everything extant, then it seems difficult to accept that this qualitative evolution occurred due to random chaotic happenstance. Instead of being explained a posteriori to fit adaptive reiterations in art expression and scientific enquiry it might, I suggest, be seen like gravity as an integral function of the universe as perceived by consciousness.
It’s more than aggregate attraction of mass. It has a component of quality to its mass; a higher order of complexity of parts and functionality. It is not a unique human ability so much as a universal property which is exploited by consciousness. We are aware of this as much as we are part and parcel of it; being a phenotype, a node of this universal evolutionary process; a product of universal properties which act to enable expansion of intricate function.
The responsible consideration, I propose, is how we get along, how we distribute power and privilege in this world picture that we have all been taught to perceive socially. I would suggest by acknowledging that reality, which includes science and art, is constantly changing and elusive, one might employ moderate behaviour since who can know anything absolutely, immutably and for certain? Or, to put it another way, how can an individual be sure to the extent of hatred, or a group the consensus of righteousness for war?
Gloria Lee Mcmillan
I can think about one thing at a time and in a western style way, so as to consider a contrary thought with as much ease as I can latch onto an association that is similar, since both similar and opposing flow readily, or bounce readily like a billiard ball responding to the angle and force of the cue ball.
What Wuxing brings to mind is the eastern cultural mandala form that contains a world at a glance, which in the simplest representation is yin-yang (☯) - containing two dynamic concepts in a dynamic set of relationships.
The 5 element relationship of the east has a western 4 element equivalent that is established in alchemy and tarot symbolism. Each of these non-atomic (i.e. you do not find them in a periodic table, nor do they make sense as chemical ingredients to react in a crucible) elements pertains to classes of concepts. But the consideration of all of them together, as in the diagram you included, is mandala style thinking, similar to what the magician is doing in the tarot card #1.
I mentioned theory of mind, because - to my way of thinking - our minds work associatively, and our elemental experiences are impressions that occur 10 times per second (alpha wave) including all of our senses and ideas all at once together as the mental contents. It is these "mandallic" assemblies of all the elements (senses+mental forms -aka the mental contents) together which become the association based memory engrams that makes up our memories and personal mental life of perceptive reflexes.
This means, in my opinion, that we are at each moment all 4 or all 5 (or 17 or whatever number you are comfortable dividing life into) "elements" of our potential in particular combinations ASSOCIATEDLY, i.e. that which is on the magicians table (which is what we are up to now - more or less for the last 5 minutes - AKA short term memory), or that which is depicted in the mandala, all at once together, every moment in succession.
Whether this is a matter of standing back and taking in an artform as if inhaling the artist's total expression, which is a valid form of art appreciation, or if it is a matter of understanding the Water Cycle, or the Metamorphosis of a Frog, all things that we may be concerned with are themselves totalities, or parts of totalities, that can be well understood all together, yet also when contrasted piece by piece, as in the process of dissection - we can become intimate with the minutae of composition.
Thus while our minds naturally work in associations of totalities, eastern style. We can best make distinctions between particularities using discernment and dissection, western style. The former being the creative domain of Art, and the latter being the domain of Science, but both come together to make things work.
Thanks for the neat division between E and W; however, the products of logical thought can only categorize this way, as you say--linearly, not interactively and experientially because all distinctions made are made on only one side of the fence and--by definition--favor that side's rule of thought. Patterns of one culture's model of brain. I want to commend your time and careful analysis above, no doubt about it. But this is like "explaining" a painting in words.
I think the ways of apprehending reality interact variously and are more porous between E and W, N and S "island universes" of world views.
For a history of Western analytical and Aristotelian attempts to look "over the fence" at the East, see Edward Said's Orientalism for detailed timelines of the summing up of one way of being by the West.
