{"id":5596,"title":"Art, Science","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/art-science","version":"d26791a69728183880dc0f9ba4eab4b3a917ec4dd2d7af299fa1d9012d100c6a","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4406292+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Vibeke Sorensen"}],"authorKeys":["Sorensen, Vibeke"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"http://visualmusic.org/vibeke","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0841","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Art, Science.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/art-science.","publication":"Vibeke Sorensen. Art, Science. http://visualmusic.org/vibeke. 1995.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5596.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0841","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":20873},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":56},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":621},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0841","generated":false,"characters":56}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Abstract: The author questions the origin of the artist/scientist split, manifest in the structure of our higher educational institutions, and comments on the many existing and potential contributions of art to science, especially computer graphics and visualization. It is the author\u0027s view that the distinction between and separation of art and science is artificial and increasingly anachronistic, and that education is both a problem and a solution. \u0022 \u0027Truth,\u0027 as defined by Alfred North Whitehead, \u0027is the conformation of Appearance to Reality.\u0027 What makes any set of bedrock truths slippery is that every age and every culture defines this conformation in its own way. When the time comes to change a paradigm - to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another-the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.\u0022 Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics, 1991 Leonardo da Vinci as a Role Model The link between visual art and science has historically been very close. We know this is true because we have evidence in the very existence of works of art which required technological and scientific advances to produce them in the first place. Over time, the ideal of the artist-scientist as an integrated, educated individual, the \u0022universal man\u0022 of the Renaissance, became synonymous with Leonardo da Vinci. He represents the achievement of the union between art and science, and as such has become a role model for subsequent generations of artists and scientists. Today, he has been elevated to almost mythic proportions, with even the innovative journal, Leonardo, of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, named after him. Despite his genius and the timelessness of his contributions, Leonardo has somehow become a decontextualized, isolated genius, a largely impossible and unsupported role model for contemporary students of art and science. All of us have constructed a personal mythology about him based on fragmentary information from the past, none of which result in a complete, truthful representation of the man. Further, Leonard Shlain, in Art and Physics has pointed out that it is primarily art students who study his work and rarely science students. The effect is that the ideal that Leonardo represents, which is supposedly embraced by our universities and institutions of higher learning, is really not agreed upon by the art and science communities, and thus is not commonly shared between them. Consequently, Leonardo has become a practically impossible role model for anyone to emulate. The term \u0022university\u0022 derives from \u0022universalism,\u0022 the Renaissance philosophy that embraced \u0022man as the measure of all things,\u0022 and the requirement to study all disciplines within a unity of knowledge and achievement of wisdom. While I believe that most universities aspire to the potential of collective wisdom and broad based intellectual growth by collecting diverse departments within a single system or structure, the size of the institutions today and the pressures upon individuals within most departments has actually led to isolation rather than interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. As a result, most educational institutions carry on the spirit of universalism in name only. As a professor at a prestigious research university offered, \u0022the opposite of diversity is university,\u0022 and since diversity and specialization is in fact what our universities have come to promote, it seems that we ought to call them \u0022diversities\u0022 instead of \u0022universities.\u0022 I believe that cultural and intellectual diversity is integral to the health of educational institutions, but that the decontextualized isolation associated with specialization can be stifling and destructive. Specialization, despite its profound contributions to our collective body of knowledge, has led to a breakdown in communication between disciplines, especially art and science. And without communication, there can be little or no understanding or shared information. Thus, universalism, the ideal that Leonardo represents, has become an anachronism, in that it is in contradiction to the values currently espoused within our conventional educational structures. Moreover, the separation of art and science education and the accompanying human communities allows for stereotypes about the two groups to thrive. Photography and the Art/Science Split One can observe that a breakdown in direct communication (and consequently often mutual respect) between art and science deepened at about the time of the invention of photography 150 years ago. While painters were freed by the camera\u0027s invention from serving primarily as recorders of history to explorers of new forms of visual representation of a wide range of alternative and abstract ideas, science found photography useful as an observing tool. Cries from the art community about the subjectivity of truth, even with a camera, (a photographer composes and edits images, and can alter the photograph in the darkroom) served more to separate photography from art than to engage the scientific community in intellectual discussions of ethics and visual representation. It is apparent that because science employed photography as a tool, and because many artists moved away from the visual paradigm of classical perspective and optical realism, the gap in communication between science and art widened. This gap is just now beginning to be bridged, as the graphics computer, also a