Views on Art and Reality
Lectures on Nothing Real
Disclaimer: The following essays are not scholarly writings or formal academic research. Rather, they are ideas I have encountered over the years through various scholarly books, literature, conversations, and observations, ideas that have combined to give rise to new thoughts. References and cross-references are not used formally; instead, I refer to source names as I recall them at the moment. These writings are derived from thoughts and research that have been incorporated into my art practice.
The essays are written the way I speak, without human editing. Grammatical and spelling mistakes are unintentional, resulting from imperfect language comprehension; they are to be recognized, corrected, or overlooked by more skillful readers. Please note that some facts, places, characters, and civilizations mentioned may be fictional.
Introduction: In the ancient civilization of Mitrovia, it was widely accepted that understanding the world around us and within us (one and the same thing) is the only logical and meaningful activity within this short game of life: to discover as much new information as possible. The majority of past knowledge was available to Mitrovians, should they wish to use it. Playing this game is how some Mitrovians made sense of an otherwise nonsensical absurdity of life.
Some Mitrovians chose to play the game but accepted only one ancient view, rejecting any facts that supported new discoveries, so called "Platonic cave dwellers." Others believed it was humanity's responsibility to play the game of life and discover as much new information as possible about this complex, non-intuitive world. The more knowledge we have, the more we can see, and the more complex the game becomes. The professions most valued in this "info-game," and most commonly chosen by curious Mitrovians, were Science and Art, collectively called Philosophy, since the term encompassed both. Interestingly, professions such as law, politics, business, and banking (most commonly practiced by cave dwellers) were among the least regarded, due to their materialistic focus. In contrast, the most admired and valued roles were those rooted in unique skill or elaborate knowledge: artisans, craftsmen, mechanics, agronomists, farmers, and philosophers.
Mitrovians lived on the Berencian peninsula, approximately in the year 302,026 since the beginning of the species.
The following may contain names of artists or scientists with whom readers may or may not be familiar. Fortunately, they are all well documented on AI and Google servers and easily accessible via search.
All essays that follow are transcriptions of the original lectures taught at the Mitrovian University of Philosophy by the Professor of Art Philosophy.
Many readers will experience strong feelings and specific thoughts of disagreement throughout. Keep in mind that any fact is only valid within a limited timescale, every fact has an expiration date before a more comprehensive one emerges. Once there was Euclid; then came Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky. This type of disagreement is of the highest value, as it contributes to progress. But there is another type of disagreement: the kind brought by cave dwellers whose eyes have adjusted to the darkness of ancient beliefs, for whom any new vision is angering and is therefore rejected.
Furthermore, anything can be explained through an infinite number of statements and opposing views, given the informational complexity of existence. Every statement, observation, and question is followed by an altered or opposing one. So your disagreement with any specific statement here will likely be short-lived even within these pages, as there is always an "unless" or "however."
Lecture #1: Methodology
Art History
There are four classical levels of Art History.
Level 1: Somatic Art
Somatic Art is representational art of superficial appearance, devoid of significant substance. It reflects an agreed-upon reality stripped of individual perception. New ideas are absent, or present only as timid hints hiding behind established symbols. The subject matter and technique within Level 1 Art are concerned only with logistics, it is Utility Art. Mimicking superficial appearances or repeating established iconography, without individual perspective, characterizes this period. Utility Art spans all art from prehistory to the late 19th century, including abstract Islamic art and World Art.
If an art piece is concerned only with aesthetic appearance, spiritual belief, or the imitation of the apparent world, it offers a certain measure of satisfaction, in which artist and viewer both benefit from consuming a goods. Somatic Art is useful, profitable, and beneficial for promoting religions, high-status individuals, and ideologies, but at its core, it consists only of the physicality of aesthetic appearance. Somatic Art follows the language of its localized society: its symbols, narratives, aestheticism, and iconography. The artist is a skilled craftsperson, an executor of social cognition and norms. Individual perception, even where present, must remain 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 appearance.
Level 2: Cognitive Art
Cognitive Art is idea-based art, beginning with Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and Conceptualism. Cognitive Art is equivalent to quantum dynamics.
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and the movements between Impressionism and Duchamp fall into a transitional state between Level 1 and Level 2 Art. These movements remain classically somatic, but they evoke a new understanding of the world — equivalent, in that sense, to Einstein's theory of relativity.
Level 3: Empirical Art
Empirical Art is process-based art. Its rational process follows the strict methodology of the scientific experiment. But unlike an experiment, whose goal is to prove an idea, process-based art is concerned only with re-experiencing the idea in order to fully understand it, or with letting the phenomenon document itself.
The process behind an art piece depends heavily on the quality of information gathered through relevant research. Empirical Art is equivalent to CERN, Fermilab, SLAC, Argonne, and similar institutions, where ideas are tested and proven while the phenomenon is documented.
Level 4: Information Realism : It from Bit to Bit
Building on Wheeler's "it from bit," I would add "to bit": the artpiece (IT) is derived from informational relations (BIT), from which informational interpretation then emerges. An art piece is defined by its structural, informational properties rather than by its material substance.
Information realism, in philosophy and physics, is the ontological view that reality is fundamentally composed of interacting informational entities rather than physical matter, that "information" is the foundational, mind-independent substance of the universe. John Wheeler proposed that every physical entity (the "it") derives its existence from information: "it from bit." Similarly, Luciano Floridi proposes that the world is a totality of informational objects interacting with one another, defining reality through structural, informational properties rather than material substance.
We move from the physical, to the cognitive, to a merger of both in Empirical Art, and finally to information-based Art. What comes next? Science seeks the unification of classical and quantum theory through loop quantum gravity or something similar. But if we trace the evolution of Art rather than Science, we would conclude that the next step is not unification or a missing link, but an entirely new theory, a whole new approach to art practice. When quantum thermodynamics was first proven, even experts struggled to grasp it. Similarly, Dada evoked revolutionary confusion among artists. A hundred years later, in our present time, these once-disorienting ways of thinking have become the norm.
As soon as humans grow accustomed to new ways of thinking, as soon as we accept and become comfortable with new ways of looking at the world, it is time for entirely new, non-intuitive ideas to arrive and disturb our understanding once again. Not knowing and not understanding are the only ways for collective and individual consciousness to develop. That uncomfortable state of insecurity is the only state in which creative progress and new knowledge can take root.
Perhaps our consciousness has not developed to the degree necessary to comprehend the workings of the universe. Dogs cannot comprehend quantum physics or art in any form, yet they possess parts of consciousness that process smell and feelings that humans could never fully grasp. Different forms of consciousness see the world in different ways; perhaps we need all of them combined, along with new, as-yet-undeveloped ones, to see the whole picture.
The world is stranger than physics can ever imagine. This is only the beginning of a non-intuitive, nondeterministic understanding. Entropy increases disorder and randomness, and our collective consciousness follows that same disordered, illogical trajectory. After Information Realism, perhaps "Illogical Empiricism" is what follows. Everything at present is deduced through logical thinking. Perhaps it is time to abandon logic, cause and effect, determinism, and move toward more complex ways of thinking.
Infosphere and InfoArt
Who are we, and how do we relate to one another?
Luciano Floridi claims that we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere," where the boundaries between our online and offline lives break down. According to Floridi, there have been four revolutions so far, the infosphere being the fourth:
First Revolution: We are not the center of the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer and mathematician, proposed the heliocentric model, placing the sun rather than the Earth at the center of the solar system.
Second Revolution: We are not a unique species. All life has evolved over time from a common ancestor through natural selection (Charles Darwin).
Third Revolution: Sigmund Freud revealed that we are not fully rational beings, but largely unconscious ones.
Fourth Revolution: We are not individuals, but agents within a network — the infosphere.
The infosphere is our environment. It profoundly affects how we understand ourselves as agents. We come to see ourselves as connected informational organisms, or "inforgs", interconnected among other informational organisms, sharing a common informational environment. We are not individuals so much as participants relying on the network.
In every area of life, the infosphere has become an environmental force, creating and transforming our realities. "Onlife" defines our daily activity: how we shop, drive, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct relationships, practice law and finance and politics, and even how we wage war. Who are we, and how do we relate to one another? Is Art to follow suit? Should Art no longer be individualized, made by an artist, but instead made by inforgs? Can Art be singular and geocentric? Are artists agents of the infosphere, or merely a minuscule part of the informational organism, or have artists always been agents of the informational universe?
It seems that art has moved from a socially acceptable and socially controlled Somatic Art, to an individually unique Art, and finally to an Infosphere Art, which may itself be just another version of socially acceptable art, only global now rather than culturally localized.
Defining Art: Art, Aesthetics, and Reason
I am not attempting to define what Art "is," but rather to explain the art process.
The most common attempts to define Art run along familiar lines: Art is aesthetics; Art has no practical or functional use; Art is feeling; Art is expression; Art is language. The challenge in reaching consensus lies in the sheer ubiquity of Art itself. In fact, it is Reality that is ubiquitous, and Art merely attempts to make sense of the information Reality is composed of, reflecting upon it, and in doing so, becoming ubiquitous as well. Reality manifests Art, and Art manifests Reality in turn. Art is human-made Reality.
The following quote perfectly summarizes what Art is. Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, gave us the most accurate and poetic explanation of what "Science" is. I have simply replaced the word "Science" with "Art":
"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."
Different fields and theories speak different languages, but essentially they all offer compatible descriptions of the same underlying phenomenon: Reality. There is only one Reality, and infinite ways of thinking about it, each capturing one element of it. Art uses its own language to capture any element of Reality, without being tied to a particular school of thought or theory. Unlike most specialized fields (philosophy being a possible exception), the language of Art is not limited but ubiquitous, free to explore any element of reality. Artists are philosophers, journalists, engineers, historians, scientists and all of the above, depending on the piece. Art instigates free thinking and liberates people from self-imposed decrees.
Art pieces whose sole purpose is aesthetic are little more than crafty furniture, something purchased to match a sofa. This typically involves craftsmanship whose process resembles a manufacturing assembly line. This is Somatic Art, Utility Art, or Level 1 Art, as described above. This is not to say Art should lack aesthetics, of course it has aesthetics. Nature is aesthetic, and so, too, is Art. The difference is that aesthetics or decoration cannot be the sole reason for an art piece's creation. When it is, what results is craft, not Art.
Art is not an object but an epistemological statement — an inquiry into anything that constitutes our experiences and observations. Art is a continuous reconceptualization of human perception, and, consequently, of cognition. Now, if an enquiry is about aesthetics then an Art piece could be cleverly set up within the Art epistemology context where an Art piece would be Level 4 opposed to Level 1.
Should We Define Art, or Explain It?
Art is ubiquitous. It emerges from anything, and from nothing. Art does not present a mistaken understanding of the world, or a merely subjective opinion, as some might assume. Instead, it reveals how our human understanding of the world is constructed. It makes us aware that we are constructing meaning, rather than simply receiving preconceived, established information. Art presents possible models of how our understanding of the world could be. It is not limiting in any way, all materials and mediums are at its disposal, and all possible ideas, existing and yet to be discovered, are available to help us explore the world, our relationship to it, and our sense of it.
From the very first cave painting to the present, art is what separates humans from other animals. In La Pasiega cave in Spain, scientists found a ladder shape made of red horizontal and vertical lines, dated to more than 64,000 years ago, suggesting it was created by Neanderthals. In Maltravieso Cave, also in Spain, three hand stencils on a wall have been dated to at least 66,000 years ago, likewise attributed to Neanderthals. There remains a possibility, however, that modern humans reached Europe tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The world's oldest known cave painting made by modern humans, a life-sized picture of a wild pig, dates to at least 45,500 years ago, in Indonesia.
The urge to understand the world, reality, and our relation to it is what propelled Homo sapiens into the modern age and distinguished us from other animals. Why would early humans create art, a seemingly useless activity, when survival and functional tool-making should have taken priority? Because making sense of the world precedes using and altering it. Thinking precedes doing. Art is thinking; it is philosophy. Art is an essential, obligatory part of human progress. It makes us aware of 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, a point I will return to. Creativity, curiosity, the ability to see the unseen, and the urge to understand are all part of the art process. Because art is materialized as a physical, tactile entity, it provokes creativity, curiosity, thinking, and awareness in others. Art, again, instigates free thinking and liberates people from self-imposed decrees.
After a thousand years of decline and intellectual stagnation in European civilization, it took the influence of artists to change course. In the 15th century, the Medici family supported Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Beyond art and architecture, the Medici also supported scientists like Galileo Galilei. Art and science use different methods and languages, but require essentially the same creative and cognitive processes. Art and science go hand in hand, feeding off each other.
In 15th-century Europe, seemingly useless vanity objects produced by artists, together with the heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, proven by Copernicus and Galileo, though Aristarchus of Samos had used mathematics to demonstrate the heliocentric model as early as the 3rd century BC, ignited intellectual freedom and the spread of reason. Not even Girolamo Savonarola, who destroyed and burned countless art pieces in the name of religious ideology, could stop it. Reform swept across Europe regardless. Even if Art had been a useless vanity (which it was not), it still brought about a liberation of free thinking that set off a landslide of religious, scientific, and artistic reform, an exponential progress that, one hopes, is still propagating today.
When we are deep within a Dark Age, within a cave, our eyes adjust, and we lose the capacity to perceive the situation we are in. We should never again have to rediscover what has already been discovered in the past. The power that art institutions hold to support the right artists, just as the Medici family once did, is a heavy responsibility, and a matter bearing on humanity's progress.
Unlike any other field, Art in its most fundamental nature is so encompassing and vast in its universality that it resists easy explanation. If we were asked to explain the entire world, the universe itself, in a single sentence, we would fail miserably, just as we fail in explaining Art. The universe is too vast to be captured in one definition. Art explains the world, and so is as vast and complex as the world itself. Art can explore life, the properties of matter, motion, energy, and force, just as biology, chemistry, and physics do. But it can equally explore cognition, sociology, politics, culture, emotion, perception, aesthetics, imagination, and nearly infinite other possibilities through which it may examine experienced and mind-independent reality. Art is not a specialized field; it is not confined to the narrow view of any one profession, but limitless in its ways of exploring the world. All possibilities are possible, just as, according to physics, they are at the most fundamental structure of the universe. Art liberates humanity from self-imposed chains and ideological imprisonment. Its purpose is to advance humanity.
