ART



SCIENCE

Richard Brown, Informatics Research Artist in Residence

Art

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Pataphysics:

Conceptual Science

Paradigms Lost:

Experimentation & Play

Return of the Analogue:

Unconventional Computing

Art

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Pataphysics:

Conceptual Science

Joseph Beuys Duchamp Pataphysics (1921-1986) (1887-1968) (Jarry 1873-1907)

Joseph Beuys - Fat Battery (1963)

Fat, felt, and metal are materials now considered to be synonymous with Beuys’ sculpture. Each of these materials can insulate, produce or conduct energy, essential factors for an object representing a battery. Each sculptural unit - the felt and fat unit; the metal casings, fat and felt unit; and the tin and fat unit - individually and collectively denote the charge, discharge and recharge of energy. (Tate)

Joseph Beuys - Capri Battery (1985)

Made during the last year of his life while Beuys was recovering from a lung ailment on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Electricity seems to flow from the fruit, lighting up the bulb and producing a curative "charge" for Beuys' own weakened system. With its bright yellow color alluding to the sunny landscape of southern Italy, the battery suggests that a marriage of art, science, and nature can nourish and heal an ailing culture (or individual) with an almost magical energy. Joan Rothfuss, Walker Art Center curator

Beuys remarked in 1958 that “the two terms, art and science, are diametrically opposed in the development of thought of the Occident, and because of this fact, a dissolution of this polarity of perception had to be looked for.”

Duchamp - 3 Standard Stoppages (1913)

"casting a pataphysical doubt on the concept of the straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another" Linda Henderson

The word "pataphysics" was first introduced in 1893 by playwright Alfred Jarry who was attempting to create what he called a "science of imaginary solutions." As historian Linda Henderson explains, "Jarry was deeply interested in contemporary developments in science and geometry, which offered a means to challenge traditional positivism" . One of these developments was the mathematical description of non-Euclidean geometries.

Pata or Quantum: Duchamp and the End of Determinist Physics, Jonathan Williams L.Henderson: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, (1915-1923.)

"The ideas in the Large Glass are more important than the actual realization. The "Large Glass" constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective. For me, it's a mathematical, scientific perspective, based on calculations and on dimensions. Everything was becoming conceptual, that is, it depended on things other than the retina. What we were interested in at the time was the fourth dimension. Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn't see with your eyes. "The Bride" in the "Large Glass" was based on this, as if it were the projection of a four-dimensional object. I called "The Bride" a "delay in glass." A tactile sensation which envelopes every side of an object approaches a tactile sensation of four dimensions. Consequently the act of love as tactile sublimation could be felt as a physical interpretation of the 4th dimension. "

ART



SCIENCE

Sci-Art:

Art as illustration ~ Science as stimulation

Arscience:

poetics, humour, wonder...

Modern Naure - Dalziel + Scullion 2000 ..aluminium structures, grouped like a glade of silver birch, house solar panels powering speakers buried underground in the surrounding landscape which periodically broadcast the call of the male Cappercaillie.

Aktion mit einer Kiste und Kappe

, Roman Signer, 1995

Kielder Skyspace -

James Turrell, 2003

“I am interested in light because of my interest in our spiritual nature and the things that empower us. My art deals with light itself, not as the bearer of revelation, but as revelation itself.”

Tickle -

Not Not

, 1999

Jane Prophet, Dorothy Cross, Mark Dion, Cornelia Parker, Wendy Mc Murdo, Christine Borland

ART

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SCIENCE

Research

Wellcome Trust Sciart Arts Catalyst Biotica Starfish

Paradigms Lost:

Experimentation & Play

Nikola Tesla ElectroChemistry Analogue Machines

Static

Around 600 BC Greeks found that by rubbing 'elektron' (Amber) against a fur cloth, it would attract particles of straw.

17th C 19th C James Wimshurst

Nikola Tesla 1856 - 1943

Lichtenberg Figure : www.teslamania.com

Electrochemical Glass

1997++

Time based reaction between 3 dissimilar metals aluminium, copper and iron in a conductive fluid

April 2002 October 2002

July 2003 December 2003

The Preservation of Entropy

Peculiar Sounds from Aluminum

Nyle Steiner K7NS 15 Sep 2003 http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elenyr/alsounds.htm

Silica Garden

Experiments on the web - www.cci.ethz.ch

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton - 1730

Metallic "vegetation" - a term used in the seventeenth century to cover a broad spectrum of dendrites and amorphous formations grown from metals or metal salts.

In the mid-seventeenth century the German chymist Johann Rudolph Glauber popularized a method of growing silica gardens webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/reference/chemProd.do

Julyan Cartwright: The dynamics of natural systems (dynamical systems and nonlinear science - chaos, complexity, pattern formation) Formation of Chemical Gardens .. However, almost a hundred years later, and several centuries on from the first observations of so-called metallic trees by the early chemists such as Glauber [ 4 , 5 ], chemical gardens remain incompletely understood. In this paper we present the results of experiments observed with Mach-Zehnder interferometry designed to understand the formation and growth of the hollow tubes that are the basic structures in chemical gardens. We discuss the fluid dynamics implicated in their morphogenesis, and highlight the dynamical processes underlying their characteristic patterns.

http://lec.ugr.es/~julyan/publications.html

(multidisciplinary research)

sci-art interface:

• Multi-discipliniarity & cross fertilisation • Innovation • Challenging paradigms • New ways of thinking and conceiving •

Powerful Ideas

:

