My work pursuits the understanding of the information that Reality is comprised of. Art piece begins with a question, subsequently an Art processes are specifically constructed in order for the phenomenon in question to be experienced through the drawing process so that question can, not necessarily be answered, but fully understood. The attempt is to capture most accurately and realistically representation of the information whereby the art piece becomes an assemblage of data and its networks, and so begins to mediate its basic meaning. By doing so the preconceived perceptions of Reality are questioned and reconstructed. My work is Information Realism.
· Visual Art language is used to deconstruct, philosophically, the most fundamental concepts of Reality. Fully comprehending and understanding the world and its dynamic relations to and between its parts, is a cause for constructing every art piece.
· I make Art pieces to understand Reality. Through the Art process I experience the phenomenon, I am an experimenter and an experimentee, so I can fully understand it.
Perceptions:
Perception and Apperceptions are misleading, usually, and the only tool that is available to us is our intellect, with which we are to understand the world and its Realness. With our intellect we can decontextualize perceptions, relationship to the world, and make sense of it. More we are aware of, the more we know, and the larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality. Art shows us the way our human understanding of the world is being constructed.
As someone who has extremely bad eyesight and who has never seen the world the same as the majority of people, I always wondered how does Reality look to other people and how that physical perception shapes our beliefs and to what extent.Question of how we perceive Reality, the disconnect between observed and interpreted, is continuously reappearing in my work. Why does our mind choose to see certain things and omit other stimuli? Why do we believe so strongly that the world is the way we see it while another believes equally strongly to complete opposite? Which reality is real? How can the same news footage, the same video, result in being perceived with two opposing views? Studying questions like these might give us a better picture of humanity, make us more tolerant, less fanatic, and more understanding of each other.
My work challenges how it is to be seen; How we observe, perceive, and connote the observed; whether to look in sequence or randomly, whether to look close up or just take it all in at once. The details pull the viewer towards the piece creating a particular visual and cognitive impression. From afar, the collection of marks, however, creates an overall new visual and conceptual experience that lets one appreciate the severity, seriousness, or immensity of the represented idea. Just like we have one theory that beautifully explains the workings of the micro world of particles and another theory for the macro world of the Cosmos, they brilliantly fit into one picture. The laws and concepts change depending on our own perceptual view.
Time:
Concepts like consciousness and perception are studied through art processes, breaking it down to the most fundamental bits of quantized information. Time is used as the essential component of the process, may it be as a durational drawing (40 hour long line) or documenting time (every minute in a year, number of days I have been alive, etc.). Through durational drawings time is observed with a full focus and consciousness, analyzing the somatic states of being. Through drawing, through this state of being oneself, one experiences oneself as the passivity of the self being given to the self. This naturally leads to an observation and analysis of one’s existential experiences. Definite conclusions are not necessarily an objective here. Rather the intention is to consciously experience the experiencing self, thus to document one’s morphological and internal existence. Perception of time as a whole of life is explored through many pieces that consist of the number of marks matching the number of days I have been alive. Likewise, documenting every minute in a year or every day is part of many pieces.
Introspections:
My early explorations were performative in nature, analyzing the somatic states of being. These were process based pieces, durational or endurance drawings, focusing on somatic function. For example; 40 hour long line, drawing every minute for 24 hours, marking every breath for 4 days, hole-drawing a minute for 36 hours, 11,929 self-portraits reflecting the number of days I have been alive, 10,000,000 points, 1 mile drawing of portraits, 10,000 things around exploring perception through various physical limitations (fasting, sleep deprivation, etc.); 55,000 portraits, etc. Each piece was executed with carefully constructed visual elements resulting in technical perfection, yet each piece communicates a very particular discourse.
Compulsive obsessiveness of excessive drawing becomes a document of time and the drawing’s creation; it becomes a document of experience itself. When so constructed, the act of drawing allows me to re-experience existence, but in a slower and fully conscious way, so that perceptions become apperceptions.
Randomness within determinism:
Pieces like Indeterminism explore randomness that arises from a very strict set of rules the art process is structured by. 100 drawings of flowers are cut into 40,000 square pieces and reassembled randomly into a new unrecognizable image.
The rules are strictly set, however, the outcome is highly unpredictable. Pieces like Necessitarianism, 16,787 Scars, Calendar, Deterioration, 1 million bricks, etc. are not only structured so that outcome depends on the process but majority of them even I don’t know how they turned out until they are installed in a show. It is like setting up an experiment and assuming the outcome but not knowing what is going to happen until the experiment is completed.
