Views on Art and Reality
Lectures on Nothing Real
The following essays are not scholarly writings nor proper academic research but ideas I came in contact with throughout the years within various scholarly books, literature, conversations, observations, and combinations of those ideas that gave rise to the new ideas. References and cross references will not be used but only the source name referrals as I remember them in the moment. Following writings are derived and have appeared in the form of thoughts, ideas, and research that were and are incorporated in my Art practice.
The essays are written the way I speak without any human or AI help or editing. Grammatical and spelling mistakes are not intentional but result of insufficient language comprehension, and are to be recognised, corrected, or ignored by more skillful readers.
Some of the facts, places, characters, and civilizations are fictional
Introduction:
In the ancient civilisation of Mitrovia it was well accepted that understanding the world around us and within us (one and the same thing) is the only logical and understandable activity within this short game of life; discover as much new information as possible within the life game. The majority of the past knowledge was available to Mitrovians if they wished to use it. Playing this game is how some Mitrovians have made sense of un-sensical life. Some Mitrovians chose to play the game but only accept one ancient view and are against any facts that support new informational discoveries; Platonic cave dwellers as they were cold. Others however, believe that it is our human responsibility to play the game of life and discover as much new information as possible about this very complex and non-intuitive world around us. The more knowledge we have, the more we can see and the more complex the game becomes. The professions that were the most successful in this info-game and most commonly chosen by the curious Mitrovians were Science and Art, which was commonly called Philosophy as it encompasses both Science and Art.
Mitrovians lived in the Berencian peninsula, approximately in a year of 300,025 since the beginning of the species.
The following may contain names of some Artists or Scientists readers may or may not be familiar. Luckily they are all well documented within Google servers and are easily accessible via Google search feature.
All of the essays that follow are copies of the original lectures taught at the Mitrovian University of Philosophy by Professor of Art Philosophy.
Many readers will experience strong feelings and specific thoughts of disagreement throughout. Keep in mind that any fact is as such only within a limited time scale. Every fact has a time limit before a new more comprehensive fact comes along. Once there was a Euclid but then came Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky. This type of disagreement is of the highest value as it contributes to the progression. However, there is another type of disagreement. The one brought by the cave dwellers whose eyes have adjusted to the darkness of the ancient beliefs. What type of disagreement is yours? In addition, anything can be explained from an infinite number of statements. This is due to the information complexity of anything that exists. Every statement, observation, and question is followed by the altered or opposing one, hence your disagreement with a specific statement most likely will be short lived.
Lecture#1:
Methodology
Art History
There are three classical levels of Art history.
Level 1
Somatic Art:
Representational Art of superficial appearances, devoid of any significant substance. This is agreed-upon Reality deprived of individual perceptions. Ideas are none, or there are timid hints of ideas hiding behind apparent symbols. The subject matter, technique, etc. within Level 1 Art, is only concerned with the logistics. It is a Utility Art. Utility Art includes all Art from prehistory to the late 19th century. This category includes abstract Islam Art and World Art.
If the Art piece is concerned only with its aesthetic appearance, imitation of the apparent world, it holds a certain measure of satisfaction where artist and viewer benefit from consuming a good. Somatic Art is useful, profitable, and beneficial, for promoting various religions, high status humans, and ideologies, but at its core it consists only of physicality of aesthetic appearance. Somatic art follows the language of the localized society, their symbols, narratives, aestheticism, and iconography. An Artist is a skilled craft-person, an executor of social cognition and norms. Individualized perceptions, even if present, must be hidden behind and within the aesthetic craft and social symbols.
Somatic Art is Propaganda Art, or as Joseph Kosuth called it, Furniture.
Level 1 Art is equivalent to Newtonian physics, it is based on physical appearances.
Level 2
Cognitive Art: It is an Idea Based Art that begins with Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and Conceptualism. Cognitive Art is equivalent to Quantum Dynamics.
Impressionism, Post Expressionism, Fauvism, and all the movements between Impressionism and Duchamp fall under the Transitional State between Level 1 and Level 2 Art. Those movements are still classical Somatic but they do evoke new understanding of the world, hence they are equivalent to Einstein's theory of relativity.
Level 3
Empirical Art is Process Based Art: Rational process of Empirical Art follows the strict methodology of the scientific experiment but unlike experiment whose goal is a proof of an idea, process based Art is only concerned with re-experiencing the idea in order to understand it fully, or letting the phenomenon document its own phenomenon.
The Process of an Art piece depends heavily on the Information Quality that must be collected through relevant research.
Empirical Art is equivalent to CERN, Fermilab, SLAC Accelerator, Argonne, etc. where ideas are tested and proven while allowing the phenomenon to be documented.
From physical to cognitive, and finally to merger of both in Empirical Art. What is next? Science is after unification of classical and quantum theories through quantum loop theory or something similar. If we are to follow the evolution of Art, for a change instead of Science, we would easily conclude that the next step is not the unification, a missing link, but a whole new theory, the whole new approach to Art practice. When quantum thermodynamics was proven even the experts were challenged in understating it. Similarly Dada evoked revolutionary confusion among Artists. Hundred years later, in our present time, they have accepted these new ways of thinking that are now the norm and not even a bit confusing. As soon as humans get used to new ways of thinking, when we accept and get comfortable with new ways of looking at the world, it is time for brand new Not Intuitive ideas to come and disturb our understanding of the world. Not knowing, not understanding is the only way for collective and individual consciousness to develop in that uncomfortable state of insecurity, which is the only state in which creative progression and new knowledge can foster growth.
Perhaps our consciousness is not developed to the degree necessary in order to comprehend the workings of the universe. Dogs are not capable of comprehending quantum physics or Art in any way, but possess part of the consciousness that processes smell and fillings that humans could never comprehend. Different consciousness sees the world in different ways and perhaps we need all of them combined in addition to the new undeveloped ones in order to see the whole picture.
The world is more bizarre and strange than physics can ever imagine. This is just the beginning of the not intuitive and nondeterministic understanding. Entropy increases disorder and randomness and our collective consciousness follows this disorder and illogical ways of thinking. After Empirical Art perhaps Illogical Empiricism is to follow. Everything is deduced via logical thinking. It is time to abandon logic, cause and the affect, and determinism, and move on to more complex ways of thinking.
Infosphere and InfoArt
Who are we, and how do we relate to each other?
Luciano Floridi claims that we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". The boundaries between our online and offline lives break down. According to Floridi there have been 4 revolutions so far. The infosphere is the 4th revolution.
First Revolution: We are not the center of the Universe. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer and mathematician who proposed the heliocentric model of the solar system, placing the sun at the center instead of the Earth.
Second Revolution: We are not unique species. All species of life have evolved over time from the common ancestor through natural selection, Charles Darwin.
Third Revolution: Sigmund Freud: we are not rational but unconscious beings.
Fourth Revolution: We are not individuals but agents within the network, infosphere.
Infosphere is our environment. It is deeply affecting our understanding of ourselves as agents. We appropriate ourselves as connected informational organisms, inforgs.
We are interconnected, informational organisms among other informational organisms sharing an informational environment, the infosphere. We are not individuals but rely on the network.
In every department of life, the infosphere has become an environmental force which is creating and transforming our realities. "Onlife" defines our daily activity: the way we shop, drive, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships, law, finance, and politics, even the way we conduct war. Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Is Art to follow? Is Art not to be individualised, made by an Artist, but inforgs? Can Art be single, Geocentric Art? Are Artists the agents of the infosphere? Are Artists just the miniscule part of the informational organism, or have Artists always been the agents of the informational Universe?
Defining Art: Art Aesthetics and Reason
I am not attempting to define what Art is but I will try to explain the Art process.
The most common responses or attempts to define Art are: Art is aesthetics; Art has no practical, or functional use; Art is feelings; Art is Expression. The challenge in finding consensus in explaining Art lies in the sheer ubiquitous nature of Art. In fact, it is Reality that is ubiquitous and Art is just attempting to make sense of any information that Reality is composed of, reflecting upon it, and making Art ubiquitous as well. The following quote most perfectly summarizes what Art is. Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist, provided us with the most accurate and poetical explanation of what Art is. “Artistic thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Art is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.”
In fact, Rovelli did not write about Art, nor Artist, but about Science and Scientific thinking. I have just replaced the word Science with Art.
Different fields, theories, speak different languages, but, essentially, they all offer compatible descriptions of the same underlying phenomena, Reality. There is only one Reality, and infinite ways of thinking about it, each of which captures one element of Reality. Art uses the Art language to capture Any element of Reality without being tied to any school of thought or a theory. Unlike many fields that are specialized, with few exceptions (philosophy, may be one), Art language is not limited but ubiquitous, and may explore any element of reality. Artists are philosophers, journalists, engineers, historians, scientists, and all of the above depending on a piece. Art instigates freethinking and liberates people from self-inflicted decrees.
Art pieces whose main and only purpose is aesthetics are no more than crafty furniture, something you purchase to match your sofa, which usually involves craftsmanship whose process is based on the manufacturing assembly line like. This Somatic Art is Utility Art or Level 1 Art as explained above. Now, this is not to say that Art should not and does not have aesthetics as part of it. Of course it does. Nature is aesthetic hence Art is too. The difference is that aesthetics or decoration cannot be the only reason for the Art piece’s creation. In this case, and only then, it is craft and not Art. Art is not an object but an epistemological statement, or inquiry of anything that constitutes any of our experiences and observations. Art is a continuous reconceptualization of human perception, consequently cognition.
Should we define Art or explain it
Art is ubiquitous. It emerges from anything and nothing. Art does not show us a mistaken understanding of the world, a subjective opinion, as some may perceive it to be, instead it is presenting the way our human understanding of the world is being constructed. It is making us aware of constructing the meaning rather than receiving the preconceived and established information. Art presents the possible models of how our understanding of the world could be. Art is not limiting in any way. All materials and mediums are at its disposal; all the possible ideas, existing and yet to be discovered, are available, with which we are to explore the world, with which we are to explore our relationship to the world, and make sense of it.
From the very first cave painting to present, art is what separates humans from other animals. In the La Pasiega cave in Spain, scientists have found a ladder shape made of red horizontal and vertical lines. The artwork dates to more than 64,000 years ago, suggesting Neanderthals created it. In Maltravieso Cave in Spain a three hand stencils on a wall has been dated to at least 66,000 years ago, also suggesting it was left by a Neanderthal. However, there is also a possibility that modern humans have reached Europe tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The world’s oldest known cave painting made by humans is a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia. The urge to understand the world, the reality, and our relation to it is what has propelled Homo sapiens to a modern age and distinguish us from other animals. Why would early humans be creating art, a useless activity, when they should be minding their survival and building functional tools to help them with the survival? Because, making sense of the world precedes using and altering that very same world. Thinking precedes doing. Art is thinking. It is a philosophy. Art is an essential and obligatory part of human progression. Art makes us aware of the things-in-the-world. The more we are aware of, the more we know, and the larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality, which I will expand upon. Creativity, curiosity, ability to see the unseen, and urge to understand is part of the art process and because it is materialized as a physical tactile entity, with its physical presence Art provokes creativity, curiosity, thinking and awareness in others. Art, I will say it again, instigates freethinking and liberates people from self-inflicted decrees.
After thousand years of the decline of European civilization and intellectual inexistence, it took the influence of artists to change it all. In the 15th century the Medici family supported Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello and Fra Angelico Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci. Besides Art and Architecture Medici supported scientists like Galileo Galilei. Art and science have different methods and use different language but essentially the same creative and cognitive processes are required for creation of either. Art and Science go hand in hand and feed off each other. In a 15 century Europe, seemingly useless vanity objects produced by artists and heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the sun proven by Galileo ignited the intellectual freedoms that even Girolamo Savonarola, who destroyed and burned numerous art pieces in a name of his religious ideology, could not stop this spread of reason. The reform was inevitable across Europe. Even if Art was, useless, good for nothing vanity, which of course was not, it brought a liberation of freethinking that began the landslide of reforms, Religious, Scientific, and Artistic, moreover the exponential progress is still propagating, one would hope.
When we are within the Dark ages, within a cave, our eyes adjust and we are no longer capable of perceiving the situation that we are in. We should never again have to rediscover that which has already been discovered in the past. The potential power that Art institutions have of supporting the right Artists, just like Medici family did, is a heavy responsibility and matter of humanity‘s progress.
Unlike any other field, Art in its most fundamental nature is so encompassing and vast in its universality that it is perhaps somewhat difficult to explain it. If we were assigned the task of explaining the entire world, the Universe itself, in one sentence, we would miserably fail just like we are failing in explaining the Art. The universe is too encompassing to be summarized into one definition. Art explains the world and as such is as vast and complex as the world itself. Art can explore the world by exploring life, property of matter, motion, energy and force just like Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. But just as well, Art may explore cognition, sociology, politics, culture, emotions, perceptions, aesthetics, imaginations, and pretty much infinite other possible possibilities through which Art may explore the experienced and mind-independent reality. Art is not specialized as already mentioned subjects and fields. Art is not limited by seeing the world only through a specific narrow view of a particular profession, but is limitless in the possible ways to explore the world. All the possible possibilities are possible just like the most fundamental structure of the Universe, according to Physics. Art liberates humanity from self imposed chains and ideological imprisonment. Art’s purpose is to advance humanity.