In a narrower sense, Art is the philosophical exploration of the world and its recreation, metaphorically, symbolically, or objectively. Each time a piece is created, the artist forges a new reality within the collectively experienced one. In doing so, the artist not only explores existing shared reality for the sake of understanding or awareness, but through the very physical activity of creating the piece, brings a new reality into being. In this sense, artists are like minor gods, continuously creating sub-universes that adhere to the same or similar laws as the collectively experienced reality. This is the power of Art: an infinity of possible creations, limited by nothing but our own intellect. The universe itself is one great art piece, within which artists continuously recreate small sub-universes with each new work.
Artists must fully understand the reality they are recreating. Our species has always had the urge to understand Reality. Religion, mythology, science, and art have each, in their own way, tried to understand Reality: seen and unseen, known and unknown, presentation and representation. Every art piece ever created is a self-portrait of reality. In the pages that follow, I will explore the most fundamental nature of art processes, their relation to reality, and an artist's relationship to the world.
Why Do We Make Art?
Free will and freedom are debatable concepts. From the moment we wake to the moment we fall asleep, our decisions are governed by others, by our own needs, by societal rules, the laws of physics, responsibilities, and physiological constraints. Freedom and free will can seem like foreign, even impossible concepts. But in moments of art-making, during the art process, artists create their own universe, the universe of the art piece. Within it, artists are unequivocally free to make any decision, experiencing something close to ultimate freedom. Creating an art piece requires perpetual decision-making, but because the artist alone makes, and can change, the rules, the artist experiences the fullest freedom of will available. This feeling is impossible to replicate in daily life, and once experienced, it becomes utterly addictive.
Why Art Matters
Artists decontextualize Reality. Each time they make a piece, they reinvent thought, perception, and the way we connote and denote the world around and within us. Artists belong to no single school of thought; they live in a perpetual state of decontextualizing ways of thinking. Perceptions become tangible. Art does not offer answers the way science does, that much is true, but it questions Reality and our perceptions of it. The capacity to perceive the world anew is not impractical, naive, or idealistic; it lies at the heart of every revolutionary advance in human history. This makes Art the most important factor in humankind's progress, and incomparably more pragmatic and useful than any other way of thinking, including science.
Process and Information Realism
Asking questions is fundamental to human nature, helping us understand the world around and within us. It begins with perception, not only visual, but, more importantly, cognitive. To gain a better understanding of the world, some humans design experiments to test their cognitive perceptions; others set up an art process to do the same. Either way, it begins with questioning perception. The best way to learn is to interact with Reality while seeking to understand it, reconceptualizing preconceived notions along the way.
Each art piece is a mini-universe adhering, fundamentally, to the same laws as the larger universe. What is most intriguing about art is its process, which, in my experience, echoes core concepts from information theory and quantum mechanics: superposition (a quantum state existing in multiple states at once, a cloud of possibility), eigenstates (the observable state of a system immediately after measurement — the collapse of that cloud into one state), entanglement (two subatomic particles linked even across great distances), and the act of quantum measurement itself (the collapse of possibility into an eigenstate). Information creates matter the same way an artist creates an art piece.
At an elementary level, the universe is made of events, relations, and interactions, as quantum mechanics has shown. Art, too, is made of processes, relations, and interactions. The brain that conceives an art piece, the body that physically creates it, and the art piece itself all exist according to the same fundamental principles as the particles that compose them. The most basic structure of the universe is no different from the art process, and this parallel between the fundamental workings of the universe and the art process is the underlying theme of everything that follows.
10⁻²⁵ seconds after the Big Bang, at 10¹⁵ degrees Kelvin, particles materialized from pure energy. Artists, under far friendlier conditions, materialize marks from their own energy, creating, in turn, the new universe of the art piece.
To trust any artistic idea, we must test it against experience, just as in science, where measurements test theoretical predictions. Through the art process, artists experience the questions in order to understand the answers; scientists build experiments to confirm them. Science discovers what is already there, Art creates what is not there yet. Both art and science bring new thought into the world, and as such, are equally practical and necessary.
For process-based artists, the value of a piece lies in its process. Once complete, that value shifts from personal to public experience. To illustrate, consider the most reduced form of art: a pencil drawing built from marks. At the outset, the paper is blank, there are only the artist's thoughts, a field of sorts, in which all conceivable options remain possible. The piece exists in a superposition state. As the first random marks appear, they become visible, each carrying its own properties, or identity, the information it conveys. As marks accumulate, the relations between them transform individual information into a collective pattern (much as individual photons together form an interference pattern, the wave-like fringes of a double-slit experiment). It is as if every possible way of making the marks has collapsed into a single final pattern, an eigenstate. Moreover, the marks exist in an entangled state with one another, correlated enough to be treated, together, as a single object.
A great deal of information is stored in a drawing, but not in its individual marks, it is stored in the correlations between them. To "see" the drawing, one must observe all the marks collectively. Like a quantum system, a drawing holds a great deal of information, but examines only one part, a single mark, and no information is visible; it is just a dot.
To experience, through one's own hands, the materialization of randomness into a complex, deterministic object is exhilarating. Once it becomes a material object, the art piece begins a new life, in which an observer, a viewer, determines its meaning through their own superposition with it. The observer collapses a cloud of possibilities into one (just as a measurement of a quantum state yields a single eigenstate out of many). In interacting with the piece, the observer reduces its meaning to a single, well-defined state. Each new observation yields a different eigenstate. The more viewers who observe a piece, the more of its possibilities are revealed — though as more observations accumulate, the revelations tend increasingly to resemble one another.
Art concerns relations and becoming, not simply being. It is not a finite aesthetic object, but a field of indeterministic wave function. At an elementary level, the universe is made of events, relations, and interactions, as quantum mechanics has shown; art is made of processes, relations, and interactions in the same way.
"Information" carries multiple meanings here. I use the word in two senses. First, in its general sense, as fact or knowledge (water is wet, the heart beats 100,000 times a day, and so on), which I will simply call Information. Second, information is the fundamental physical unit, a unit of something physical (such as a mark) encoded in the state of an art piece's system, much like the temperature of water. I will call this an Informational Unit (IU). Through the relations between IUs, an art piece's system of meaning arises, its information is created.
Information Realism (IR) is art that, through its processes and its IUs, most accurately captures information from Reality. What is not understood is created so that it may be comprehended. Visual art pieces fundamentally present information observed from Reality. When that information appears in its purest form, materialized into visual information through basic IUs and their relations, detached from the artist's own beliefs, it becomes Information Realism. This is to be distinguished from classical realism, which represents only the external appearance of a form, offering no information about it beyond the impression of appearance. IR is not a movement or an art group, but a description of 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 about, and representing reality is among the most fundamental human urges. The capacity for abstract thought, to imagine and to recreate, is part of what sets us apart 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, in turn, studies the nature of art: aesthetics (beauty and taste), expression, interpretation, representation, and form. I would propose an updated definition of the nature of art, not so much changed as expanded. Art is the least about aesthetics and form, and mostly, if not entirely, about thinking processes. Art is information-based, where matter (form) is merely a consequence of the processes (fields) among and within information.
It seems telling that the philosophy of art is typically studied from the outside, by non-artists. How else could we justify studying art through aesthetics, form, and emotion alone? The epistemology of art has been criticized heavily throughout history, and, troublingly, contemporary philosophers continue that tradition. In 1992, Jerome Stolnitz wrote "On the Cognitive Triviality of Art," arguing that art cannot contribute to knowledge because it generates no form of truth. He goes on to argue, by opinion, not scientific method, that art's influence on social structure and historical change has been inconsequential. His own trivial opinions are exactly what he claims art to be. If art is trivial because it eschews the scientific method, was that same method used to reach his conclusions about art? Or is his opinion no more significant, and just as trivial, as he claims art to be?
The trouble is that most people who write about art are not artists themselves. They form opinions from outside the subject, without ever experiencing or understanding its process firsthand. Art is epistemological. What I offer here is not "philosophy of art" but "Art Philosophy", a philosophy of an artist, for an artist.
Many contemporary art schools try to minimize, or eliminate entirely, the teaching of traditional art in favor of conceptually based work. This cannot succeed unless educational institutions are willing to teach Art Philosophy as well. Unlike an artist statement, which is a personal introduction to an artist's work or a specific project, Art Philosophy reflects on reality and its relation to ourselves. Reality is examined ontologically, epistemologically, and axiologically, not by philosophers, but by artists, presenting their observations through the language of Art.
The fundamental, epistemic nature of things should be analyzed and correlated with art processes.
Art Education
Art-Learning Methods Are Inquiry and Problem-Solving-Based
Hypatia, who lived in Alexandria in the 4th century, was a philosopher in the old sense of the word — astronomer, mathematician, artist, and more. She was an excellent teacher who believed in the value of small steps and was confident that everyone had the capacity to learn a great deal. She worked to genuinely understand what students found difficult. Students are often discouraged from attempting difficult things simply because they haven't been shown how to begin with the simplest steps first. If a student cannot learn something, it is because it was not explained well enough.
Universal lectures, projects, and due dates have never worked for me as an educator. I may open with a lecture, but each topic needs to be communicated to each student in a way that fits them, with examples they can relate to. Art teaches us that we all reason somewhat differently, and that the way I learn is not the way someone else learns. This means adjusting how we communicate to each student individually, which demands real empathic effort from teachers, to understand and get to know each student as an individual. In the process of trying to understand how a student perceives and reasons about reality, through questions and through critique of their work I familiarize myself with the student’s way of thinking and seeing, which helps with personalizing lectures, and they, in turn, come to understand themselves better. This usually sets off an avalanche of self-discovery and empowerment.
Once students are empowered through self-discovery and confidence, they begin questioning, rethinking, and recontextualizing the world around them, and this becomes incorporated into every piece they make. It demands complex critical thinking and the integration of diverse knowledge, much as in the old days when philosophy encompassed both art and science or, in today's terms, STEAM. Art builds self-confidence; Art leads to self-discovery and empowerment. When we are strong, confident, and diverse thinkers, we learn faster, regardless of field. Art changes us, and as a result, Art can transform our lives.
Art learning grounded in questions, rather than technique or craft, encourages critical thinking and fosters strong, diverse thinkers in any field. Art is an access point for guiding inquiry, dialogue, and critical thought.
Questioning and rethinking our preconceived understanding of things-in-the-world gives rise to new ideas. How, then, do we express and materialize those new ideas and perceptions? An artist's approach is not so different from a scientist's experimental setup. Working from an idea or hypothesis, an artist must choose materials, medium, format, installation, duration, and the space in which the process will unfold, so that every aspect matches the idea as closely as possible. This demands a high level of problem-solving skill.
Even in traditional approaches, problem-solving pervades the process. What makes Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Anselm Kiefer, or any other artist in history great is the sum of decisions made along every millimeter of their work. An artist's choices, how much, where, to what degree, and in what particular way, are what make an art piece an art piece. Those choices are rooted in how we think, how we see the world, and how we choose to present it.
An art piece begins with an idea, but the rest is problem-solving: making decisions among infinite possibilities. Artists are remarkably skilled at solving the problems of everyday life, finding solutions among countless options. A problem becomes a puzzle to be solved, rather than an overwhelming, solutionless tragedy. And even a puzzle without a solution can, in an artist's hands, become a new puzzle that does have one.
In art schools, we teach tools and the craft of making objects. But to move art beyond its own Dark Age, we should probably reconsider our educational curriculum. If you can only use materials within two meters of you to build a house, no matter how creative you are, the result will not be great. But given no limit to how far you can search for materials, you are bound to build something magnificent. Artists, like chemists, should discover and create new materials. Scientists impose no limits on how far they will go in pursuit of their ideas; artist classes by contrast, too often look no further than a few meters away. Art education must address this limitation.
Art should learn to truly observe the world and the things within it, to observe deeply, rather than casually.
Art for Cognitive Health
Neuro-Arts is a multidisciplinary field of research on how the arts affect us, radically changing how we understand and apply the power of the arts. Art processing engages the frontal lobe, the region of the brain responsible for problem-solving, language, higher executive functioning, judgment, abstract thought, creativity, planning, and decision-making.
Colette J. Brown, a teaching artist and community health researcher, developed a project while working with dementia patients: pick an object, describe it, then rename it in a way that gives it new meaning. One participant renamed "Hands" as "Choice" — "Hands can be used for good or evil," they explained, "we just have to make a choice." This forges a new connection in the brain between two concepts, hands and choice, producing neuroplasticity and increasing cognitive reserve. "Cognitive reserve" refers to the reserve of thinking abilities people build over a lifetime, and it is directly tied to the brain's neuroplasticity.
Art that asks more questions than it answers has been shown to improve neuroplasticity and help prevent cognitive decline. Most people who make art for as little as 45 minutes show a reduction in the stress hormone cortisol, regardless of skill level. People who engage in the arts also show lower mental distress, better mental functioning, and improved quality of life.
Lecture #2: Failure of Free Will in Art : Art criticism
"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:
1. Art fails when it represents superficial appearances of the physical world.
2. Art fails when an idea is already known and expected, and is repetitive.
3. Art fails when it uses known language; when it repeats.
4. Art fails when it becomes deterministic, unless.
5. Art fails when it gives all the answers, unless.
6. Art fails when it is intuitive, unless.
7. Art fails when it has a singular interpretation, unless.
8. Art fails when it is popularized.
9. Art fails when it is concerned with aesthetics only.
10. Art fails when it is too logical, unless.
11. Art fails when it reflects an opinion or a belief.
12. Art fails when it is repetitive, unless.
13. Art fails when it doesn't provoke awareness.
14. Art fails when it uses localized symbols.
15. Art fails when it is not Art.
16. Art does not fail when it is understood by no one.
Failed science is easy to determine: if truth is not obtained, it is not science. The measure of that truth is sigma. A five-sigma event (5σ) signifies a finding that is exceptionally statistically significant, highly unlikely to be due to random chance. It corresponds to a probability of roughly 1 in 1.7 million that the observed result is a statistical fluctuation rather than a genuine effect. But how do we determine Art's failure, where truth is superfluous? In fact, truth in Art is not to be found and stated, but found and manipulated. First, we should understand what Art is. I say "understand" rather than "know" or "determine" on purpose, the nature of Art is meant to be understood, not summarized in a single sentence. Simply put: if something is Art, it has, by definition, succeeded in being Art. If it has failed to be Art, it was never Art to begin with.
