New Science and Art

NKS at Work and Play

Version 0, Vienna, Tuesday, April 21, 2004

Michael@Schreiber.at

Abstract

The talk starts by listening to a conversation with Brian ENO, continues by checking the limits of the Marcel DUCHAMP art coefficient, then decides to rejects Futurism by interfacing classical art and science and returns with what I am doing between art and science.

Why are we doing what?

"Mark EDWARDS: 
Most people who create, well, anything want to believe that the creation is in some way perfect. You're quite unusual as an artist who's happy to see his work manipulated after its left you (the album with Jah Wobble springs to mind, just as an aside).

Brian ENO: 
I don't accept this. I want to believe that what I make is a good start, a strong place to begin. I then hope that at least it will be better in the user's (listener's) mind than it is in mine. I want to plant seeds that will grow when they leave me.  If I thought the music was only going to remain as I left it, then why would I want to release it? 

You released things so that they will grow.  And have interesting other lives without you. Just like kids...

Mark EDWARDS: 
We've got a question here asking you to finish the Turner speech. That's a huge answer. If people want the full answer, you've written an essay in the Waterstone's magazine, I think. Maybe you could give the three sentence summary. (question was from Mark Harrop by the way)

Brian ENO: 
1) if you ask a scientist what he's doing, he'd probably be able to answer that it has something to do with learning about the world, how things work.  

2) If you ask an artist the same question, you would get a thousand muddled answers. My feeling is that the conversation about art is about in the same place as that about biology was before Darwin: we have lots of observations but no single frame in which to locate them all and make sense of them. 

3) I think it is possible to discuss all culture in one language (in the same way that evolution theory allows you to discuss all living things in one language). I look for a theory that will unify cake decoration, Cezanne, and Little Richard.

Mark EDWARDS: 
Maybe part of being an artist is not knowing why you're doing it. Like a child playing - it's important, but they couldn't verbalise why. (except maybe' it's fun', which would be a good answer for an artist to make, although funding to the arts might get cut).

Brian ENO: 
I think this is a load of old bo***cks, actually of course it should be fun, but why shouldn't you ask why you're doing it?  It doesn't matter if you can't come up with an answer, but not to even ask the question strikes me as rather bizarre."

Brian ENO-in conference with CompuServe on July 4th,1996 at his London studio. The headline says it all. The conference had two moderators: Charon WOOD and Mark EDWARDS.

A new kind of science provides a new framework to answer these questions by offering a new paradigm which might be formulated as:

"What is computes."

Subjects and objects of art might thus be regarded as similar to the processes which generate both of them.

Limits of the DUCHAMP art coefficient

"THE CREATIVE ACT
	
	Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.
	
	To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
	
	If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.
	
	T. S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent," writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."
	
	Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
	
	In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.
	
	I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act-yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.
	
	If the artist, as a human being, fall of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words how does this reaction come about?

	This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.

	But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word "art"- to be sure, without an attempt to a definition.

	What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion. 

	Therefore, when I refer to "art coefficient," it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in a raw state--a letat brut--bad, good or indifferent. 

	In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. 

	The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. 

	Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intention; this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal "art coefficient" contained in the work. 

	In other words, the personal "art coefficient" is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

	To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this "art coefficient" is a personal expression of art "a l'etat brut," that is, still in a raw state, which must be "refined" as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

	All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists." 

Marcel DUCHAMP

The limits of this art coefficient can be computed. If limits of intent are evaluated before limits of effect one obtains (the results of reversing this natural sequence of evaluations are given in brackets where order matters):

Infinite intent is thus guaranteed to result in an art coefficient ranging between Infinity and Indeterminate — whereas maximum response from spectators returns art coefficients between Zero and Indeterminate.

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Intent->∞],Effect->∞]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Effect->∞],Intent->∞]

The other computations

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Intent->0],Effect->0]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Effect->0],Intent->0]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Intent->0],Effect->∞]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Effect->∞],Intent->0]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Intent->∞],Effect->0]

Limit[Limit[(Intent/Effect),Effect->0],Intent->∞]

Non-futurist intent

New powerful technologies can inspire a dangerous enthusiasm which forgets historic achievements preceding our great inventions and ignores the lessons taught by the brutal consequences of Futurism (compare the manifests of MARTINETTI).

This is one of the reasons why I look for ways to relate art in the context of the new science to classical traditions in art and science.

- Music for instance provides a well documented example for randomized generative procedures in art. Compare "Wuerfelspiel" a kind of composition which use dice to arrange a sequence of tunes (Bach [1754], Calegari, Chevardiére, Fiedler, Fischer, Gerlach, Graff, Haydn [1790, 1812], Hayes, Hayn, Hoegl, Kirnberger, Lange, Mozart [1791], Rellstab, Ricci, Spaeth, Spies, Stadler) (see Hans PIMMER)

- In traditional oracles from China (Yijing etc.) physical randomization procedures generate binary or ternary distinctions which are decoded by quoting statements from a table of conventional interpretations (see Derek WALTERS, The Alternative I Ching).

- In 1977 Walter de MARIA uses weather for randomization and a desert as a landart theatre for tourists defined by 400 steel poles in the rectangular 1 mile by 1 km lightening fields near Quemado New Mexico (see Patrick WERKNER).

- Classical texts like the Dao De and Kantian contributions to enlightenment provide historic perspectives for definitions for a kind of art which is aware of modern epistemologic paradigms like the three worlds of Sir Karl POPPER.

- George SPENCER-BROWN needs just one form which wraps unknown instances of itself which are either cancelled by itself to produce the void, or not-cancelled by itself thus marking a state. This form may return its output inside of itself thus offering recursion ("reentry").

Examples

At the 2003 NKS conference I showed a photo which renders the entire Kanji context of the Dao De quote given by Spencer-Brown between tiled cellular automaton evolutions of a color map obtained by comparing the classical Wang Bi edition and archeologic findings near Mawangdui. A compiled implementation was used to illustrate the immense length of the explicit eight color 3 by 3 planar neighbourhood rulenumber.

This year I offer
- a one page quote of the entire Mathematics Subject Classification 2000,
- non-standard interpretations of elementary rules in space, 
- results of initialiazing the rule 30 based random generator of Mathematica,
- compositions of quiet elementary rules
- the universal DiscreteDelta implementation of a poem defining the SPENCER-BROWN form:

More than one is one, 
yet one in one is none.

Literature

Marcel DUCHAMP in his 1957 lecture "The creative act" , Art News, volume 56, n° 4, New York, 1957 (Le Processus Créatif, translated by the author himself ADAGP et L'Échoppe 1987).

Brian Eno-in conference with CompuServe on July 4th,1996 at his London studio.
"http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/ciseno.html"

Filippo T. Marinetti, "Primo Manifesto del Futurismo", Archivi del Futurismo Raccolti e ordinati da Maria Drudi Gambillo e Teresa Fiori, Roma 1951, pages 15-18, and 31-32.

Hans PIMMER: "Würfelkomposition", Akademischer Verlag München 1997 .

Michael SCHREIBER: some other examples are online. "\!\( \*ButtonBox[\(\(\(http\)\(:\)\) // michael . schreiber . at\), ButtonData:>{ URL[ "http://michael.schreiber.at"], None}, ButtonStyle->"Hyperlink"]\)"

George SPENCER-BROWN: "Laws of Form" ("Gesetze der Form"), selfpublished editions 1969 to 1997.

Derek WALTERS: "The Alternative I Ching", Aquarian Press. 1983.

Patrick WERKNER: "Landart USA". Prestel. 1992.

Stephen WOLFRAM: "A New Kind of Science", Wolfram Media 2002.