In the film Dark Matter we get a binocular view and more than can be paraphrased or summarized of what it is experientially like being in one "island universe" or a worldview or another. The 2007 Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn, Liu Ye, (Dir.) Shen Shi-Zheng film treatment is different than batting around explanations here. That is the unique potential of art. I do not know how those filmmakers did this feat. I recommend the film highly and its embodiment--rather than analysis of--Wuxing principles.
Generalizations do not catch all the contrary examples, either. Westerners all do not operate in Aristotelian modes. After 15 million dead in the war from 1914-1918 and having memories of horrors burned into their brains, three groups of western artists tried to operate on non-linear, non-Aristotelian semantic and visual thought patterns--and they put a lot of thought into it. They tried every method of chance, employment of dreams, and humor and games to get out of the "glories of their cultural heritage." The ruts of the mind, according to them--men who had seen war firsthand.
Surrealism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism
Dadaism: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/dadaism-guide
Our systems of thoughts may be part of the problem of sustainability of our species, they averred. Were they right or wrong? Maybe boundary crossing as we are now able to do on Reserchgate may help us to peek into "island universes" other than our own idee fixe ones.
Dear Thomas Byrne Gregory,
"Nice try," as the saying goes, "but no cigar." Why?
It is always good to do a thorough lit review on a claim that we make.
"2020 Nobel Prize winner says the universe has gone through multiple Big Bangs"
Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/nobel-prize-winner-says-the-universe-has-gone-through-multiple-big-bangs-10641825/
"When it comes to how the universe started, science holds that the universe began in what's known as the Big Bang. Many have wondered over the years what the end of the universe will be like. A 2020 Nobel Prize winner in physics named Sir Roger Penrose believes that the universe goes through cycles of death and rebirth.He believes that there have been multiple Big Bangs and that more will happen. Penrose points to black holes as holding clues to the existence of previous universes. Sir Roger Penrose is a mathematician and physicist from the University of Oxford, and he believes in the future there will be another Big Bang. Penrose won the Nobel Prize for working on mathematical methods proving and expanding Einstein's general theory of relativity."
Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/nobel-prize-winner-says-the-universe-has-gone-through-multiple-big-bangs-10641825/"
This 2020 Nobel Physics winner says that there is no One Bang for our Buck but multiple bangs. This far, other physicists have no master key to the universe to prove this theory wrong. So the issues at the core of the film Dark Matter -- matter. In this films on many psychological, physical science, and international cultural contact zones, we are treated to a view of BOTH SIDES, I might add--for a change.
MOVING SCIENCE INTO FILM
That is always impressive for me. When a discussion has various POVs being heard. Thanks for weighing in on this issue. Maybe watching Dark Matter will inspire some here to move into whether of not a fictional film treatment cna ever get to the heart of any mater--light or dark. Or even gray matter in our heads?
Dark Matter won the Alfred P. Sloan AWARD for the depiction of the lives of those engaged in Science and technology at the 2007 Sundance Festival.
Gloria Lee Mcmillan While I really like the point you make about the porosity of cultures, I tend to think of that mostly as the porosity of individual minds for we do soak experiences like sponges into our memories. Naturally cultures represent the collections of pluralities of individuals with some commonality and from that we can generalize about the cultures allowing for porous interchange.
What I really meant to highlight is not about how eastern minds differ from western minds, but that both groups have left cultural footprints in symbols that superficially appear to be evidence of esoteric alchemies (5 elements or 4 elements or whatever). Instead I was pouring light onto the occult symbols in the direction of talking about science and art.
Both east and west have both science and art, and both also have religions with "esoteric" knowledge and practices that have left us these perplexing images.
I would tie my explanations up with the fact that our minds work naturally and creatively upon synchronous multichannel gestalts[, or totalities of feelings]; but we also can deliberate ploddingly using discrete linkages and attributions [or "reasoning"], temporarily sacrificing what it feels like to be an artist, to resolve points that can influence others' thoughts in the manner of scientific facts, processes and relationships that remain true whether we have experienced them ourselves or not.