Seymour Pappert, Mindstorms

Return of the Analogue

Unconventional Computing

            chemical computing reaction-diffusion systems cellular computing bio- and molecular computing mechanical computing analog computation novel hardware architectures computational complexity of unconventional computers theory of amorphous computing logics of unconventional computing computing in nanomachines physical limits to mechanical computation www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/ucg/

“Pask’s devices have far-reaching implications for artificial intelligence, self-constructing devices, theories of observers and epistemically-autonomous agents, theories of functional emergence, machine creativity, and the limits of contemporary machine learning paradigms.'' [Peter Cariani 1993]

"We have made an ear and we have made a magnetic receptor. The ear can discriminate two frequencies, one of the order of fifty cycles per second and the other on the order of one hundred cycles per second. The 'training' procedure takes approximately half a day and once having got the ability to recognize sound at all, the ability to recognize and discriminate two sounds comes more rapidly....The ear, incidentally, looks rather like an ear. It is a gap in the thread structure in which you have fibrils which resonate at the excitation frequency." --Gordon Pask, [28] , p. 261.

www.cariani.com

( temporal processing networks)

Dendrite - www.armyofclerks.net - 2001

Gordon Pask's schematics for dendrite growth, SnCl2 dendrites. The diagrams from Gordon’ Pask’s 'An approach to cybernetics' explain how to control the growth of electrochemical deposition threads (i-iv) and the self repairing and evolutionary capacities of the system(v-viii). The Image shows tin threads growing from platinum electrodes, in the finally employed saturated alcoholic solution of stannous chloride.

Occular Witness 2001

Diffusion Limited Aggregation

Analogue versus the Digital!

Pask dismissed the digital computer as a kind of kinematic "magic lantern".

He saw mechanical models as the future for the concurrent kinetic computers required to describe natural processes.

He denied the competence of mathematics or digital serial and parallel processes to produce applicable descriptions because of their innate pathologies in locating the infinitessimals of dynamic equilibria (Stafford Beer's "Point of Calm").

Pask held that concurrence was a necessary condition for modelling brain functions and he remarked IA* was meant to stand AI, Artificial Intelligence, on its head.

*Interaction of Actors

W.Grey Walter - 1910-1977

Machina speculatrix

Walter emphasized analog electronics to simulate neurodynamics at a time when most of his colleagues such as John von Neumann were developing digital computers to implement symbolic logic and deep arithmetic algorithms. His devices were the forerunners of currently emerging machines that are governed by nonlinear dynamics, and that rely on controlled instability, noise, and chaos to achieve continually updated adaptation to ever-changing and unpredictable worlds. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science(2003) 4: 537-539

Jonathan Mills: Extended Analogue Computing - 1995 "The future of analog computing is unlimited. As a visionary,I see it eventually displacing digital computing, especially, in the beginning, in partial differential equations and as a model in neurobiology. It will take some decades for this to be done.

In the meantime, it is a very rich and challenging field of investigation, although (or maybe because) it is not in the current fashion.

Sincerely yours, LEE A. RUBEL" www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwmills/ANALOG.NOTEBOOK/klm/klm.html

Mills calls his new kind of analog computer a Kirchhoff-Lukasiewicz Machine, named after physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and mathematician Jan Lukasiewicz. In Mills's computer, a sheet of silicon without transistors, solves partial differential equations just as Kirchhoff's copper sheets did 150 years ago. Combinations of these two simple components, silicon sheets and diodes, can be configured to simulate complex systems in real time, processing massive amounts of data from sensors.

www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v21n2/p24.html

Paper: Computing Beyond Digital Computers by Neural Models

Hava Siegelman gave at the Hypercomputation Workshop at University College, London, in May 2000, where she and others go so far as claiming that "

analog recurrent neural nets are, in general, more powerful than the universal Turing machine.

"

Analog Computer Trumps Turing Model

HYPERCOMPUTATION

The study of machines that can compute more than Turing machines.

When we observe natural phenomena and we endow them with computational significance, it is not the algorithm we are observing but the process, the computation.

Hypercomputation means computation without a program.

Some objects might be performing hypercomputation around us: we observe... but we will never be able to simulate their behaviour on a computer.

“We would be profoundly surprised if the physics of the real world can be properly and fully set out without departing from the set of Turing-machine-computable functions.” Copeland and Sylvan

Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst

www.tbm.tudelft.nl/webstaf/gertjanl/hypercomputation.helsinki.pdf

An Illustration: A simple analog apparatus capable of doing something that no Turing machine can do (after F. Waismann 1959). M is a circular mirror with a reflecting surface on the inside; A is a small hole in M with a semi-transparent detector (light may come in but not go out); R is an incoming ray of light; α is the angle between R and the horizontal plane L. By the laws of geometry and optics, the detector at A gets hit from the inside if and only if there is some rational number q such that α = q x Л (In the diagram α = 1/5 Л)

Beyond Turing and Von Neumann?

Analogue  Digital Symbolic Simulations Concurrency, Continuous “Field Computation” Serial, Discrete Modelled - reduced, simplifed Integer, Rational, Real Numbers

James Nyce [21]: Analog machines ... offer us a way to reconsider what we have come to take for granted - how we model and think about objects in the world and, in particular, what we understand and mean by computation.

Some recent developments on Shannon's General Purpose Analog Computer Daniel Silva Graca CLC and DM/FCT, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal April 28, 2004

http://artsinformatica.blogspot.com

www.mimetics.com