Art Thought

There was a very interesting interview a couple weeks ago on Science Friday, with the data visualization pioneer, statistician and sculptor Edward Tufte. As you could guess by that collection of descriptions – from statistician to sculptor, Tufte has thought a lot about crossing boundaries and disciplines. One of the benefits of Arts Education is that it helps students to see connections between disciplines more clearly, a very useful skill in our modern climate of technical specializations, where the idea of "interdisciplinary" studies is on the ascendance.



Tufte specifically speaks to some commonalities between the disciplines of science and art:

"...science and art, at least at a high level, have in common intense seeing, bright-eyed observing and deep curiosity."

Beyond theory, he mentions a project of his that brings science and art into direct contact, a series of sculptures of physicist Richard Feynman's diagrams of quantum electrodynamics.



Tufte also talks about a current project of his called "The Thinking Eye," (a title borrowed from a collection of Paul Klee's teaching notebooks, with material drawn from his lectures at the Bauhaus). To me, this title speaks to art-making as a cognitive process. One of the reasons art programs get cut in times of lean budgets is that the arts are seen as less "academic" – they are sometimes viewed as breaks from the "real work" of school.

Of course, if art is taught with integrity, it's not a form of "mental recess," and not in contrast to "real thinking" – the arts are modes of thinking unto themselves. Tufte talks about trying out a sort of "seeing exercise," where he deliberately tries to allocate space in his brain to see more clearly. When he's asked whether seeing better is related to thinking more clearly, he says:

"Well, I sure think so... In some ways, seeing is thinking. The light comes in through the lens and is focused on the retina. And the retina is doing - is pretty much working like brain cells. It's processing. And then the two optic nerves are sending what we now know are 20 megabits a second of information back to the brain... 

And so the seeing right then is being transformed into information, into thinking, right as that step from the retina to the brain. And the brain is really busy, and it likes to economize. And so it's quick to be active and jump to conclusions. So if you're told what to look for, you can't see anything else. So one thing is to see, in a way, without words."

As an expert in data visualization, of course it's Tufte's job to tell the viewer "what to look for" – but this speaks to his integrity as a designer. You have to be able to see what's really there in order to abstract it in a meaningful way, to make sure you're genuinely visualizing reality, and not some figment of your biases.

Our world has become more and more data-driven, from the way sports teams acquire players, to the way complicated financial instruments function (or fail to function, as the case may be), to the way weather data is compiled to create models of climate change, to the way companies harvest the information we leave like breadcrumbs on social networking sites. Visualizing and interpreting that data has become a crucial component of navigating our world – doing it well has both utilitarian and ethical ramifications. Tufte implies that artists have an important part to play in that process. Towards the end, he's asked "Is there data that can't be visualized well?" He replies:

"Not if you allow artists into the arena."

The full interview is well worth listening to – you can stream it by clicking here.

First Exhibition of the New Year: Landscape Mythologies

David Semeniuk, Landscape Permutation 2 (2010)

Featuring FIELD, Oscar Lhermitte, Christine Nguyen, Mike Ruiz, David Semeniuk

Landscape Mythologies explores the interpretation of landscape by methods of fabrication and narration. It investigates if our view of the world can be unfolded through translations of physical, virtual and imagined spaces. Riddled with half-truths, the interpretations on display hold a fluid footing between imaginary or unverifiable existence and the real thing.

Exhibition Dates: January 17 - February 15

Reception: January 31, 5-7pm
Lecture by David Semeniuk: 5:45pm

Watch online: https://new.livestream.com/snc/landscape-mythologies/

David Semeniuk currently lives and works in Vancouver B.C., Canada. He is a formally trained scientist, and an autodidactic artist. David's art practice is an aesthetic extension of his scientific exploration, in which he uses the medium of photography to experiment with how we experience everyday spaces.

Facebook Event

Tahoe Gallery at Sierra Nevada College
Prim Library, 3rd Floor
999 Tahoe Boulevard
Incline Village, NV 89451

Gallery hours: 9am-5pm

Ben-Day Dots and Bugs

I've taken a breather from the blog in the past couple weeks, doing a bit of a wind-down -- but this summer I'll be keeping up a flow of posts, so keep your eyes peeled here. I have lots of stuff to catch up with (several BFA shows included), and lots to write about -- and here to begin to pick up the slack is a link to a post I put together for hilobrow, as part of their "4CP Friday" series. The series invites several people to curate a handful of images from John Hilgart's 4CP blog, where Hilgart posts beautiful scanned blow-ups of comics panels. The theme for my pick was "resolution." Click here to see the gallery.


And this also reminds me -- I neglected to post a link for my prior piece for hilobrow, a short appreciation of botanical/entomological illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian -- click here to read the whole thing:

"Even today, a sketch of her biography would mark her an eccentric trailblazer: a divorced woman of 52, after a stint in an anti-materialist religious commune, leaves the comforts of Amsterdam for a two-year sojourn in Surinam in order to paint insects hitherto uncataloged by science. That MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN (1647-1717) did this in 1699 is a genuine shock..."

