Art and Science by (Egon) Von Bark

by (Egon) Von Bark

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
--Henri Poincare

Von Bark ain't a technologically advanced type, though I sure do enjoy just hanging out with scientists from a purely superficial, voyeuristic perspective. The Subtle Technologies conference held at the University of Toronto Innis Hall last May was a perfect place to be hanging out with scientists. The real theme underlying the conference was the convergence of Art and Science, and like a lot of people attending, I don't even make that kind of distinction. For me these two separate words, Art and Science, simply represent the same concept; it's only a matter of tone or emphasis.

Zeina Khan studies physics at the University of Toronto. She works at the Experimental Nonlinear laboratory in the basement of the McLennan Science Building. This lab reminds me of your typical sculpture studio. Scattered about are bits and pieces of distinctly sculptural-looking apparatti. Zeina's experimentations include spinning coloured sand in glass tubes and then scanning it with lasers. So what she's really doing is building things that look cool.

On the door of the lab are exquisite photographs of her supervisor's complex geometric patterns made by pools of vibrating liquids. The images appear along with the Poincare quote at the top of this article.

I asked Zeina: "Does your supervisor, Dr.Stephen Morris, think what he is doing is Art?"

She said: "I don't think so."

I asked: "Well, does he think these photographs are pretty?"

She said: "Oh yeah, for sure."

Personally, I would love to do this kind of stuff for a living, and I probably could, except that I really hate writing exams.

Image: Sumo Robot Challange, referee Duane Muldar goes
over the rules with Jimmy Green and Doug Back prior to battle.