“To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating noting, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/einstein?page=2
Thanks for that, Irina! I like Gorky, Gogol, and Turgenev a lot. Andrejev, as well.
NOW--segue to something completely different!
We are the Planet Zoom Players please watch this instance of how art connects to science. Note how art does in fact connect to science both in the work of H.G. Wells and in these now global play performances. Who kne w five years ago that we could assamble a whole cast in different countries? It is mind-boggling, constructive work, and so creative.
Below is the link for my rather unpolished trailer for our coming play H. G. Wells's "The Crystal Egg."
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSkPGRp9FbE
Request to you, Irina, please tell any actors you know wherever you are! We're always looking for special effects team and actors, playwrights, etc.
Thanks!
Messa in the opera- to my Friend Dr.O.Yu.Latyshev https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEVZAzlF1IA
“When it comes to travelling to Mars, we either pursue physical paths and redesign our spacecraft with improved radiation-shielding and staggering fuel-efficiency. Or we cheat a little and bend the space/time continuum to get there.”
― Stewart Stafford https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/einstein?page=2
Space, "Symphony"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqiNbgwB-Ic
Dear Gloria,
Cosmos is again in my mirror. Pink Floyd, Tarkovsky, judy Chicago and Cicero! "Mundi corpus apte cohaeret" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQukugcrY3Y
I liked this talk about music and math. Is this interesting?
LINK:
https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_miller_the_beauty_of_math_and_music
Dear Irina,
Thanks for that very well-filmed animated song, My Star! It helped to have subtitles. I am sorry this trailer for our play H.G. Wells's "The Crystal Egg" is only in English. But it is mostly visual. Phil Nichols, our text Wizard in the UK, made this trailer. Much better than my first try at a trailer.
See how you like it.
Science and art! It has theremin music with the crystal. I did that. Leon Theremin the Russian physicist invented the theremin.
Gloria
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alb7n0KUAHw
Dear Gloria,
Thank you! It's one of my favourite songs. But, but... “It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
― Noam Chomsky
"The Universal" by V. Butusov. "To see the music, and to listen to the painting"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtHBDgHcPXg
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2476.Noam_Chomsky
Here is an interesting essay that will be out in print next week from THE NEW YORKER, June 12th edition.
"How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood" LINK:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/how-the-marvel-cinematic-universe-swallowed-hollywood
ART and SOCIETY meet in group psychology via the arts of entertainment
---
I recommend writing comments because the ability to think, use detailed process thinking, and other more high level frontal tasks of the human brain are being re-wired in some of these habitual behaviors, while just a small segment of society is able to live without from these habits and profits.
Keywords:
Compensatory fantasy, denial, mass psychology, gaming addiction, war, peace
"How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood"
Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”
By Michael Schulman
"We are all responsible for it". “The author frowned. Don't ask me what I want. Do you think I wanted to see the continents where people live reduced to rubble, do you think I wanted it to end like this? That was just the logical course of events; what could I have done to stop that? I did everything I could; I gave people enough warning; what about that X, that was partly me. I warned them, don't give the newts weapons and explosives, stop this vile trading in salamanders, and so on - and you saw how it all turned out. They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn't stop. I'm not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things. What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts! Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on. There's nothing we can do about that. The internal voice was quiet for a while. "And don't you feel sorry for mankind?”
― Karel Čapek, War with the Newts
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1469484-v-lka-s-mloky
https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2021/04/18/karel-capek-war-with-the-newts-1936club/
Dear Gloria,
I'm so sorry! It's Butusov the best. "My Star"
https://yandex.ru/video/preview/13141221852908648965
I had probably one of the first web sites on Capek--when we only had text. Nice to see the world taking an interest. But most places. you can ask 1000 people and 999 won't know he brought the word 'robot' into global languages.
The ending of Capek's other play R.U.R. is rather hopeful in that old Alquist the robotics engineer realizes that the Robots have developed enough introspection to be self-sacrificing, which he equates with having a spirit inside them.