Through my art pieces I try to understand the nature of concepts by reducing them to the most basic Art constructs. Use of materials is reduced to paper and pencil for the majority of the pieces. Minuscule drawing elements become colossal art pieces through a unique repetition of each mark. Most pieces contain tens to hundreds of thousands, and even millions of particularly chosen drawing elements. Repetition of mark bits, through durational, repetitional, excessive, and endurance drawings, creates unpredictable randomness that self organizes into patterns and structures on a large scale. This randomness and determinism is one of the fundamental fibers of the Universe.
I seek understanding of Reality and its relations by constructing art processes based on the singular information. Through my work I search for the informational epistemology of Reality. I construct the Art piece process so I can go through the phenomenon, thus understanding it. I don’t need to prove the Reality but to understand it.
Physics Fundamentals Lecture (Brown University)
As a kid I shared a room with my sibling who had monopoly over it, and whose untypical sense for the interior design resulted in walls covered with posters, not of the super stars but real stars, galaxies, and nebulas. We both spent countless hours staring at those walls that transfigured into the infinity unknown worlds, and we both wondered the exact same questions “What in the world is all of this around us?” We both pursued this question and while my sibling’s life is devoted to physics, while mine to art. In the lab full of metal and liquid helium, my sibling sets up experiments to test the question and confirm the answers, while I, in a studio filled with carbon (pencils) and paper, set up an Art process to experience the questions and understand the answers. Both Art and Science question the world; they bring new thoughts to the world, and re-contextualize preconceived ideas and views.
To illustrate this I chose Carlo Rovelli’s quote, an Italian theoretical physicist, that provided us with the most accurate and poetical explanation of what Art is even though he was in fact talking about science, I just replaced the word science with the word 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.”
Art and Science may use different language but essentially are the same in their attempt to explain the world.
Erwin Schrodinger writes in What is Life? that we have inherited, throughout centuries, the unified, universal, all-embracing knowledge, which is the only one with full credit, however, the depth of knowledge has forced us to branch into specialized limited and narrow focus. Perhaps it is time to go back and attempt to unify some of the knowledge that will give us a more comprehensive view of Reality.
Patrick Cavanagh, a co-founded the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, and leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, recognizes that Art is a 40,000-year record of experiments in visual neuroscience that reveals as much about the human brain as it reveals about the world around.
Roberto Zenith, researcher in fluid dynamics and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, have extensively studied David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock’s painting process realizing similarities between the paint technique to flow phenomena in other areas, which have helped explain formation of lava domes on Venus, and the Great Kavir salt desert in Iran.
Art that best encompasses these ideas of all-embracing knowledge is, what I like to call it Information Realism, the Art that questions reality and shows us the unknown or not so obvious. IR is art that through its processes, through the relations between informational units (marks, brush strokes, etc), most accurately captures information from Reality. When information from reality is directly, in its purity materialized into visual information, detached from artist’s beliefs, then it is Information Realism. Artist, just like scientist with the experiment, sets up an art process that allows a phenomenon to be documented by the phenomenon itself. IR presents information from Reality verbatim. Art is information. IR is to be distinguished from classical realism that represents the external appearance of a form and gives us no information about the form except the Artist’s impression of an appearance.
The best way to learn is to interact with Reality and re-contextualize the preconceived views. This is exactly what Information Realism is.
How do we determine the value of an Art piece? By applying the information theory, of course. This is the power of fundamental physics, that it can explain anything including Art.
If we take information to be physical and the fundamental bit unit of our reality, as Information Theory predicts, we can explain Art this way as well, I would argue.
We can determine the value of Art simply by determining How probable an art piece is, which determines its information content, and its quality.
The Ancient Greeks suggested that the information content of an event depends only on how probable this event really is. Aristotle argued that the more surprised we are by an event the more information the event carries. This means that information is inversely proportional to probability, meaning events with smaller probability carry more information. In case that an art piece is probable, let's say pure aesthetics, it then does not have much, if any, information content. Let's say realistic painting of a regular cat, not Schrödinger’s, (no mystery if it is dead or alive but a nice fluffy cat) the piece is probable, we know what it is, how it is done, and it is not saying anything new about the cat, therefore, information content is low, if any, the probability contact is higher, and the piece has low or no artistic value. The painting is an Artist’s impression and copy of a superficial appearance of an object, or predictable aesthetics, and no more, it is agree upon reality without offering us new ways of seeing it. In contrast, Rachel Whiteread’s work or Man Ray’s The Gift is unexpected and consists of a high level of information content, meaning it is a high value Art.