Sometimes, in trying to talk about Art, we sound pretentious or even nonsensical, as the sentence above may demonstrate. I believe this comes from our structural, linear reasoning and our habit of "cause and effect" thinking. Thinking comprehensively, with emotion, and holistically, like Borges's Immortals, is the only way to grasp the complexity and ubiquity of Art. Art speaks the language of the Immortals, and it is no surprise that Art is timeless and immortal. Cave art is as strong and powerful today as the day it was made. A drawing of a horse in the Lascaux cave (15,000 BCE) is as truthful as any other art piece depicting a horse made since; it is a five-sigma event. Truth is singular, but in Art, "truth" means one truth among infinite truths. Art's language is not pretentious nonsense, but the timeless language of all there is, all at once.
Here is the wonderful language of the Mortal:
"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 clothes' 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 no one makes sense of it. An individual's failure to comprehend something is not proof of universal nonsense, only of the limits of their own rigid reasoning.
Questions:
Should there be an Art History of Failed Art, and what would belong in it?
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, political or religious art, for instance?
What is an acceptable level of ambition? Can Art be called successful if it is effortless, requiring minimal work?
Is the work of professional Sunday painters, portraitists, tourist art, and hotel art actually Art?
What about art made by celebrities — Bush, Kim Gordon, Hunter Biden, Jim Carrey?
Do "how to paint" books and "how to draw a figure" guides teach Art, or merely the mimicry of it?
On the unoriginality of group mentality: are Social Realism (Russian and Chinese), the fifth generation of Abstract Expressionism, and the eighth generation of Surrealism successful as influencers and followers, or merely derivative? Is Regionalism a form of culturalism? Can regional art be Art, or is it simply trend-following?
Are social media art influencers and art tutorials Art? Does a large following determine artistic quality?
The missing label: can an art piece succeed if its meaning is undefined or unknown?
Can an art piece have too much aesthetic quality — or too little?
Does a lack of style constitute failure? Is Duchamp's or Picasso's lack of style — as a style in itself — an artistic failure?
Do good artists eventually tire and repeat themselves?
Art
Artists are committed to uncovering what is hidden from ordinary view. Our senses, at their very best, are dreadfully limited. The only tool available to us is intellect, with which we attempt 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, to examine our relationship to it, and to make sense of it. The more we are aware of, the more we know, and the larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality.
Art reveals how our human understanding of the world is constructed. It has nothing to do with craft or talent, it is entirely a thinking process. How, then, do artists represent this hidden yet abundant reality through thought rather than craft? Can Art help us decipher the world and our relation to it? What is the true nature of reality, and are art processes capable of analyzing and decoding that same world?
Does Art fail if it says nothing new about the world?
How do we determine the value of an art piece, and the degree of its failure?
I would suggest applying information theory. If we take information to be physical, the fundamental unit of our reality, as information theory holds, we can explain Art in the same terms. We can determine the value of a piece by determining how probable it really is, which in turn determines its information content and quality.
The ancient Greeks suggested that the information content of an event depends only on how probable that event is. Aristotle argued that the more an event surprises us, the more information it carries, meaning information is inversely proportional to probability: less probable events carry more information. If an art piece is highly probable, say, an exercise in pure aesthetics, it carries little or no information content. Take a realistic painting of an ordinary cat: not Schrödinger's, no mystery about whether it's dead or alive, just a nice fluffy cat. The piece is, say, 90% probable, we know exactly what it is and how it was made, and it tells us nothing new about the cat. Its information content is low or nonexistent; its probability is high; and so its artistic value is low. The painting amounts to an artist's copy of an object's superficial appearance, predictable aesthetics and nothing more. It is an agreed-upon reality, offering no new way of seeing it.
By contrast, work like Rachel Whiteread's or Man Ray's The Gift is unexpected and carries a high level of information content meaning it is high-value Art. I take this view from two of the most brilliant minds on the subject: Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the University of Oxford, and Claude Shannon, the engineer known as "the father of information theory." Physicists and engineers, after all, are artists who happen to be very good at math.
The unit of information is the bit, a digit whose value is either zero or one. Shannon's central insight was that unlikely messages should be encoded with many zeros and ones, while frequent messages should be given a short code. How many zeros and ones, then, should Duchamp's Fountain require in its encoding?
Claude Shannon put it this way: "Content is irrelevant. The 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, its entropy level. The point of an art piece is to carry as much uncertainty, and as high an entropy, as possible: the more possible outcomes or states it can hold, the more information it contains, and the higher its quality.
Collection
Cabinet of Curiosities In 16th-century Renaissance Europe, wealthy individuals began assembling encyclopedic collections of extraordinary objects. These private collections blurred the boundaries between natural history, geology, art, and antiquities, and served as precursors to the modern public museum.
Such a cabinet was a space in which one could curate the world according to one's own interests. A collection defines its owner's identity, placing the owner at the center of attention, a way of seeing the world entirely through the objects one has gathered. There are no labels; truth can be embellished; and only the expert, the collector, may speak on it. The owner becomes a curator, creating and dictating the narrative. As the sole possessor of "knowledge," the owner gains extraordinary power in the eyes of the viewer, though this knowledge was rarely scientific in any rigorous sense. Some of the earliest cabinets concerned the natural world; over time, this shifted toward Art, botanical illustration, landscape painting, and the like, creating a space where art and science combined and coexisted.
The cabinet of curiosities lets us envision the world through personal mythology. Once an object enters someone's cabinet, it loses any independent scientific or artistic value and becomes something else entirely, a small piece of the owner's fiction, assembled to validate their own ego. Much the same could be said of most current art and science institutions, where uninformed collectors, curators, and art historians hold all the authority while misleading their audiences. Meanwhile, some artists choose to play the game, making work suited to the cabinet; some give up on it entirely; others keep creating in isolation, with none of the validation.
There is another correlation worth pointing out. Many artists have taken on the role of cabinet-collector themselves, to draw attention to a particular subject, Henrike Naumann, Predrag Đaković, and Oriol Vilanova, to name a few from the 2026 Venice Biennale, alongside earlier figures like George Maciunas, Joseph Cornell, Wolfgang Laib, Kurt Schwitters, and Phoebe Washburn.
Validation Art history books are filled not with the greatest artists, but with those who carved out a path through economics. Art books and museums are, in a sense, books and museums of money, every piece in them has been commissioned or purchased, often more than once. The more it changes hands, the more validation it accrues. Some of the largest galleries even bid on and purchase their own inventory, simply to sustain prices and validate an artist's name. Being an artist, in this system, is not a form of freedom but a game of monetary validation. To be an artist, in practice, is to be a celebrity. The only way to be a truly free artist is to make work once the day's sustaining labor is done and everyone else is asleep. In that moment of stillness and serenity, half-conscious from exhaustion, when time slows, is when an artist can create in full freedom. It comes with zero validation and no acknowledgment. It is the ultimate freedom found within void and solitude.
Giorgio Vasari, the first art historian, unintentionally invented the artist-as-celebrity. An Italian Renaissance painter, architect, historian, and biographer, Vasari wrote Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a book that celebrated artists even as it embellished, altered, and, in numerous places, simply got the facts wrong. The book set off a trend: the wealthy and powerful of the time wanted a piece of that celebrity, wanted their own names recorded alongside the artists they had supported, so posterity would know it. That trend has never stopped, it has only intensified over the centuries.
Around the world, artists have held very different roles: sometimes humble craftsmen in a workshop, sometimes idealized, sometimes admired yet dismissed, and, as in imperial China, sometimes part of an elite class, an elite reserved for men, since women were not permitted to paint.
The very foundation of being an artist is bound up in power, power imposed on artists by art historians, curators, and collectors, many of them poorly informed. Artists gain this power through validation, which confirms that one is worthy of attention. The curator sits in the position of authority to grant that validation, much as the collector once did in the cabinet of curiosities. Vasari's book set the terms that persist today: the artist's required "superstar" status.
Limitations in Art Is there such a thing as a genuinely new idea? Do artists have free will, able to make any choice they want? Does free will even exist within Art context?
The artist's process is extremely limited and shaped by the external world:
Materials: every artist is bound by their materials, whether oil paint, wood, their own body, clay, computers, or code. Which material best expresses the idea? What are its properties, and how should it be used? How can a material be used in a new way, or combined with materials it isn't usually paired with, or placed in a context that changes its very quality (an umbrella made of sponge)? These are among the challenges an artist must weigh. We have to know our materials in order to manipulate them. As any artist knows from experience, the limits of materials often lead to unexpected new solutions and directions in the making process. Material limits and free will are locked in a constant back-and-forth, each shaping and constraining the other, and the laws of nature will always govern what we, as humans, are able to do or use.
Time, as noted above, is always a factor in making a piece, dictating, in its own way, what an artist can and cannot do.
History: the moment an art piece is made shapes not only its context but its very possibility. Imagine Marina Abramović's work made in the 17th century, or Claude Monet painting today. However revolutionary an artist's ideas may seem, they remain, in the end, in step with their time and a reflection of its current state.
Social norms: Abel Azcona eating a Quran, or Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, are just two examples of social norms and shortsighted, superficial beliefs dictating what is and isn't allowed in the art world. Commentary on ruling leaders, or on dominant religions and gods, remains off-limits, even when such commentary is necessary for society's own improvement.
Validation and the art market: the truest free artists are often the unknown ones, but they cannot realize their larger ideas and projects without validation from the art market, which provides the space and funding materialization required. And yet, once an artist is validated, their freedom of thought effectively ends. What is and isn't permitted becomes subject to control.
It is striking to what extent an artist's free will is constrained and imprisoned by social norms, beliefs, and outside forces. Abel Azcona's performances have drawn threats, persecution, and acts of violence. Under the Nazis, artists lacking "proof of Aryan descent" were barred from practicing art after 1933. Robert Mapplethorpe: USA, 1989. Owen Maseko: Zimbabwe, 2011. Caravaggio: Italy, 16th century. M.F. Husain: India, 2006. Jafar Panahi: Iran, 2009. Ai Weiwei: China, 2010. Andrei Tarkovsky: Russia, 1984. These are only a few examples of "artists' freedom."
Art and Politics Can Art transcend social trends? Should Art reflect the news of the day? Should artists take sides? Can, and should, Art meet aggression with aggression? When does Art stop being Art and become political activism instead? Can Art change the world?
Lecture #3: Reality or Absurdity — Consciousness: Who Needs It
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
The universe runs on probability, which exists because of a lack of information. We can know, measure, or observe speed but not position, or vice versa (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) — never both at once. The universe allows us only partial images, leaving us in a world of probabilities.
What Is Deterministic and What Is Indeterministic Art?
Questions arise around the human condition and the often nonsensical way we think. Art that uses absurd representations of mundane objects and everyday situations, yet carries tragic, profound meaning, is best equipped to question the absurdity of reality. This is Art's strength; its capacity to pull the viewer out of their comfort zone and challenge them to consider sides of the story beyond safe, convenient interpretations, through visually powerful concepts.
Official discourses of dishonest empowerment; the cherishing of violence in the name of greed; paradoxical tautologies in rhetoric; justifications for any ill-conceived action; the unquestioning mass following of those who should not even be acknowledged as human; the contradiction between our personal beliefs and the beliefs of those we follow, those for whose ideas we are willing to kill or die, while ignoring that very contradiction: these are just a few of the absurdities we live by. If our arrogance tells us these absurdities are always "theirs" and never "ours," because we alone see the "correct" way, how wrong we are. Anyone who fails to question their own views and perceptions, yet makes pronouncements regardless, is just as arrogant in their absurdity as those they judge.
Scientific experiments tend to prove an idea; art processes tend to question one. Facing absurdity with proven truth is almost always rejected by the absurd, who prefer to dwell in an illogical reality, one that offers freedom and justification for any ill behavior or thought, without consequence. An art process that results in an absurd art piece reflects the viewer's own absurdity back at them, like a mirror; viewers see themselves in the piece's irrationality. Seeing our reflection diffused through an absurd, deformed reality of beliefs, contradictory actions, and unquestioning conformity forces us to question our own identity, and realization follows. Questioning different models of reality is the artist's responsibility.
Reason and Reality: Reason as the Highest Form of Absurdity
Humans love truth; it is the insatiable instinct of our consciousness. Possessing the truth of some idea or thing-in-the-world lets us consciously, conveniently justify our actions. We apply logical conclusions to new or existing information in pursuit of truth, and this capacity for logical conclusion, in the name of truth, is what we call Reason. But truth is deeply damaging to humanity, and fails to be what it claims to be in its own definition. Definite truth is impossible, only "truths" exist, the sum of all possible truths held within a single reality. I see it as possible that there are two distinct modes of reasoning: Functional Reasoning (based on function, purpose, and hierarchy) and Quantum Thinking (all possible thoughts held simultaneously, universalism).
Truth is an effect of perceptual processes, perceptually created information, both relative and, in a sense, irrelevant. Consciousness ought to be explained first, but as we know, that hasn't gone 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 say what consciousness is, the very thing with which we reason, how can we claim Reason for anything at all?
Reason ceases to be what it claims to be. Its definition is as illogical as those that employ it in practice. Its failure stems from the nature of our consciousness itself. Reason consists of hallucinatory constructs of consciousness, never a factual a priori. Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, proposes that the human mind is "constantly hallucinating the world and the self" in order to create reality.
How does consciousness happen? Without it, there is no self, no reality, no Reason; the universe itself ceases to exist for us. Answering the question of consciousness's origin and function is therefore essential to understanding anything at all. According to Seth, conscious experience is a controlled hallucination that happens with, through, and because of our living bodies. Being conscious has two properties: first, experience of the world around us, and second, the conscious self, the specific experience of being a self.
