Marcus du Sautoy on the false dichotomy between Art and Science

In this talk for 5x15 Marcus du Sautoy describes his frustration with the false dichotomy drawn between Art and Science. du Sautoy shows how mathematics, specifically prime numbers, can create effects in music and how these same primes are also featured in nature's evolutionary cycles. Aesthetics, he suggests, exist in mathematics – a mathematician, after all, is a maker of patterns, a creative artist. He or she does not work only with truths, but with choices, driven by the aesthetics and beauty of mathematics. Art and science, du Sautoy concludes, are two parts of the same equation.

"A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns.. I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art." GH Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

Sautoy talks about how artists and musicians are drawn to structures almost intuitively - as there is aesthetically something nice about them that retrospectively relates to mathematics.

For example, Arnold Schoenberg used a 12 tone system which incidentally created a symmetrical object that only exists in higher dimensional space and can therefore only be listened to.

Notes from Brian Cox on Carl Sagan and The Beauty of Diagrams

Carl Sagan has been one of the most inspirational people in my current project. 'A Personal Voyage' was Brian Cox's Radio 4 tribute to him.

"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." 

- Carl Sagan

     
"For as long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the sun as a red hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the galaxy as the backbone of night." Sagan


(On people in 100 years time looking back at us)
"They had a society that was entirely dependant on science and high technology and yet the understanding of science - of its values, its methodology, was confined to a tiny few and so everyone depended on the output of science and technology but most people just compartmentalised them into a tiny place inside instead of integrating it into their complete perspective." Ann Druyan


"Juxtaposing humanity's fragility and overwhelming smallness with the vast expanse of the cosmos, Sagan was able to create a feeling of unity and value for our civilisation. This theme is most powerfully expressed, taken at his suggestion, by the Voyager 1 Spacecraft in 1990.." Brian Cox on Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech which I mentioned in an earlier blog post.


The Beauty of Diagrams - Pioneer Plaque

The BBC had a series that explored various visual representations in history. The one that I watched was about NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 which carry a small plaque showing the image of a man and a woman beside a map that tells our location.

"The radial pattern on the left of the plaque shows 15 lines emanating from the same origin. Fourteen of the lines have corresponding long binary numbers, which stand for the periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit. Since these periods will change over time, the epoch of the launch can be calculated from these values. The lengths of the lines show the relative distances of the pulsars to the Sun. A 

tick mark at the end of each line gives the Z coordinate 

perpendicular to the galactic plane" wikipedia

The pioneer plaque's pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Voyager Golden Record.

Voyagers 1 and 2 carry a gold plated 12" record with sounds of earth recorded onto it, and a detailed description of how to listen to it. Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are now respectively 15 billion and 12.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, equivalent to about 14 and 11.5 light-hours distant.

voyager interstellar message - Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
In the annals of exploration, the achievements of the two Voyager spacecraft are unprecedented. The piddling journeys of Columbus and Magellan spanned a few tens of thousands of miles on the watery surface of one small world. Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled billions of miles through the ocean of space, exploring dozens of new worlds along the way and revolutionizing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live. And as a gift of the brilliant mission design, these robot ships are no longer bound by the Sun's gravity. They have passed the outermost planets and are on their way to the cold, dark near-vacuum that constitutes interstellar space. Nothing can stop them. Their radio transmitters are unlikely to work beyond the year 2020. Thereafter, they will wander silently and forever in the realm of the stars.
Who knows who's out there? Perhaps the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by desolate, wasteland worlds circling a hundred billion stars. Or maybe the Galaxy is rich in life forms and intelligence and technology much further beyond our reach than the Voyagers are beyond the reach of Columbus and Magellan. Someday - maybe millions of years in the future - one of these ghostly, derelict ships may be detected and captured by the representatives of some devastatingly advanced interstellar culture. They will wonder about the shipbuilders.
If you could send a long message to such extraterrestrial beings - words, pictures, sounds, music - what would you say? How would you describe us? What would you leave out? Could you communicate intelligibly to very different beings with a wholly independent evolution? In 1977, at NASA's behest, a few of us had a remarkable opportunity to attempt such a (one-way) communication. Frank Drake suggested not a plaque, but a phonograph record. As described in the book, Murmurs of Earth, we designed and prepared the record to carry a rich message to the stars - 116 pictures and diagrams about our global civilization and our species, greetings, samples of the world's great music, the brain waves of a young woman in love and much else.
The Voyager mission has already become the stuff of myth, the premise for many works of science fiction. Brief excerpts from the Voyager record have been heard in films, television and radio. But the record itself has never before been available to the public, because of corporate rivalries and copyright restrictions. Warner New Media has broken through the logjam. Those of us who created the interstellar record - well-aware that different people would have made different selections - are delighted to help bring this message to you, essentially complete, as carried by Voyager. This is what the extraterrestrials will learn about us, should the spacecraft - now the fastest and farthest machines ever launched by the human species - one day encounter someone else in the depths of space.
A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents are changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will still speak for us.