In a narrow sense, Art is philosophical exploration of the world and its recreation, metaphorically, symbolically, or objectively. Every time a piece is created, the Artist creates a new reality within the collectively experienced reality. By doing so Artist not only explores the existing collectively experienced reality for the sake of understanding and/or being aware of a particular part of it, but through this process of exploring, through the physical activity of creating the Art piece, Artist creates a new reality. In a sense, Artists are like mini gods constantly creating new sub-Universes that adhere to the same or the similar laws as the collectively experienced reality. This is the power of Art; the infinity of the possible creations, limited by absolutely nothing other than our own intellect. The Universe is just one big Art piece; within which artists continuously keep recreating small sub-Universes with each new art piece.
On an elementary level the Universe is made of events, relations and interactions, as quantum mechanics has proven. Art is made of processes, of relations and interactions. The brain that conjures an art piece, the body that physically creates it, and the art piece itself exists according to the identical principals as particles that make them. The most fundamental structure of the Universe is no different than the Art process. This parallel between the fundamental workings of the Universe and Art process is the underlying theme of all that follows.
Artists must understand, fully, the reality that they are recreating. One thing that unifies all humans from the very beginning of our species is the urge for understanding the Reality. First, religion, mythology, science, and art have been, each in their own way, trying to understand Reality; seen and unseen, known and unknown, presentations and representations. Every art piece that has ever been created is a self-portrait of reality. In the following pages I will explore the most fundamental nature of Art processes, its relation to reality, and the relationship to the world as an Artist.
Why do we make Art?
Free will and freedom might be debatable concepts. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep our decisions are ruled by others, our own necessities, societal rules, laws of Physics, responsibilities, physiological body constraints, etc. Freedom and free will seems like a foreign concept and impossibility. But, in moments of Art creation, during the Art process, Artists just like a mini Gods create their own Universe; Universe of an Art piece, within which Artist’s are unequivocally free to make any decision, and experience ultimate freedom. Creating an Art piece requires perpetual decision-making, but because the Artist is the only person making the rules and/or changing them, the Artist is experiencing the ultimate freedom of free will. This feeling of freedom is impossible to experience in daily lives, and once experienced it is absolutely addictive.
Why Art Matters
Artists decontextualized Reality. Every time Artists make apiece, Artists reinvent thoughts, perceptions, the way we connote and denote the world around and ourselves. Artists do not belong to any school of thought but live in a perpetual state of decontextualizing the ways of thinking. Perceptions become tangible. Art does not give us answers like science does, that is true, but it questions the Reality and our perceptions of it. The capacity to perceive the world in a new way is not impractical, naive, or idealistic, but it is at the heart of any humankind revolutional progression, through history. This makes Art the most important for humankind progression and incomparably more pragmatic and useful than any other way of thinking including science.
Process and Information Realism
Asking questions is a fundamental nature of humans that helps us understand the world around and within us. It all starts with perceptions, not only visual, but more importantly cognitive perceptions. In order to gain a better understanding of the world some humans set up experiments to test their cognitive perceptions, while others set up an Art process to understand it. Either way it all starts with questioning perceptions. The best way to learn is to interact with Reality, while seeking to understand it, and reconceptualizing the preconceived notions.
Each Art piece is a mini Universe adhering, fundamentally, to the same laws as the Universe. The most intriguing part about Art is its process, which from my experience, emulates the most fundamental concepts of Information theory and Quantum Mechanics, such as for example superposition (a quantum state can be in multiple states at the same time, a cloud of possibility), eigenstates (the observable state of the system right after the measurement, collapse of the cloud of possibility into one state), entanglement (two subatomic particles can be linked to each other even at the large distances), and act of quantum measurement (collapse of the cloud of possibilities into an eigenstates). Information creates matter the same way an Artist creates an Art piece.
10-25 seconds after the Big Bang, at 1015 degrees Kelvin, particles have materialized from pure energy. Artists, within much friendlier conditions, materialize marks from their own energy, consequently creating the new universe of the Art piece.
To trust any artistic-ideas we must test them against experience, just as in science - the measurements are performed to test theoretical ideas - . Through Art processes, artists experience the questions to understand the answers; scientists build an experiment to confirm the answer. Both Art and Science bring new thoughts to the world and as such they are equally practical and necessary for the progression of humanity’s progression.
For process based artists, the value of an Art piece is in its process, and once it is complete, the value shifts from personal to public experience. To explain this further I will use the most reduced form of Art, a pencil mark-making drawing. At the beginning of an art piece, paper is blank, there are only Artist’s thoughts, a field of a sort, and all the conceivable options are possible. The Artist's piece is in a superposition state. As the first random marks are made they are visible, with their own properties, or identity, that is information they convey. As the marks accumulate, the relations between marks change the individual information of the mark into collective patterns (just like many single photons make interference pattern-waves like features in a double slit experiment). It is as if all the possible ways of drawing the marks have collapsed into the final pattern, eigenstate. Moreover, marks are in an entangled state with each other since they are correlated and they, together, can be treated as a single object. There is a lot of information stored in a drawing but it is not stored in the individual marks but in the correlation between the marks. If you want to “see” the drawing you have to collectively observe all the marks. A drawing, just like a quantum system, contains or stores a lot of information but if you look at its parts, a mark, you cannot see the information, it is just a dot.
To experience, through one's hands, materialization from randomness to complex deterministic objects is an exhilarating one. Once it becomes a material object an Art piece begins a new life where an observer, a viewer, determines its information based on their superposition with it. A viewer, an observer, collapses a cloud of possibilities into ONE (just as an act of measurements of a quantum state yields only an eigenstate out of many), meaning, an observer by interacting with the piece, reduces an art piece's meaning to a single state with one well defined meaning. Every time a measurement is taken, an observation is made and the Eigenstate is different. More viewers observe the piece; the more of the possibilities of a piece are revealed. However, more views are made - revelations are more likely to be alike.
Art is about relations and becoming, not simply being, hence it is not an aesthetic, finite object but a field of an indeterministic wave function. On an elementary level the Universe is made of events, relations and interactions, as quantum mechanics has proven. Art is made of processes, of relations and interactions.
Information, connotes and denotes multiple meanings. Word Information is used in this case in two ways. First, in its general meaning as a Fact or knowledge (wet water, 100,000 heartbeats in a day, etc.), which I will simply call information. And, secondly, information considered as the fundamental physical unit, as a unit of something physical, i.e. mark, that is encoded in the state of an Art piece’s system, like temperature of water, which I will call Informational Unit (IU). Through the relations between the IU Art piece’s system of meaning arises, meaning Art pieces information is created. Information Realism (IR) is art that through its processes, through its IUs, most accurately captures information from Reality. What is not understood is created so it could be comprehended. Visual art pieces fundamentally present information observed from Reality and when it is in its purity materialized into visual information, by using only basic IU and its relations, detached from artist’s beliefs, then it is Information Realism. This is to be distinguished from classical realism that represents the external appearance of a form and gives us no information about the form except the impression of an appearance. IR is not a movement, nor an Art group, but individual Art pieces that present information from Reality verbatim.
A successful Art piece is one that carries information about Reality. Art is information. Observing, interpreting, reasoning, and representing reality is the most fundamental urge in humans. The ability to do so, to have abstract thinking abilities, to imagine and recreate is what separates us a bit from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Art philosophy
Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, existence, reason, values, mind, and language. Philosophy of art studies the nature of art, such as aesthetics (beauty and taste), expression, interpretation, representation, and form. I would propose a new and updated version of the nature-of-art definition. It is not so much that it changed as it has expanded. Art is the least about aesthetics and form and mostly if not all thinking processes. It seems obvious that philosophy of art is studied externally, by non-artists. How else are we to justify studying art through sheer aesthetics, form, and emotion? Epistemology of Art has been criticized greatly throughout ages, and disturbingly, contemporary philosophers are continuing the tradition. In 1992 Jerome Stolnitz wrote “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art” that art does not and cannot contribute to knowledge primarily because it does not generate any sort of truth. He goes on explaining why, and may I emphasize -in his opinion- and not scientific method, art’s influence on social structure and historical change has been inconsequential. His trivial opinions are exactly what he is claiming Art to be. If art is trivial because it is not using scientific method then is that same scientific method used for his own conclusions about the art or does his opinion have no value or significance and is just as trivial as art is in his view.
The problem here is that the majority of people that write about art are not artists themselves. They base their opinions on the external views of the subject without ever experiencing the process and understanding it. Art is epistemological. My thoughts on the subject are not philosophy of art but Art philosophy. It is a philosophy of an Artist for an Artist.
Many of the contemporary Art schools are trying to minimize, or entirely get rid of, the knowledge of traditional art and insist on conceptually based art. This cannot be done unless educational institutions are willing to teach Art Philosophy. Unlike artist statement, which is a personal introduction to artist work or specific project, Art Philosophy reflects reality and its relation to ourselves. The reality is analyzed ontologically, epistemologically, or through axiological inquiries, not by philosophers but by Artists, who present observations through Art language.
The epistemic fundamental nature of things should be analyzed and correlated with the Art processes.
Art learning methods are inquiry and problem solving based
Hypatia, who lived in Alexandria in 4th century in Egypt, was a philosopher, in the good old days when that meant astronomer, mathematician, artist, philosopher, etc. Hypatia was a very good teacher and believed in the importance of taking small steps, and was sure that everyone had the ability to learn a lot. She tried to really understand what students find difficult. Students are usually put off from doing difficult things because we haven’t been taught how to start with the easiest, simplest steps first. If students can’t learn something it is because we didn’t explain it well enough for them. Universal lectures, projects, and due dates, have never worked for me as an educator. I may start with a lecture, however a topic is communicated to each student in a unique way with particular examples that they can relate to. Art teaches us that we all reason slightly differently and the way I learn is not the same as someone else, meaning we must adjust the way we communicate the information to each student individually, which requires a great deal of empathic effort by teachers to try to understand and get to know each student individually. Through the process of me trying to understand how the students perceive and reason the reality, by asking questions and analyzing their work (critiquing) not only that I get to know the student but they start to understand themselves better. Usually this results in an avalanche of self-discovery and empowerment for students. I must emphasize that when I say that I get to know students well I mean I know how they reason and see the world, and if life experiences have scared them and to what degree, without knowing absolutely none of their specific experiences, which should and must stay private.
Once students are empowered by self-discovery and confidence they start questioning and rethinking, re-contextualize the world around which becomes incorporated in every art piece they make. This requires a high level of complex critical thinking and integration of diverse knowledge, just like in the good old time when philosophy meant art and science, or should I say STEAM. Art builds self-confidence, Art leads to self-discovery and empowerment, and when we are strong, confident, diverse thinkers we learn faster no matter the field. Art changes us; as a result, Art can transform our lives.
Art learning as a question base, encourages critical thinking, not technique or craft base fosters strong diverse thinkers in any field. Art is an access point for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.
Questioning and rethinking the preconceived understanding of things-in-the-world, results in new ideas. How do we express and materialize those new ideas and perceptions? Well, artists' approach is not much different from scientists who set up an experiment. Based on an idea, hypothesis, artist must think of appropriate materials, mediums, format, installation, time duration of the process, space where process is taking place, etc. so that every aspect of the process most accurately matches the idea. This requires a high level of problem solving skill. Even if we are to talk about the traditional approaches, problem solving is all encompassing part of the process. What makes Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Anselm Kiefer, or any other Artist from art history so great is the decisions they made along every millimeter of their piece. Artists/students’ choices and decisions of how much where, to what degree, in which particular way, is what makes an art piece an art piece. Choices are based on how we see the world and how we want to present it.
Art piece starts with an idea but the rest of it is all about problem solving and making a decision among an infinite number of possibilities. Artists are quite skillful at solving problems that occur in everyday life and find solutions among an infinite number of solutions. A problem is reasoned like a puzzle to be solved instead of the overwhelming tragedy without solution. Even if a puzzle is without a solution, artists are good at transforming it into a new puzzle that has a solution.
Art for cognitive health:
Neuro-Arts is multidisciplinary research of how Arts affect us, giving rise to a field that is radically changing how we understand and translate the power of the Arts.
Art processing is part of the frontal lobe, the sections of the brain responsible for problem solving, language, managing higher executive functioning, judgment, abstract thought, creativity, planning, decision making.
Colette J. Brown, teaching artist and community health researcher, while working with dementia patients came up with the following project: pick an object, describe it, rename it so it gives a new thought to the object. One participant renamed the word Hands to Choice. Hands can be used for good or evil, they explained, we just have to make a choice. Now we have a new connection in our brain between these two new concepts, hands and choice, which results in neuroplasticity, and our cognitive reserve increases. 'Cognitive reserve' is the idea that people develop a reserve of thinking abilities during their lives. Cognitive reserve is directly connected to the neuroplasticity of the brain.
Art that asks more questions than gives answers, is proven to help improve neuroplasticity and prevents cognitive decline. The majority of people who make art in as little as 45 minutes reduce the stress hormone cortisol, no meter the skill level. People who engaged in the arts were found to have lower mental distress, better mental functioning, and improved quality of life.
In class approach:
The lessons are created intentionally to cultivate inquiry, problem-solving and process-based learning. Integrating the arts with any other content area and having a multidisciplinary approach is very important for educating strong, healthy, creative, innovative thinkers.
By connecting classroom learning to the real world relations, not typically thought of, and hands-on investigations results in a novel way of seeing the world.