Not so lucky in War with the Newts. Newts don't care or give an inch. More hope for robots, then?
:-)
Here's a lecture by Allister Neher on the interplay between art and the science of anatomy:
https://www.researchgate.net/deref/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGBpmVKU8Np0%26t%3D592s
Dear Karel Pfeifer,
Thanks for this pointer to your fteind's work. We welcome your input, as always (from the "old days' when this was a Project.)
This traces back to many artist-scientific illustrators such Leonardo Da Vinci. We for get that people can be both artists and scientists. Sometimes an anatomical sketch is the basis for an accurate pose in a non-scientific painting!
Does anybody else wish to post about scientific-art boundary crosser?
Here is a Theremin Jazz concert that includes a reference to Leon Theremin.
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ywH1Vj8_U
I found more on Wikipedia about the origin of the Theremin:
Theremin wrote that (a certain professor he listened to lecturing named) Ioffe talked of electrons, the photoelectric effect and magnetic fields as parts of an objective reality that surrounds us every day, unlike others that talked more of somewhat abstract formulae and symbols. Theremin wrote that he found this explanation revelatory and that it fit a scientific – not abstract – view of the world, different scales of magnitude, and matter.[3] From then on Theremin endeavoured to study the microcosm, in the same way he had studied the macrocosm with his hand-built telescope.[4] Later, Kyrill introduced Theremin to Ioffe as a young experimenter and physicist, and future student of the university.
Thanks, Karl. I have some more ideas for the Glor in RatLabLand series of "science meets the arts" cartoons. Here is the latest one. Like all Marvel Comics and other superpower origin stories, my ability to think like a rat lab rat has a story.
A registrar clerk's mistake at Indiana University NW Campus put me, an English majoring freshman in college into advanced 3rd year college rat lab psych class. I only received a D+ grade, but this traumatic class has inspired me because I identified so much with Rat Number 6 or "Ratsputin" as called Rat number 6 who was assigned to me.
Neither Rat Number Six nor i knew what was going on but we were fast learned. I almost had a C- in the class, despite being and English-majoring Freshman in advanced 3rd-Year Rat Lab Psych. So like Peter Parker who became Spiderman, I got my unusual ability to think like a rat lab rat from an accident. End of origin story that shows how art can meet up with science and produce serendipitous results. Everything can become art! Or science!
Boris Slutsky
Physicists and Lyricists
Physicists are held in reverence,
Lyricists — let's be truthful —
in the shade.
This is not an ordinary preference,
It's a law, and is as such obeyed.
All it means is that poetic reverie
Sidetracks us from pathways of discovery,
That our verse is so much syrup,
That our feet just miss the stirrup,
That our Pegasus, as has been found,
Merely trots but never leaves the ground.
Physicists deserve the world's esteem,
Lyricists clearly don't, so it would seem.
And it's all so evident and obvious
That to take offence is stupid really.
So, instead of being envious,
Let us watch objectively and coolly
How the foam of measures rhythmic
Drops away in sheer dejection,
And the mantle of distinction
Falls to
spirals logarithmic. https://ruverses.com/boris-slutsky/?ysclid=lj1llbvlvl692834442
An example of art connecting to science via Images of Research:
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/research-through-the-lens/?utm_source=University+Affairs+e-newsletter&utm_campaign=9589d1a1d4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_06_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_314bc2ee29-9589d1a1d4-425253977
This is most inspiring, Karl. I looked at some of the photos of winners and other. We have a similar but limited to space art exhibition and contest every winter at the University of Arizona.
I think it is officially called ART OF PLANETARY SCIENCE. Let's see... Our entries are not limited to those at U of Arizona but from anywhere.
