Nikolaus Gansterer
Geometry has been central to the way human beings have visualised ideas for thousands of years. However most users of geometry don't understand the mathematical principles that lie behind its success, they operate, especially if they are artists like myself, somewhere between maths and instinct. Those that don't normally use geometry will of course still make images and often powerfully emotive ones, but it is when the two approaches combine, that I think unique and fascinating images can arise.
For instance, Gaussian probability field graph paper is manufactured for the use of visualising mathematical statistics and graphing the appearances of random variables, but it is also used by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer to draw on. Nikolaus Gansterer's work is typical of artists that sit in that field that sits between art and science, his working processes are informed by logic and an idea of experimental research, but his working process is also informed by instinct and an artist's logic.
You can download probability field graph paper from here. You don't have to understand how it is used, but as soon as you print it off, it exudes an aura of mathematical and scientific 'knowing'.
He also uses various drawing devices which operate rather like a scientist's apparatus, (see an earlier post on this) and by doing this his work begins to take on a degree of authenticity that stems from the rigor of adherence to the processes that he has evolved. He talks about these drawings as 'interrogating the relationship between empiric and subjective truth', and uses both hands to draw them with. The 'right' hand being the one in control, the 'other' or less used hand being the one that expresses a degree of 'un-control' or expression. You can download probability field graph paper from here. You don't have to understand how it is used, but as soon as you print it off, it exudes an aura of mathematical and scientific 'knowing'.
These rough drawings of ideas (above) seemed to take on a certain 'reality' or 'conviction' as soon as they were done on graph paper.
Kate Hammersley: Helium drawing
Kate Hammersley has a particular interest in materials and materiality, in particular in the way flow and flux is exhibited when materials come together. She was the first artist-in-residence at the University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science and in these drawings she is exploring both the material quality of helium and how balloons can be repurposed as drawing tools. Her apparatus in this case being the balloon environment she has constructed to enable the drawing. The final piece is usually shown as a video as the idea is durational rather than being about a fixed, static image.
Kate Hammersley: Helium drawing: detail
Karina Smigla-Bobinski: Ada
Interacting with other materials such as lighter than air gases can lead to some very interesting experimental situations. Karina Smigla-Bobinski's 'Ada' installation is a gradually developing drawing made by a sphere filled with helium and covered with precisely located and firmly attached charcoal sticks. She has taken on the idea implied by Hammersley and pushed it on much further. It is though at its core still a basic experiment using three dimensional geometry. What would happen if I made a plastic sphere, attached charcoal in a regular geometric pattern over its surface and filled it with helium?
Some artists sit in that gap between science and art, whereby an experimental approach is associated with the open ended 'I wonder what will happen if ?', attitude. An attitude that I believe should belong all scientist and the fine art practitioners.
The geometric opposite of a sphere is a hyperbolic surface. A flat, or Euclidean, plane has zero curvature. A sphere has positive curvature. A hyperbolic plane has negative curvature; it may thus be understood as a geometric analogue of a negative number. Negative spaces have intrigued artists as much as scientists and mathematicians, therefore it is no surprise to find this area rich in possibilities for crossovers between disciplines.
The geometric opposite of a sphere is a hyperbolic surface. A flat, or Euclidean, plane has zero curvature. A sphere has positive curvature. A hyperbolic plane has negative curvature; it may thus be understood as a geometric analogue of a negative number. Negative spaces have intrigued artists as much as scientists and mathematicians, therefore it is no surprise to find this area rich in possibilities for crossovers between disciplines.
Structures that have emerged from the Coral Reef Project
The Crochet Coral Reef project has its roots equally in handicraft, marine science, community art practice, feminism, environmental consciousness raising and mathematics. The crenellated forms of corals, kelps, sponges and nudibranchs are biological manifestations of hyperbolic surfaces. These structures are ideal for maximising nutrient intake in filter-feeding organisms and they are clear 'demonstrations' by nature of how mathematical principles can be used. The project emerged from the beautifully named, 'the Institute For Figuring'. The Institute For Figuring is an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering. As it states on its website, 'the Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring'.
Folding paper is one of the institutes interests. The Hindu mathematician T. Sundara Row's 'Geometric exercises in paper folding' is the classic text on this and is another of those examples of someone devoting nearly all their energies to exploring a very particular field in order to extract new thinking.
The artist Dorothea Rockburne has said that, “I came to realise that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” She is interested in paper not just as the ground for a drawing but as an active material, its inherent qualities determining the form of the artwork. Rockburne studied with the mathematician, Max Dehn, in the early 1950s, and his teachings on the underlying geometries in nature and art affected her profoundly.