ETEK L.A. Trip, 2009: Day 1

The first day of the ETEK L.A. trip tends to be somewhat shambolic, a bit of a random tour of Los Angeles sights before getting down to the weekday business of visiting studios and production houses. This Sunday was no exception, starting off with a delay as they changed the tire on our airplane before letting us board. The delay gave me ample time to sketch out a couple of other stranded passengers on my iPhone.



But eventually, we were up in the air, crossing the sierras before dipping into the brown paste of LA smog. I slept through most of it; Sarah took the pic below.


After some breakfast/lunch off Wilshire Boulevard, we hit the LaBrea Tar Pits.




Much of the displays seem a bit old-fashioned; the animatronic animals, like the small mammoth, or the saber-tooth tiger locked in a perpetual dinner interruptus with a giant sloth, have shuddery stalling movements, as if they're constantly second-guessing themselves, and you can hear faint clickings under their fur. And the large mural that you see on entrance is quite hyerbolic in its insistence on carniverous drama. Check out this sabertooth tiger, who looks not just hungry but also clinically insane:


But those sorts of details constitute part of the offbeat charm of the site. There's something inherently comical/horrible about the sort of image that is emblematic of the rich fossil finds at LaBrea: the vision of a dead horse, with a dead sabertooth tiger glued on top of it, and then some enormous vultures stuck on top of the tiger, all sinking together into the tar under the accumulated weight of the food chain. It has the ridiculous momentum of those children's songs that build on an ever-expanding chain of misfortune: she swallowed the cow, to catch the dog, she swallowed the dog, to catch the cat, she swallowed the cat, to catch the bird...






There's an impressively fastidious painting of the prehistoric LaBrea area by Mark Hallett included with the displays. Although it doesn't offer much relief from the carnivorous round. There's one fox, sleeping placidly in the hollow of a felled tree trunk, but other than that, it's nature "red in tooth and claw," with a pretty robin proffered only to spill its guts to a hawk, and even the lowly earthworm unspared, wriggling in the maw of a mole.



I think the most interesting part of the museum is the scientific "fishbowl," where you can watch excavators at work behind glass, removing the fossils from their cement of excess rock. Peeking at the dry-erase boards posted for the edification of us spectators outside the bowl, you learn that the excavators like to give the exhumed skeletons names like "Zed," "Fluffy" and "Conan." They're also eager to expand their contact beyond the fishbowl -- a URL was posted for The Excavatrix, "the semi-official blog of the excavators and excavatrices at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA," at which you can find stories of long-dead gastropods, and dragonflies stuck together with asphalt.




From there it was a quick hop to LACMA (we didn't even have to leave the parking lot -- a smooth continuity from asphalt to tar to art). There's an exhibit called Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics currently up, which seemed promising. As the blurb has it:

This exhibition examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre.

The exhibit had some nice work, especially some pages by Mukesh Singh and Abhishek Singh (the latter employing a dynamically loose inking style that you can get a hint of in the black and white reproduction below). I wish more work had been on display -- it was more of a sampler plate than a full-course meal. The image directly below, showing Durga defeating the demon Mahisha (as he assumes the form of a buffalo), isn't included in the LACMA show, but it's similar to another piece representing the same story, dating to the mid 1700s, which is in the show. The way Durga's multiple arms seem to be a form of animaton, in the way that speed-lines or superimpositions can suggest frantic or rapid movement, formed a tenuous but suggestive link between 18th-century illustration and 21st-century comics.




For me, the highlight at LACMA was probably the roomful of Giacomettis (the pic below isn't from LACMA's collection, but the head is similar to one of the heads on display there). The surfaces of his figures are so whittled at, so chipped away (as if an excavator has scraped his way to bone, then kept scraping), that the light falls and scatters over them, not like an illumination, but like a thin tissue of spiderweb, torn against the ridges of substantive fact.


And then we drove down Hollywood Boulevard -- and after that finally corkscrewing up into the Hollywood Hills, ultimately (after a few involutions and wrong turns, and a bit of GPS consulting via iPhone) looping up Mulholland Drive, getting close enough to the HOLLYWOOD sign that we could make out the vultures wheeling in the blue air directly above it.



(The last two pics were snapped by Sarah)

Tamarin Monkeys chillin out to Metallica

A recurring point of interest, in the scattershot reading I've been doing on animal consciousness, is the area of non-human animal aesthetics. Humans are notoriously jealous of their capacities, but the more animal researchers dig into those categories which are supposedly "uniquely human" -- the use of tools, the capacity for language, and now perhaps what could be called the possession of an "aesthetic sense" -- the less "uniquely human" those categories appear to be. Temple Grandin, in her book Animals in Translation, even suggests a religious sense, or a sense of "God," may be innate in some non-human animals. She hasn't done any studies on this -- she uses a combination of intuition and analogy to get there -- but I find the notion as suggestive as the description I came upon, in the book When Elephants Weep, of bears climbing out onto hillsides at the end of the day to sit down and watch the sunset.