LINK: https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/art/
PTSD and the Work of the Surreal Painters in Paris
Keywords: Psychiatry, neuroscience, Art Therapy, chance, aleatory art
The Paris that the Surrealists saw after WW I was not free, cheerful, and gay. It was grim. F. Scot Fitzgerald tried to romanticize Paris in the 1920s but it smelled like a slaughterhouse. Fitz lied to please the aesthetes of his day.. As the early surreal paints--Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Rene Magritte, Hans Arp--wended their way to the local wine cafe, their eyes were assaulted by the wreckage of men and women and children who were maimed over the treasures of culture. Countries fought as much over culture as over geographical territory, over terms--buzz words--like the German term 'Kulturkampf' or 'guerre culturrel' in French.
In peace time, nations had to be content with simply censoring each other's language, music, art, and literature, but in war, these nations could blow up everything, as well, leading to that famous sentence from a later war, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
These returning artists, coming back from the front, saw that they were repeating themselves, their minds running in the rigid ruts of what we now call PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome), so they did everything possible and IMpossible to not celebrate the cultures and the norms and the histories of society, art styles, that had led to the series of wars upon wars. This was the first time an art movement was founded upon ART THERAPY.
A few latched onto Freud, such as Salvador Dali. the Belgian painter Magritte latched onto the linguistic approach of Ferdinand Saussure--that the words in a nation's language had no "sacred" connection to the thing symbolized. Magritte's famous painting "La Trahison des images--Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or in English "The Treachery of Images--This is not a pipe" tried to break the magic of national feelings about language. If we were to realize that the lovely words each language has for things are arbitrary as much as pulling words from a hat, then perhaps one less thing to have wars over, oui? How many who see this painting online or in its original at the LA County Art Museum recognize its origin in PTSD and post-war art therapy?
(Be honest.) Few countries will have wars over "readymades," either, so DuChamp's Urinal installation was another experiment, (until that urinal gets "monetized.")
The Surrealist term "aleatory" was used for their scientific and artistic experiments with chance patterns. One surreal "readymade" poetry technique was to throw words into a hat and make poems of what came out. Or paint the mysterious image of dreams if not too PTSD. Then Max Ernst hit upon another aleatory technique: Decalcomania. This is the same root word for commercial decals (pictures with sticky backs) that are stuck upon objects. But artists loads a sheet of glass with paint and list it off quickly so that random rivulets formed. They worked into the accidental shapes. See any online collection of Max Ernst's art. A noted science fiction and horror magazine illustrator, Alan M. Clark, is a skilled decalcomania painter. I was fortunate to see him demonstrate how he does the techniques in Sept. 2022. Since then I have been making a series of decalcomania paintings.
Hope you like these paintings released today to honor the Surrealists and their struggles,
Golden Apples of the Sun
Silver Apples of the Moon
Today in Tucson, AZ, they are having a Ward 6 meeting about a "new rodent" problem. The newspaper writer said that these new rodents must have hitched over from Phoenix. Our neighbor and rival city (so nobody will doubt, since Phoenix has a 'negative halo' in Tucson.)
I first did a new cartoon, then I went to work and found an anti-rat ad from 1920 in The Tucson Citizen. That is no native field rat or Kangaroo rat in the line drawing but Rattus rattus the roof or house rat.
CATION of cartoon: Mrs. Franchesca Rhodentte, a longtime Tucson resident and member of the local university's Lab Rat community, instructs here children before tonight's meeting...]
"An Aeolian harp (also wind harp) is a musical instrument that is played by the wind. Named after Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind, the traditional Aeolian harp is essentially a wooden box including a sounding board, with strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges. It is often placed in a slightly opened window where the wind can blow across the strings to produce sounds. The strings can be made of different materials (or thicknesses) and all be tuned to the same pitch, or identical strings can be tuned to different pitches. Besides being the only string instrument played solely by the wind, the Aeolian harp is also the only string instrument that plays solely harmonic frequencies.[1] They are recognizable by the sound which is a result of this property, which has been described as eerie[2] and ethereal.[3]
The Aeolian harp – already known in the ancient world – was first described by Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) in his books Musurgia Universalis (1650)[4] and Phonurgia Nova (1673). It became popular as a household instrument during the Romantic era, and Aeolian harps are still hand-crafted today. Some are now made in the form of monumental metal sound sculptures located on the roofs of buildings and windy hilltops.