Seth begins with experience of the world: imagine being a brain, sealed inside a bony skull, trying to work out what's out there. There is no light or sound inside the skull; all the brain has to go on are streams of electrical signals, only indirectly related to things in the world. Perception, Seth argues, has to be a process of "informed guesswork," in which sensory signals combine with prior expectations about how the world is, to form the brain's best guess about the causes of those signals, a guess continually updated to guide 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." We are, in effect, all hallucinating all the time. "It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that's what we call 'reality.'"
Throughout their training, artists learn how to exploit this "informed guesswork" at the heart of consciousness. Artists know we do not passively perceive the world, and they use well-established tricks to manipulate perception: optical illusion, perspective, ambiguity of form, visual depth, selective emphasis and blur to steer the narrative, symbol, color constancy, and more. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring shows a pearl with no contour and no hook to hang it from the girl's ear, just a smudge of paint, yet we see the most realistic pearl imaginable. Every art piece is built from particular, suggestive fragments of information that artists know will trigger a specific or deliberately ambiguous form, narrative, or reality in the viewer's mind. Artists create controlled, agreed-upon hallucinations. They create Reality, a new one, with every piece. By deciding to place a mark here, with certain properties, rather than there, we split the universe in two, much as a coin toss does in Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation. Every decision creates a new world.
A second observation follows from 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.'" Perhaps, I would add, when we agree about our hallucinations, that is also what we call Reason. But Reason is nothing more than an illusion, a construct the brain builds to make sense of ourselves and our relation to the world. This is precisely why Reason cannot be what it claims to be; its own definition undoes it. The reason is not reasonable.
We are also entirely certain that we possess a complete understanding of our own Self. Yet Seth argues that this, too, is a hallucination generated by the brain. Neurologists and psychiatrists already know well how these distinct elements of self can break down in various ways. In the rubber hand experiment, a person's real hand is hidden from view while a rubber hand is placed before them; both hands are stroked with a paintbrush at the same time, while the person watches only the rubber one. After a while, most people begin to feel the rubber hand as part of their own body. "Even our experience of what our body is, is another kind of 'best guessing' by the brain," Seth says.
We misperceive the world constantly. We misperceive ourselves. PTSD and panic attacks are real physical experiences of the brain. Fibromyalgia is constant physical pain, and yet it stems from a complete mis-signaling of the nervous system. Our bodies hallucinate about themselves and the world alike. How, then, can we use Reason to make any definite statement or take any definite action? The only meaningful way to live within this nonsensical hallucination we call Self and Reality is to create new realities, the way artists do. Anyone who uses Reason to make a definite statement justifying their actions, usually, in the end, with destructive consequences, is, as I see it, operating at a fairly simplistic stage of conscious development. Collective hallucinations should never be mistaken for true Reality, and those who use the Reason of Conformity to follow the group blindly and unquestioningly tend, in the end, toward destruction and atrocity.
Thermodynamics and quantum physics should have taught us by now that nothing in nature is truly definite, it is all based on relations and probabilities, indeterminism. No purpose, only relation. "We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature," as Seth puts it, and neither we nor our Reason can obey some separate set of cosmic rules. Reason fails because it attempts the impossible: to be definite knowledge, rather than the whole of possible knowledge and its relations. Once humanity begins reasoning this way, we just might become human.
In the 4th century BCE, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus understood the entire universe as boundless space through which atoms move, atoms possessing no quality apart from shape, with no finality to their endless dance. 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 goes on experimenting with forms and structures, and we, like other animals, are the product of a selection that is random and accidental across eons of time. Our lives are combinations of atoms; our thoughts are made of atoms; our dreams are products of atoms; our hopes and emotions are written in a language of atomic combination; the light by which we see the world is itself composed of atoms.
Plato and Aristotle rejected Democritus's naturalism in favor of explaining the world in finalistic terms, believing everything that happens has a purpose, and understanding nature through the lens of good and evil.
Democritus reportedly wrote over 70 treatises, all of which are lost with the exception of a few fragments. What survived, instead, was Aristotle's work, which tragically became the foundation and central pillar of Western thought. The edicts of Emperor Theodosius declared brutal repression of paganism and made Christianity the sole obligatory religion, closing schools and destroying any texts inconsistent with Christian doctrine. Aristotle's work survived that purge; Democritus's did not.
In Democritus's thought, there is no fear of gods, no ends or purposes built into the world, no divide between Earth and the heavens, no cosmic hierarchy, only a deep love for the nature we are part of, a serene immersion in which humans, animals, plants, and clouds are all part of one whole, without hierarchy: a deep, profound universalism. What would the world look like if Aristotle's work had been lost and Democritus's had survived instead? Had humanity followed Democritus's atomism, naturalism, and universalism, how many divisions, how much hatred, how many wars, how much abuse and atrocity might have been prevented? How many lives might have been saved? To think of ourselves as equal parts of one whole leaves no room for hate, no room for fear. Democritus's luminous, serene meditation on the beauty of the world was destroyed in the name of suffering, violence, and punishment. We chose, instead, a world of hierarchy and punishment, where everything happens for a reason, where good and evil are fixed categories. We chose Aristotle. The only outcome of hierarchy is tyranny and hatred; perhaps the single greatest tragedy in human history, with consequences measured in billions of lost lives, and in the damage done to the Earth itself, its nature and climate.
Lucretius (the Roman poet and philosopher, born circa 99 BCE), writing in the spirit of Democritus, speaks profoundly of unity, that we are made of the same substance as the stars and the sea. "To a wise human, the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe." It is no surprise that the Catholic Church tried to suppress him, banning the teaching of Lucretius in schools in 1516. But the reasoning that all structures are hierarchical, governed by cause and effect, punishment always for a reason, never went away; over the centuries, it has only dug itself deeper into mass consciousness. It remains, it seems, the only mode of reasoning most humans currently know. If only we could set Reason aside and bring Democritus's thought back, in the name of peace among ourselves and with the environment. Thinking fluidly and universally, as artists do, should be the next reform of human thought.
Thinking means consciously connecting near and far, related and unrelated experiences and concepts, and grasping the relations between them. Reasoning, by contrast, is logical thinking, a mechanical, rudimentary process: if A, then B. Reason leads to fundamentalism. Thinking, unlike automatic reason, ranges freely across the full field of possibilities and their relations. Reason is rigid, and usually results in a misunderstanding of the world. Art uses thinking, not reasoning. Artists consider every possibility, not merely logical conclusions that are, in the end, anything but logical. Cause and effect hold no interest for the artist; they belong to those who practice Functional Reasoning, reasoning that depends on cause and effect, on everything happening "for a reason," on A because of B. Thinking is like an artist making a piece: a process unfolding through time. Reasoning is the final, definite outcome others later see as an object.
Unlike Zeno, I am not arguing that the failure of rigorous logic proves our perceptions irrational or illusory, only that there are better, more complex, more efficient ways of analyzing the world: through a continuous thinking process in which every possibility is considered, and possible, though some are more likely than others. In this continuous state, no conclusive belief or opinion forms; instead, the whole world is comprehended simultaneously, through time, without time. Quantized thinking, perhaps.
Take a guitar. What comes to mind first, an object, strings, music? We likely picture it visually, from the front, defined by its function and visualized in the simplest, most common way. Cubist artists would instead break its form apart, so that every possible angle appears simultaneously. Moreover, the space of the guitar, the space within it, and the space around it become one and the same. Air is as much a part of the guitar as the wood. The air within and around it takes its shape, and gives the guitar its meaning and purpose by carrying sound waves to our ears. When observing the world, artists consider every possibility, then choose one to materialize through visual language. Artists think in a quantized way rather than reason their way into belief. Some who call themselves artists nonetheless practice the rigorous logic of strict Reasoning; calling oneself an artist, as noted, doesn't make it so. Perhaps this is exactly how we might critique Art and judge its value: by asking whether it thinks, or merely reasons.
The world is built on quantum relations; computers and the Internet already run on quantum principles (or very nearly so, and closing in fast); and I suspect it is only a matter of time before the scientific community formally confirms that our brains, too, are quantum-based (promising data has already been published). If the world, and everything in it, operates on quantum principles, why wouldn't our thinking reflect the same? Our thinking must expand beyond Functional Reasoning (object–function–cause and effect), beyond even the digital age, into the quantum. Until then, humanity will keep being inhumane, violent, and oppressive, cause-and-effect Reasoning will be our undoing. Perhaps the way forward is to abandon the primitive, geocentric idea of an individualized rational self demanding a selfish, aggressive sense of "mine," and instead understand the self as part of the Infosphere revolution (discussed in Lesson 1), recognizing that we are all connected, for good and ill, within one complex network, so that harming others harms the system, and consequently ourselves. Inforgs, rather than an individualized, geocentric self.
Reason has cost humanity not only its progress but, more importantly, billions of lives across history. I am not critiquing Reason the way Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and many others have; I am arguing that every mode of reasoning — "private," "public," deductive, inductive, analogical, fallacious, abductive, and so on — is dangerous to humanity, holding back, intellectually, anyone who reasons by means of it. Contradiction and hypocrisy are inevitable consequences of Reason. Reason reshapes Reality into a personalized illusion. Reason blinds us. We use it to justify atrocity, immorality, unethical action, self-pity, destruction both personal and global, and to assign blame for our failures. Reason is Absurdity.
We group people by some arbitrary quality, calling the process rational Reasoning, and then give that group a name: Neanderthals, heathens, barbarians, primitives (to say nothing of the more contemporary vocabulary of racism and religious hatred). The name itself evokes Reason to justify hatred, revulsion, and violence. We use Reason, conveniently, to empower ourselves by belittling others, constructing a hierarchy that is arbitrary yet made to seem purposeful. We invoke a Geocentric Reason in which we alone are the chosen ones, always the "good ones," the ones who can truly "see," the ones "looking up." Our ego is built from Entitled Reasoning, and the more we observe ourselves through it, the more entitled the self becomes, and the larger our ego grows. We can easily reason our way into immorality, corruption, or dishonesty, usually by accusing others of the very same, or through "Entitled Reasoning": the belief that we are simply better than others. So readily do we spin this around, justifying not only our own wrongdoing but projecting it onto others, becoming blind to our own faults while rationalizing them as morally sound. We accuse others of the very wrongs we ourselves commit.
Curiously, the further we reason, the further we drift from Reason itself, and our actions grow illogical, hypocritical, and distorted. The consequences of this overextended Reasoning are plain to see in the practice of law and its frequent failure to rule by reason at all, any case, any event, can be argued successfully through Reason even when the outcome is utterly nonsensical. The more we reason, the further we stray from Reason. Common sense, what some languages literally call "Healthy Reasoning", is increasingly suppressed in modern society, leaving us with its opposite: Unhealthy Reasoning.
Religious texts, meant as manuals for proper, morally acceptable behavior, contain narratives and instructions that describe, encourage, command, and reward violent acts by individuals and groups alike; war, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, murder, rape, genocide, criminal punishment. Gods command their followers to kill members of rival groups, to slaughter women, children, and infants, sparing only virgins to be taken home as prizes. Women and slaves are commanded to obey their masters, instructions that have propagated abuse and racism for thousands of years. Violence has been justified in the name of Reason, globally, for millennia.
Such atrocities were made possible by 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. Through Reasoning, leaders manipulate groups into conformity. Conformity may once have made evolutionary sense, but today it is a dangerous doctrine, almost always ending in human casualties: conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine movements, violence, war, racism, to name only a few. Facts are logically set aside; distorted misinformation props up belief, all for the convenience of conforming. It is intellectually far easier to conform to reason than to think independently and judge for oneself. Political and religious leaders alike have exploited this throughout history, and continue to do so today. It is not the leader who should be feared, but the followers; the leader is one; the followers number in the millions.
In 1935, Muzafer Sherif conducted an experiment demonstrating how readily people conform to group norms, using the autokinetic effect: a small spot of light projected onto a screen in a dark room appears to move, though it never actually does. Tested individually, participants' estimates of how far the light moved varied widely, from 20 cm to 80 cm. They were then tested in groups of three, two people whose individual estimates had been similar were grouped with a third whose estimate had differed sharply. Each person stated aloud how far they thought the light had moved. Over repeated trials, the group's estimates converged, and the outlier conformed to the view of the other two. This showed that people consistently tend toward conformity, reaching group agreement rather than trusting their own judgment. A person looks to others for guidance and adopts the group norm, wanting to do the right thing but lacking sufficient information of their own; observing others supplies that information, however incorrect it might 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 could live in pure thought, pure speculation? Of the immortals, Borges writes: "In a self-absorption, they scarcely perceived the physical world." What is this self-absorption that extends beyond the self to the universe itself? Could we become absorbed into the very construct of the universe, oblivious to both the ego's self-absorption and the physical world? This passage, I believe, most accurately captures what I would call Quantum Thinking, or the artist's mode of thought.
Art speaks the language of immortals, a language with no nouns, only impersonal verbs, no adjectives, no tenses, only a constant construct of impression. Art speaks not the language of objects or their use and properties, but the language of thought itself. "There is no more complex pleasure than thought," said Borges. Art has no words and no objects, only thoughts and impressions, from which we build a construct of all there is, the universe itself, where every thought and every moment of time collapses into one. This is the artist's resistance to Geocentric Reasoning and Logic; it is the artist's resistance to humanity's own absurdity.
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
The official definition of consciousness: the state of being aware of one's surroundings, internal states, and existence.
Does the Universe have consciousness (panpsychism)? Bernardo Kastrup proposes analytic idealism, claiming that phenomenal consciousness is the primary substrate of existence, with individual minds representing dissociated segments of a universal consciousness.
Is my consciousness mine, or a 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 we are just an assembly of all the conscious bits?
A 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; a higher, more complex consciousness might be 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 someone’s Art project?
Is there something that is more than consciousness? Something that exceeds the classic understanding of consciousness, not awareness but being all simultaneously.
Localized Consciousness
Consciousness is an internal experience: a self's interpretation of the world, a self-construct of what is. It is, by nature, utterly self-centered. Our personal experiences are processed, digested, and perceived through our own internal consciousness. For Carl Jung, the ego sits at the center of consciousness, giving us awareness of our existence and personal identity. Ego is one's personality. It seems to me that ego sustains itself through conscious awareness, growing its own self and identity in the process. Ego creates ego. Jung does distinguish between ego and self: ego is the center of the conscious mind, while the self is the entire psyche, conscious and unconscious together.