Art education should not teach techniques but how ideas are communicated and interpreted, the ways one thinks, interacts and views the world around in innovative ways.
Lecture #2:
Reality or Absurdity
Socrates:
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”
"Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people."
"Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people learn from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers."
Probability:
Universe is based on probability, which is there because of a lack of information. We can know/measure/observe the speed but not the position, or vice versa (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). We can only know one or the other but never both. Universe allows us to see only partial images, and leaves us in the world of probabilities.
What is deterministic and what is indeterministic Art?
Questions may be raised regarding the human condition, the often nonsensical way we think. Art that uses the absurd representation of mundane objects and everyday situations, yet is tragic in the profound meaning they bear, is the most extensively equipped for questioning the absurdity of reality. This is a strength of Art, its capacity to take the viewer out of their comfort zone and challenge them to consider new sides of the story beyond the safe and convenient interpretations through the visually powerful concepts.
Official discourses of dishonest empowerment, cherishing violence in the name of greed, paradoxical tautologies in rhetoric, justifications of any ill conceived action, unquestioning mass followings of those that should not have even been acknowledged as humans, contradictions between personal beliefs and those we follow for whose ideas we are ready to willingly die or kill, while choosing to ignore the ideological contradiction between our believes and the ones we are dying for; these are just few absurdity we live by. And, if our arrogance informs us that absurdities are theirs and never can they be ours as we can see the correct way, oh how wrong we are. All who are not questioning their views and perceptions but make statements are equally arrogant in their absurdity as the one they judge.
Science experiments tend to prove an idea; Art processes tend to question ideas. Facing absurdity with the proven truth is almost always rejected by the absurd one who enjoys dwelling in the illogical reality that provides freedom and justification to any ill behavior or a thought without any consequences. Art process that results in absurd Art piece reflects viewers absurdity, like a mirror, viewer can see themselves reflected in the piece’s irrationality. Seeing our reflections diffused in an absurd reality of beliefs, contradicting actions, and unquestioning following, makes us question our identity and realisation arises. Questioning different models of reality is Artist responsibility.
Reason and Reality
Reason as the highest level of Absurdity
Humans love truth; the insatiable instinct of our consciousness. By possessing the truth of a certain idea or thing-in-the-world we can consciously, and conveniently, justify any of our actions. We consciously apply logical conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. This capacity for logically concluding in the name of truth is Reason. Truth, the reason, is highly damaging for humanity and fails to be that which argues to be in its definition. Definite truth is impossible, only the truths are, the possibilities of all truths within singularity. I see it as a possibility, that there are two distinct ways of Reasoning, for the most part, the Functional Reasoning (based on the functionality, purpose, and hierarchy) and Quantum thinking (all the possible thoughts in singularity, universalism).
Truth is an effect of perceptual processes. It is perceptually created information, relative and irrelevant. Consciousness should be explained first, but as we know that is not going too well for millennia. We have theories, versions of idealism, contextuality, and information theory being the most successful thus far, without getting any closer to the answer. If we cannot answer what consciousness is, that with which we reason, how can we then claim reason for anything at all.
Reason ceases to be that which claims to be. Its definition is as illogical as those that employ it in practice. Its failure stems from the nature of our consciousness. Reason being the hallucinatory constructs of our consciousness and never a factual priory. Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, proposes an idea of the human mind as a “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.
How does consciousness happen? Without consciousness there is no self, no reality, no Reason; the universe ceases to exist. Obviously, answering the question of consciousness origin and function is imperative for understanding all there is. Conscious experiences are controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies, according to Seth. There are two properties of being conscious: first, experiences of the world around us and second, the conscious self, or the specific experience of being self.
Seth starts with experiences of the world: imagine being a brain, stuck inside a bony skull, trying to figure out what’s out there in the world. There’s no light or sound inside the skull; all you have to go on are streams of electrical signals, which are only indirectly related to things in the world. Seth says that perception has to be a process of “informed guesswork,” in which sensory signals are combined with prior expectations about the way the world is, to form the brain’s best guess of the causes of these signals. It’s the result of the brain continually updating its best guesses to help drive our behavior. “We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it,” Seth says. “The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in.” In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time. “It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call ‘reality.”
Artists study, throughout their art education, how to exploit the “informed guesswork” workings of our consciousness. Artists know that we do not passively perceive the world, and we use the well established tricks to manipulate the viewers perceptions; optical illusions, perspective, forms ambiguity, visual depth, emphases and blurriness of form to dictate the narrative, symbols, color constancy, just to name a few. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer shows a pearl that has no contour and also no hook to hang it from the girl’s ear, it is a smudge of a brushstroke, yet we see the most realistic pearl it can be. Every art piece is made of the particular suggestive specks of information that Artists know, will invoke a particular or ambiguous form, narrative, or reality in a viewer's mind. Artists create controlled, agreed upon hallucinations. Artists create Reality, a new Reality with every piece. By making a decision to put a mark here with such and such properties, or mark there, we split the universe into a new one, just like a coin toss and Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation. Every decision creates a new world.
My second observation is based on Seth’s statement: “We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside out as the outside in. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call ‘reality’”, or perhaps that when we agree about our hallucinations that is what we call Reason, I would say. But Reason is nothing more than an illusion, a construct of our brain trying to make sense of our-selves and our relation to the world. This is exactly why Reason is impossible to be that which it claims to be, its definition. Reason is not reasonable.
We are also entirely certain that we have, and that we utterly possess the understanding of Self. However, Seth posits that this experience is also hallucination generated by the brain. As neurologists and psychiatrists are already very well aware that these distinct elements of self can break down in all sorts of ways. In the rubber hand experiment, a person’s real hand is hidden from view and a rubber hand is placed in front of them. The real hand and the fake hand are simultaneously stroked using a paintbrush, while the person looks at the fake hand. After a while, for most people, the rubber hand begins to feel like part of your body. “Even our experiences of what our body is, is another kind of ‘best guessing’ by the brain,” Seth says.
We misperceive the world, at all times. We misperceive ourselves. Experiencing PTSD or panic attacks is a real physical experience of brain misperceptions. Fibromyalgia is a constant physical pain, yet it is a complete miss signaling of the nervous system. Our body hallucinates about itself and the world. How can we now use any Reason to make definite statements or actions? The only way to live meaningfully in this nonsensical hallucination we call Self and Reality is to create new realities like Artists do. Anyone who makes a definite statement by the means of Reason to justify their actions, most of the time with destructive consequences, is, as I understand it, on a very premature level of conscious development. Collective hallucinations should never be taken as true Reality, and those that do use the Reason of Conformity to blindly and unquestionably follow the group. The results are usually destruction and atrocities.
We should have learned by now thanks to thermodynamics and quantum physics, that there is nothing in nature that is definite, but it is about relations and probabilities, indeterminism. No purpose, only relations. “We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature,” as Seth states, and we, and our Reason, cannot adhere to different cosmic rules. The Reason fails because it is trying to be impossible, to be definite knowledge, instead of being all the knowledge possible and their relations. Once humanity begins Reasoning this way we just might become human.
In 4th century BCE, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus understood that the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which atoms run. Atoms have no quality apart from their shape.
There is no finality, in this endless dance of atoms. We, just like the rest of nature, are one of the many products of this infinite dance- the product, that is, of accidental combinations. Nature continues to experiment with forms and structures; and we, like the animals, are the product of a selection that is random and accidental, over the course of eons of time. Our life is a combination of atoms, our thoughts are made up of thin atoms, our dreams are products of atoms; our hopes and our emotions are written in a language formed by combinations of atoms; the light that we see is composed of atoms, which brings us images.
Plato and Aristotle rejected Democritus' naturalistic ideas in favor of explaining the world in finalistic terms, believing that everything that happens has a purpose, and understanding nature in terms of good and evil.
Democritus reportedly wrote over 70 treatises, all of which are lost with an exception of a few fragments. What did survive, however, is the works of Aristotle. Aristotle’s thought became a foundation and main building block for the Western thought, tragically. Edicts of Emperor Theodosius declared the brutal anti-pagan repression and that Christianity was to be the only obligatory religion. Closure of schools and destruction of all the texts not in accordance with Christian ideas, was the effect of the edict. Aristotle’s work was accepted while Democritus was destroyed.
In Democritus thought there is no fear of gods, no ends or purposes in the world, no distinction between Earth and heavens, no cosmic hierarchy, only deep love for nature that we are part off, a serene immersion within nature, where all humans, animals plants, clouds are all part of whole without hierarchies; deep and profound universalism. What would the world be like if all of Aristotle’s work was lost and Democritus survived? Had humanity followed Democritus’s thought of atomism, naturalism, universalism, how many divisions, hate, wars, abuse, atrocities would have been prevented? How many lives would have been saved? Thinking that we all are equal parts of the whole means no hate, no fear. Democritus’s luminous and serene meditation on the beauty of the world was destroyed in a name of suffering, violence, and punishments. Unfortunately, we choose to have a hierarchy, punishment, suffering for a reason, everything being defined with a purpose, good and evil, where all happens for a reason. We chose Aristotle. The only outcome of hierarchy is tyranny; hate. This is the biggest tragedy of all humanity that had consequences on billions of lost lives through time, as well as the Earth itself (destruction of nature, climate, etc.).
Lucretius (Roman poet and philosopher, born c. 99 BC), in a spirit of Democritus, writes profoundly about the unity, that we are all made of the same substance as are the stars, and the sea. “To a wise human (the original says man), the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” It is to no surprise that the Catholic Church attempted to stop Lucretius, and in 1516 had prohibited his readings in schools. The reasoning that all structures are hierarchical and adhere to the cause and the affect principles, the punishment for a reason, did not go away, though, and throughout centuries it has only dug itself deeper into the mass-consciousness. This type of reasoning seems to be the only one we humans know of, currently. If only we could reject the Reason and bring Democritus thought back in the name of peace among ourselves and peace with the environment. Thinking fluidly and universally, like Artists, should be the next reform of thought. Our thinking processes should be put in a quantum state.
Thinking means consciously connecting close and far, related and unrelated, experiences and concepts, and creating and understanding the relations between them. Reasoning, however, is a logical thinking which is a very mechanical and rudimentary way of thinking: if A then B. Reason leads to fundamentalism. Thinking goes beyond automatic reason and is a free, encompassing, range of possibilities and their possible relations. Reason is rigid and usually results in misunderstanding of the world. Art uses thinking not reasoning. Artists think of all possible possibilities not just logical conclusions that are anything but logical. Cause and effect is of no use to an Artist as it is left to those that use Functional Reasoning. Functional Reasoning relies on the cause and effect, all happens for a reason, everything must have a reason, A is because of B. Thinking is a process, personal and intimate process. Reasoning is definite and relies on external influences. I Reason about A based on the facts I heard from someone else. Thinking is like an Artist making an art piece, a process through time, while Reasoning is the final definite outcome of it that others see as an art object.
Unlike Zeno, I am not arguing that failure of rigorous logic means that our perceptions are irrational and illusion, but that there are better, more complex, and more efficient ways to analyze the world; by the means of a continuous thinking process where all possibilities are considered and are possible, but some more likely than others. In this state of continuous process conclusive beliefs and opinions are not formed, rather the entire world is comprehended simultaneously, through time – without the time. Quantized thinking, perhaps.
Guitar. What is your first connotation; an object, strings, music, etc. We most likely have a visual image in our head seen from the front. We define it by its function and visualize it simply and most commonly. Cubist Artists would instead break its form so that every possible angle is simultaneously visualized. Moreover, the space of, the space within, and the space around are one and the same. Air is as much a guitar as the wood. Air within it and around it wraps around it, has the shape of it. Air gives guitar its meaning and allows it to have its purposeful existence by enabling the sound waves to travel to our ears. When observing the world Artists think of all possibilities, then choose one that is materialized into a piece via visual language. Artists think (quantized thinking), they do not reason and make beliefs. Some who call themselves Artists do use rigorous logic of the austere Reasoning. As stated, they call themselves Artists, which does not mean that they are. Perhaps this is how we can critique Art and assess its value; by thinking or reasoning.
The world is made of quantum relations; computers and the Internet are quantum based (well, we are pretty close to making them publically available); and I think it just matter of time when the science community will officially announce the proof that our brains are quantum based (many have published promising data). If the world and all in it works according to the quantum principle, why in the world would we not reflect that in our thinking? Our thinking must expand from Functional Reasoning (object-function-cause and the effect) to not only the digital age but to quantum. Until then, humanity will keep being inhuman, violent, and oppressive. Cause and effect Reasoning will cause our destruction. Perhaps overcoming the primitive geocentric understanding of individualized rational self that demands selfish and aggressive attitude of “mine”, and instead understanding self as just a part of the Infosphere revolution (explained in Lason 1) which means that we are all connected, good and bad, and that we exist within a complex network, thus hurting others hurts the system and consequently us. Inforgs instead of individualized-geocentric-self seems more humane.