The quality of sound depends on many factors, including the lengths, gauges, and types of strings, the character of the wind, and the material of the resonating body. Metal-framed instruments with no sound board produce a music very different from that produced by wind harps with wooden sound boxes and sound boards. There is no percussive aspect to the sound like that produced by a wind chime; rather crescendos and decrescendos of harmonic frequencies are played in rhythm to the winds. As Aeolian harps are played without human intervention, the sounds they produce are an example of aleatoric music.
Aside from varying in material, Aeolian harps come in many different shapes. Some resemble standard harps,[3] others box zithers,[4] others lyres,[5] and, in one monument, a fiddle.[5] More modern Aeolian harps can more closely resemble lawn ornaments than any traditional string instrument. The unifying characteristic between all Aeolian harps, regardless of appearance, is their source of sound, the strings, and the fact they are played by the wind. This distinguishes Aeolian harps from other instruments played by the wind, such as wind chimes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp
“Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the undergraduate. But you can’t expect an ordinary adult man, like myself, to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics —that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of ‘Comic Cuts’ is its stock man of science. As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re a bore.” Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%96%D1%91%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC
In mass culture, anything that details the arts OR the sciences is a bore or is so under-marketed as to seem so. This quiet advertising means that films detailing the lives of artists and scientists often slip by the public in their very short runs in theaters, as opposed to the daily repetition of
"TOP GUN II is coming to theaters near you!"--"TOP GUN II is coming to theaters near you!"--"TOPGUN II is coming to theaters near you!"--"TOPGUN II is coming to theaters near you!--"
An extreme example of this undermarketing is the 2007 (Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn, Ye Liu, Dir. Shen Shi Zheng) film Dark Matter, which only showed briefly in two or three cities, made what is considered "pocket change' in the novel business. This film won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for its portrayal of the lives of scientists. But not being given that daily TOP GUN treatment, who knew it existed.
It does exist and can be watched here on YouTube.
DARK MATTER (2007) Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance Film Festival...
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNZKmMKvIPE
Gloria Lee Mcmillan
As Zoncita Norman said: they exist in complementarity. For me the artistic world tries to integrate the inner human life with the outer world, as a synthesis of nature and culture. The scientific world tries to give a stereoscopical restitution of human real-life experiences, which can only be known through a plurality of paradigms.
As an example of this complementarity, I drawed a chalk painting in 1970: "The transfigured night", in hounor to Schoenberg, and was surprised to see in 2019 a scientific view of antimatter, which was so near to my painting.
to all participants of this discussion
You may visit my website: http://courgeau.com/ in order to see more clearly this complementarity.
Dear Gloria,
Thank you for the film! It's super! Classical dostoyevshchina/Dostoyevskian psychology/. A-la "Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right". I like the structured life of the man of genius, identified by the hieroglyphic symbols/to our proverb, "to go through fire, water and brass pipes"/ and music/super!-like Tarkovsky or Dovzhenko/. "Oh, my butterfly is dying"-/The Butterfly effect/- it's the strong quintessential embodiment of lies, corruption, venality, theft, hypocrisy, slave competition, and vulgarity in science. The snake is a symbol of corrupt individualism and distruction of godless spirituality. There is only one step from the insight to the dark matter. The evil is punished, but not destroyed. And what about his Mom and Dad? And the future of humanity is under the question.There is a victimological profile of the victim and the aggressor against the background of full respect for cultures. Greed-envy-provocation-aggression. "Big Brother is watching you"/Orwell/, using your social rating, not the story of American dream. Unbounded ambitions rule the world!
