Added Sep 13, 2023
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this short pamphlet whose title takes its name from a column held by Alimberto Torri and which will examine the possible relationships existing between Art and Science. Let us therefore start with a first simple classification which has nothing to do with the extravagant Chinese encyclopedias dear to J.L. Borges:1. Scientific research influenced by art: Scientists who incorporate artistic approaches into their research to promote creativity, communication or inspiration, or to approach scientific problems differently.2. Education and dissemination: Educational programs or dissemination initiatives that use artistic approaches to make science more accessible, engaging and understandable to the public.3. Developing interdisciplinary communities: Creating an environment where artists and scientists can collaborate, share ideas, and deepen their mutual understanding.4. Philosophy of Art and Science: Philosophy can be used to examine fundamental concepts related to artistic creation and scientific research. Questions about the nature of creativity, the representation of reality and the search for truth can be explored.5. Critical Analysis: Art scholars and critics can analyze works of art that incorporate scientific elements or scientific themes. This analysis can highlight how art reflects or criticizes scientific ideas, or how it uses science as a source of inspiration.6. Science-based artistic creation: Artists who use scientific principles, data, or technologies as an integral part of their creative process to explore scientific themes or to innovatively communicate scientific ideas to audiences.7. Interdisciplinarity: A common way to explore the relationship between art and science is through interdisciplinarity. Artists and scientists can collaborate to create works of art that incorporate scientific principles or to conduct experiments that involve art. This collaboration can lead to new perspectives and innovative approaches.8. Exploring conceptual connections: Theoretical or philosophical studies that examine how artistic ideas and practices can interact with scientific research and vice versa.9. Historical studies: The history of art and the history of science can be studied in parallel to understand how scientific ideas and technological innovations have influenced art over the centuries. For example, Renaissance art was profoundly influenced by the scientific developments of the time.
I deliberately made sure that the first letter of each of the previous points formed the two Latin words RES FACIES, forcibly translated with an ASPECT OF MATTER that we want to explore in depth, through a mental experiment, in the company of an unaware Martian who had just put himself in I listen, in order to argue how robust the previous arguments are. In fact, the meaning of Art and Science extrapolated from the series of previous reports appears vague and generic to say the least. Therefore, investigating possible interactions between these two different domains of human knowledge could appear to be a vain pursuit: in fact, if art is any form of human activity as proof or exaltation of talent and expressive capacity, science is, on the contrary, something even more vague and impalpable, at the limits of existence itself, since there is in fact only a scientific "method" and not "science". It is therefore better to immediately give up on an undertaking that appears to be too generic or has uncertain contours, instead trying to shift attention to the single concept of artscience which we could meanwhile begin to place in the universe of chimeras, dreams or utopias but which would still present itself as an entity with already clearer and more defined contours. In this vision we can therefore begin to outline a first approximate definition of artescience as a rigorous, scientific methodology that establishes a precise relationship with those human activities as proof or exaltation of talent and expressive capacity. To give meaning to this procedure, we will therefore try to present some concrete examples of art science, touching as far as possible on the first evident interactions that emerge between method and creativity.
The metaphor of angels
Through an artistic work created starting from a cross-play of images, we will now try to suggest some interpretation between two entities, apparently in opposition, which present themselves as irreducible: I am talking about a set of pairs of angels which I have called, respectively, hidden angel and angel of beauty. The angel of beauty is a sort of representation of reality, a first phenomenal level where things are given according to even fallacious or biased criteria, hiding behind an appearance of false candour, of perfection, real traps set to our detriment. Some aspects of contemporary society can easily be ascribed to behavior of this type; unfortunately, many specific examples could be drawn. Only by means of a more relativized vision of reality and a more defined action of reason, combined with a greater will, can we free ourselves from some of the previous prejudices: this consists of the figure of the hidden angel, a precious guide who accompanies us and it encourages us to open our gaze, silently, along less obvious perspectives. All that remains therefore is to move on the edge traced by these two opposing visions, taking into account that neither of the two alternatives is ever clearly presented, there is always some slight oscillation that makes us flex, more or less, in one of the two opposing directions.