descendant of classical perspective and photography, is quickly developing in the hands of both artists and scientists. Artists are infusing contemporary visual and conceptual paradigms and scientists are working with contemporary natural and computational paradigms. And at the base of much of this work are fundamental philosophical attitudes which date from the Middle Ages and before: the mind-body split and its descendant, the material-spiritual split of the Renaissance, which has continued to the present and takes its form in the stereotypes of the artist and the scientist. These philosophical issues have not been updated nor resolved in light of our contemporary collective computer-based community of artists and scientists. I feel that philosophical issues such as these are already a subtext to collaborations between the two groups and will likely be hotly debated as we re-construct our identities as artists and scientists. Art History Despite the current movement towards integrating paradigms for thinking about images (ultimately made up of light, space, and time) from both the arts and the sciences, there is a great deal of \u0022catch up\u0022 required on both sides. And while the search for optical realism in computer graphics has led to important developments such as ray tracing and virtual reality, it is my opinion that as a form of visual representation, optical realism based on classical perspective alone is not the ultimate, end goal of computer graphics. It is important to remember that while perspective and photography are related through the common ancestor of the camera obscura, the light sensitive surface of film is itself directly related to the structure of the retina and Helmholz\u0027s theory of tri-variance. (Cathode ray tubes use the theory of tri-variance, also.) Over 100 years ago, this paradigm for thinking about light and images was paralleled in the work of the impressionist painters, including Claude Monet. Leonard Shlain, in Art and Physics, calls Monet the first relativistic painter, in that his paintings are about change in light as affected by change in time. Painters and photographers saw that classical perspective is only one, albeit powerful, element of the perceived image, and that the \u0022big picture\u0022 includes perspective but is not limited to it. It concerns new ideas about the structure of the image: light, space, time, perception, perceptual apparatus, and interpretation of data in its multiple and kinetic forms. And today, \u0022realism\u0022 and \u0022truth\u0022 do not just mean dispassionate observation of the surface qualities of a visual scene. It means perceiving a sense of reality, being aware of the subjectivity of truth, the existence of multiple and perhaps contradicting truths, understanding the context of the observed and the effect of the observer upon the observed. We all know that much more than what we can see is real, made tangible with remote sensing devices that extend the dynamic and temporal range of our sensory perception to include such things as heat waves and data from distant stars and distant times. From contemporary chaos theory, we understand that disorder is a form of order, and that small changes in a system can cause large scale effects. In short, it simply seems inappropriate to use a model of realism from the 15th century to represent 20th century realities. Fifteenth century, western, classical perspective is based on a static, single, measurable view of the world, which does not by itself deal with the problem of concurrent and constructed realities, movement, or contemporary concepts of time, light, space, order and chaos. Impressionism and Cubism, for example, dealt with color (light) and movement (time). Cubism mapped time to space, that is 4-dimensions (x, y, z, and time) to 2-dimensions (x and y), and dealt with issues of relativity (what you can measure and therefore represent visually depends on your point of view, and the same scene can be viewed from many points of view, simultaneously). Motion picture film also does this, but in a different way. It maps 4-dimensions (x, y, z and time) to 3-dimensions (x, y and time). It exists as a linear, graphical sheet of sequential images, but is usually experienced as a \u0022single\u0022 transitory, 2-dimensional image. The reduction of dimensions from 4 to 3 or from 4 to 2 thereby frees up a dimension or two for the representation of other information. Since virtual reality systems deliver five dimensions (2 -x, y, z views, and time), it is possible to transmit a great deal of information beyond that of traditional perspective images by using clever strategies for embedding data, many of which were laid out over the past century by visual artists, including painters, photographers, stereographers, filmmakers and others. Recent concerns about how we know what we know, especially in relation to media, the ultimate mythmaker and source of mass, \u0022ersatz\u0022 primary experience, should be of concern to all who create computer images, given the computer\u0027s ability to undetectably alter photographic images. How does the representation of reality affect our experience of it? Since what we see is based on what we know and how we see, the way we construct our world view defines what we can see. Our world view is shaped by our mental strategies for negotiating the world of light, space, and time. Therefore, it is likely that people with different backgrounds see differently. But each world view is \u0022true\u0022 and \u0022real\u0022 for each person. Moreover, given that all representation is an illusion, then all images are at best, potential truths. Given this dilemma, our images lose objectivity and become myths. Film History Clearly, it is obvious that the universe is not static, and that movement and dynamism are integral to contemporary models of nature and reality. The development of motion picture film came a century ago, after artists invented photography and discovered the phenomenon of persistence of vision. Today, the very act of incorporating animation into scientific visualization pays unspoken homage to art and artists, and draws upon a rich heritage shaped almost entirely by them. These people include Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and others whose work has become a permanent part of film language and technique. Film artists know this history and build upon it. Working with computers, contemporary experimental animators are at the cutting edge of understanding the complex relationships between information, visual representation, and movement, and the","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":20873,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}