Dear Irina,
I appreciate your remarks and I hope that others will watch this film which was almost totally censored. You might say soft censored. We know that the grounds were gun violence and that the film's origin is in a case of a student in the 1990s who shot a professor. But I think the suppression of this film that only showed in two or three cities in the Us and made a grand total of $75,000 is that here was a view from outside of smug island universes of thought, so totally self-justified. I hope that over time more people will watch Dark Matter (2007) with Meryl Streep a fine director from China and the others.
DARK MATTER is free at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNZKmMKvIPE
The Chinese elements are not like the Greek elements of nature (metal, wood, fire, etc.) They are a different concept.
After seeing this film read up on Wuxing. Chinese chemical elements are like transitions or phases rather than essences. So these character son screen are phases. It makes sense. Wikipedia:
Wuxing (Chinese: 五行; pinyin: wǔxíng; Japanese: gogyō (五行);[1] Korean: ohaeng (오행); Vietnamese: ngũ hành (五行)), usually translated as Five Phases or Five Agents,[2] is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs, and from the succession of political regimes to the properties of medicinal drugs.
You may also be interested that our Hard-Science SF Zoom group will host Hua Li (she) and P.J. Manney (she) to discuss this film in our monthly meeting May 6 2924. I WISH we could have a discussion group before then. But that was the opening.
My favourite one!
“Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus. There was Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at first—a new virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and venerated him. But did he move them to behave as he wanted them to behave—reasonably, decently, or at least a little less porkishly than usual? He did not. And then Luther appears, violent, passionate, a madman insanely convinced about matters in which there can be no conviction. He shouted, and men rushed to follow him. Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled for his reasonableness. Luther was serious, Luther was reality—like the Great War. Erasmus was only reason and decency; he lacked the power, being a sage, to move men to action. Europe followed Luther and embarked on a century and a half of war and bloody persecution.
We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities to the service of reason. We can’t leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can’t allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn’t so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world’s maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo… The men of intelligence must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct us. They must found the Rational State.” Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%96%D1%91%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC
And "There is no place for you"
“In the Rational State human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.
“The three main species will be these: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd.
“From their earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists have assigned them their place in the classified scheme, the Men of Faith will have had their special education under the eye of the Intelligences. Moulded by a long process of suggestion, they will go out into the world, preaching and practising with a generous mania the coldly reasonable projects of the Directors from above. When these projects are accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade ago have ceased to be useful, the Intelligences will inspire a new generation of madmen with a new eternal truth. The principal function of the Men of Faith will be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species consisting of those countless millions who lack intelligence and are without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is required of the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united by some single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with some simple and satisfying creed, will be sent out on a mission of evangelisation. At ordinary times, when the high spiritual temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy, the Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of education. In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited. Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness to be found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy, that they are tremendously important beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant. For the lower species the earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to pre-eminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in the Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake. The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.”
“And what will be my place in the Rational State?” Denis drowsily inquired from under his shading hand.
Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. “It’s difficult to see where you would fit in,” he said at last. “You couldn’t do manual work; you’re too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd; you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and merciless and penetrating.” He paused and shook his head. “No, I can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.”Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%96%D1%91%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC
Too much reason, too much religion. Karel Capek said that he wasn't against any of these rhetorical positions and what are basically neurobiological buzz words we think we understand (and therefore bypass the frontal lobe), but Karel Capek didn't say anything was basically wrong with any position except absolutist insistence upon that position with no exceptions to the badness of the other side.
Calling out the failings of a target group or institution is less difficult than seeing the good intention at the start that the institution of group had that one is opposed to.
Denouncing itemized failings leads to demonizing--defined as freezing one's opponent at their worst, not allowing that they may have changed or progressed. Is everybody in that group ALL the same?
We are premiering an online adaptation of an H. G. Wells play called "The Crystal Egg" that tackles some of these issues. I will post the LOGIN poster later because this play at YouTube will not premiere until July 30th at 7PM Pacific.
The Absolute at Large by Karel Capek. These were not quotations but only in the spirit of Capek.