The images of angels
Having said that, we can now focus on some photographic images of these figures just presented, since we want to examine with a sort of lens not only the meaning of this work but also that particular link between method and creativity. Let us therefore begin by analytically dissecting these images starting from a preparatory distinction between photography and photography. What presents itself before our gaze would not seem to require such a distinction since both photography and the photographic present themselves in the same way and both in disguise! The photograph that offers itself as a truth is only a precise description, a syntactic and non-semantic operation of reality. The photographic, on the other hand, is the shell: the way in which the image appears to our gaze, that is, that set of shapes, colors, chiaroscuro, graininess, contrast, sharpness and so on. Please note that I deliberately used the term image when referring to the photographic since the photographic can originate from both a photograph and an anti-photography, i.e. a device not necessarily born from the application of geometric optics rules. Now, since in the field of conceptual art what we want to carry forward is the idea (specifically the metaphor of angels), here we are at a cross-section of the world that is completely consistent with what could be seen through the shots taken with a traditional photojournalist's camera, despite the awareness that what we are seeing in reality does not exist anywhere. The places cannot be placed in any precise geographical position, the personal identity of the people depicted or the concrete availability of furnishings and details visible in these anti-photographs cannot be traced back. Therefore, in summary, we have a somewhat more real idea of what these photos, albeit unreal, show us, since they tell us about those circumstances in which we feel deceived on the one hand by someone who presents himself in a commendable way, by more heartened by the carousel of imagination that helps us read the world in a more transgressive and disenchanted way. The methodological aspect then consists in recreating precisely this condition of plausibility whose aim is to help us understand the world through a clearer gaze (provided that we know how or want to make the effort to interpret these symbols). In other words, given that the photograph is configured, according to consolidated social patterns, as attestation of a document (to the point of considering it universally credible when affixed to the identity card) what the photos of the angels show are also a document on how the small one works part of the world depicted. In other words, they are like a kind of theorem or a procedure (in principle completely mechanizable) which starts from a series of axioms (angels, objects, wheat fields, clouds, chairs and ruins) and from a set of production rules (those created starting from the photographic coherence rules) assemble a series of demonstrations just as if it were a theory on a law of nature.
In doing so we left the scientific component a little behind the scenes, that is, we considered it superfluous to consider an "equal" relationship between art and science as interesting, we also freed ourselves from a specific scientific context, given that any human activity is always referable to something specific: whether it is science, history or fortune telling, it adds nothing either to the domain of art or even to that of science or fortune telling. On the contrary, the illustrated methodology made it possible to create a more rigorous work for the purposes of the meaning that the author wanted to convey. So far, however, we have only focused on how the scientific component influences artistic production, let's now move on to the vice versa, or how a more artistic approach could impact the creation or construction of a scientific theory. In this regard I would like to briefly mention a famous experiment carried out by the physicists Michelson and Morley which cast doubt on the existence of the luminiferous aether and paved the way for Einstein's theory of special relativity. The experiment consisted of measuring the speed of light in different directions, using an interferometer that divided a beam of light into two perpendicular parts and recombined them on a screen. If light propagates in a medium called the aether, then its speed must have depended on the motion of the Earth with respect to the aether, and therefore varied as the direction changed. This would have caused a shift in the interference fringes on the screen, which could be detected by rotating the apparatus. Michelson and Morley performed the experiment in 1887, but found no significant displacement of the fringes. This meant that the speed of light was the same in all directions, regardless of the Earth's motion. This result was at odds with the predictions of classical mechanics and the aether hypothesis, and suggested that light did not need a medium to propagate. The Michelson-Morley experiment was a challenge to the physics of the time until Lorentz suggested, in 1904, simple transformation formulas to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
In fact, he hypothesized that the lengths of moving objects contracted and times expanded due to the interaction with the ether, the presumed medium in which light propagates. Einstein, however, with brilliant intuition, worthy of the best work of art, eliminated the aether hypothesis and simply postulated the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial reference systems, using precisely the same Lorentz transforms. That is, in some way he made a gesture very similar to that of Duchamp when he showed that any object can become art if it is chosen, signed and presented in an appropriate context: that is, he took formulas belonging to an uninteresting theory and presented them in the appropriate context of special relativity, eliminating ether and stating that the speed of light is constant, thus decisively changing the direction of physics. I wanted to take this example into consideration only to draw a first balance on the idea of artscience: a more interesting result emerges if the two disciplines somehow manage to merge with each other, or when one collapses onto the other bringing together points of view and new approaches. On the contrary, a marked separation of knowledge always risks placing a limit on the advancement of knowledge, obviously denials and new original points of view are accepted!
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Artescienza is the name of a column held by Alimberto Torri. (https://www.ticinowebtv.ch/channel/95/artescienza/)
Article also published on my blog: https://ideografie.blogspot.com/2023/09/artescienza.html