BDH

The Wonders series was probably what got me started on this project in the first place around this time last year, and I suspect it was the animations that excited the artistic side of me the most. In the latest series they upped their game with the simulations of space. 

They make opening sequences and visuals for a lot of TV programs and are clearly a very polished and well known company. What interests me the most about them is the methods they must go through to create specifically scientific animations - is it all artistic license or do they use data? I would love to see their workings of how they get from abstract theories and facts about space to such rich wonderful sequences.

Bad Astronomy sung its praises in this blog post

And it "enchanted viewers who have praised it on a string of space blogs.

Tre Gibbs wrote on one: ‘Haunting, Beautiful and amazing... The images almost seem to be sped up to a speed that allows us to view beyond our miniscule life span and observe the different phenomena that has transpired in our universe from the beginning of time.

‘Engaging, frightening, awe inspiring. We have NO IDEA what lies beyond the fragile safety of our atmosphere.’"- Daily Mail

BDH did have a brilliant video on Vimeo 'A Cosmological Fantasia' of all the animations stitched together to music but for some reason it has been removed.. If it gets put up again I will link it here.


Incidentally I am in the process of editing Wonders of the Universe to music, as I did for the first series - but this is really a side project and very much a cheesy fanvid rather than a substantial addition to my research journal!

BOINC

Someone on twitter mentioned SETI@home and I went to investigate. SETI is the collective name for projects started in the 80's to look for extraterrestrial life. SETI@home basically uses everyone's computers to join up and make a supercomputer to sift through recordings from space to look for rhythms that could come from intelligent life. BOINC is a program that starts up like a screensaver whenever there is spare CPU and works away with any projects that you have chosen to sign up for.

After SETI@home had been running for a few minutes I got visuals like this of live data

I liked the fact that this was a 3D graph of live data, and that it was data from space.

(Apparently SETI is being shut down. Great.) http://www.unthinkable.biz/home/article/2468/seti-gets-shelved-the-truth-will-have-to-wait

BOINC also recommends other similar projects for you, and through that I found Einstein at home. 

"The Einstein@Home Screensaver has a number of elements related to current efforts to detect gravitational radiation from periodic sources such as pulsars. The primary element of the screensaver is a rotating celestial sphere showing the known constellations, along with the current zenith positions of three gravity wave detectors. The positions of the detectors relative to the stars changes periodically over a 24 hour period. If you went to one of the detector sites, the stars visible directly overhead at any time are the same ones that appear next to the detector on your screensaver. (This assumes of course that your computer's time and timezone are correctly set!) Also shown are the positions of the known pulsars and supernovae remnants, and a marker indicating the positions being searched as the calculations proceed. When the graphics are shown in a separate window (not as a screensaver) the user can control the display with the mouse and keyboard." - The Einstein@home website.

 

As far as I'm concerned these are practically ready made art. Blown up big enough in an installation, with people being able to zoom in with gestures instead of a mouse, I think this would be brilliant!

data visualisation and processing

Information is Beautiful

I found information is beautiful a few months ago and loved it, but have recently rediscovered it as my work creeps towards data visualisation. It is a site run by David Mccandless where he puts his own work alongside other top data visualisation artist's work.

Here is his TED lecture...

Aside from it being a promising area for my project I think it might be inevitable that this is the sort of thing I will keep making as an artist. I mentioned ages back that I find myself visualising information without realising, with a diagram of my housemates - putting the weirdest things like relationships into graphs. But I am not alone, not by a long way!