For me, that image of sunset-admiring bears is at once surprising and consoling. There would be something horrible about a vast and verdant world, a world that humans find self-evidently beautiful in both its enormous vistas and its detailed filigrees, populated with an army of creatures completely insensible to that beauty. If beauty is just a freak of the human mind, it amounts to little more than a pretty mirage laid over the landscape.


I caught an interesting interview on Talk of the Nation today, dealing with monkeys and music. Ira Flatow interviewed both biomusic researcher Patricia Gray, who jams with Bonobo apes on synthesizer, and David Teie, a cellist who has composed music for tamarin monkeys. Both interviewees end up relating music more to behaviors and emotions than to aesthetics (you'd probably get closer to musical animal aesthetics with songbirds or whales), but there are a lot of fascinating details that shake out. The second-funniest bit is when Flatow asks Gray: "Does it matter when you play with them that they hit the right notes?" I'd really like to know what he thinks the "right note" would be for a monkey.

The funniest bit is when Teie reveals that, of the human music played to tamarins, Metallica and Tool made the most impact -- and the impact it had was that it calmed the monkeys down.

And then there was this bit:

Mr. TEIE: According to my hypothesis, the reason we have rhythm and the sense of - and the foundations of all music are of the womb sounds that we have heard, that the fetus can hear for five months and the sounds of the heartbeat, the female voice of the - the voice of the mother and the respiration, they account for all of the universal traits music found in all cultures.

That's an evocative notion: that music has as much to do with the womb as it does the brain. The capacity for musicality, for musical art, is impressed upon us in the dark, before we're even born. And in this case "us" is a noun that encompasses more than humankind.


And with that, I'll leave you with a video of a Walrus playing a Swiss horn:

Darwin's Drawings

This post is a day late, since yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday, but I thought I'd post a few of Darwin's drawings. As my own art, for the past few years, has included investigations into the subject of Natural History, I've become more and more fascinated by the visual culture of science -- and the way in which functional scientific drawings also have an aesthetic dimension. Darwin, as it turns out, was not a draughtsman on the order of an Audubon or a Gallileo (Galileo's drawings of the phases of the moon are quite lovely) -- his drawings are chiefly an act of investigation. Of course, much of good drawing, even in the purely aesthetic sphere, is also an act of investigation.

Below is an example of Darwin being investigative, and an example of Darwin being more pictorial (click on them to see larger versions):



Both are from the website "The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online" -- to see more of his drawings, go to the Manuscripts section of the site, and do a page-search for the word "drawing."

Drawing -- like writing -- is not merely an act of recording, it's also an act of thinking. Darwin's most consequential drawing is probably a drawing he made of an idea, rather than of a thing. Made in a private notebook, it looks like a drawing or a twig or a tree. But it's really the drawing of a notion that would go on the revolutionize the way we look at the world:

Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a Dead Horse

The newly-released game Spore allows you to create creatures that start at a protozoan level - and then, as you progress through a series of stages, you evolve into creatures that have functioning societies (and even, ultimately, space travel). I haven't played it myself, but there's a gameplay demo here.

The "evolution" in the game is driven by a combination of psuedo-Darwinian precepts and intelligent design -- with the gamer being the Intelligent Designer. There's a good article by Luke O'Brien in Slate Magazine about the tension between evolution and ID in the game. Chances are I'll assign it to the Entertainment Technology class -- it does a good job of pointing out that gaming systems are also ideological systems. There's a link in that article, to a further article by an ID advocate who thinks that Spore helps to refute objections against ID. It's a curious approach -- to use a fiction to buttress something the writer wants to set as fact. His second point -- that clumsy design can also be design, and therefore the clumsiness that can be seen in biological structures is not a refutation of the idea of a designer -- hardly seems reassuring. If Intelligent Design implies a designer that is either capricious or incompetent, the kind of theology it would point to would be a fairly terrifying one.

O'Brien briefly touches on the question: what would Spore look like if it did actually attempt to follow Darwinian logic more accurately? Of course, the whole creature designing layer would have to be stripped out, and the gamer would have less control over the development of their creature, as random mutation would be added to the mix. You could be a participant in the world, but not a God. Which is probably antithetical to the notion of gaming itself. Part of the appeal of games is to give us a world we have some degree of control over: a portable universe that is bounded by rules that can be understood. Games give us fun, diversion, stimulation -- but most fundamentally, they give us the illusion of mastery.

A brilliant detail of Spore is that it apparently lets you upload gameplay directly to youtube -- there are already numerous clips of animals generated via Spore's "Creature Creator," which is available free as a kind of teaser for the game. The creature in the clip above, "Dead Horse on Crossbar," is a pretty amazing thing. Made by users calling themselves vorneus and Reflex, it strikes me as the sort of thing that might've appeared if Samuel Beckett had been a plush animal designer.

(apologies to J. for the post title)