This view I adopt from two of the most brilliant minds, Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the University of Oxford, and Claude Shannon an engineer and "the father of information theory". After all, physicists and engineers are artists who are very good at math.
Examples of Information Realism:
El Castillo cave in Spain contains handprints about 40,000 years old. We have direct information of the person’s physicality and actions who 40,000 years ago was present in the cave. The information of their existence at the moment, in the moment, is permanently preserved. This is one of the very first IR.
Similarly, Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe begins with an empty gallery space. Gallery attendants mark, with a marker, height, name and date of each visitor who enters the space. As the blank walls transform into a universe of marks, a dense, dark mass congregates at the average height of participants. Measuring the Universe is the most realistic, the most literal, representation of everyone who walked into the space, and who by simply existing in the space, temporarily has transformed that very space. Every name, even if invisible, has permanently defined the current state of the space while existing within the space only for a brief moment, just like the cave handprints. Ghostly trace of a moment in time and its effects. Randomness of the individual height marks has over time accumulated into a wave pattern.
Art movements like Dada and Fluxes liberated Art from physical objects at around the same time Thermodynamics liberated matter into field theory.
Dada, a nonsensical, 20th century European avant-garde art movement, is one of the most intriguing modern Realists. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement formed in Zürich, Switzerland in 1916. Dada rejected logic, reason, and aestheticism, instead expressing nonsense and irrationality in their works. In the time of WW1 the entire world was using the most rational reasons and arguments, according to them, for justifying behaviors that were the most irrational and ill conceived. The world made no sense and the most realistic representation would be nonsensical art and irrationality, which is exactly what Dada did. Interestingly enough, around the same time Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, to name only a few of the great thinkers, were working on Quantum theory. Quantum Theory, like DADA, at the same time period, seemed not to make sense at first and required a high level of abstract thinking, knowledge, and intellect in order to be understood.
Cornelia Parker is one of the most acclaimed British contemporary artists. In Parker’s work are literal objects, or more accurately, their remains, that have undergone dramatic event of a destruction, making them a documentation of an event frozen in time; an infinitesimal moment permanently tangible, like in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991.
Charles Ross’s piece Year of Solar Burns (March 20, 1992–March 20, 1993), 366 painted wooden planks, 10" x 20", with solar burns; consists of burned wooden planks by concentrating sunlight with a lens. The Sun is 150 million km away from our planet Earth. Light travels at 300,000 km/s. It took 8 minutes and 33 seconds for the photons to travel from the surface of the Sun to Earth and burn the wood. The Sun is drawing a portrait of itself. Observation of the phenomenon documented by the phenomenon itself.
Rachel Whiteread makes us aware of things-in-the-world that we experience and are part of, yet are rarely, if ever, consciously aware of. By pouring the concrete inside a building, under the chairs, elevators, etc. she makes air and even more importantly space itself, solid. We exist now in our rooms only because of the space between the walls, we exist within the air, yet how often do we think about space under the table that allows our legs’ comfort. What if the air was solid and we were the air?
William Anastasi would hold a pencil, one in each hand, paper on the lap, and close eyes while taking a ride on the subway train. The movement and vibration of the train would move pencils across the paper creating the Subway Drawings. Even though the rules were the same, the commute, pencils, eyes closed, etc. the drawings are unique and different each time the same ride is repeated. The realistic representation of the phenomenon’s information, in this case a train ride, is documented by the phenomenon itself. Identity of things-in-the-world and experiences are never finite but unique and ever so changing due to the relation to all that is involved with.
Man Ray’s The Gift, 1921, flatiron with brass tacks glued in a column down its center, and Wolfgang Paalen’s Articulated Cloud, 1938, an umbrella crafted from spongy foam, both take an information that defines the object’s identity, reversing it into its opposite. The sponge umbrella denies the object’s intended function by causing water to be absorbed rather than repelled, the same as the flatiron with tacks fails to be flat. Reconstructing Reality makes us aware of Reality.
Personal IR studies:
Mark-in-time, 2020
Pencil and Marker on paper
2.75” x 2.75”, Each of 365
Process: Paper is field with 1440 marks daily, number of minutes in 24 hours. 365 pieces of paper in total, one for each day in a year. Colored-in is the number of awake minutes daily.
The piece: Being aware of every minute of existence makes one experience the relativity of the time arrow perception.