Dorothea Rockburne
What began as an investigation of geometrical possibility with T. Sundara Row, has gradually evolved into an art form. Rockburne gradually begins to develop free form inventions based on the principles developed by Row and passed on to her by Dehn. This is very like jazz improvisation and as Rockburne's work evolves it gradually opens out into a more lyrical space.
Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing that makes itself
The very formal investigations undertaken by artists such as Rockburne can be compared to more political work of artists, who nevertheless can also be influenced by concepts or images that derive from maths and science.
Ruth Cuthand: Bubonic plague
Ruth Cuthand: Typhoid
Ruth Cuthand is an American aboriginal Indian. She used the same type of beads traded by European settlers for furs, to make representations of the diseases brought to America by European settlers. These images of viruses which are based on electron microscope representations reflect a continuing power difference between the people of the Indian nations, and those people from more recent immigrant stock. Many Indians still make items for sale using these beads, beads which have over the years become associated with their culture because of their use in decorating both clothes and objects. However the immigrant WASP community is the one that possesses the powerful electronic microscopes, high levels of technological sophistication and more importantly a tradition of university education and connections that allow their children to aspire to lifestyles unavailable to poorly educated indigenous children. This white anglo saxon protestant community now regards its own people as owning these lands that once belonged to North American Indian tribes and tales of past atrocities are fast fading; Ruth's work being an attempt to remind everyone of how these two worlds are in fact still closely intertwined.
The 'myth' of science is a very powerful one and for those that sit outside it, uneducated in its concepts and structures it can take on an almost religious aura.
Daniel Martin Diaz
Daniel Martin Diaz is a fine artist based in Tucson, who represents the mysteries of life using geometry to construct scientific seeming diagrams. Immersed in scientific and philosophical concepts, Diaz has constructed a series of images that appear to come from another world, one that understands and uses both physical and metaphysical concepts in a similar manner to a science fiction novel such as 'Hyperion' by Dan Simmons. In his novels, Simmons fuses concepts of ancient religions with a future science that allows for travel between the stars. You could imagine Diaz's drawings as being used as illustrations for some of the chapters of Simmons' books.
Daniel Martin Diaz
Daniel Martin Diaz's work reminds me of Luboš Plný's drawings; drawings that combine his own very personal ideas about anatomy and psychology with actual anatomic structures taken from medical textbooks. His hybrid images deriving their conviction from both the intensity of the emotional engagement and the diagrammatic approach that he borrows from the science of medicine. Sometimes he gets so lost in his image making that it is hard to work out which way up these images should be. The bottom one of these three below being one of those drawings that record him working over a long period of time and from a variety of positions as he has worked his way around the image as it has developed.
Luboš Plný
Nikolaus Gansterer's probability fields don't seem too far away from Luboš Plný's anatomical diagrams, even though these artists are coming from totally different fields of art practice. Their images are neither one thing or another, and the slippage between logic and instinct gives them that indefinable 'edge' and keeps us thinking about whether or not we understand the world through the application of logic or through engaging with our emotions.
Asa Schaeffer: Spiral path of a blindfolded man
The drawing above by Asa Schaeffer was made in 1920 and shows the path of a blindfolded man walking through a field of wheat. Although done by a scientist to illustrate how we would walk in spirals if we couldn't use our eyes to locate ourselves spatially, the drawing also operates as an analogy for the human condition, we go on blindly until we are brought up short by an immovable object, in this case a tree stump.
In the field of data visualisation the Stamen company has begun to look at how to geometrically visualise emotions. This work overlaps some of the issues I have looked at before such as the relationship between music and visual forms, but it is interesting to see how they have progressed this area. Their 'Atlas of Emotions' icons go back to several older tropes of emotional geometry, finding the angle of perceived pain being a foundation course exercise from back in the 1970s, which itself was based in readings of Kandinsky's work.
From the 'Atlas of Emotions'
The interweaving of art and science is I do believe going to be very necessary if we are to embrace the full implications of living and being properly connected to this world. Without science we would have no hope for a future solution to the fast approaching climate crisis but without art we could be in a position of not being able to emotionally engage with a fast approaching future. Stories and beliefs, inner as well as outer worlds, will have to be harnessed and used to enable us to shape positive world views instead of the often found fatalism of those that have given up. As well as practical mechanical solutions to physical problems, we will need responses to our many and various emotional dilemmas. Hopefully we will eventually find ourselves woven back into the entangled fabric of everything, and as this happens we might finally realise that we belong.
See also:
Patterning, knots and entanglements: Includes more thoughts on hyperbolic surfaces.
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