What would it feel like to have a more altruistic consciousness, one capable of comprehending and being aware of everything at once, every probability simultaneously? What if, instead of merely seeing a rock, we could feel what it is to be one? What if we could feel, inhabit, and hold every living creature's feeling, perception, apperception, thought, and comprehension, all at once, in this very moment, a superposition of consciousness? Could we possess a "probable consciousness," and what would the world look like if we did? Would time still feel linear, or would it become three-dimensional, or vanish altogether? What would the perception of space become? Our consciousness, in its current state, is a self-made prison of self-centered constructs, a self-imposed, localized "cave dweller's" perception.
Metacognition is thinking about thinking; it is an awareness of one's own thought processes, and of the patterns within them. It lets us step outside our own minds to observe why we react or perceive the way we do. Metacognition seems to question the ego, and in doing so, offers a first step toward a delocalized consciousness.
From Localized Consciousness, through Metacognition, to Delocalized, Probable Consciousness.
I will leave the deeper questions of consciousness's nature and origin to philosophers and neurologists, apart from a few key ideas worth mentioning here. However, I will give examples of concepts that are on par with Artists' creativity and freedom of thinking. In fact, Artists have a reputation for nonsensical, useless ideas, seemingly as far removed from reality as possible. And yet, a few scientific theories and thought experiments manage to astonish even the most creative artist. These challenge our accepted reasoning and perception, and are invaluable for learning how to think like an artist, and how far the mind can stretch its own reasoning.
As I passed by, a tree leaf caught my eye. The tree stood bare in the winter cold, with only a few leaves still stubbornly clinging on. Watching one leaf in particular, I noticed that at any given moment, though it wasn't moving at all, it appeared to move, because I, the observer, was the one moving through space and time. The leaf looked different, seemed to occupy a different spot, moment to moment (look at the space around or behind it, and this becomes obvious), not because the leaf itself moved or changed position, but because I moved through time, so it appeared, to me, to be changing. The leaf simply is; the observer is the one changing through spacetime. A small, beautiful observation, perhaps one that mathematics and quantum physics could formalize. The world, in all its structure, is constantly revealing itself, but only to those who choose to look. Casual observers see the world of "Mortals"; deliberate observers incline toward seeing it as the "Immortals" do. Artists are anything but casual observers.
In Search Of Our curiosities and our questions define us. Through questions, we explore and learn; they expand our consciousness bit by bit. There are some 64,000 Google searches per second, 228 million per hour, 5.6 billion per day, 2 trillion per year. The questions we ask, the things we search for, reflect who we are. Is our search history a self-portrait of our state of Being? What does our cultural self-portrait look like? What is Google's collective epistemological reasoning, set against the individual's own? The knowledge we choose to seek defines us. Can we ask the same questions countless others have asked before, and still arrive at answers that are entirely our own?
Consciousness
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, the Austrian mathematician and theoretical physicist, proposed the "Boltzmann Brain Paradox", a thought experiment in cosmology and philosophy questioning the nature of reality and the very possibility of our existence. The Boltzmann Brain suggests it may be statistically more likely for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with false memories of an entire life in the universe, than for the whole universe to have arisen the way we currently believe it did. Given enough time, random fluctuations could, in principle, cause particles to spontaneously assemble into any structure of any complexity, including a fully functioning human brain.
Boltzmann brains are used to test our assumptions about thermodynamics and the universe's development. 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. Boltzmann argued that although most of the universe is featureless, we don't perceive those regions, because they are devoid of intelligent life to observe them.
The 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 of how we look physically in a moment, never at all angles at all times. Strangers know better how you look than yourself. A mirror helps, but it does not give us the whole picture. We attempt to research, experiment, philosophize, 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, any opinion, analyzing it like an image in a mirror. It is a highly inaccurate image.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For Sartre, consciousness is not a static entity but a dynamic process, always directed toward something, and always aware of itself. Consciousness, he argues, is fundamentally intentional, always consciousness "of" something, whether a physical object, a person, or an idea. It is also self-conscious: aware not only of objects, but of itself as the subject doing the perceiving.
George Berkeley
Berkeley'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 holds that things exist only when perceived; meaning that, without a conscious mind present to hear it, the falling tree makes no sound at all.
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 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 behavior of a system, or do we all together get rid of an observer's consciousness in Hilbert-based Art?
Madness
My perception of reality is as real and truthful as it is to someone with opposing views, or someone with hallucinations. So how presumptuous would it be to assume that my perception of the world is The correct one and everyone else is wrong. This is madness. To think that the way I see the world is the right way and whoever disagrees with me is wrong is the most preposterous narrow minded idea. What if my truthful wives are the “mad” ones?
According to Werner Herzog Madness is a state where we can be out and beyond ourselves. What if madness is the state of more complex delocalized consciousness, but the world we constructed is based on reason and logic, which is limiting and leads to absurdity, so we write it off as unwelcomed. Perhaps the madness is an ability to possess Probable consciousness, consciousness of all, without time-space-ego limitations.
Lecture #4: Seeing or Observing : Reality of a Box : Reality is not as it appears
Reality of a Box
Fundamental Questions:
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?
What is reality? Is Reality real?
Does time define space or vice versa?
By blurring, and I hesitate in my optimism to say "erasing", the strict border between Art and Science, great progress becomes possible in both fields. Art and Science may speak different languages, but they are, at bottom, engaged in the same attempt to explain the world. Both pursue the same questions: scientific life is devoted to discovery and proof of the existing world, while an artist's life is devoted to discovery and understanding of the existing world by creating never seen before new worlds. In a lab full of metal and liquid helium, scientists set up experiments to test questions and confirm answers. In a studio full of carbon (pencils and paper), artists set up an art process to experience the questions and understand the answers. Both Art and Science interrogate the world, bringing new thought into it and recontextualizing our preconceived ideas and views.
Art and Science require the same fundamental mode of thinking: connecting things, beliefs, and ideas not typically seen as connected, and perceiving relations within concepts that usually go unnoticed. The difference between them is one of name, and name only. The moment we label something, we create a divide, an irreparable one, at least for now. Art goes into a box labeled "Art"; Science into its own labeled box. The contents of the two boxes are not to be mixed, and when they accidentally are, outrage follows; the art world furious at science, and vice versa, each dismissing the other. Labels do that. In both cases, it is shortsightedness and instinctive hostility, born of arbitrary tradition. This labeling appears not only in academia but across every culture, as an integral part of human behavior: us versus them. It sounds almost absurd when named plainly: people bickering and shouting at each other from their respective caves, drowning in self-imposed stereotypes.
Humanity's progress is only possible once we step outside our labeled boxes and start communicating with one another. Our thinking is fundamentally the same; artists simply notice connections that scientists are not accustomed to seeing, and the reverse is equally true. A scientist's chain of reasoning is quite similar, if not identical, to an artist's. The only real difference is language.
Erwin Schrödinger writes in What is Life? that we have inherited, throughout centuries, unified, universal, all-embracing knowledge, which is the only kind with full credit. However, the depth of knowledge has forced us to branch into specialized, limited, and narrow focuses. Perhaps it is time to go back and attempt to unify some of that knowledge to give us a more comprehensive view of Reality.
Patrick Cavanagh, co-founder of the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard and a leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, recognizes that Art is a 40,000-year record of experiments in visual neuroscience that reveals as much about the human brain as it does about the world around us. Roberto Zenit, a researcher in fluid dynamics and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, has extensively studied David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock's painting processes. He realized similarities between their paint techniques and flow phenomena in other areas, which have helped explain the formation of lava domes on Venus and the Great Kavir salt desert in Iran.
If we, as artists, bear a responsibility to represent reality, shouldn't we also bear a responsibility to understand that same reality through knowledge? I, for one, would like to gather as much information as possible about "the Box", an object, before attempting to render it in visual language, whether as a simple impression or down to its atomic structure.
A Box
One possible view: an object did not exist until I became aware of it, until I interacted with it. (Berkeley'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 it: a football game does not exist until the players gather and begin interacting, only then does the game come into being. Once a relation or interaction is established, that is the moment an object, or an event, comes into existence. This is not a matter of consciousness, but of interaction. We create our own universe in every minuscule moment we spend interacting with it. Perhaps Boltzmann was right to believe in a multiverse, in which every event splits the existing universe into every possible version of that event. Something may have happened, somewhere, at some point, but for me, it did not exist until I became entangled with it, and it became part of my perceptual construct of reality.
When interpreting an object, an art object, the artist presents their own relation to that object's information, because it is the artist who gave the object its existence, in a moment of awareness. It is this awareness, this interaction, that is being presented. Creation is a documentation of the interaction itself.
A box's identity holds only in the moment of observation, and only by virtue of its relation to the world around it. Observe a box, then move it to the other side of the room: each time it is moved, and interacts with a new set of things-in-the-world, it takes on a different appearance and identity. Traditional artists know this all too well. We, too, are different people depending on who we're with, and in what situation. The world is in constant flux, and every interaction reshapes it. To be unaware of this, to believe instead in the fixed, permanent identity of a box, or of a self, is to see life as a single snapshot without continuity, rather than as an ever-changing film in which each frame, however invisible or insignificant on its own, is a crucial contributor to the whole picture. The strong opinions and rigid views some hold so dearly often belong to shortsighted viewers of a single frame, missing the whole of life's film.
Is the reality we see around us merely a random collection of unrelated rules and events, or is there some common thread underlying it all? Why is there a Reality at all? What is Reality? To understand anything, we must break our observations down, decode the bits and the intricate connections between them, and only then use that information to reconstruct a fuller, more coherent picture of Reality. How, then, are artists questioning Reality and our perceptions of it? Art breaks the observed down and reconstructs it. Art links different facets of reality in an attempt to understand it.
Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965) offers a perfect example of questioning the realness of reality, and the connotation and denotation of what we perceive. Think of a chair: what comes to mind first? A three-dimensional object in space? A particular material? Or simply the meaning of the word "chair"? We could ask endless further questions, and each of us would answer differently. So what, then, is a chair? This is exactly what Plato's Theory of Forms addresses. The physical reality we experience as real is imperfect and ever-changing. What is "a chair" if each of us pictures a different one? Even granting that we agree on a chair, that same chair keeps changing physically through time. What, then, is the ultimate chair, the true blue, or any true instance of any entity in the world? If we cannot even agree on physical reality, how could we ever agree on concepts and ideas? This, as Plato put it, is a world of shadows. True reality, for Plato, lies in the Realm of Forms — the world of ideas, ideals, and abstraction, the world where concepts themselves live. This reality of true Forms is perfect and unchanging; it exceeds time and space, and is, in that sense, more real than the temporary shadows of physical reality. Just as in Kosuth's piece, there is a chair belonging to physical reality — imperfect, changing, one interpretation among many, a shadow. The two-dimensional image of a chair offers a simple connotation of one. And finally, the dictionary's definition of the word "chair" is its denotation: a concept, an abstraction, belonging to the Realm of Forms.
What we should take from Kosuth and Plato is that our perceptions of physical reality are not true reality, or at least not the whole of it. As in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, our physical, perceptual reality is a shadowy illusion, not to be trusted blindly. If we apply what we know of the physical world to our cognitive perceptions, rather than relying on sensory perception alone, the world grows considerably larger. Perhaps that is precisely what Plato had in mind with his image of walking out of the cave.
Consider simply what color is. Think of photons, and of electromagnetic radiation. We can perceive visually only a tiny sliver of the full spectrum, 400 to 700 nanometers, while the rest, though known to us, remains imperceptible (I guess we are out of Plato's cave now, as we know that which we cannot perceive). Radio and TV waves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays, secondary cosmic rays, frequencies ranging from 3 × 10²⁶ Hz to 3 × 10³ Hz, wavelengths from 10⁻¹⁸ m to 100 km, and we perceive only the smallest fraction of it all. That tiny fraction is what we take as the whole of reality. Picture all those frequencies rippling around us, rushing through objects, reflecting, bouncing, piercing, being absorbed. Picture neutrinos, right now, passing through our bodies and through solid objects at the speed of light, entirely undisturbed by the apparent solidity of "real things." Picture the vast emptiness that makes up all matter, including ourselves. The visuals alone are astonishing, but this knowledge lets us see more of reality than our eyes alone ever could. The world is made of light, but that is only the visible sliver of the whole universe. Dark matter and dark energy, whose nature we still don't understand; quantum fields; gravity; and a great deal more we don't yet know, all of it within us and around us. We are, fundamentally, the same stuff as the rest of nature: our bodies, and our desks alike. To paint that reality with knowledge; where space ripples with speed-of-light photons, where every frequency and form of energy, not only visible color, fills the space within and around every object, where time and space simply are, would be about as close as one could come to Plato's world of ideal Forms. This view lets us grasp our oneness with everything. We can comprehend, and even feel, Reality. This is the power of Art and Science together: the ability to perceive, to feel, and perhaps even to understand with the mind, not only the eyes. It is a rare privilege to understand things as they truly are. Limited knowledge and perception yield a limited reality, and we should ask whether that limited view is reality at all, or merely a Platonic world of shadow and illusion. Knowledge gives us the power to see beyond the realm of shadows, and to step outside the cave.
What we perceive, what we call physical reality, is no more than the cave wall an inch from our faces. However real it feels, it is, at best, an extremely reduced and distorted version of reality. With our faces pressed so close to the wall, seeing only the shadows cast by the fire behind us, with no knowledge whatsoever of the fire, the cave, or the chains, we would, understandably, invent our own fictional explanations for what we experience. This, evidently, is a recurring part of human history and of the present, one need only look at politics, conspiracy theory, religion, and cults. We experience it, and so it becomes our Reality, except it has nothing to do with Reality; it is a self-imposed, invented one.