Reason has cost humanity not only progression but most importantly billions of lives throughout history. I am not criticizing Reason like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, or many other philosophers did; I am stating that all methods of Reasoning: "private", "public", Deductive, Inductive, Analogical, Fallacious, Abductive reasoning, and so on, are all extremely dangerous for the humanity and they hold back intellectually any individual that reasons with Reason. Contradictions and hypocrisy are inevitable consequences of a Reason. Reason modifies Reality into personalized illusions. Reason makes us blind. We use Reason to justify atrocities, immorality, unethical actions, self-pity, destruction personal and global, our failures and blame. Reason is Absurdity
We group people according to some random quality, which we understand to be a rational Reasoning. We then give that group a name; Neanderthals, heathens, barbarians, primitives, etc. (and I can’t even go into the more contemporary labels of racism and religious hate). The name evokes Reason to conclude hate, abhorrence, and justifies violence. We conveniently use reason to empower ourselves. We create a random, yet swimmingly purposeful hierarchy. We use the Geocentric Reason that we are the chosen ones, we are always the “good ones”; we are the ones who can “see”; we are the ones who are “looking up”. Our Ego is made of the Entitled Reasoning, and the more we self-observe ourselves through the Reason more self becomes entitled, and our Ego ever so larger. We can easily Reason why we should be immoral, corrupt, or dishonest, most commonly by blaming and accusing others of the same, or by the “Entitled Reasoning”, we are better than others. So easily are we capable of spinning it around and not only justifying our immorality but assigning it to the others and becoming oblivious to your own wrong doings, rationalizing them as morally appropriate actions. We accuse others of wrongdoing, that in fact, we are doing.
Interestingly enough, the further we Reason further we get from it and our actions become illogical, hypocritical, and deviated. Consequences of this extreme Reasoning are quite evident in law practice and its failure to rule by Reason. Any event, any case may be successfully argued by the means of Reason even if by doing so the result is utterly nonsensical. More we Reason, the farther we are from the Reason. Common sense, or Healthy Reasoning as it is laterally called in some languages, is being ever so more suppressed in modern societies; what we are left with is the Unhealthy Reasoning.
Religious texts contain narratives and instruction describing, encouraging, commanding, and rewarding violent actions by individuals, and groups. Among the violent acts are war, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, murder, rape, genocide, and criminal punishment. Gods are telling their tribes to go and kill people belonging to other tribes, ordering murder of women, children, infants, and sparing virgins so they may be brought back as prizes. Women and slaves must obey their masters, which has and is propagating abuse and racism for thousands of years. The violence is justified in the name of Reason, globally, for thousands of years.
Those atrocities were possible due to the Reason of Conformity. Social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group is an incredibly powerful tool for manipulating individuals and groups for the purpose of having followers. By means of Reasoning leaders manipulate groups into Conformity. Perhaps, once upon the time, conformity made evolutionary sense, but presently it is a dangerous doctrine and almost always results in human casualties. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine, violence, wars, racism, just to name a few. The facts are logically ignored; deviated misinformation is used for the support of the beliefs, all out of the convenience of conformity. It is intellectually incomparably easier to conform to the reason rather than to uniquely think and make individual judgments. Leaders, political and religious, have exploited this method continuously throughout history and currently. Leaders are not to be feared but those that follow them. Leader is one, the followers are by millions.
An experiment was conducted in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif to demonstrate that people conform to group norms. Sherif used the autokinetic effect. A small spot of light was projected onto a screen in a dark room; the light appears to move, even though it is still. When participants were individually tested their estimates on how far the light moved varied considerably, from 20cm to 80cm. The participants were then tested in groups of three. Two people whose estimate of the light movement, when alone, was similar were put in a group with one person whose estimate was very different. Each person in the group had to say aloud how far they thought the light had moved. After numerous trials, the group converged to a common estimate. The person whose estimate of movement was greatly different to the other two in the group conformed to the view of the other two. This showed that people always tend to conform. They tend to come to a group agreement, rather than make individual judgments. A person will look to others for guidance and adopt the group norm. They want to do the right thing, but may lack the appropriate information. Observing others can provide this information, regardless of how incorrect that information may be. This is known as informational conformity.
In the story The Immortal, Borges writes: “I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos combined them differently than I, constructed from them different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives. “
What if we can live in thought, in pure speculation? Borgues, writes about the immortals “In a self-absorption, they scarcely perceived the physical world.” What is this self-absorption that extends beyond self to the universe itself? Can we be absorbed into the construct of the universe and be oblivious to the Ego deviated self-absorption and physical world? This passage most accurately captures what I believe to be Quantum Thinking or Artist way of thinking.
Art speaks the language of immortals. Art speaks the language of no nouns and impersonal verbs, no adjectives, nor tenses, but a constant construct of impressions. Art speaks the language not of objects and/or their use, their properties, but the language of thought. “There is no more complex pleasure than thought.” said Borges. Art has no words, no objects, just thoughts, impressions, with which we all create a construct of all there is, the universe itself, where all thoughts and time collapse into singularity. This is Artists resistance against Geocentric Reasoning and Logic. This is Artist resistance against humanitie’s absurdity.
Lecture #3: Art criticism: Art Failures
If you would create something, you will be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Arthur Koestler
If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
Lyall Watson
Failures:
Art fails when it represents superficial appearances of the physical world.
Art fails when an idea is already known and expected, and is repetitive.
Art fails when it uses known language; when it repeats.
Art fails when it becomes deterministic, unless.
Art fails when it gives all the answers, unless.
Art fails when it is intuitive, unless.
Art fails when it has a singular interpretation, unless.
Art fails when it is popularized.
Art fails when it is concerned with aesthetics only.
Art fails when it is too logical, unless.
Art fails when it reflects an opinion or a belief.
Art fails when it is repetitive, unless.
Art fails when it doesn't provoke awarines.
Art fails when it uses localized symbols.
Art fails when it is not Art.
Art does not fail when it is understood by no one.
Failed science if easy to determine; if truth is not obtained it can not be science. Measure of truth is Sigma. Five-sigma event (5σ) signifies a finding that is exceptionally statistically significant, meaning it's highly unlikely to be due to random chance. It corresponds to a probability of approximately 1 in 1.7 million that the observed result is a statistical fluctuation rather than a genuine effect. But how to determine Art failure where truth is superfluous. First understand what Art is. I purposely say “understand” rather than “know” or “determined” as Art definition is to be understood not summarized in a one sentence long definition. Simply, if something is Art then obviously it has succeeded to be an Art. If something has failed to be an Art then it is not Art to begin with.
Sometimes when we attempt to talk about Art we sound pretentious or even nonsensical as the above sentence may demonstrate. I believe that this is due to our structural linear reasoning and “cause and effect” thinking processes that were covered in Lecture 2. Thinking comprehensively with emotions and holistically like Borgues’s Immortals is the only way to understand the complexity and ubiquitousness of Art. Art speaks the language of Immortals and it is no surprise that Art is timeless and immortal. Cave art is as strong and powerful as the day it was made. Art language is not pretentious nonsense but timeless language of all there is all at once.
Following is a wonderful language of the Mortal one:
“Any young person who has studied Heidegger; or seen Ionesco's 'plays'; or listened to the 'music' of John Cage; or looked at Andy Warhol's 'paintings'- has experienced that feeling of incredulous puzzlement: But this is nonsense! Can I really be expected to take this seriously? In fact, of course, it is necessary for it to be nonsense; if it made sense, it could be evaluated. The essence of modern intellectual snobbery is the 'emperor's new cloths' approach. Teachers, critics, our self-appointed intellectual elite, make it quite clear to us that if we cannot see the superlative nature of this 'art'- why, it merely shows our ignorance, our lack of sophistication and insight. Of course, they go beyond the storybook emperor's tailors, who dressed their victim in nothing and called it fine garments. The modern tailors dress the emperor in garbage.” Ron Merrill
Does Art fail if it doesn’t speak the language of Mortals? Nonsense lasts only as long as there is no one to make sense of it. Individual lack of comprehension does not mean universal nonsense but failure of one’s rigid reasoning.
Questions:
Should we have Art History of Failed Art and what would be included in such history?
What is the importance of skill?
Should there be a theory that there should be no theory?
What is the role of seriousness in Art, like political or religious art?
What is the acceptable level of ambition? Can Art be proclaimed successful if it is effortless and requires minimum work effort?
Is Art of professional Sunday painters, portraiture, tourist, and hotel Art, Art?
Art of celebrities: Bush, Kim Gordon, Maurizio Cattelan, Hunter Biden, Jim Carrey?
How to paint books and how to draw a figure, are they teaching Art or Art mimicry?
Unoriginality of the group mentality: Are Social realism (Russian and Chinese), fifth generation of abstract expressionism, and eighth generation surrealism successful influencers and followers? Is Regionalism culturalism? Can Regional Art be Art or is it a trend following.
Is social media Art influencers and Art tutorial, Art? Do the number of followers determine the quality of Art?
Missing label: Can Art be successful if the meaning is undefined or unknown?
Can an Art piece have too much aesthetics or not enough?
Does lack of style result in Art failure? Is Duchamp and Picasso’s lack of style as style an Artistic failure?
Do good Artists get tired and repeat?
Art
Artists are committed to uncovering that which is hidden from our apparent view. Our senses are dreadfully limiting at its best. The only tool that is available to us is our intellect, with which we are to understand the world beyond Plato's cave without ever leaving it. Art goes beyond reason, using its own language to explore and redraw the world, explore our relationship to the world, and make sense of it. More we are aware of, the more we know, and the larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality.
Art does not show us a mistaken understanding of the world, a subjective opinion, as some may perceive it to be, instead it shows us the way our human understanding of the world is being constructed. Art has nothing to do with craft or talent, but it is entirely a thinking process.
How do Artists represent this not apparent yet ample reality through thinking processes and not craft? Can Art help us decipher the world and our relation to it? What is the true nature of reality and are the Art processes capable of analyzing and decoding that same world?
Does Art fail if it does say nothing new about the world?
How do we determine the value of an Art piece and its level of failure?
By applying the information theory, I would suggest. If we take information to be physical and the fundamental bit unit of our reality, as Information Theory predicts, we can explain Art this way as well, maybe. We can determine the value of Art simply by determining How probable an art piece really is, which determines its information content, and its quality. The Ancient Greeks suggested that the information content of an event depends only on how probable this event really is. Aristotle argued that the more surprised we are by an event the more information the event carries. This means that information is inversely proportional to probability, meaning events with smaller probability carry more information. In case that an art piece is probable, let's say pure aesthetics, it then does not have much, if any, information content. Let's say realistic painting of a regular cat, not Schrödinger’s, (no mystery if it is dead or alive but a nice fluffy cat) the piece is 9 probable, we know what it is, how it is done, and it is not saying anything new about the cat, therefore, information content is low, if any, the probability contact is higher, and the piece has low or no artistic value. The painting is an Artist’s impression and copy of a superficial appearance of an object, or predictable aesthetics, and no more, it is agreed upon reality without offering us new ways of seeing it. In contrast, Rachel Whiteread’s work or Man Ray’s The Gift is unexpected and consists of a high level of information content, meaning it is a high value Art. This view I adopt from two of the most brilliant minds, Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the University of Oxford, and Claude Shannon an engineer and "the father of information theory". After all, physicists and engineers are artists who are very good at math.
The unit of information is the bit, a digit whose value is either zero or one. Shannon’s principal idea is that unlikely messages should be encoded with many zeros and ones; frequent messages should be given a short code. How many zeros and ones should Duchamp’s Fountain have in its encoding?
Claude Shannon: “Content is irrelevant. Point of sending the message is to remove the uncertainty, something you didn't know, now you know.”
In Art, however, content creates certainty or uncertainty, the entropy level. Point of an Art piece is to have as much uncertainty as possible, higher entropy, and the more possible outcomes or states an Art piece can have. This results in more information hence more quality.
Lecture #4: Consciousness: Who Needs It
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What could it be?) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system.Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
John R. Searle
Does the Universe have consciousness, panpsychism?
Bernardo Kastrup: analytic idealism that claims that phenomenal consciousness is the primary substrate of existence, with individual minds representing dissociated segments of a universal consciousness.
Is my consciousness mine or subpart of some more complex universal consciousness of ALL?
Is my consciousness an assembly of smaller parts? What if every cell and every particle has consciousness and I am just an assembly of all the conscious bits?
Bicycle will never be able to know its purpose nor why it is rolling. Just the same, perhaps we will never be able to understand our purpose by using our limited consciousness but higher, more complex consciousness is needed.
Why do we do what we do? Are we just programmed AI by our experiences and our physiology?
Is the Universe a Math construct (Max Tegmark) or Art project?
I will leave to philosophers and neurologists to discuss the nature and the origins of consciousness with the exception of mentioning a few. I will however give a few examples of ideas that are on par with Artists creativity and freedom of thinking. In fact Artists have a reputation of nonsensical useless thoughts that are as far removed from Reality as it is ever possible. There are few scientific theories and thought experiments that successfully manage to astound even the most creative Artists. Those theories challenge our human reasoning and accepted perceptions and are extremely valuable for learning how to think as Artist and how far the mind can expand its reasoning.
Art Critique:
Sometimes, only sometimes, my views of Art are a bit more disheartened than usual. Artists make Art for Earth’s humanity and never do we consider all there is in the Universe. Physicists, however, don't limit themselves to this Universe but consider infinite universes.