Dear Gloria,
Such a wonderful masterpiece! Jan Matejko, "Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, or Conversation with God"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Matejko_-_Nicolaus_Copernicus._Sketch_to_the_Painting_%22Astronomer_Copernicus,_or_Conversation_with_God%22_-_MNK_IX-25_-_National_Museum_Krak%C3%B3w.jpg
Hereis the WORLD PREMIERE of H.G. Wells's "The Crystal Egg."
Our Women's Peace group has four members involved but the majority at present are men. If the time is suitable, hope you can join this premiere.
A quotation from H. G. Wells:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQMqRwuJDs
WORLD PREMIERE of the war and peace play “The Crystal Egg!” 7PM Sun July 30 Pacific US Time.
The famed science fiction writer H. G. Wells had a nightmare (of colonialism) after his brother had read and told Wells that the last indigenous Tasmanian had died. Must contacts among different beings always be exploitive? Must wars always happen over differences? This PRECURSOR play “The Crystal Egg” is more open-ended and challenging than the later War of the Worlds. Don’t miss “The Crystal Egg” because TWO WILPF members are involved in this play and four WILPF members are in our Planet Zoom Players.
“We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them [the Martians] at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. […] And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and dodo, but upon its own "inferior" races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” -H. G. Wells
"The Crystal Egg" is permanently viewable AFTER this world premiere. We are just trying this feature. Our Planet Zoom Players is open to any here at RG who like to act or to read plays.
Most film science fiction is violent, full of "war-as-solution" and not given the full play to other ways of thinking. Whatever Planet Zoom Players manages to stage is THOUGHTFUL science fiction. Mostly classic SF. Tell us any stories you know. We might do them. "The Crystal Egg" has been in production for six months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQMqRwuJDs
Fingers crossed that its premiere works, First time I have "premiered" at YouTube. Phil Nichols, our entire Tech Crew (teaches Media at Wolverhampton Univ., UK) said we should make it more like an "event' since we all worked so hard on it for six months. I hope it will be a GOOD event.
7PM US Pacific is 3AM for Phil will not be there. He will count how many actually logged on the the premiere after the event.
Thereafter, this video will be there and anybody can watch it anytime.
David Drummond, "A Dreamlike Piece of Art: String Lake Mist"Another painting I like is called “String Lake Mist”. String Lake is located in the Grand Teton National Park, in north-western Wyoming. What I really love about this painting is the atmosphere depicted as it is very romantic, fantastic and almost dreamlike.
For me, the most interesting thing about this painting is how the water looks like a mirror and the effect it has on the spectator. It creates a boundary between two worlds, not only both sides of the river but also between the water and the skies: we can notice that we cannot really see the difference between them, both disappearing into the mist in the background...As written in my previous post, David Drummond was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He moved to Colorado to study and obtain his doctorate in physics. After being hired by the US air forces as specialist of lasers, his love for painting provoked his return to civilian life.
I would like to focus myself on another aspect of David’s work, the numerous awards and medals that he has received through the years.
He became member of the American Watercolor Society in 1986, in the same time that he left the army, and of the Watercolor West in 1987."
https://artmsg2016.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/albuquerque-david-drummond/
Please view this PRESENTATION showing the sources and digital techniques for some details of a painting-in-progress (I Sing The Body's Electrons) intended for the Neuro-bio Art Show at the University of Arizona. I hope this can de-mystify how artists can work with technology without being overwhelmed by technology. In fact, every generation of visual artists has used what tech was available.
Once people can see how this is something that has already been going on for centuries, then the panic against image tools may be less over-stated. In other areas like photos as forensic evidence, they haven't been valid evidence in courts for awhile. Nothing new there. But that is another topic. Here i am only talking about aids to the drafting phase of art. I discuss the "Lucy" tool we used in the ate 1970s, among other standard narrative artists' tricks of the trade.
Presentation PRESENTATION: "How Does Art Connect to Science?" in the Visu...
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Philosophy