Unknown of the Known, 2017/2019
Pencil on paper
h54"x w84" each of two
In the first drawing, bits of information, in this case melancholic portraits, create peacefulness and tranquility of the entire image. Portraits vary from 1mm to 1cm in size. Anything that exists, reality, only exists by the virtue of the mutual information it shares with other objects in the Universe, as information theory explains. Each bit/portrait defines and shapes the space of the other. Collectively, bits define the whole, yet when observing the entire image the well defined bits become unperceivable. Just the same, when observing the bits a tranquil perception of the entire imagery is not perceivable any longer. Even if the bit defines the whole, a bit is unlike the whole.
In the second drawing, portraits are blank. The space for information is present, but the information itself is not. Even though the information within the space is unknown, it is blank, the entirety of the image is fully comprehensible. How do we perceive the space of the missing information within the bits? Do we project previously perceived portraits, or are we capable of creating new perceptions? How different, if any, is our perception of the whole depending on our knowledge of the parts? By knowing a bit can we automatically claim the knowledge of the whole?
55,000 portraits and 95,000 blank portraits; there is more of the unknown then of the known.
Indeterminism, 2022
Drawing and projection each: h100” x w100”
Paper, mixed media, projection
Process: After completing 100 drawings of flowers, 10 x 10 in. each, drawings are photo documented and assembled into one digital image, square grid, and projected onto the wall. The original 100 drawings are cut into 1 x 1 cm squares, totaling 40,000. Cut pieces are randomly reassembled back onto one hundred 10 x 10 in. pieces, which are then installed on the wall next to the projection of the flowers’ drawings before being cut. For 40,000 there are 2.1x10166,713 possible rearrangement possibilities (40,000 factorial which is 21 followed by the 166,712 zeros).
On the most fundamental level the world is made out of randomness, uncertainty, which, through interactions, causes the deterministic reality. Are randomly assembled small drawing pieces going to create new patterns, containing all together a new meaning? Is the world no more than absolute randomness with the human mind assigning the deterministic patterns to it? Is determinism nothing more than a human way of making sense of reality?
If we have the information of the specific recognizable imagery, flowers, but presented in random bits (cut drawings and randomly reassembled) would we visually be recreating the familiar patterns, creating new patterns, or would we only see randomness? Would randomness create wave patterns and clumps of more and less material, or would it be even?
1,000,000, 2005
170” x 41”
Pen on paper
Process: Draw one million bricks.
The piece: What is One million?
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. “How can we make something of long duration from parts that are very short lived? How something that is perfect could be constructed out of imperfect components? This, Is a basis of living systems.
Any individual mark, in this case about 1/8”, carries its own imperfection. Any of one million marks would be invisible by itself, insignificant. Nevertheless, one million of insignificant imperfections, together as a whole, give rise to the massive wall (the part and the whole are rectangular in shape).
Universe, 2022
Liquid charcoal on paper
Universe is a wall size installation mosaicked by the small textured charcoal drawings. The mosaicked installation is in the shape of an oval resembling the current imagery of the Cosmic Background Radiation and Map of the visible Universe. One small drawing has two minuscule figures drawn, practically invisible, symbolizing humanity. The figures are independently looking down. There is no order to the drawing tiles, hence every time the piece is installed it is in different random order and visually different.
The process: Liquid charcoal and water are applied first onto the paper. Charcoal pencil is used at the end to emphasize already created textures. The charcoal creates textures by following the paper’s surface texture and water, accumulating more or less in different areas, resulting in 3D implied visual space. There is a correlation between the drawing creation process and that of the visible Universe. Superficially looking, paper and water are an invisible and insignificant part of the drawing, considering that we observe and are interested in a drawing's appearance and not the surface it is on. However, the blank paper and water are an invisible scaffolding that dictates where the charcoal will collect, consequently the appearance of the drawing at the end. The Universe is mostly made of Dark Energy (71.4%) and Dark Matter (24%), which has a strong influence on its structure and evolution, and affects the universe on the largest scales. Dark matter is invisible (it does not interact with the electromagnetic field) yet determines the structure, just like paper does. Water mysteriously forces charcoal matter to move and collect, causing it to spread/expand.
Individual pieces of the Universe are installed randomly each time the piece is installed resulting in a different configuration of the apparent Universe.
Meaning: Humans are practically infinitesimal specs, as shown with the insignificantly miniscule drawing of human figures among large-scale pieces. Figures are looking down, introspecting their own melancholy, not interacting nor looking at the vastness of the space around them. Intricate textures of the charcoal drawings symbolizes the complexity of all that the visible universe is composed of.