Now, suppose we do the hard work, turn our heads and learn the true state of the universe we inhabit. Our reality expands and changes. Knowledge helps us see, helps us understand the state of our being, and, ultimately, helps us Be in Reality. At present, everything known in the universe, the neutrons, protons, and electrons that make up everything visible to us, accounts for only about 4% of its mass and energy. Roughly 70% is dark energy, about 26% dark matter, and we still don't know precisely what that 96% actually is. Everything humanity has ever discovered and learned accounts for just 4% of the universe. We know about the fire, and we know there is something beyond the cave, but we cannot yet explain the remaining 96%. There is 96% we know that we do not know. How much more is there that we do not know we do not know? Will we ever get out of the cave? Knowing the unknown is incomparably more real than not knowing at all.
And yet, more than a century on, we are still suffering from what mathematical physicist Marcus Appleby calls "long classicality" in our understanding of quantum physics, comparing it, aptly, to long COVID. Numerous interpretations compete to tell us what quantum mechanics is really saying about reality: the many-worlds interpretation, objective collapse, relational quantum mechanics, spontaneous collapse theory, Bohmian mechanics, QBism, and others. These interpretations diverge substantially, which is remarkable, given that they all claim to interpret the very same theory. It is as if we construct the story to fit the reality we want, then make it consistent with quantum mechanics after the fact. We form interpretations based on prior belief true of how we read the news, how we relate to others, and just as true of scientific data or the art process. Can we look at information objectively and let it dictate our interpretations, rather than letting prior belief, or what we've been told to believe, dictate them instead? Can a rational person set aside ego and prior experience entirely, approach something without preconception, and let the data alone speak?
Physical Reality, Mind-Independent Reality, and the Reality of Meaning and Knowledge
Is physical reality, the reality we experience, the only real reality? What of mind-independent reality? Just because, a hundred years ago, we did not know dark matter existed doesn't mean it wasn't there. Galaxies held together just as well then as they do now; the Earth kept spinning, uninterrupted, for dinosaurs, for flat-earthers, and for those with a basic grasp of astronomy and physics alike. How many more things hold our Reality together with no consciousness present to perceive them? Reality is mind-independent, yet no less real for it.
We know quantum mechanics works, we know it because we rely on it daily, in our devices. We also know how difficult it is to wrap our minds around. The double-slit experiment is deceptively simple in construction, yet it thoroughly challenges our logical reasoning, implying that tiny objects can seemingly exist in two places at once, or can they? We know now that it is not the atom that forms the fundamental building block of reality, but the field, the field's information, shared invisibly among fundamental building blocks through interaction.
We have based all of humanity's reasoning, from the very start, on logic. But what if we didn't reason logically? What if we didn't simply deduce and conclude? What if somewhere there are exoplanets where reasoning doesn't follow the rules of logic at all? What if we could reason collectively according to entirely new, beyond-logical principles, the way an octopus does, with its nine effective brains: a central one between its eyes, and a mini-brain in each of its eight arms, allowing each arm to act with a degree of independence? What might decentralized logic look like in a highly developed brain? How much would our perception of Reality expand, or not? Can something other than logical reasoning even exist, and if it does, would our neurology even be capable of recognizing it? The trained mind of an artist might stand a better chance than most of recognizing such a different mode of thought, and of expanding our world of perception in turn.
Once again: what is the reality of a box? Is there something more to it than how we see it, more than a snapshot of its superficial appearance, taken in a single sliver of time? I mentioned Hilbert space earlier: the mathematical description of quantum wave functions, of every possible state existing at once. What does a box look like in Hilbert space? How would one paint a box in a Hilbert-space state? What is inside an empty box? Does the act of looking, of knowing what's inside, change the box's context? What is the space of nothingness?
Hydrogen atoms are 99.9999999999996% empty space. To grasp the scale of that emptiness: if an atom were the size of a large stadium, its nucleus would be about the size of a ping-pong ball, with electrons no more than specks of dust floating somewhere among the stands. Why, then, do solid objects feel solid? Why don't we fall through our chairs, or walk through walls? When two atoms come into contact, they never physically touch, being, as they are, almost entirely empty space, but they do exert forces on each other, chiefly the electromagnetic force. It is this electromagnetic field that keeps us from walking through walls, or through each other. When a massive star collapses at the end of its life, its gravitational field is strong enough to merge all its atoms together, leaving only neutrons and no empty space at all, a neutron star. Neutron stars are so dense that a mere 20 km of one weighs about as much as one and a half times our entire solar system. Sufficiently massive stars collapse further still, into a black hole, where a single cubic centimeter can weigh more than the Earth. And yet we know that empty space, properly speaking, does not exist at all, a vacuum is not emptiness, but a space filled with bubbling quantum-field fluctuations. Artists are, for the most part, preoccupied with the solidity of reality, of objects, but does that solidity even exist? Is it real?
What color is a box? We say blue, and so we paint the whole thing blue. Except it isn't quite that simple. In ancient Greece, the sky was described as bronze, not blue. In fact the Greeks had no word for blue at all. What they did have were words describing the intensity of light and dark (glaukos and kyanos). Homer names only four colors across the Iliad and the Odyssey: black, white, greenish-yellow, and purple-red. The sky is bronze because it dazzles like a shield; wine, the sea, and sheep are all, in his telling, purple-red. NASA's 2006 Mars rover was, notably, designed to categorize color much the way the ancient Greeks did, grouping objects by property rather than strict hue, so that yellow or light green, for instance, signified fluid, fresh, or living. In parts of Papua New Guinea, many languages have words only for black and white, and nothing else. Classical Welsh has no distinct word for brown, gray, blue, or green. What color we see, then, depends in part on our language, and on how our culture prioritizes an object's properties.
The box is not what it is simply because it IS; it is what it is because of its context, and its relation to everything else in the universe.
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 the problem demands a different, novel approach. The bricks would need to be assembled in an entirely new way, and the problem itself would force us to discover a solution never tried before, resulting in real advancement. We don't need to change the bricks; we need to change our concept of what a house is, what a brick is, and how it might be built. Our understanding of the universe remains incomplete, and we keep trying to fit its fragmented pieces into an image we already recognize. Instead, we should take all the pieces and construct an entirely new image of the universe.
Hilbert's problems are the 23 mathematical problems published by the German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900, presented at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians. He spoke on August 8 at the Sorbonne, presenting 10 of them at that time. All were unsolved then, and several proved deeply influential for twentieth-century mathematics. The full list of 23 was published later, in English translation, in 1902; problems 8, 13, and 16 remain unresolved to this day. Combining known things-in-the-world into new combinations is admirable, but it comes nowhere close to the rare insight of those able to perceive and name what remains genuinely unknown. Solving a hard puzzle is impressive; creating a puzzle is remarkable; but creating an unsolvable one is the work of intellectual "gods."
In some cases, in both Art and Science, we must devise entirely different approaches to test the very same problem, in order to confirm a result.
Fundamentals
What follows may lean a bit heavily on science, but our understanding of Reality cannot rest on simply seeing and believing, it must rest on analytical observation. Science shows us the non-intuitive, proven fundamentals of reality; it tells us that the shadows we so readily accept in our everyday experience, within our own Platonic cave, are not real, and that reality is far more complex than it appears. We, as artists, should be familiar with the proven nature of things in the universe, so that we may observe and truly see. It's also worth noting that scientific reasoning is built on a kind of simplistic complexity not unlike an artist's own reasoning.
Information is fundamental to everything in nature. It seems to me there are two kinds: ephemeral and a priori. Ephemeral information is a manifestation, an effect, of a priori information, it is our interpretation of Reality, a superficial and largely invented one, shaped by our beliefs and personal impressions. A priori information, by contrast, is the most fundamental, integral part of nature itself.
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 shows on a screen positioned behind the slit.
As light passes through the slits, it spreads out and refracts; the wave splits into two new waves, each radiating outward from one slit. These two waves then interfere with each other. Where a peak meets a trough, they cancel out; where peak meets peak, they reinforce each other, producing the brightest light. On a second wall placed behind the first, this produces a striped pattern, known as an interference pattern, with the brightest stripes marking where the waves reinforced one another.
If one slit is blocked, some electrons pass through the open slit and strike the second wall much like pebbles thrown at a target: the resulting spots form a strip roughly the shape of the slit itself. With both slits open, one might expect two such rectangular strips on the second wall. What appears instead is very different: the accumulated pattern of electron strikes replicates the interference pattern of a wave. This holds even when electrons are fired one at a time, with no possibility of interfering with each other, and yet, strangely, each individual electron still contributes one dot to a pattern that, after enough strikes, looks exactly like wave interference. Can an electron somehow split? Roman Ondák's piece Measuring the Universe produces a strikingly similar interference pattern.
(The interference pattern of an electron looks remarkably like the pattern produced by random mark-making in a drawing — which, too, always resolves into a pattern of its own.)
If a detector is placed at the slits to determine which one an electron passes through, the pattern on the screen changes into the two-strip particle pattern, and the interference pattern vanishes. The very act of observing seems to force electrons to behave like well-mannered little pebbles after all.
The experiment suggests that particles like electrons somehow combine the characteristics of particles and of waves, and that the act of observing, of measuring a quantum system, has a profound effect on that system. We may observe something similar in Art. An art piece holds multiple characteristics at once, yet the act of observing it, the observer's presence, has a profound effect on the piece, fixing it to only certain of those characteristics.
Classical physics holds that if we knew the properties of every particle in the universe, we could determine the outcome of any future event. The universe is deterministic. Quantum physics, however, explains the universe through probability: a deterministic universe arising out of indeterministic relations. 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 proposed by physicist Niels Bohr in 1920, a quantum particle does not exist in any single, particular state, but carries a probability of being in every possible state at once. We do not measure one state or another directly; we calculate the probability of finding the particle wherever it is. This condition of existing in every possible state simultaneously is called coherent superposition. An object's wave function is the sum total of every state in which it could exist. When we observe the object, that superposition "collapses," and the object is forced into just one of the states within its wave function. This act of quantum measurement, popularly known as the "collapse of the wave function" was mathematically formalized by the Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.
By contrast, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that every possible outcome of a quantum measurement is physically realized in some "world," or universe, with the universe splitting to accommodate each one. This theory removes the observer from the equation entirely. We no longer influence an event's outcome simply by observing it, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle might otherwise suggest. Also known as the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957, many-worlds is explained through the mechanism of quantum decoherence, widely developed since the 1970s. It implies the existence of many universes, perhaps infinitely many, in which every possible quantum outcome plays out.
A tossed coin has two possible outcomes. In practice, it lands on heads or tails because we, as observers, "collapse" its wave function and force it into just one of those possibilities, according to the Copenhagen interpretation. According to Everett, however, the moment the coin is tossed, every possibility occurs — it lands on heads and tails simultaneously, but in different worlds; we simply happen to be conscious of only one of them. Every time a decision is made or an event occurs, the world splits into different realities, and we split along with it.
Just two hundred years ago, we would have failed utterly to convince anyone that the Earth spins at roughly 460 meters per second, nearly 1,000 miles per hour. Some might even have claimed experimental proof to the contrary: toss an object in the air, and if the Earth were truly spinning, surely it wouldn't fall straight back down. We know better now. We may struggle today to fully grasp Everett's many-worlds idea for much the same reason, we experience only this one reality, and take it to be the only one there is. Just as people two centuries ago couldn't believe the Earth was spinning because they couldn't feel it, we may struggle to accept the idea of infinite universes because we cannot feel them either. To be clear, I personally find Everett's interpretation difficult to accept, not because it's unintuitive, but because it remains, and may always remain, far from experimentally proven. What I do admire is the sheer creativity and boldness of reasoning that steps outside the Platonic cave the rest of us still inhabit.
What does all this say about our direct experience, and about Reality itself? Is there any "realness" to Reality, or only perception? What are the implications for Art? What, exactly, is an observation? Does an observer collapse all the possibilities of an art piece simply by looking at it? Does Art extend beyond direct, tactile experience? Should traditional art education include reasoning that goes beyond simply representing our direct experience of the physical world? Should it include the facts of what Reality actually is, at its most fundamental level? Could artists go even further than quantum mechanics and Everett's theory, observing with reason and not only the eye? Can the artist present the true nature of reality, however counterintuitive it may be? Can we move beyond conceptualism, last century's movement, after all?\
Information is something encoded in the state of a quantum system, and it is physical. Where quantum mechanics examines the properties of matter at the microscopic scale, quantum information science focuses on extracting information from those very properties. Reality is made of information. Artists decode this reality, encode that information into their art, and finally, an observer decodes the piece in turn. The artist observes and decodes the world; once encoded into a piece, that piece becomes its own universe, in turn observed by the world. The decoder becomes the decoded. And decoding always depends on context, and on the relations within it.
Where Does Reality Come From?
As an artist, as someone who represents reality and the nature of things in the world, I must understand the information Reality is made of. Reality is made of realities: decoherence, coherent superposition, indeterminism, determinism, and so on. For an artist, these distinct realities are not mutually exclusive, but mutually contributing pieces of an all-encompassing vision, one that connects widely different views into a single, as complete as possible, whole. Artists concern themselves with every existing model of reality, not by keeping them separate, but by holding them together and presenting them within an art context.
Fixating on the superficial appearances of Reality, and on our distorted interpretation of it through belief, ephemeral information, carries profound consequences for the world and for humanity. We see only differences, superficial, inconsequential ones, and on that basis we sort and group each other, hate, fail to reason, destroy, grow shortsighted and aggressive. If, instead, we focus on observing and comprehending the reality of nature in its fullness, known and unknown alike a priori information, we would be occupied instead with reasoning, contemplation, and creativity. We would be struck by the realization that we are all, fundamentally, the same, simple parts of one universe, made, after all, of stardust, and that our experiences and perceptions carry far more depth once examined through reason. If we could, even for a moment, stop obsessing over entirely irrelevant differences among ourselves, and instead try to grasp the vastness and complexity of the universe as a whole, I believe atrocity would cease to exist. We would simply, all of us, be human. Can Art help with this? Can it reform human perception on a large scale, and make us more human? Artists do not claim to See, but Artist do Observe, and understand.