Consider the creativity and innovation of the ideas such as those of Boltzmann Brain, Hilbert Space, Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe, and Everett’s Many Worlds, just to mention a few. Can anything analogous be found in the Art world that would come even close to the revolutionary ideas of Boltzman, Hilbert, Maxwell, Tegmark, and Everett. Artists are defined by their creativity, yet in comparison with physicists many of us artists are not doing all too well. The primary concern of physicists is the universe as a whole, from minuscule particles to the infinite universes, with complete disregard to the public acceptance. Artists, however, are concerned with immediate public outreach and pleasing reaction of the general public. The concepts in Art, regardless how revolutionary they may have been, make us aware of things-in-the-world. These things-in-the-world already exist in an obvious way i.e. social issues, understanding of experienced physical space, use of materials, psychological states, emotions, visual spectrum, just to name some. We Artists learn and then teach our students how to use very primitive tools to mimic our observations and how to observe and see the appearances of the things-in-the-world. But what we see is infinitely shortsighted. In the past Artists copied superficial appearances of the objects of the still-lives with their stone tools creating aesthetic decorations. Presently, Artists copy news, information, or anything else from their close proximity creating an aesthetical mimicry of the obvious and the shared experiences. Duchamp and DADA may have revolutionized Art thinking perhaps more than anyone before or since. However, have we changed much at all? Perhaps we moved from seeing only an inch in front of us in Plato's cave, to maybe turning our heads left and right seeing perhaps what is next to us. But the Art world is still extremely far from turning around and walking out of the cave. Art needs a major reformation. Kosuth implied that artists must invent new languages. Perhaps we need to reinvent art in its entirety. Art always represents some-thing or an idea. But those ideas are obvious and limited to direct observations, just like Kosuth’s chair or Duchamp’s urinal. With our Art we mimic direct observers from our close proximity, and then we talk to Art institutions and the general public. Just like the rejection of the Copenhagen Interpretation got rid of the observer, which opened the door to the many universes, Art should also get rid of the observer.
But, how is this to be done when the observer in most cases makes the Art piece? If we are to get rid of an observer, are we getting rid of the fundamental identity of Art.
What would happen if instead of observing only our small planet and making Art only for humans in present time, we consider making Art infinite time and space, and any possible consciousness. What would Art look like to an Alien consciousness and what would it mean to them? What if Artists can obliterate an observer, including themselves? Can Art be rid of an observer fully or it has to have at least one, the Artist themself? What if we can take in consideration not the single event or observation from recent history or present, not the whole planet, but the whole infinite universes, micro and macro scales? What kind of Art would that be? What does art mean to an artist personally? What are we as Artists in search of? What if we stop making Art on a human scale but the Universe scale?
Is it time to turn around and walk out of the Art cave?
Art, currently, is obeying Newton’s law of direct observation. We are at least 400 years behind science. Art is still in its geocentric state of shortsightedness and it must escape it.
Imagination is infinite. Ideas are infinite. Perception is limited but searching mind is infinite. Art is made of ideas, thus its creations absolutely cannot be limited. Art may be a portal to any universe including those created by the artist, and to those places that are something completely other than the Universe. Art currently is an object that contains and/or provokes an idea within an observer. Performance, 4D, Process based art, and all the other versions of it, still exist in time and space, and the reason for their existence is some kind of a message that is communicated to an audience.
Now, how can Art be involved and contribute to the understanding of reality? Well, Art has no cognitive or medium limitations. Science must adhere to the laws of physics or math. The new rules may arise from the existing, which is common occurrence, (i.e. Newton-Relativity-Quantum, Euclidean geometry-Non Euclidean geometry, etc.), but it still must follow the math. Art is completely and infinitely free in thinking and doesn’t have to adhere to absolutely any particular laws. This is the power of art. Artists could be Gods, Creators, who are creating new universes. Ideas are infinite and Art should not be finite but just as infinite. Unfortunately, artists have not utilized this amazing ability fully. Art can create new laws. Art can combine all the existing laws. Art can combine and create new laws. Artists can combine theory of music, biology, mathematics, thermodynamics, sculpture, anthropology, astrophysics, emotions, psychology, and quantum physics, all the ideas, all the theories into one ultimately simple one. Mathematicians see all as a function of math. Physicists see all through laws of physics. Artists could see reality through All the information at once. Artist view is the ubiquitous one. Imagine the universe explained through the ultimate understanding of all. Art and Artist have been ridiculed, and under appreciated justifiably so. It is time to use the power of Art reasoning and finely do something with it. Art doesn’t have to discover the universe but it just might be able to represent it, understand it, and/or coexist with it. Artists could have the idea that would change the way we think and perceive as humans. With their ideas Artists can find questions. The ultimate goal of an art piece is completely different from that of a scientist. Art piece just has to be.
Education
In Art schools we teach tools and craft of making art objects, ideas as the primary and only venue of an art piece, or combination of both to various degrees. In order for Art to get out of its Dark Ages existence we must start with changing our education curriculum. If you can use materials that are only two meters around you to build a house, no matter how creative of a person you may happen to be, it will not be great. But, if you were to have no limits to how far you go to find materials you are bound to create a magnificent house. Artists should, like Chemists, discover and create new materials. Scientists have no limitations in how far they would go in search of their ideas. Artists, however, look no further than a few meters away for their ideas. Art education must address these limitations.
Art should learn how to truly observe the world around and things in the world, how to observe the world deeply and not to be casual observers.
As I was passing by a tree leaf caught my sight. The tree was bare due to the winter coldness, with only a few leaves still stubbornly still holding on. As I was walking I observed one particular leaf. At any given point in time that leaf, even though not moving at all, appeared to be moving for me as an observer because I was the one moving through space and time. The leaf looked different, and was in a different spot at any given moment (just look at the space around or behind it and the obvious will reveal itself) not because it was moving or it was in different spots in space but because I was moving through time so it appeared to me as an observer as if the leaf was changing. Leaf always is, but the observer is the one changing through space-time. This was a beautiful simple observation that perhaps may be explained through math language and quantum physics. The world with its beautiful structure constantly is revealing itself but only to those that decide to look. As great physicist Dr. Warner would call “Casual Observers” versus those who observe the world deeply. Artists are anything but Casual Observers, perhaps they just need to be reminded of it.
Portrait of Humanity:
State of Humanity; Anthropocene, Divisions and Unity; Worldwide knowledge and lack of it; Atrocities and Humanitarians, Human Conflicts and Aggression, Intrinsic nature of Humanity, Humans place on the large scale. These are some of the discourse topics the class will cover. Artwork created in class will reflect upon the current state of humanity and its effects on the future. Each topic will be supported by extensive research and facts (scientific research in philosophy, psychology, neurology, and physics), history, and examples through art history and contemporary art.
In a Search of:
There are 64,000 Google searches per second, 228 million searches per hour, 5.6 billion searches per day, and 2 trillion searches per year. Questions we ask, our searches, reflect ourselves. Is our Google history our self-portrait? What is the cultural self-portrait? What is Google’s collective epistemological reasoning, versus individual?
Curiosity and questioning the world is what makes us human. Knowledge we decide to seek defines us. Can we search for the same questions as many before us but find our own answers that are revolutionary?
Consciousness:
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian mathematician and theoretical physicist who came up with “The Boltzmann Brain Paradox”, a thought experiment in cosmology and philosophy that questions the nature of reality and the possibility of our existence. The Boltzmann brain suggests that it might be more likely for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a memory of having existed in the Universe, rather than for the entire Universe to come about in the manner we think it actually did. Over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations could cause particles to spontaneously form literally any structure of any degree of complexity, including a functioning human brain.
Boltzmann brains are used to test our assumptions about thermodynamics and the development of the universe. The scenario initially involved only a single brain with false memories, but the scenario works just as well at larger scales, like that of entire bodies or galaxies, etc.
Boltzmann argues that, while most of the universe is featureless, humans do not see those regions because they are devoid of intelligent life.
Hard Problem of Consciousness:
“David John Chalmers: The "hard problem of consciousness" refers to the difficulty in explaining how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences, such as feelings, sensations, and the "what it's like" aspect of awareness. It contrasts with the "easy problem," which focuses on understanding how brain processes lead to specific behaviors or information processing.”
How can one ever know oneself? Consciousness would have to observe itself through itself. Even self-physicality is an impossibility. We have an idea how we look physically, in a moment, never at all the angles at all times. Strangers know better how you look than yourself. Mirror helps but it does not give us a whole picture. We attempt to research, experiment, philosophy, etc. about what consciousness is by using the very same consciousness we are trying to understand. Perhaps it is all reflection. We reflect our consciousness against any experience, any thought, opinion, analyzing it like an image in a mirror. Highly inaccurate image.
Jean-Paul Sartre:
For Jean-Paul Sartre, consciousness is not a static entity but a dynamic process, always directed towards something, and always aware of itself. He argues that consciousness is fundamentally intentional, meaning it is always consciousness of something, whether that be a physical object, a person, or even an idea. Furthermore, Sartre asserts that consciousness is self-conscious, meaning it is not only aware of objects, but also aware of itself as the subject of awareness.
George Berkeley:
Barklie’s woods: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?," Berkeley's idealism: Berkeley argued that things only exist when they are perceived, meaning if no one is there to hear the sound, the tree falling doesn't make a sound because there's no conscious mind to perceive it.
Unconsciousness:
Spinoza's philosophy is rooted in panpsychism, the idea that all things have some form of mind or consciousness. This makes it difficult to draw a clear line between human consciousness and the consciousness of other things, including those we might consider unconscious. Spinoza distinguishes between adequate and inadequate ideas. Adequate ideas are clear and distinct, while inadequate ideas are vague and confused. He argues that actions arise from adequate ideas, while passions depend on inadequate ideas.
David Hilbert
Hilbert Space is a way to mathematically describe the state of a quantum system. It is a generalization of Euclidean space, allowing for infinite dimensions and the description of quantum wave functions. Hilbert space is a framework for understanding quantum mechanics and the nature of Reality, meaning that Hilbert space serves as the "space" where quantum states, or "wave functions," live.
Can an Art piece exist in a Hilbert Space state with all the possible possibilities all at once? If so Would our primitive consciousness be able to comprehend it? Does that even matter? Do we even need to have Berkeley’s conscious observer or the quantum observer that can influence the outcome and behaviour of a system, or do we all together get rid of an observer’s consciousness in Hilbert-based Art?
Lecture #5: Reality of a Box
What is space? What is the space of, versus space around, versus space beyond?
Does space exist?
What is the edge of space?
Is there an edge or is it just another space?
What is the nature of known reality and that of the unknown reality?
My references to science may have been taken a bit literary or misunderstood in a way I would like to disassociate myself from. I am not claiming that particular scientific theories must be understood by Artists, nor that one is better than the other, but simply that we are all in the business of trying to figure out the world around us and that fundamentally our ways of thinking are very similar, if not the same. Only by blurring, and I hesitate in my optimism hence not saying erasing, the strict border between Art and Science the progression is possible in either field.
Art and Science may use different language but essentially are the same in their attempt to explain the world. Both pursue the same questions and while scientific life is devoted to discovery and profs, Artists life is devoted to discovery and understanding. In the lab full of metal and liquid helium, scientists set up experiments to test the question and confirm the answers, while Artists, in a studio filled with carbon (pencils) and paper, set up an Art process to experience the questions and understand the answers. Both Art and Science question the world; they bring new thoughts to the world, and re-contextualize preconceived ideas and views.
Art and Science require the same fundamental way of thinking, of connecting things-believes-ideas that are not connectable. They see relations within concepts that are not commonly perceived. The difference is in name and in name only. Once we label anything we create a divide. Irreparable divide at this time and age. Art is put in its box labeled Art and Science is its own labeled box. Content of the box can not be mixed by any means and if that accidentally happens an outrage breaks out. Art content is furious at science and vice versa. One putting down the other. Labels would do that. But in both cases it is shortsightedness and instinctual hostility. We should be above it. It sounds a bit ridiculous that bikerring and people shouting offends at each other from their respective caves while drowning in the self imposed stereotypes.
Humanity’s progression is possible only if we walk out of our labeled caves and start communicating with each other. Our thinking is the same but Artists see connections that Scientists are not accustomed to just the same is the other way around. Artists should analyze the train of thought any scientist has as it is the identical process to how Artists should and doreason.The only difference is language.
Erwin Schrodinger writes in What is Life? that we have inherited, throughout centuries, the unified, universal, all-embracing knowledge, which is the only one with full credit, however, the depth of knowledge has forced us to branch into specialized limited and narrow focus. Perhaps it is time to go back and attempt to unify some of the knowledge that will give us a more comprehensive view of Reality. Patrick Cavanagh, a co-founded the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, and leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, recognizes that Art is a 40,000-year 1 record of experiments in visual neuroscience that reveals as much about the human brain as it reveals about the world around. Roberto Zenith, researcher in fluid dynamics and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, have extensively studied David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock’s painting process realizes similarities between the paint technique to flow phenomena in other areas, which have helped explain formation of lava domes on Venus, and the Great Kavir salt desert in Iran.
If we, the Artists, have responsibility to present the reality, shouldn’t we also have a responsibility to understand that same reality. Impressions are illusionary bolives, realism is a superficial mimicry, yet understanding something due to scientific evidence is somehow morally wrong. I certainly would like to get as much information about the Box, an object, before I attempt to represent it within the visual language, may that be a simple impression or atomic structure of it.
Posable view: An object did not exist until I became aware of it, until my interaction with it. (Barklie’s woods: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?,") Or as Rovelli explains: a football game does not exist until the players get together, start interacting and only then do we have a football game. Once the relation or interaction is established, this is the moment an object, or an event just the same, has come to an existence. This is not due to consciousness but interaction. We create our own universe every miniscule moment we happen to be interacting with it. Perhaps Boltsman was correct in believing in the multiverse where every event splits the existing universe into all the possibilities of that event. An event may have happened somewhere at some point but for me it was nonexistent until I intengle myself with, which became the perceptual construct of reality.