The book of all, 10,000 things, 2011/2023
9” x 6”, book thickness 60”
Ink, watercolor, pencil, charcoal on paper
Process: The book of 10,000 things, the book of all, contains 4 sections, 2500 drawings each: plants, stones, animals (including humans), and places.
The Piece: The book is a collection of perceptions, of the world, of being in the world.
Book of Knowledge, 1,000 pages, 500,000 bits of mark information, 2021
Marker on paper
8.5” x 5.5” x 3.5”
Process: 1,000 page book has a total of 4% filled-in pages with the bits while the rest is blank, corresponding to the 4% of the known about the Universe, and 96% of the unknown. Filled in pages are fragmented and at the beginning of the book just like our collective knowledge of any subject is fragmented and missing. Estimate of 500,000 mark bits.
Knowledge helps us see, understand the state of our being and ultimately Be in Reality. Currently all that is known in the Universe, neutrons, protons, and electrons that make up everything we can see accounts for only about 4% of the mass and energy of the Universe. About 70% of the Universe is what is dark energy; about 26% is dark matter, and this 96% is unknown. All that humanity has ever discovered and learned accounts for 4% of the Universe. There is 96% that we know that we do not know. How much more is there that we do not know that we do not know? Is our consciousness not complex enough to see the unknown even though we are staring at the answers? Knowing the unknown is incomparably much more real than not knowing at all.
Heart Beats, 100,000 marks, 2015
Watercolors on paper
5” x 3.5”
Process: Draw 100,000 watercolor marks in the book which format corresponds to the average heart size. The drawing represents the following fact: The human heart beats about 100,000 times in a day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
Self portrait of them, 2009 updated in 2018
Pen on glass
16” x 16”
Each side of the glass respectively contains the number of marks equal to the days in each of my parents’ lives. 24,622 ; 26,889
Necessitarianism, 2022
Pencil on paper
170” x 41”
Process: Paper is wrinkled and crumpled before drawing a portrait. The grooves, rips, and wrinkles on the paper determine, to a different degree, where the pencil will leave a mark and the quality of the mark. The drawing follows the surface and is determined by it.
The piece: Self is molded into, or as a reaction to the environment it is within (family, culture, climate, etc.), as much as by the biological system we are composed of. Our beliefs, our knowledge comes from others. Every original thought is, at its best, derived from a combination of previously accounted thoughts, but usually, it is a thought we accounted for in the past, forgot about its resource and then freely claimed it is our own. Physical Self, Self-cognition, and actions (choices that Self makes) are predetermined by the interactions within and between its biological micro parts, and the world around. Every attempt to self create the Self is dictated by what is already in the world and interactions with it, which is no different than attempting to draw a portrait where each pencil mark is dictated by the surface it is on. Free choices are made where and how the mark should be placed but the outcome of it is defined by the paper’s surface as it deforms and alters the mark based on its topography and textures.
Physical Self, Self-cognition, and free will, exist only within the constraints of the law of physics, social, and biological rules, and our interactions with it.
Limited view of a self-portrait, 1 mile drawing, 2004/2022
Mixed media
2.25” x 1 mile (1,609 meters or 5,280 feet)
Process: Originally created in 2004, as a kilometer long drawing of portraits, was expanded to a mile long drawing in 2022. The piece is installed on the film reels and the viewer can observe only a few feet at the time as they rewind the reels.
One mile long drawing represents all the possible selves even though the viewer can observe only one or few portraits at the time. They all ARE simultaneously in the superposition existence, that we, or the observer, collapse into one state, one impression of a character at the time. Our perceptual cognition has not yet evolved into complex enough consciousness to be able to comprehend the whole mile of portraits. Until that happens we must do the hard work of rewinding the reel in order to perceive. How much are we not aware of, within and around us?
Self Limitation, Circle, 40hr piece, 2004
Pencil on paper
h67” x w23.25”
Process: The piece began by drawing a spiral-circle with a continuous line for 40 hr. The limitation of the paper format (height of the paper equals physical body height) as well as physical exhaustion led to the circle’s deformation and line breakage.
One has a given amount of potential. One may constantly work hard on developing and building one’s self, but at some point one will reach one’s own limitations (the circle could not expand beyond the paper or physical abilities). However, when a limitation is reached, in order not to stop and go beyond imposed limitations, one must act or be something other than what one has been; the line breaks and deforms. In self development the further one gets, further one is from the self so that the self can be more of the self.