There are lots of artists and designers using the most unusual data for the most beautiful visualisations.

Not only that, but of course some of this data is about space!

 

What's great about informationisbeatiful.net is that David Mcandless goes through all the steps of his design process and talks in a very accessible way. It was his friendly vibe that made me decide to send him an email letting him know that I am available to come and help or just see what he's up to, if he'll have me. He replied to say that they aren't taking on people at the moment but to send him my CV anyway. He said he liked my 'Dozens' installation!

Jer Thorp is another similar artist who has been inspiring me along similar lines.

 

Jer Thorp has a bunch of tutorials for using Processing - the program which he uses to make his visualisations.

I have had a bash at processing, using a few tutorials online. I can make a few things happen like automatically save images of an animation, which at the most basic looks like this

 

 

Using Jer Thorp's tutorial I have also managed to use his spreadsheets of data (on google spreadsheets) to make pretty graphs.

So I *may* take this further, either way it is useful to have a vague understanding so that I don't have to restrict myself with my ideas - anything is possible! I found it strangely exciting to be able to type words out and get the computer to draw things.

The point I think for me is that I was saying how a lot of my work so far has been relevant to space or science, but not factual or precise. This sort of thing can allow me to make very similar work but using actual data - so it can be informative instead of just pretty.

Anyway I'm now trying to document all the weird visualisation ideas that I get without noticing - here is a start:

what was the earth like where I am sitting, 100 years ago, 1000, a million?

what colour would the light from the windows go / our sitting rooms go when the sun expands?

what areas of space would glow if they glowed more when you stood in them?

what if you could visualise every single click you make online etc. (like in ted hiebert's lecture)

and is there a way of representing this same sort of data in a 3D space? With LEDs or holograms or something?

Along with his own work, Jer Thorp blogs about any other great data visualisations out there, like this one which I sadly can't embed

...which combines space, data AND synaesthesia.

And before I get completely carried away, here is something along those lines which is also really fun...

These ideas plus interactive installation = my next idea..?

Books!

I'm keeping in mind that I need to start thinking about my dissertation and that reading is the first step... Here are all the books that I would love to get my hands on at the moment.

Digital Futures is a new series of critical probes of the digital future. The question of technology is framed by the broader traditions of literature, humanities, politics and the arts. Focussing on the ethical, political and cultural implications of emergent technologies, the series looks at the future of technology through the "digital eye" of the writer, new media artist, political theorist, social thinker, cultural historian, and humanities scholar. The series invites contributions to understanding the political context of contemporary technology, including, for example, the relationship of terrorism, ethnicity and fundamentalisms to images of the "wired world," in addition to cultural reflections on such issues as the implications of the machine-body interface and the biotech future. The series is envisioned as a creative dialogue on the destiny of the wired world in all of its utopian promise and real perils.

Experiential Art: a Social Media Powered Movement and a Challenge to Critical Perspectives

Some excerpts from my latest Critical Practice essay.


“In light of …our fast-changing cultural landscape, I would say that the media artists who are doing installation work are at the forefront of those formulating a medium which impact in the future will be comparable to that of cinema in the not-so-distant past… The combination of the three things (immersivity, movement and experiential art) should be the basis of the next mass medium and the cultural expression of a society looking to mark it's entry into the 21st century." (Clay Shirky)

Golan Levin says in his TED lecture “there’s still a lack of understanding about what it could mean to be an artist who uses the materials of their own day, which I think artists are obliged to do – to really explore the expressive potential of the new tools that we have.” Levin’s ‘The Interstitial Fragment Processor’ allows people to explore the negative shapes that they create, where Mehmet Akten’s ‘Body Paint’ allows people to paint in technicolour using gestures in front of a screen.

Golan Levin, ‘The Interstitial Fragment Processor’(2007)

Mehmet Akten,’Body Paint’(2009)

"Golan Levin's work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media."
Onedotzero

“Combining traditional design methods and aesthetics with programmatic design, generative systems and natural human-computer interaction; [Akten] seeks to create emotional and memorable experiences.” blazetheshow.com..."