Marks: Physics of the Art Process
The most fundamental feature of the universe is its granularity, as Rovelli puts it, and as quantum mechanics has shown us. The universe is made of bits, small packets of energy, grains, or units of information, that exist only in the act of interacting with one another. A particle, a packet of information, materializes only when it interacts with something else, a detector screen, say, or a photon. The cloud of probability in which we had conceived it "collapses," and the electron materializes at that point, but only in relation to the detector screen. This act of quantum measurement occurs when a wave function, a wave of probabilities, reduces to a single state through interaction with the external world; we call this interaction an "observation." In relation to any other object, the particle and the detector screen exist together in superposition. Before that interaction, the particle carries no mathematical value, and so, in a sense, does not exist. The physical world holds no value until it interacts with something else, and once it does, it becomes deterministic, but only in relation to that specific interaction, remaining indeterministic for the rest of the universe. Interactions between bits of information create physical reality.
Biological systems, and humans, can be understood the same way. Humanity, too, is granular, each person a granular bit. For a person to exist, to hold any particular material value, they must interact with another; physically, through media, through storytelling, or by some other means. One person exists for another only through awareness born of interaction. In relation to any other person, two interacting people exist together in superposition. We group people this way constantly, by nationality, race, profession, and so on.
The more interaction between particular people, the more events occur between them, the more reality is created, and the more real they become to one another. We might know of a person's existence simply by seeing them, or hearing about them on television, and while we know they're real, they occupy only a tiny sliver of our own reality, quite unlike, say, a parent, with whom we've interacted our entire lives, where the sheer number of shared events and interactions makes the created reality vast by comparison. Your parent is as real to you as you are to yourself, though that same parent does not exist, in this sense, for me; we've never met, shared no events, no interactions. As living beings, we create our reality through our interactions with one another, and, of course, through our interactions with our environment as well. Vlatko Vedral applies the information theory of quantum mechanics beautifully to the fundamentals of biological systems and DNA, in his wonderfully inspiring book Decoding Reality.
We do not interact with the vast majority of the 8.5 billion people on Earth, and so they do not exist for us. Only a minuscule part of humanity is real to us. The rest we know only as possibilities, as superpositions, with no interaction value of their own; the wave function has simply never collapsed for our personal observation.
Our knowledge of the universe must be just as minuscule, given how little of it we ever interact with. Who could guess the existence of all the people we've never heard of? Who could guess all the forces, and all the information, that make up the universe but that we'll never interact with, and so never come to know? We see only a small part of the universe, just as we see only a small part of humanity. We are, in truth, terribly shortsighted. We build our sense of physical reality, of the universe itself, from what we happen to see and know. Reality is only as large as our interaction with it; the universe is only as large as we manage to reach through intellect. Reality is created through the intellect: through observation.
We, as individuals, are responsible for creating our own levels of reality; rather like a video game: more interaction, a higher level reached, a larger physical reality. But does this mean reality is merely an illusion? If each of us builds our own reality through our own intellect and interactions, shouldn't each of us then inhabit a different reality? In a sense, we do, yet it is not an illusion. It's worth distinguishing two different senses of reality here: personal reality and collective reality. Personal reality arises from our own interactions and experiences, rooted in our individual beliefs. Collective reality is what we can all agree on, regardless of belief: the laws of physics, for instance.
History offers proof enough. Before humans discovered the electromagnetic force, we were simply blind to it, and electromagnetism was not, in any meaningful sense, part of our reality, it did not exist for us. People lived, each convinced their own conscious reality was the whole of it. Once electromagnetism was discovered, our collective and personal realities expanded enormously; reality itself grew bigger, richer with possibility.
There was a time when the universe was believed to revolve around the Earth, until Johannes Kepler's intellect engaged with perceived reality and expanded our collective reality into something far larger, simply by showing that the Earth and planets travel around the Sun in elliptical orbits. Our world also functioned perfectly well under Isaac Newton's laws; we reached space using them. Quantum mechanics, however, expanded our reality again, exponentially, both personally and collectively. Intellect creates reality; the absence of it shrinks reality.
This idea, that intellect creates reality, cis itself a reflection of 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, must themselves be made of information. The brain may well exist in a quantum state, as many researchers are working to prove. Quantum interactions between our intellect and the world produce more information, meaning a larger reality. Reality expands through intellect. The 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. This growth in intellectual entropy is simply the natural order of things, probably.
Why does any of this matter to an artist? For one thing, because when we speak of the universe's most fundamental structure and its granularity, we might as well be speaking of an art piece, of the granular marks whose interactions and relations create the piece's own unique universe. Artists, like minor gods, create a new, unique universe every time a piece is made, using granular marks whose interactions and relations bring a new reality into being.
Before the interaction between pen and paper, or between one mark and another, an art piece has no value, and so does not exist. A mark, like a particle, becomes concrete only in relation to whatever physical object it interacts with, paper, or another mark. The mark, and by extension the piece, does not exist until that relation is established, between paper and pen, or between one mark and another.
Taken as a whole, the physical world of an art piece has no value until it interacts with something else, an audience, say, or the broader context of art itself, interacting with other works within it. Once that interaction occurs, the piece becomes deterministic, or "Real Art", but only in relation to whatever it interacts with, remaining indeterminate for the rest of the art universe. Art is made of interactions; interactions create physical, artistic reality. Within a single piece, these interactions are numerous, and worth unpacking in more detail. For simplicity, I'll use the example of a plain pen-on-paper drawing.
a. Artist–Paper relation: At the very outset, the piece does not yet exist; every possibility remains possible, and it exists in a state of pure wave function. An artist facing a blank page may contemplate all the ways the piece could turn out, but nothing becomes deterministic or specific until the relation, the interaction, is actually established. The piece is, in this sense, nonexistent, yet full of potential. The artist holds every probability of what it might become.
b. Pen–Paper relation: Up to the moment of first contact between pen and paper, the artist is like a universe holding every possible combination at once. But the instant that relation is established, deterministic information appears, and the piece begins to exist. With every new mark, the number of possible futures narrows; each added mark reduces the once-endless possibilities of the piece. The work begins taking on a specific shape.
c. Mark–Paper relation: The pen-paper interaction produces particular information, a mark. The visual information a mark carries is determined by its relation to the space around it, meaning the character of a mark depends on the space of the paper itself: composition, format, and so on. The character of a mark, its information, in turn shapes the character of the entire piece.
d. Mark–Mark relation: As pen-paper interactions accumulate, so does visual information, more interaction, more information; more information, more entropy. The piece grows more complex and more deterministic. Every bit of information, every mark, is now shaped both by its relation to the paper and by its relation to every other mark. What a remarkable thing, to recreate the most fundamental workings of the universe; a perfect reenactment of thermodynamics, performed not by a particle accelerator, but by an artist's hand.
A mark, like a particle, materializes only when it collides with something else, a detector screen or a photon, in the case of a particle; paper or another mark, in the case of a mark. The cloud of probability the artist had conceived "collapses," and the mark, like the particle, materializes only in relation to the paper, or the detector screen. In relation to everything else, the mark and paper, or particle and screen, exist together in superposition. A mark is concrete only in relation to whatever physical object it is interacting with; with respect to everything else, it does not yet exist, until that interaction is broadened in the two ways described next.
e. Art Piece–Art Context relation: An Art piece has no value until it interacts with the space of Art, meaning put in the context of Art. Once placed there, the piece exists only within that context, and remains indeterminate for the rest of the universe. An oil stain on the sidewalk, even one made by an artist, has no artistic value unless it is presented as an art piece within an art context; otherwise, it is simply an oil stain. Likewise, an art piece within an art context carries no value beyond that of art; though, given the inherent ambiguity of art, a piece may sometimes interact with another context as well, such as politics or science, existing within both simultaneously. The Teeter-Totter Wall, by Rael San Fratello and Colectivo Chopeke, is one such example.
f. Art Piece–Observer relation: Once a piece exists within an art context, it remains in superposition, concrete only within that relation, nonexistent within every other, unless, as noted, it interacts with multiple contexts at once. A viewer, an observer, collapses that wave function: by interacting with the piece, they reduce its meaning to a single state. The piece becomes deterministic through its interaction with an observer. Since it remains, in itself, a constant superposition of many possible meanings, it collapses into a different meaning for every observer. An art piece is, in this sense, omni-meaningful, specific to each observer, and potentially different for each one.
Where is an art piece before it is made? Where is a mark before it is drawn on the page? It does not exist; no more than a particle exists before it interacts with something. The interaction of the brain that moves the pen, the pen itself, and the paper together create a mark. The mark itself does not preexist any of this; it is simply the consequence of that brain-pen-paper interaction.
During a night walk through a park in 1925, Werner Heisenberg arrived, through intuition, at one of the foundational equations of quantum mechanics. In the park, occasional street lamps are separated by long stretches of darkness. A figure passes by, visible to Heisenberg only as he steps beneath a lamp, before vanishing into the dark and reappearing under the next one, again and again, from one pool of light to another, appearing and vanishing in turn. Heisenberg reasoned that the man surely doesn't actually appear and disappear, one could easily reconstruct his path from lamp to lamp. But what if particles worked the same way, vanishing and reappearing? What if, between one interaction and the next, a particle simply had no location at all? A particle, in this view, manifests only when it interacts, when it collides with something else; between interactions, it holds no precise position. This is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, the relational nature of things. Particles do not simply "exist" at all times; they exist only when they interact. Heisenberg went on to prove this intuition mathematically, and we now know it to be the way reality genuinely works, we need only glance down at our phones for a working demonstration.
Particles carry a wave function, a wave of probability in which anything might happen, a cloud of possibility, much like the man in the dark who might be anywhere, and is, at that moment, nowhere in particular. When a particle interacts with something, its cloud of possibility collapses into an eigenstate, a fixed, determined state, one out of many possible ones. Each new measurement, each new observation, yields a different eigenstate. Picture the man in the park walking beneath a lamp: we observe him as he is, in that moment. An observer sitting ten benches further away would see him appear smaller, and vanish more slowly, in a slightly different spot. If Heisenberg himself were walking too, each of his own observations of the man would differ slightly as well. And yet, the more observations accumulate, the more consistently we converge on the same conclusion: that this particular man is, indeed, 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 we tried explaining the world through an artist's eye, rather than through a man walking through a darkened park? We would likely arrive at the very same conclusion. An art piece, too, depends on the interaction and perspective of its viewer, each one creating a different reality. Many art pieces shift in meaning, concept, and even physical appearance depending on the observer's distance and angle. Each piece carries many different properties, many wave functions; for a given observer, only one property is revealed at a time, through that particular interaction, an eigenstate. But as the observer moves, other properties and meanings come into view. In Art, an observer's shifting perspective reveals different, previously hidden properties. And though every viewer collapses a piece into their own eigenstate, more viewers observing it tend to converge closer to a shared one. Each piece carries as many possibilities as its wave function allows; each viewer reads it differently, bringing their own interpretation, and yet, the more viewers observe it, the more of its possibilities are revealed, and, interestingly, the closer those readings tend to converge. Art is quantum mechanical, just as quantum mechanics is, in a sense, Art; because everything, fundamentally, is information. The nature of quantum information, a particle's information, is no different from the nature of a mark's.
Another observation worth making: a simple, mundane visual experience can provoke deep thought in a highly intellectual mind, as it did for Heisenberg, ultimately reshaping our collective intellect and expanding our shared reality. Artists are, in theory, trained to observe reality; yet art education too often teaches us merely to copy it, literally and superficially, without real intellectual reasoning or true observation. We should be training art students to think, and to analyze what they observe, to reason, not merely mimic. Perhaps then, one day, artistic intellect will expand our collective intellect, and help us grow our reality into a far larger universe. Someone has to keep asking the questions that move us forward collectively, and who is better equipped to question things than an artist? An artist's reasoning questions the very perception of reality we already hold.
In statistical thermodynamics, entropy describes the macroscopic state of a system, characterized by a distribution across its microstates, a distribution captured by the Gibbs entropy formula. The macroscopic state of an art piece, in the same way, is characterized by the distribution of marks across its own microstates.
How Much Information Is in the Universe? What is the information-carrying capacity of the human head? According to the Bekenstein bound (named for the Israeli physicist Jacob Bekenstein), the maximum number of bits any system can hold is roughly 10⁴⁴ bits times the system's mass in kilograms and its maximum length in meters. Given a human head roughly 20 centimeters across and weighing about 5 kilograms, this works out to a storage capacity on the order of 10⁴⁴ bits of information. Computers, by comparison, can store around 10¹⁴ bits, meaning computers still lag human informational capacity by roughly 10³⁰.
The universe itself, some 15 billion light-years across with a mass of roughly 10⁴² kilograms, has an informational capacity of about 10¹²⁰ bits. Archimedes, for his part, estimated the universe to contain about 10⁶³ grains of sand, not bad, for the third century BCE.
Lecture #5: Art for N-Space and Hypertime — Art Beyond Earth
Many scientists not only toy with an idea but even try to understand and prove the existence of other universes. Many researchers devote their lives to researching the Cosmos. Science does not limit the research to Earth only as they understand all too well that life on Earth IS, depends, and is ruled by the Universe. And I am not talking only about physicists and chemists here but biologists (the origin of life), philosophers, and research in consciousness. How many of us Artists have ever considered the world as a whole and not just the immediate surface boundaries of this particular planet. How many of us have considered making art about and for another planet, another solar system? What about Art for different spices? What if we had a show inside a black hole? What kind of piece can be created for the unknown incomprehensible rules and laws of physics? What if the art piece is made for space, just floating in space. What materials would we use in order for the piece to withstand the harsh environment of space? Can predictions be made based on the materials for how long it would exist? For whom would it be made for? Does a piece exist if there is no conscious viewer to perceive it? Is the Artist conscious all there is needed without the piece ever reaching another consciousness? Can the piece be made for all different levels of consciousness? Can my dog or an alien understand my Art as Art? What would the Art piece’s message be; what would it be about? What is Art for another consciousness?
What if there is a force we haven't found yet?
The universe is governed by four distinct fundamental forces. Strong Nuclear Force, Electromagnetic Force, Weak Nuclear Force, and Gravitational Force. These four forces act on everything from micro to macro world, shaping our Universe.
At extremely high energy levels the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force act as one and are combined into a single force called the electroweak force.
Strong Nuclear Force: Binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons, and holds the atomic nucleus together. It is the strongest of all fundamental interactions but operates only at subatomic scales.