When interpreting with an object, an Art object, the Artist must present their relation to the object's information because the Artist has given an object its existence in a moment of an awareness and it is this awareness, this interaction, that should be presented. Creation is a documentation of the event interactions.
An identity of a Box is only as such in a moment of observation and is like so because of its relation to the world around. Observe a box, now move it to the other side of the room. Every time it is moved and it interacts with another set of things-in-the-world it assumes a different appearance and identity. Traditional Artists know this all too well. We are different people when interacting with different people and in different situations. World is in constant change and interactions modify it. Not being aware of it but believing in the permanent identity of a box or self, is as if life is seen in a snapshot picture without continuity, instead of an ever changing movie where each picture is invisible, insignificant yet crucially important contributor to the overall understanding of life. Strong opinions and rigid views some hold so dearly are shortsighted picture observers who are missing seeing the whole picture of a life movie.
Is the Reality that we see around us just made up from the random collection of unrelated rules and events or is there a common underlying thread from which these all derive? Why is there a Reality in the first place? What is Reality? In order to understand anything we must break down our observations, decode the bits and intricate connections existing between them, and only then use this information to reconstruct a better and more understanding picture of Reality. How are we as Artists to question Reality and our perceptions? Art breaks down the observed and reconstructs it. Art links different aspects of reality and attempts to understand the Reality. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a perfect example of questioning the realness of the reality and connotation and denotation of the perceived. If we think of a chair, what is the first thought that comes to our mind? Do we envision a chair as a 3D object in space? What material is it? Is it just the meaning of the word chair that we see? We can continue asking numerous questions and each of us will have a different answer. So, what is a chair? This is exactly what Plato’s Theory of Forms is asserting. The physical reality that we experience as real is imperfect and changing. What is a Chair if we all connote a different chair in our mind? Even if we do agree on a Chair, that same chair is changing, physically, through time. What is the ultimate chair? What is a true blue or any other entity that is in the world? If we cannot agree on a physical reality how are we to agree with concepts and ideas? This is a world of shadows as Plato stated. According to Plato the true reality is in a Realm of Forms. This is the world of ideas, ideals, and abstraction. This is the world where concepts live. This reality of true Forms is perfect and unchanging. It exceeds time and space and as such they are more real than the physical reality of temporary shadows. Just like Kosuth’s Chair, there is a chair that belongs to the physical reality; imperfect, changing and one of many other interpretations of a chair, a shadow. The two dimensional image of a chair is a simple connotation of a Chair. And finally, the dictionary explanation of the word Chair is a denotation of it, a concept, an abstraction, a Realm of Forms.
What is to be taken from Kosuth and Plato is that our perceptions of a physical reality are not true reality, or at least not a complete reality. Just like in Plato’s Allegory of a Cave, our physical perceptual reality is a shadowy illusion and should not be blindly trusted. If we apply what we know of a physical world to our cognitive perceptions instead of simply relying on a sensory perception, the world becomes much bigger. Perhaps that is what Plato envisioned with his image of walking out of the cave.
Simply think about what color is. Think of photons and Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR). We can visually perceive only a tiny part of the entire spectrum, 400-700 nm, the rest we know of but cannot perceive (I guess we are out of Plato's cave now). Radio and TV waves, infrared Rays, ultra violet, x-rays, gamma rays, and secondary cosmic rays, all of those frequencies, frequency of 3 × 1026 Hz to 3 ×103 Hz, or wavelengths 10-18 m to 100 km, and we can only perceive a minuscule part of it. That tiny part that we do perceive is our prerogative for what reality is. It appears to me that we see less than if we were chained facing the wall in Plato’s cave. Picture all the frequencies waving around, rushing through things, reflecting, bouncing off, piercing, and being absorbed. Picture neutrinos, right now, going through our bodies, going through objects with the speed of light not even the slightest being disturbed by the solidity of “real things”. Picture the vast empty space of all matter around yourself including yourself. Not only are the visuals astonishing, but the knowledge has allowed us to see more of the reality. The world is made of light. We are fundamentally all the same part of Nature, our bodies and our desk. Painting that reality with knowledge, where space is waving with speed of light photons, and not only the visible color, but all frequencies and energies, in the space within the objects, in space around objects, where time and space just is, well that would be as close as one can get to Plato’s World of ideal forms. This view makes us comprehend the oneness with all. We can comprehend and feel the Reality. This is a power of Art, we can perceive, feel, and perhaps even understand with our mind and not only our eyes. It is a prerogative to understand things in reality. Limited knowledge and perceptions result in limited reality and we should question if it is reality at all or a Platonian world of shadows and illusion. Knowledge gives us power to see and go beyond the realm of shadows and out of the cave.
What we perceive and what we call physical reality is no more than the cave wall an inch away from our faces, which, as real as it feels, is in its best an extremely reduced and deviated perception of reality. With our faces so close to the wall, seeing only the shadows made by the fire behind us, and not having any knowledge whatsoever of the reality of fire, cave, and chains, we would, understandably so, create our own fictional explanations of what the experienced reality is. Evidently, this is a part of human history and the present, we just have to look at the politics, conspiracy theories, religion, cults, etc. We are experiencing it therefore it is our Reality, except it has nothing to do with the Reality.
Now, let's say we do the hard work and we turn our heads and learn the state in which we are, the state of our universe. Our reality will expand and change. Knowledge helps us see, understand the state of our being and ultimately Be in Reality. Currently all that is known in the Universe, neutrons, protons, and electrons that make up everything we can see accounts for only about 4% of the mass and energy of the Universe. About 70% of the Universe is what is dark energy; about 26% is dark matter, and we still don’t know exactly what this 96% is. All that humanity has ever discovered and learned accounts for 4% of the Universe. We know about the fire and we know that there is something else beyond the cave but we cannot explain what that 96% is. There is 96% that we know that we do not know. How much more is there that we do not know that we do not know? Will we ever get out of the cave?
Knowing the unknown is incomparably much more real than not knowing at all.
Physical Reality, Mind–independent Reality, Reality of Meaning and Knowledge:
Is Physical Reality, the experienced reality, the only real reality? What about Mind-independent Reality? Just because 100 years ago we did not know of the existence of Dark Matter it doesn’t mean that it did not exist. Obviously the galaxies held together then just as well as today. Earth keeps spinning, with no interruption, for dinosaurs, flat-earth-bolivars, as well as for those who have basic knowledge in astronomy and physics. How many more things hold our Reality together yet there is no consciousness to perceive it. Reality is mind-independent yet no less real.
We know that quantum mechanics works. We know it because we use it, daily, in our gadgets. We know it is somewhat hard to wrap our minds around it. The double slit experiment is fascinatingly simple in its construction, nonetheless massively challenges our logical reasoning. It clearly implies that tiny objects can be perceived as being in 2 places at the same time, or do they? We know that it is not an atom that is a fundamental building block of all there is – but the fields. It is the fields’ information invisibly shared between fundamental building blocks through interactions.
We relay and base all of humanity's reasoning, from the very beginning, on logic. What if we didn’t think logically? What if we don’t just deduce and conclude? What if there are exoplanets where reasoning doesn’t adhere to the rules of logic? What if we can collectively reason on new beyond-logical principles? Perhaps like an octopus who has practically nine brains, a central brain located between its eyes, and a mini-brain in each of its eight arms. This decentralized nervous system allows each arm to act relatively independently. Now, what would decentralized logic look like in highly developed brains? How much would our perceptions of Reality expand, or not? Can something other than logical reasoning even exist? If it does, would our neurology be able to recognize it? The trained mind of an Artist might have a better chance than the rest in recognizing this new different way of thinking and perhaps expand our world of perceptions.
Once again, what is the reality of a Box? Is there something more than how we see it? Something more than how we see a snapshot of the superficial appearance in a fraction of a time bit?
I have mentioned in Lecture 4 the Hilbert space; the description of quantum wave functions and all the possible spaces existing all at once. What does a Box look like in the Hilbert Space? How to paint a Box in a Hilbert Space state?
What is inside an empty Box? What is the space of nothingness?
Hydrogen atoms are 99.9999999999996% empty space. In order to comprehend the amount of emptiness, imagine if an atom was the size of the large stadium the nucleus would be about the size of a ping pong ball, and electrons would be bits of dust floating somewhere around the stands. Why then do solid objects feel solid? How come we do not fall through the chair or walk through the walls? When two atoms come in contact they do not physically touch, obviously considering they are all made of empty space, however they have forces, electromagnetic force specifically. It is due to the electromagnetic field that we fail to walk through the walls and each other. When a large star collapses at the end of its life with such a strong gravitational field it merges all of its atoms together living behind only neutrons without empty space, neutron star. Neutron stars are so dense that 20km of a neutron star is about as heavy as 1.5 times our solar system. Super massive stars collapse into a black hole. 1cm of a black hole weighs more than Earth. But we know that empty space does not exist. Vacuum is not emptiness but filled with bubbling Quantum field fluctuations.
Prof. Derek Leinweber, University of Adelaide, created an astonishing simulation video of Quantum Field Fluctuations.
What is the color of a Box? We say blue so we paint the whole box blue. Well not quite. In ancient Greece the sky was not blue but bronze. In fact they didn’t even have a word for blue. They did however have a word that describes intensity of light and dark (glaukos and kyanos). Homer mansions only four colors in Iliad and Odyssey: black, white, greenish yellow, and purple red. Sky is bronze as it is dazzlingly bright like a shield. Wine, the sea, and sheep are all, purple red color. NASA’s Mars rover in 2006 is designed to read the color the same way as ancient Greeks. The objects were grouped by property rather than actual color, i.e. yellow or light green ment fluid, fresh, and living. In Papua New Guinea many languages have only a word for black and white and no other color. Classical Welsh has no word for brown, gray, blue or green. So what color do you see depends on your language and cultural reasoning of how the objects’ properties are prioritized.
The Box is not the way it is because it IS, but because it is in context and relation to all there is in the universe.
Lecture #6: Seeing or Observing
… originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.
Richard V. Clemence
Can a stable house ever be built from damaged fragmented bricks? Possibly, but this new problem has to have a different and novel approach. Bricks would have to be assembled in a new way and we would be forced by the problem to discover a never before solution resulting in advancement. We don’t need to change the bricks but change the concept of what a house is; what the brick is; and the building approach. Our understanding of the Universe is not complete and we are trying to fit all the fragmented pieces into the image we are familiar with. Take all of the pieces and make a new image of the Universe.
Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by David Hilbert (German mathematician) in 1900, at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on August 8 at the Sorbonne (10 problems at that time). They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. The complete list of 23 problems was published later, in English translation in 1902. Problem 8, 13, and 16 are still unresolved. To combine known things-in-the-world in new combinations is admirable, but it does not even come close to the rare insight of some people to see and know that which is unknown. Solving hard puzzles is great, creating a puzzle is amazing, but creating the unsolvable puzzle is a job for “gods” of intellect.
In some cases, in Art and in Science, we must create different approaches to test the same problem to confirm the result.
Fundamentals
The following might be refiring a bit too much to science, however, our understanding of Reality can not be based on seeing and believing but analytical observations. Science shows us the not intuitive, proven, fundamentals of Reality. Art and Science tells us that shadoves in front of us that we so obviously see in our everyday experiences within our Platonian cave, are not real and that our reality is way more complex. We should be familiar with the proven nature of things in the universe so that we as Artists can observe it and properly see.
Ephemeral information is a manifestation, and an effect, of the a-priori information, it is our interpretation of the Reality. It is a superficial interpretation of Reality, a made up one, based on our beliefs and personal impressions. A-priori information on the other hand is the most fundamental and integral part of Nature.
In 1801 Thomas Young performed the Double Slit Experiment in order to demonstrate the wave-particle duality of matter and light, showcasing how they can exhibit both wave-like and particle-like behavior. If light passes through two parallel slits a characteristic pattern of light and dark patches show on a screen positioned behind the slit.
When the light goes through the screen and passes through the slits light spreads out and refracts. As the wave passes through both slits, it splits into two new waves, each spreading out from one of the slits. These two waves then interfere with each other. Where a peak meets a trough, they will cancel each other out. And where peak meets peak, they will reinforce each other. Places where the waves reinforce each other give the brightest light. When the light meets a second wall placed behind the first, you will see a stripy pattern, called an interference pattern. The bright stripes come from the waves reinforcing each other.
If one of the slits is blocked off for the moment we will find that some of the electrons will pass through the open slit and strike the second wall just as pebbles would: the spots they arrive at form a strip roughly the same shape as the slit.
If the second slit is open we would expect two rectangular strips on the second wall, but what you actually see is very different: the spots where electrons hit build up to replicate the interference pattern from a wave. The interference pattern remains even when you fire the electrons one by one, so that they have no chance of interfering. Strangely, each individual electron contributes one dot to an overall pattern that looks like the interference pattern of a wave after sufficient number of electrons have hit the screen. Can electrons somehow split? Similarly, Roman Ondák’s piece Measuring the Universe, results in the same interference pattern.
(The image of the interference pattern of an electron is identical to a random mark making on a drawing, which always results in a pattern)
If a detector is installed by the slits to see which slit an electron passes through, the pattern on the detector screen turns into the particle pattern of two strips. The interference pattern disappears. Somehow, the very act of looking makes sure that the electrons travel like well-behaved little pebbles.