"...In light of the Internet boom, the way our brains work are changing. Our attention spans are shortening, it has been well documented. The Internet is changing everything about the way we learn and take in information. If our attention spans are shortening, maybe artist’s blurbs will become obscelete. If we are to stay true to our own interests, perhaps that should not matter. If a gallery were to take away all the titles, artist names and artist blurbs, which pieces would still be the most effective or interesting?

We are now used to having everything at our fingertips and we are more demanding than ever. “Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Nicholas Carr) Maybe we have something to gain by playing to this short attention span culture, and we can hone and perfect art that’s immediacy is spot on, while viewers will only visit work that is worthy of their increasingly precious time.

Maybe our data overload is making us increasingly aware of our position. Google Earth begins with the image of the world hung in the sky, detached and separate from everything else. And we have exhausted every inch of it, there is no ‘terrain incognita’ because every part has been photographed and stitched together for our viewing pleasure. In the space of a few seconds you can go from blandly gazing at Egypt's pyramids to the Grand Canyon.

And this is the way that we are viewing our friendships and the world around us, everything that has always been real. I confess to finding it easier to read from my computer screen than from a page in a book because I know that it is more likely to be concise, filtered down to what I need to know. This framing of nature is becoming our world. The gallery space is just another frame. If an artist has taken the time to put it together it must be worth our attention for at least 30 seconds.

If our friendships are being boxed into this same frame, perhaps lying down in an installation with our friends is one of the few ‘real’ experiences to have with them, as opposed to Bourriaud’s ‘communication superhighways’, He warns that they “…threaten to become the only possible thoroughfare from a point to another in the human world… Before long, it will not be possible to maintain human relationships with people outside these trading areas… The social bond has turned into a standardized artifact.” Surely sharing the experience of an art work is better than his coffee idea; ‘a symbolic form of contemporary human relations “you are looking for shared warmth and the comforting feeling of wellbeing for two? So try our coffee..” The gallery may not be as wholesome and devoid of capitalist values as he would like but it’s a start. “The work of art is a “social form” capable of producing positive human relationships."(Claire Bishop)


I think ‘event culture’ has sprung from the idea that “anything that cannot be marketed will eventually vanish”. Not that I am championing paintings that go for sale at millions of pounds, on the contrary, the art that is ephemeral but provides an experience is worth much more to many more people and could be a whole new better way of reaching the public.

The way the Internet has changed the way we think is that it has given a voice to anyone with an Internet connection – each individual can now have a Facebook, twitter, blog, YouTube channel – to express their views. Everything is editable. Wikipedia is a source for information but it is user built, and relies on every day people’s input to make it work. Clay Shirky in ‘cognitive surplus’ tells the story of a little girl looking behind the television, asking where the mouse is. ”The girl’s explanation has become my motto for what we might imagine from our newly connected world: we’re looking for the mouse… Everywhere, a reader or a viewer or a patient or a citizen has been locked out of creating and sharing, or has been served up passive or canned experience, and we’re asking ‘if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? I’m betting the answer is yes, or could be yes, if we give one another the opportunity to participate and reward one another for trying.”

And so if every website has a place for us, so should an art gallery. We no longer want to be served up this ‘passive or canned experience’; we want to leave our mark on it, even if it only lasts as long as the gallery is there – or as long as that site is fashionable.

Still from Videogrid by Ross Phillips, Design Museum, 2008

I think it’s easy to see why Bourriaud has been criticized for such a ‘peace and love’ attitude. It’s charming, the idea of everyone having an equal voice, of everyone being a part of something. Charming, but not impossible. “What matters most now is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individually and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing.”(Clay Shirky)

We are entering a time when the public is becoming increasingly aware of information. Data visualization and information art is on the rise and I believe we are entering a time where a nostalgia for reality is driving our artworks. Look at ‘hipsters’, often art students, using the Hipstamatic App on their iPhones to create a vintage feel, a nostalgia for real Polaroid photographs. Even advertising is experiencing a fad for the appeal of the ‘real’. If northern, ‘ordinary’ people are trying to sell you something to the sound of a bright sounding ukulele, it must be good.

I think art can go either way, either embrace the medium of the internet and information matrix, immediacy, the demands of our ‘double tap’ society or rebel and create works that are static, contemplative, obscure and deliberately exclusive. Maybe that is what post-relationalism is?"


Theodora Sutton 2011