Von Bark's subjective history of the relationship between Art and Science

1452-1519: Leonardo da Vinci is like an Artist and a Scientist at the same time. Most people seem to think that this is an exception to the rule.
1596-1650: Rene Descartes tortures animals and starts to give science a bit of a reputation for inhumane activity.
1633: Galileo is prosecuted. In the words of Robert Anton Wilson: "Science and art. Now what created such a chasm between them? Why the hell did that happen? I think I'm going to go back and blame the Inquisition. Science had to fight an uphill battle against the Inquisition and this created a historical hangover in which scientists had acute hostility to every form of mysticism, not just to the Catholic church which had been persecuting them. I think that rubs off onto art, because there's something mystical about art no matter how much you try to rationalize it..."
1789-1815: The French Revolution is inspired in part by people like Diderot and Voltaire who are convinced that enlightenment comes with the rejection of religion.
Let's skip a few years ...
1856-1943: "Mad" Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla stuns mortals with his dazzling displays of electromagnetic energy. Tesla is not just an eccentric genius, he is a show-off who likes to present visual spectacles involving lots of neon and pyrotechnics. Everyone is impressed, nobody calls it Art, but several artists I know avidly read his biography. (Trivia: Like Lola, Tesla is obsessed with pigeons.)
1879-1955: Albert Einstein is a scientist and genuinely nice guy who likes playing the fiddle and joking around. The general public seems to think he is the exception to the rule. A popular idea of a what a scientific personality would be seems to fit more along the lines of physicist John Nash: cold, serious, arrogant, inhuman.
1950s: Scientist Richard Feynman hangs out with some artists at Yale and gets the impression they aren't really interested in science, but Dick is fairly interested in Art. He ends up doing cool stuff, like playing bongos for modern interpretive dance performances, when he isn't doing nuclear physics. He writes two great autobiographies: What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!
1960s: Artist Naim June Paik assembles sculptures out of television sets.
1965: Arthur Koestler publishes The Act of Creation, a dazzling essay that draws analogies between research science, poetry, and comedy: success in all three pursuits hinges upon the ability to capture shifts in perspective.
1965: James D. Watson publishes The Double Helix, an engaging autobiography about Nobel prize-winning scientists trying to pick up chicks at parties.
1973: Marshall McLuhan talks about global villages and new technology. He inspires advertising exec Richard Hill to accost conceptual avantgarde Ontario College of Art president Roy Ascot at a cocktail party and convinces him to inaugurate a technologically driven department of OCA dubbed Photo-Electric Arts.
1982: Fairlight sampling technology infiltrates popular music. She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby follows Video Killed the Radio Star (1980) up the charts.
1982: InterAccess Inc. is born, an artist-run centre in Toronto devoted to the popularization of the use of innovative technology in the arts. A subset of InterAccess, called the Arts & Robotics Group, later coalesces. Obviously, a significant part of this club is veterans of the Photo-Electric Arts era. They build neato things like the SenseBus, a large conglomeration of interactive devices.
1984: Dick Burton appears in the movie version of George Orwell's 1984, while Von Bark studies video art at OCA where visionary instructors Norman White and Douglas Back evangelize the use of computers and electronics in sculpture. Aside from dabbling a little with the behemoth Telidon graphic system and fiddling with a kid's program called "Logo," Von Bark doesn't really get a handle on incorporating modern technology and just ends up watching old movies with Morris Wolfe. However, other very smart people, like, for example, David Rokeby, grab the idea and run with it. Von Bark also attends budget meetings at OCA where occasionally painters say things like: "You Photo-Electric types aren't really artists and shouldn't be here."
1988: With the possible exception of Von Bark, virtually every single beatnik, musician, and underemployed artist in downtown Toronto is hired by Colorization Inc. for the aesthetically dubious practice of tinting old B&W movies. This job inadvertently ends up teaching everybody the basics of computer graphics.
1989: San Francisco artist Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratory attracts attention. He builds military-style robots that attack each other and blow up. Kids love it.
1989: OCA adds a D to its name and restructures its departments. Photo-Electric Arts is consumed by a new manifestation called New Media.
1990: Ubercharismatic electronics sculptor Laura Kikauka hosts outlandish parties at The Funny Farm near Flesherton, Ont. where we see San Francisco artist Barry Schwartz clamp leads to hydro lines and mess around with high voltage right off the grid, just like Tesla. Don't try this at home.
1992: Toronto artists Norm White and Doug Back host Sumo Robot events at OCAD. To the glee of spectators, Graham Smith's 100-pound sledgehammer armed robot instantly crushes a glass and rubberband powered device made by Von Bark. A few years later this technogladiatorial theme becomes a fad on popular television.
1993: Wired magazine hits newsstands. People buy computers. As more regular folks get used to the idea of using computers, the concept of "computer art" starts to lose the taint of an oxymoron.
1997: Gus Van Sant releases Good Will Hunting and math is now regarded (by some) as cool. (Trivia: Shot on location at U of T, teaching assistant John Mighton, originally hired as a behind-the-scenes techie, gets the part of Gerald Lambeau's TA in the movie. He then drops his grad program and moves to Hollywood!)
1998: Von Bark's brother, an ex-philosophy student (and a natural caricaturist) enrolls in mathematics at U of T. Von Bark starts hanging out with mathematicians, and the experience is a lot like hanging out with artists: generally, people with an interesting sense of humour who like playing around with ideas.
1999: Millennial panic runs rampant, then fizzles.
2000: Rob sends Von Bark a website link describing how artist Eduardo Kac convinced some geneticists in France to splice phosphorescent jellyfish genes onto albino rabbit DNA to create a bunny with green glow-in-the-dark fur. Von Bark tells Rob he likes the prank. Rob insists that it is no parody: the glowing bunny really exists! Von Bark thinks Rob is just teasing him, but as the weeks go by and he starts to see the news reports, the realization slowly dawns that this joke is real.
2001: The most popular exhibit in the history of the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art is a functional robotic simulation of the digestive system. Small jars of the "excrement" produced by the device make must-have souvenirs. A massive hit.

Meanwhile in Toronto, Von Bark, having returned to watercolour painting, declares that the conceptual division betwixt Art & Science had never really existed after all. Most people just ignore him, or have known this all along.

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