The experiment suggests that particles, such as electrons, somehow combine characteristics of particles and characteristics of waves. It also suggests that the act of “observing”, of measuring a quantum system, has a profound effect on the system. In Art we may observe similar phenomena. An art piece has multiple characteristics, however, the observer, the act of observing has a profound effect on the art piece assigning only specific characteristics to it.
Classical physics argues that if we knew properties for all the particles in the Universe, we would determine the outcome of any future event. Universe is deterministic. Quantum physics, however, explains the Universe through the probabilities. Through the Indeterministic relations the deterministic universe comes to be. As Artists we are quite familiar that using a sufficient number of random marks always results in deterministic patterns or representational forms.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, first posed by physicist Niels Bohr in 1920, a quantum particle doesn't exist in a particular state but has a probability to be in all states at the same time. We do not measure one state or another, but we can calculate a probability that the particle is where it is at. This state of existence in all possible states at once is called coherent superposition. The object's wave function is the total of all possible states in which an object can exist. When we observe an object, the superposition “collapses” and the object is forced into one of the states of its wave function. The act of quantum measurement, popularly known as a ``collapse of the wave function’’, was mathematically proven by Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.
On the other hand there is The Many-Worlds theory of quantum mechanics, which supposes that each possible outcome of quantum measurements is physically realized in some "world" or universe, and the universe splits to accommodate each one. This theory takes the observer out of the equation. No longer are we able to influence the outcome of an event simply by observing it, as is stated by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Many-worlds theory is also called the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Many-worlds are explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence, which has been widely explored and developed since the 1970s. The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many universes, perhaps infinitely many, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized.
The tossed coin has two possible outcomes. In reality it will land on tails or heads because we as observers have collapsed the wave function and forced it into only one of the possibilities, according to the Copenhagen interpretation. According to Everett, however, as soon as the coin is tossed all the possibilities do happen, the coin does land on heads and tails simultaneously but in the different worlds, we just happen to be conscious of this particular one. Every time a decision is made or an event happens the world splits in different realities as so do we.
Just 200 years ago we would miserably fail in convincing anyone that Earth is spinning at a speed of 460 meters per second, or roughly 1,000 miles per hour. They might even have an experimental proof by tossing an object in the air. If the Earth was spinning the object would not fall straight down. But now we know better. We presently have a hard time comprehending Everett's many-worlds idea, perhaps, because we experience this reality as the only reality. Just like 200 years ago we wouldn’t believe that the Earth is spinning because we don’t feel it, we might have a hard time comprehending the idea of the infinite number of universes because we don’t feel it. Now, to be clear I personally have a difficulty with Everett’s interpretation not because it is not intuitive but because experimentally it is far from being proven, if ever. What I do admire though is the creativity and boldness in reasoning outside of the Platonian cave where the rest of us dwell .
What does this say about our direct experiences and the Reality? What is Reality? Is there realness to Reality or just perceptions? What is the implication of all this in Arts? What is an observation? Does an observer collapse all the possibilities of an art piece simply by observing it? Does Art go beyond tactile direct experiences? Should traditional Art education include reasoning that exceeds representing direct experiences of the physical world? Should Art education include the facts of what Reality truly is, on its most fundamental level? Could we, as artists, go beyond quantum mechanics and Everett’s theory by observing with reason and not just our eyes? Can we, the Artist, present the true nature of reality, no matter how counterintuitive it may be? Can we go beyond conceptualism, which is the last century’s movement anyways? Is a qubit Art (Art that can be in multiple places and/or have multiple characteristics simultaneously) as much Art as a bit Art (Art that makes definite statements of this or that (0 or 1)? Can Art reasoning exceed representing direct experiences of the physical world as almost all Art is (in fact I can think of any that it is not) based on direct observations of events, physical materials, social structures and historis, psychological interpretations of experiences, etc.
Information is something that is encoded in the state of a quantum system and it is physical. While quantum mechanics deals with examining properties of matter at the microscopic level, quantum information science focuses on extracting information from those properties.
Reality is made of information. Artists decode this reality, henceforth encode that information into their Art piece, and lastly, an observer decodes the piece. Artist observes and decodes the world, and as an Art piece is encoded and created, the piece becomes its own universe that is then observed by the world. The decoded becomes the decoder. The decoding always depends on the context and relations within the context.
Where does reality come from?
Reality is made of information. As an Artist, as someone who Represents reality and the nature of things in the world, I must understand the information that Reality is comprised of. The Reality is made of Realities, may that be decoherence, coherent superposition, indeterministic, deterministic, etc. For an Artist these distinct Realities are not proposing mutual exclusivity but are mutually contributing to the omnipotent vision of the reality by connecting far different visions into one complete, or as complete as it can be. Every profession, may it be science or philosophy, is limited in studying only its own specialized language, however Artists’ job is to redefine its language, to expand and go beyond Art language. Art has a freedom and responsibility to use other languages and present it as its own. Physicists are concerned only with Physical Reality, mathematicians Knowledge Reality, philosophers meaning reality, etc. Artists on the other hand must be concerned with all of the existing models of reality, not orthogonally, encompass them and present them in Art context.
Focusing on the superficial appearances of Reality and our distorted interpretation of Reality by our beliefs (ephemeral information) has profound consequences on the world and humanity. We see only differences (which are so superficial and inconsequential for anything at all), we select and group each other, we hate, we don’t reason, we destroy, and we are shortsighted and aggressive. On the other hand, if we are to focus, observe, and comprehend the Reality of Nature with all its unknowns and known (the a-priori information) we would be preoccupied with reasoning, contemplations, and creativity that will consume us by the realization that we are all the same, a simple part of the universe (we are made of stars anyways), that our experiences and perceptions have more to them, if observed by reason. If for once we could stop being shortsighted and so closely and obsessively be looking for the entirely irrelevant differences among ourselves, and instead, just for a moment try to comprehend the vastness and the complexity of the universe as a whole, I am convinced that the atrocities would not exist, we would simply all be humans. Can Art help in this respect? Can Art reform human perceptions on a large scale and make us more human? Artists do not claim to See but we, the Artist, Observe!
Marks, Physics of Art process
The most fundamental nature of the Universe is its granularity (Rovelli), as quantum mechanics has shown us. Universe is made of bits, little packets of energy, grains, or bits of information. These tiny packets that all is made of, exist only when interacting with one another. A particle, a packet of information, materializes only when it interacts with another entity, a screen of the detector or a photon, for example. The cloud of probability with which we conceived of it ‘collapses’ and the electron materializes at that point only in relation to the detector screen. The act of quantum measurement in quantum mechanics occurs when a wave function, a wave of probabilities, reduces to a single state due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an "observation". In relation to any other object, the particle and the detector screen are together in a superposition. Prior to the interaction it does not have any mathematical value, hence it does not exist. The physical world has no value until it interacts with something else, and when it does it becomes deterministic but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indeterministic for the rest of the Universe. Reality is made of interactions. Interactions between information creates physical reality.
Biological systems or humans may be observed the same way. Humanity is granular. Each human can be seen as a granular bit. In order for a human to exist, in order for any human to have a particular material value, that particular person must somehow interact with another, may that be a physical interaction, through media, story telling, or whichever other way, one human exists for another only if one is aware of the other through interaction. In relation to any other person, the interacting people are together in a superposition. We group people, we superposition them by nationality, race, profession, etc.
More interaction between particular humans, more events appear, more reality is created, more real they are to one another. We may be aware of a person’s existence by seeing them and hearing about them on the TV, let's say, and even though we know they are real, they are a part of a very tiny part of our reality. Unlike, let's say a parent, whom we have been interacting with our entire life. In this case the events are many, the interactions are numerous, so the level of created reality is vast. Your parent is as real to you as you are to yourself, although your parent does not exist for me because we have not met, we have no shared events, nor interactions. Universe exists through interactions and reality of the physical world is created through the interactions on a most fundamental level. We, as living animals, create our reality through interactions between one another. Personal life reality is created by interactions with others. Of course we must not omit the interactions between us and the environment. Vlatko Vedral beautifully applies information theory of quantum mechanics into explaining the fundamentals of biological systems and their DNA, in a most inspiring book, Decoding Reality.
We do not interact with the majority of seven billion people, hence they do not exist for us, and only a minuscule part of humanity is real to us. The rest of seven billion people we only know as possibilities, superposition, but have no known interaction value. The wave function did not collapse for our personal observations.
Our knowledge of the universe must be just as minuscule because we do not interact with the majority of it. Who can guess the existence of all the people we never heard of existing, who can guess all the forces and the information universe is made of but we will never interact with, thus never know about. We see only a small part of the universe just as we only see a small part of humanity. We are terribly shortsighted. We create reality of the physical world, of the universe, by what we see and know. Reality is only as big as we interact with it. The Universe is only as big as we manage to interact with via intellect. Reality is created by the intellect (observations).
We as individuals are responsible for creating our own levels of reality. Almost like a video game, more interactions, higher the level is reached and bigger the physical reality is. But, does this mean that the reality is an illusion? If we all create our own reality by our intellect through the interactions, then each of us should have a different reality. Well in a sense we do, but illusion it is not. It is imperative to distinguish two different perceptions of reality, one being personal reality and second being collective reality. Personal reality is created by our personal interactions, our experiences and the root of it are our beliefs. Collective reality is what we can all agree upon regardless of our beliefs, like laws of physics. Collective reality is created by collective intellect interactions. It is like a personal computer vs quantum computer network.
We may find a proof in history. Before humans discovered the electromagnetic force, humanity was blind to it, and electromagnetism was not part of the reality. It did not exist. Humans lived, each minding their own reality as real, being convinced that their conscious reality is real and all there is to it. After electromagnetism was discovered our collective and personal realities expanded dramatically. The reality became bigger with more possibilities.
Once upon time the universe revolves around the earth and it took the intellect of Johannes Kepler to interact with the perceived reality to expand our collective reality into a much bigger one, simply by pointing out the fact that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits. Our world was also just fine when it worked on the Isaac Newton laws. We went to space by using his reality. Quantum mechanics, however, expanded exponentially our reality, personally and collectively. Intellect creates reality; lack of intellect shrinks reality.
This proposition that intellect creates reality is a reflection on Information theory. Intellect is information. If the world is made of Information and information is physical as Vedral proposes then our brains, being part of the physical world, are made of information. Brain might as well be in a quantum state as many researchers are trying to prove. Quantum interactions of the information between our intellect and the world results in more information, meaning larger reality. Reality expands through the intellect. Universe expands physically with the increase of information, entropy (entropy is the information content of an object), just the same as our physical reality expands with the collective and personal intellectual information. The increase in intellectual entropy is a natural state of things.
Why does this matter to an Artist? Well, firstly because when we talk about the most fundamental structure of the Universe and its granularity it is as if we are talking about an Art piece and the granularity of marks that create an art piece that make its own unique universe. Artists are like mini Gods creating a new unique Universe every time an Art piece is created. We, the Artists, use the granular marks, whose interactions and relations create a new reality.
Prior to the interaction, between pen and paper or one mark and another, an art piece does not have any value, hence it does not exist. The mark just like a particle is only concrete in a relationship to the other physical object it is interacting with, i.e. paper or other marks. The mark, hence an art piece, does not exist unless the relation is established between paper and the pen or mark and another mark.
As a whole, the physical world of an Art piece has no value until it interacts with something else, meaning an audience or when an art piece is put within an art context and interacting with the other art within the context. When it does so, it becomes deterministic or Real Art, but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indeterministic, inexistent, for the rest of the Art Universe. Art is made of interactions. Interactions create physical Art reality.
Within the art piece interactions are many and deserve more detailed elaboration. For the sake of the simplification I will use a simple pen on paper drawing example.
a. Artist – Paper relation: At the very beginning of the piece, the piece is inexistent but all the possible possibilities are possible, it is in a state of a wave function. Artist who faces the blank paper may contemplate the probability that the piece may be this or that way, but it will not be deterministic or specific until the relation or interaction is established. It is inexistent yet it has a potential and the Artist holds all the probabilities of a piece.
b. Pen - Paper relation: Artist is like a Universe holding all the possible combinations until the moment of the pen-paper interaction, the very first contact. But as soon as the relation is established the deterministic information appears, meaning the piece begins its existence. With every new mark added the number of possible futures decreases. Increase in marks impacts and reduces the endless possibilities of a piece. The piece is starting to form in a specific way.
c. Mark – Paper relation: Pen – Paper interaction creates particular information, a mark. Information of the visual mark is determined by its relation to the space around it, meaning the character of the mark is determined by the space of the paper (composition, format, etc.). Character of a mark, mark’s information, determines the character of the entire Art piece.
d. Mark-Mark/Marks relation: As the Pen-Paper relation increases, the visual information increases as well. More interaction, more information. Increase in information, increases the entropy. The piece becomes more complex and more deterministic. Each bit of information, each mark, is now determined by its Mark-Paper interaction as well as its interaction to all the other marks. How wonderful it is to be able to recreate the most fundamental workings of the universe. This is a perfect thermodynamics reenactment by the Artist hand and not the accelerator.