Electromagnetic Force: Acts between electrically charged particles. It is responsible for electricity, magnetism, light, and almost all chemical reactions, forming the everyday structures of atoms and molecules.
Weak Nuclear Force: Controls the radioactive decay of subatomic particles and triggers the nuclear fusion that powers the sun and other stars. It acts only at incredibly short ranges.
Gravitational Force: The force of attraction between all objects that have mass. While it is the weakest of the four forces, it operates over infinite distances, making it the dominant force shaping the large-scale structure of the cosmos.
Due to strict geometric rules, there are exactly five shapes in the three-dimensional convex polyhedra, also known as Platonic solids (or Platonic shapes). They are defined by having identical, regular polygon faces with the exact same number of faces meeting at every corner.
Tetrahedron: 4 faces, each an equilateral triangle.
Cube (Hexahedron): 6 faces, each a square.
Octahedron: 8 faces, each an equilateral triangle.
Dodecahedron: 12 faces, each a regular pentagon.
Icosahedron: 20 faces, each an equilateral triangle
The four classical elements of ancient Greece, earth, water, air, and fire, were the fundamental building blocks of all matter. First proposed by the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles around 450 BCE and later formalized by Aristotle, this philosophical framework defined physics, medicine, and cosmology for nearly 2,000 years.
Plato paired each of the four classical elements with a regular solid: earth with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. Of the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, he remarked only, cryptically, that "the god used it for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven." Aristotle later added a fifth element, ether, proposing that the heavens themselves were made of it, though he showed no interest in matching it to Plato's fifth solid.
Our standard model of the universe rests on four fundamental forces. But what if there's a fifth? A fifth force remains a hypothetical interaction, one some scientists invoke to explain cosmic anomalies like dark matter and dark energy, though definitive proof remains out of reach. Models like the "chameleon force" propose a repulsive interaction whose strength shifts depending on the density of its surrounding environment.
How do we see the invisible? How do we come to know the incomprehensible? What lies beyond the universe? What is the nature of spacetime inside a black hole?
Consider the sheer creativity behind ideas like the Boltzmann Brain, Hilbert space, or Everett's many-worlds, to name only a few. Physicists concern themselves with the universe as a whole, from the smallest particle to infinite universes, with little regard for public reception. Artists, by contrast, remain concerned with immediate outreach, with pleasing a general audience. However revolutionary the concep ts behind a piece of art may be, they still tend to make us aware only of things in our immediate world, social issues, our understanding of physical space, the use of materials, psychological states, emotion, the visible spectrum, to name a few of the more obvious ones.
As artists, we learn, and then teach our students, to use fairly primitive tools to mimic our observations, to notice and represent the appearances of things in the world. But what we actually see is, in the end, infinitely shortsighted. In the past, artists copied the superficial appearances of objects in still lifes, using stone tools to produce aesthetic decoration. Today, artists copy the news, information, or whatever else happens to be close at hand, producing an aesthetic mimicry of the obvious, of shared experience.
Duchamp and Dada may have revolutionized art's thinking more than anyone before or since. And yet, have we truly changed all that much? Kosuth suggested that artists must invent entirely new languages. Perhaps what we need is to reinvent art altogether. Art always represents something, some idea but those ideas remain obvious, tethered to direct observation, much like Kosuth's chair or Duchamp's urinal. With our art, we mimic what's directly observable close at hand, then present it to institutions and the public. Just as the rejection of the Copenhagen interpretation did away with the observer, opening the door to many-worlds theory, Art, too, might need to do away with its 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 if the interacting observer is other than another human?
What might happen if, instead of observing only our small planet, making art only for humans in the present moment, we made art for infinite time and space, for any possible form of consciousness? What would art look like to an alien mind, and what would it mean to them? What if artists could remove the observer entirely, even themselves? Can art ever be fully free of an observer, or must it always retain at least one, the artist? What if we set aside the single event, the single observation drawn from recent history or the present, and considered instead the whole of infinite universes, from the microscopic to the cosmic? What kind of art would that be? What does art mean to an artist, personally? What are we, as artists, actually searching for? What if we stopped making art on a human scale, and started making it on the scale of the universe?
Art tends to exist in the moment, made for the time in which it was created. Art is only concerned with the immediate perceivable linear time. But what if time isn't what it appears to be? What if the arrow of time isn't linear at all, but three-dimensional, a sphere of time? What if past, present, and future all exist at once, simply beyond our comprehension? What would a piece of art look like if made for all times, simultaneously? Can Art exist outside of time altogether?
At present, Art still obeys something like Newton's law of direct observation. We are at least 400 years behind science. Art remains stuck in a geocentric, shortsighted state, and it needs to escape it.
Imagination is infinite. Ideas are infinite. Perception is limited, but the searching mind is not. Art is made of ideas, and so its creations cannot, by rights, be limited either. Art might serve as a portal to any universe, including ones the artist invents, or to places that are something else entirely, beyond the universe as we know it. At present, art functions mainly as an object that contains, or provokes, an idea within an observer. Performance, 4D work, process-based art, and every other variation still exist within time and space, their reason for being some message meant for an audience.
So how, then, can Art contribute to our understanding of reality? Art, unlike science, carries no cognitive or medium-based limitations. Science must obey the laws of physics and mathematics; new rules may emerge from old ones, Newton giving way to relativity, relativity to quantum mechanics, Euclidean geometry to non-Euclidean geometry, but math must still be obeyed throughout. Art, by contrast, is entirely and infinitely free in its thinking, bound by no particular law at all. This is Art's real power. Artists could be inventing entirely new universes, governed by entirely new sets of laws. 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 existing laws. Artists can combine theories of music, biology, mathematics, thermodynamics, sculpture, anthropology, astrophysics, emotions, psychology, and quantum physics, all ideas, all theories, into one ultimately simple one. Mathematicians see everything as a function of math; physicists see everything through the laws of physics. Artists could see reality through all information, all at once. The artist's view is, in that sense, the truly ubiquitous one. Imagine the universe explained through the fullest possible understanding of everything. Art, and the artist, have long been dismissed and underappreciated, not without some justification. It is time to put the power of artistic reasoning to real use. Art doesn't need to discover the universe outright, but it might well be able to represent it, understand it, or coexist with it. An artist could hold the very idea that changes how we, as humans, think and perceive. Through their ideas, artists uncover new questions. The ultimate goal of an art piece is entirely different from that of a scientific experiment. An art piece simply has to be.
Every Artwork, however conceptual, still assumes a human nervous system on the receiving end. Every Artwork that has ever been made is made by humans for humans. Even if Art is made by inforgs within the infosphere it is still meant to be seen or heard by human senses. I believe that the next step forward in art, the next Art reform, would be Art that is incomprehensible or invisible to humans and only legible to some other system: ultrasonic work for bats, chemical signaling for plants or fungi, magnetic-field patterns for migratory animals, informational documentation of decay event of Radioactive isotope through decades,etc.
Humans are losing humanity (rather, has lost humanity), for infosphere, AI, to absurdities and deviations within morality and intellect; and with it humanity has lost Art. So what is left for the Artist to do? Well, rather than making Art for a person to see (which nowadays seems pointless considering the state of humanity) Art should stick to Art for Art's sake, Art that goes beyond perception and meaning that is only relevant and understood by humans.
Every movement so far, including the readymade, still has one irreducible human act: someone chooses. Duchamp chose the urinal. Even the most random Art process has a human deciding when the process starts, stops, or counts as finished.
Art in which no human consciousness ever makes a selection.
The Artist only sets up a physical or logical system, and everything ensuing (what exists, what's kept, what's shown) is decided by the process: a chemical reaction, a decaying isotope, an ungoverned neural net with no fine-tuning or curation, etc. Removing the observer and Art curation itself, much like the Copenhagen-collapse, gave way to many-worlds interpretation and got rid of the observer in physics. Art for many-worlds.
Duchamp still needed a name attached to the gesture, that's part of why it worked institutionally. For any Artpiece to be an Artpiece it must exist within the Art context, within Art institution. Every Artpiece is Institutionalized.
Perhaps Art should emerge from a system with no attributable author at all: not "collaborative" art (which still has named collaborators) but something more like new system structure, genuinely emergent, with the Artist being sets up rules or protocol that no individual controls or can take credit for, closer to open evolutionary systems than to any studio practice.
Almost all art, even durational and process art, still assumes completion or perception within a human lifespan. Few brilliant exceptions:
John Cage art piece Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, and it is scheduled to last for 639 years. The performance began on September 5, 2001 (Cage’s 89th birthday) and is not set to conclude until September 4, 2640.
The Zeitpyramide (Time Pyramid), A public monument in Wemding, Germany, designed by artist Manfred Laber to mark the passage of time. The duration of the piece is 1,200 years. The pyramid consists of 120 concrete blocks, where one block is placed every 10 years. The project began in 1993, and the final block is scheduled to be laid in the year 3193.
Longplayer, is a musical composition composed by Jem Finer that is engineered to play continuously without ever repeating for 1,000 years. The piece began playing on January 1, 2000, using a combination of Tibetan singing bowls and precision computer algorithms. It is programmed to play an exact, non-repeating sequence until December 31, 2999, at which point it will loop back to the beginning and start again.
What is so brilliant about these works is that they are explicitly designed never to be seen complete by anyone. Can this be expanded to geological or cosmological time art, seeded now, legible only in millions of years, deliberately built so that "the audience" is structurally excluded from ever existing in relation to the piece. As questioned above: can art exist without ever reaching a consciousness? Can and should Art be made for the time after human extinction?
The one category no Art movement has actually dared to fully commit to yet is the removal of curatorial consciousness; the removal of an Artist's decisions, Art institutions, and audience. Even the most extreme process artists still choose the process, the duration, the materials. The next Duchamp figure is probably someone who finds a way to make even that choice unverifiable or irrelevant, where the art exists, or doesn't, independent of any human's decision that it should.
Most Artist and scientists presented:
El Castillo Cave, Spain; Roman Ondák; DADA;Cornelia Parker; Charles Ross; Rachel Whiteread; Wolf Vostell; William Anastasi; Tim Knowles; Joseph Kosuth; Michael Craig-Martin: An Oak Tree 1973; Man Ray; Wolfgang Paalen; Richard Feynman: Mirror; Ranjani; Shettar; Magdalena Jetelová; Berlinde De Bruyckere; Malin Bülow; Roman Signer; Arcangelo Sassolino; Kathleen Ryan; Pim Palsgraaf; Tori Wrånes; Benjamin Orlow; Klara Kristalova; Song Dong; Oriol Vilanova; Mona Hatoum; Su Xiaobai; Mono-ha; Tim Gaudreau, Michelangelo Buonarroti; Cabinet of Curiosities; Joseph Cornell; Predrag Đaković; Henrike Naumann; The Home Front, 2026; El Anatsui; Anne Wilson; Wolfgang Laib; Douglas Weathersby; Kurt Schwitters; Phoebe Washburn; Nonument Group, Soundtrack for an Invisible House; Carmen Herrera; Jesse Krimes; Walead Beshty; Jorge Méndez Blake; Aleksandra Kasuba; Danh Vo; Lukas Liese ; Mark Manders; Igshaan Adams; Paulo Nimer Pjota; Camille Claudel; Louise Richardson; Erwin Wurm; Zuzanna Czebatul; Julia Gault; Parastou Forouhar; Millica Tomic; Orlan; Matías Duville; Keith Tyson; Critique of Julian Voss-Andreae; David Spriggs; Makoto Aida; Doris Salcedo, Disremembered I, 2014; Georg Baselitz; Maurizio Cattelan; Kadar Attia; Alfredo Jaar; George Rouy; Christine Ay Tjoe; Jennifer Packer; Ghada Amer; Jack Whitten; Pablo Boneu; Cecily Brown; Jean Shin; John Dahlsen; Louise Nevelson; José Damasceno; Ashley Oubre; Lisa Yuskavage; Margherita Manzelli; Meret Oppenheim; Eleanor Antin; Joseph Beuys; Maarten Baas; Sarah Sze; Shirin Abedinirad; Daniel Arsham; Lucas Simões; Rachel Whiteread; Cai Guo-Qiang; Sead Čizmić; Nelson Leirner; Gab Bois; Naoko Yoshimoto; Yasuaki Onishi; Pia Männikkö; Andrea Galvani; Florian Pungnaire & David Raffini; Gabriel Orozco; Anil Seth; Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann; Katharina Fritsch; Joseph Kosuth; Leonardo Drew; René Magritte; Sophie Jodoin; Piet Mondrian; Wangechi Mutu; Paul Cézanne 1839-1906; Pablo Picasso; Georges Braque; Theo van Doesburg; Constantin Brancusi; Henri Michaux; Scott Short; On Kawara; Piero Manzoni; Glenn Ligon; Tim Gaudreau; Roman Opałka; Janet Zweig; Antony Gormley; Tehching Hsieh; Michal Rovner; Zimoun; Kwon Young-Woo; Juhkee Kwon; Sachiko Abe; Dieter Roth; Giuseppe Penone; Wim Delvo; Maria Taniguch; Hugo Ball; John Cage, 4’33”; Simulation by Prof. Derek Leinweber, University of Adelaide;Paradox of the Möbius Strip and Klein Bottle; Klára Hosnedlová; Duane Hanson; Sarah Sze; Maria Taniguchi; Monika Grzymala; Parastou Forouhar; Analytical and Synthetic Cubism; Chromophobia, animation; When the day Brakes, animation; Breathe, animation; Jeff McMillan; Tavares Strachan’s Gemini series; Eva Jospin; Augustas Serapinas; Katharina Grosse;Letha Wilson; Julius von Bismarck; Latifa Echakhch; Tara Donovan; Cai Guo-Qiang; Roman Ondak; UbuWeb;Harmen Steenwyck;Bill Viola; Soviet-era phones lacked any dial, keypad, or buttons; Paul Pfeiffer; Tim Hawkinson; Martin Puryear; Chris Burden; Allan Kaprow; Song Dong; William Anastasi; Alastair MacLennan; Andres Serrano; Abel Azcona; Robert Mapplethrop; Owen Maseko; Caravaggio; M.F. Husain; Jafar Panahi; Ai Weiwei; Andrei Tarkovsky