A Mark, or a particle, materializes only when it collides with another entity, a screen of the detector or a photon in case of a particle, and paper or another Mark in case of a Mark. The cloud of probability with which the Artist has conceived of it ‘collapses’ and the Mark, or the particle, materializes at that point only in relation to the paper, or detector screen. In relation to any other object, the Mark / particle and the detector screen / paper are together in a superposition. The Mark is only concrete in a relationship to the other physical object it is interacting with. With regards to all the others it does not exist, until the interaction is expanded as the following two points, e. and f., explain.
e. Art piece – Art context: An Art piece, just as the physical world, has no value until it interacts with something else, and when it does it becomes deterministic but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indeterministic for the rest of the Universe. Interactions create physical reality. Similarly an Art piece has no value until it interacts with the space of Art, meaning put in context of Art. Once put in context of art, an Art piece exists only within the context of art and it remains indeterministic for the rest of the Universe. An oil stain on the sidewalk, even if created by an artist, has no artistic value unless it is presented as an art piece within an art context; otherwise it is no more than an oil stain. Just the same, an art piece within an art context has no other value than art value. It is possible, though, due to the ambiguousness of art, for an art piece to interact with another context, like politics, science, etc., and to exist within an Art context as well as some other one. An example would be the Teeter-Totter Wall, by Rael San Fratello and Colectivo Chopeke.
f. Art piece – Observer: Once the art piece begins existing within an art context, it is in a superposition and it is only concrete within this relation and it is inexistent for all the other contexts (unless, as explained above, an art piece is interacting with multiple contexts). A viewer, an observer, collapses a wave function, meaning, an observer by interacting with the piece, reduces an art piece's meaning to a single meaning state. Art piece becomes deterministic by its interaction with an observer. An art piece is constantly in a superposition state with many possibilities, and for every observer it collapses its superposition to a different meaning. Art piece is Omni-meaningful and becomes specific for one observer perhaps differently than for another.
Where is an art piece before it is created? Where is a mark before it is drawn on the paper? It does not exist just like the particle does not exist until it interacts with something. The interaction of the brain that moves the pen, pen, and paper creates a mark. Mark does not exist but it is a consequential outcome of the brain-pen-paper interaction.
During his night walk in a park in 1925, Werner Heisenberg, through his intuition, came up with a fundamental equation of quantum mechanics. In the park there are occasional street lamps separated by the extensive darkness. A figure passes by, but the figure is perceived by Heisenberg only as he appears beneath a lamp, and then disappears into the dark before reappearing beneath another lamp, and then vanishing back into the dark again. From one pool of light to another, appearing and vanishing. Heisenberg reasons that man obviously does not appear and disappears, he can even easily reconstruct the man’s trajectory from one street lamp to another. What if particles vanish and reappear? What if, between one interaction with something, and another with something else, the particle could be nowhere? Particles are something that only manifests itself when it interacts, when it collides with something else; and between one interaction and another, it has no precise position. This is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, the relational aspect of things. Particles don’t always ``exist’’. They exist when they interact. Heisenberg has proven mathematically his logical observations. We know that this is the truth and the way nature reality works. We just have to look down at our phones to have a perfect example.
Particles have a wave function. A Wave Function is a wave of probability where anything can happen. It is a cloud of probability. Like the man in the dark who can be anywhere and is nowhere. When a particle interacts with something it collapses its cloud of possibilities into an eigenstate. An Eigenstate is a fixed and determined state, one out of many possibilities. Every time a measurement is taken, an observation is made and the Eigenstate is different. The way to visualize it is that man in the park walks underneath the light and we observe him as such and such. For the observer sitting ten benches farther from Heisenberg, a man will appear smaller and disappear more slowly and in different spots. If Heisenberg was walking as well every time he makes an observation of the man it will be different, too. However, the more observations are made the more we will all come to the same conclusion that this particular man is in this particular park.
The beauty of the fundamentals is that all that comes after, all that is bigger, works and is the same. What if the world is to be explained through an Artist’s view? What if the world is like an art piece instead of a man walking through the night park? We would come to the exact same conclusion. An art piece depends on the interaction/perspective of a viewer, which creates a different reality. There are many Art pieces, mine included, that change meaning/concept (piece’s identity), as well as its physical appearance depending on the observer’s observable distance and angle the piece changes. The piece has many different properties, wave functions. For an observer there is only one property that is revealed through the interaction with the piece, an eigenstate. However, as the observer moves other properties and meanings are revealed (as in piece: Unknown of the Known, 2017/2019, Pencil on paper, h54"x w84" each of two, 55,000 portraits and 95,000 blank portraits). In Art, an observer’s perspective reveals different previously identifiable properties. Even though every viewer collapses a piece into an eigenstate, more viewers observe it closer to the eigenstate. Piece has many possibilities, equal to the wave function. Each viewer reads it differently. Each viewer has their own interpretation. More viewers observe the piece, the more of the possibilities of a piece are revealed. Interestingly enough, more views are revealed closer they are to be alike. Art is quantum mechanics just like quantum mechanics is Art, simply because all is fundamentally information. The nature of the quantum information, a particle, is the same as the nature of the information of a mark.
Another interesting observation I would like to point out is that a simple visual experience of the mundane reality may provoke thoughts within highly intellectual people, like Heisenberg, consequently changing the collective intellect and expanding our reality. Artists are trained to observe reality, but unfortunately Art education teaches us to copy it literally, superficially and without any intellectual reasoning, or observing. We should be training our Art students to think and analyze their observations. We should be reasoning, not mimicking. Maybe then, one day Art intellect will expand our collective intellect and will help us expand our reality to an ever much bigger universe. Somebody has to ask questions so we can collectively move forward and who can be better at questioning things than artists. Artists’ reasoning questions the existing perception of the Reality.
Entropy in statistical thermodynamics is understood as the macroscopic state of a system that is characterized by a distribution on the microstates, and distribution is explained by Gibbs entropy formula. The macroscopic state of an Art piece is characterized by a distribution of marks on the microstates of the piece.
How much information is in the Universe?
What is the information carrying capacity of our human head?
According to Bekenstein bound (Jacob Bekenstein, an Israeli physicist): the number of bits that can be packed into any system is at most 1044 bits of information times system’s mass in kilograms and its maximum length in meters. If the human head is 20 centimeters in diameter and weighs 5 kilograms, we can calculate that the head can store 10 to the power of 44 bits of information. Computers can store 10 to the power of 14. Computers still have 10 to the power of 30 less informational power in comparison to humans.
Universe, however, is 15 billion light-years in diameter and a mass of about 10 to the power of 42 kilograms, meaning, the informational capacity of the universe is 10 to the power of 120 bits. Archimedes estimated 10 to the power of 63 grains of sand in the Universe, not too bad for the 3rd century BC.
Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning
Understanding self or Universe, which is one and the same, is not an easy task, resulting in two types of human reasoning. Indolent reasoning accepts fantasy, believes, creating its own discriminative reality, selecting fantasies and assigning fictional purpose to the reality. This reasoning egocentrically creates an imaginary omnipotent lookalike who implements a particular rule and decrees in a name of reason and consequences. Absurdity is justified by all means as the omnipotent one always has a reason for it. All is justified, atrocity included, in the name of the decree. Anyone who cannot identify themselves with the all-powerful is to be treated with utmost brutality by the ones who have projected themselves into this almighty fiction. It is a shortsighted vision of us versus them. There are no consequences for the individual actions as all can be justified by the will of the omnipotent one. As easy as it may be to put our hands in the air and blindly believe fictions, not to think, question, reason, analyze, observe, not knowing oneself, and not studying, the result is oblivion. Deviated fantasies and oblivion have created more incomprehensible atrocities that one can ever count. Every war since the beginning of humanity was led in a “name of”, “for a reason of”. By the indolent reasoning we have imprisoned ourselves in the self-created prison of fiction giving all the power to the imaginary almighty one, leaving no freedom, no power, no responsibility. The result is blame, hate, and aggression. Like an abused one who becomes an abuser. Tragically though, the abuse was self-inflicted out of idleness to observe and Reason. Interestingly enough the word Indolent came from the Latin, in- ‘not’ and dolere ‘suffer or give pain’.
The second kind is inquisitive reasoning. The observers. By observing a caterpillar crawling on the branch Einstein thought of the curved space and special relativity. Brownian motion (Robert Brown) was based on observing the dance of the speck of dust or pollen suspended in the still air, which was later mathematically explained by Einstein. By observing the wearing down of the wheel, Democritus concludes that it is due to the slow flight of particles in 460 BC. Democritus comprehended a world of quantum physics that we just recently started using on a daily basis simply by observing the wood on the wheel. All, more than fifty works by Democritus were destroyed by the Indolents. Perhaps that explains why it took from the 5th century BC till the 20th century for humanity to rediscover the fundamentals of the Universe that we now call quantum mechanics. If only there were not for the indolent ones, maybe people in the Dark Ages could have communicated to each other on the iPhones.
Observations by reason have made Democritus realize the boundless space that makes the Universe in which innumerable atoms run, simply by observing the wearing down of a wheel concluding that it could be due to the slow flight of particles of wood. Space is without boundary; atoms have no quality apart from their shape. Atoms push and pull, a wave of reality, and all in it is a by-product, an accident of the atom’s movement and their combination. There is no purpose, just accidental combinations. And we are no more than the result of the same random dance of atoms, our soma, our thoughts, and dreams.
Inquisitive ones are free part of the universe, while the atrocious indolent ones are imprisoned in the self-created fiction.
We are made of the same materials as stars and all the rest of the matter in the universe. There are no them versus us, but only the universe. We are all the same. Understanding yourself is understanding the universe and vice versa. Understanding wooden wheels or the speck of dust is understanding the universe. There is a universe in all. Reality is to be comprehended with the Reason and not for a reason.
Artists observe with empathic observations, and Reason. However, instead of using the language of mathematics to show it, we artists materialize our observations and reasoning through object, language, sound so that we as well as others can experience and feel the knowledge of the observed through their senses. Parmenides (born ca. 515 BC) rejected the empirical experiences of the senses, relying instead on the pure reason, which is the way I see art. Artists use pure Reason to convey the idea or a concept, and through the art piece we communicate our reasoning and observations. Art lets us cognitively re-experience the universe through all our faculties, giving us freedom to understand and be part of all reality. Art created with inquisitive reasoning is the only true art, the art of Information. So-called art of copying the superficially observed objects from the close proximity for the sake of physical likeness and temporary aesthetics is the Indolent art. Indolent art is a pure aesthetic object and not art. It is as if the banker or accountant was to call themselves a mathematician. They are good at math but they are not mathematicians. Just the same, an Indolent observer of art is intellectually incapable of experiencing reality’s information, thus projects their own fictional beliefs. A good example on this subject is Girolamo Savonarola destruction of Botticelli’s, and many others’ art for the reason of vanity in the name of god.
A Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (born 94 BC, Pompeii) in his philosophical poem De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things, didactic work about philosophy of Epicureanism, sings of atoms, the sea, and the sky, of nature. Art is Reasoning of nature and Reality. Lucretius epitomizes true Art. Lucretius observes Nature with his reason and through his art of poetry materializes his reasoning. His words may make us see and understand nature through his observations so we may expand and further our reasoning, or we may project our own preconceived fictional beliefs that are the only purposeful ones, hence reject it if it is not molded into our limited beliefs. We may accept, reject, or be inspired by the Lucretius words based on our beliefs or Reasoning. We choose how to see reality, thus we create our reality. This is Quantum Mechanics. All the possibilities are possible when the coin is tossed and once an observer looks at it is either heads or tails. Based on our own Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning we tip the coin one way or the other, like an external physical force, a slight breeze or the invisible texture on the table that made the coin tip over one way or the other. Perhaps this is why some think art is subjective and anything can be art if “I like it”. All there is then can be seen as subjective based on Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning, so perhaps Art, as so many other things in life, is not for Indolent minds.
Rovelli reminds us that in 1917 Einstein proposed a 3-Shape as a solution to the problem of the border of the universe. 3-Shape has finite volume but it is without borders. In the 14th century, Dante Alighieri, a genius Italian poet, wrote his vision of the medieval world, with the spherical Earth at the center, surrounded by the celestial spheres, in his Divine Comedy. The sphere of angels is surrounding the universe, and at the same time they are surrounded by the universe, which is the most accurate explanation of Einstein’s 3-sphere. Interestingly enough it appears that Dante was inspired by The Florence Baptistery, and the mosaic depicting Hell, by Coppo di Marcovaldo, 13th century. It appears to be that artists have visualized the space of the universe 8 centuries before modern science. Artists represent reality by cognitively observing the world around and representing it through art language instead of math language, nonetheless equally significant.
The great minds of Miletus, in the sixth century BCE, thought that through discussion, it is possible to understand the world. Art piece starts a discussion so we can collectively understand the world more fully. This is perhaps a reason why Renaissance has changed a thousand year cognitive blackout in Europe. Art piece is created by the Inquisitive reasoning, and when observed by the same inquisitive reasoning it can progress humanity.
When Artist’s choices are not theirs but dictated by pre-set rules, where phenomenon controls and dominates the process and the result, then you can be assured the Art process is cleverly done. In order to study nature scientists do not go on interpreting how something appears to be but set up experiments where nature’s phenomenon is allowed to manifest itself, just like a successful Artist sets up an art process to let a phenomenon document itself. Only then true observation begins. Examples: Jeff McMillan’s watercolor rocks drawings where he would wrap up a rock from the location in paper, then paint the facets of the subject before unwrapping them, or Solar Burns by Charles Ross.