1 line extended, 30 hr., 2004
Pencil on paper
16.25’ x 1.7’
Process: A continuous line is drawn for 30 incessant hours.
The piece: Through the focused durational activity self becomes an observer and observed, simultaneously; one who is experiencing and one who is observing the experiencing self. How much can one extend oneself in 30 hr.?
Artist’s Journal
Observations (2022)
Understanding Reality: Art Reality and Information Realism
Abstract
The new concept of Information Realism in contemporary Art is analyzed, its objective to understand the fundamental workings of Reality, and its similarities in methods with Science. Specifically, Art is defined within the context of Information Realism, by using Carlo Rovelli’s definition of Scientific thought, as the intention of both, Art and Science, are identical. Furthermore, the similarities between Artistic and Scientific thought are supported by the examples through history. Unlike other approaches to Art that are concerned only with aesthetics or obvious ideas, Information Realism reinvents thought, perceptions, the way we connote and denote the world around and within ourselves. Multiple examples of contemporary Art pieces, as well as personal works, are used to support the narrative. Radically it is proposed that DADA’s ideas are Information Realism along with El Castillo cave in Spain, Roman Ondák, Charles Ross, Rachel Whiteread, William Anastasi, Cornelia Parker, Man Ray, and many others. The idea, described in this manuscript, establishes that Art is a cognitive and not intuitive process, whose purpose is knowledge and understanding of the world.
Defining Art: Information Realism
To understand Reality is to understand Art
Different professions speak different languages, but, essentially, they all propose compatible descriptions of the same underlying phenomena, Reality. There is only one Reality, and infinite ways of researching it, each of which captures one element of Reality. Art can capture Any element of Reality without being tied to any school of thought or a theory. Unlike many fields that are specialized, with few exceptions, like philosophy, Art language is not limited, and may explore any element of reality. Artists are, to a certain extent, philosophers, journalists, engineers, historians, scientists, and all of the above depending on a piece. Art instigates freethinking and liberates people from self-inflicted decrees.
Interestingly enough, the most successful definition of Art comes from an Italian theoretical physicist, founder of loop quantum gravity theory, Carlo Rovelli, unknowingly. Rovelli was in fact talking about Science and Scientific thought, but if we just replace the word Science with Art, the most accurate and poetical explanation emerges. “[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.” [1] Art and Science may use different language but essentially are the same in their attempt to explain the world.
Erwin Schrodinger writes in What is Life? that we have inherited, throughout centuries, the unified, universal, all-embracing knowledge, which is the only one with full credit, however, the depth of knowledge has forced us to branch into specialized limited and narrow focus [2]. Perhaps it is time to go back and attempt to unify some of the knowledge that will give us a more comprehensive view of Reality.
Asking questions is a fundamental nature of humans that helps us understand the world around and within us. In order to gain a better understanding of the world, scientists set up experiments to test their cognitive perceptions and confirm the preconceived answers, while Artists set up an Art process to experience the questions and understand the answers. What is not understood is created so it could be comprehended. Both Art and Science question the world; they bring new thoughts to the world, and as such they are equally practical and necessary for the progression of humanity’s progression. Either way, it all starts with questioning perceptions of the obvious appearances. The interactions with the apparent leads to the hidden and unknown. Knowledge is not just knowing already known information but discovering how much and what we don’t know. The best way to learn is to interact with Reality and re-contextualize the preconceived views. This is exactly what Information Realism is.
Information, connotes and denotes multiple meanings. First, information is denoted as a meaning, semantics, for example information contained in news, or an Art piece, its meaning, which I will simply call information. And, secondly, information is considered as the fundamental physical unit [3] i.e. drawing mark, spin of an electron, or water temperature, which I will call Informational Unit (IU). Through the relations between the IUs, an Art piece’s system of meaning arises, in other words the Art piece’s information is created. Information Realism (IR) is art that through its processes, through the relations between IUs, most accurately captures information from Reality. Visual art pieces fundamentally present information observed from Reality and when it is in its purity materialized into visual information, by using only basic IU and its relations, detached from artist’s beliefs, then it is Information Realism. This is to be distinguished from classical realism that represents the external appearance of a form and gives us no information about the form except the impression of an appearance. IR is not a movement, nor an Art group, but individual Art pieces that present information from Reality verbatim. Art is information.
Art Before Science
Art, in many instances, has discovered, through practical experience, concepts and phenomena long before science translates it from Art to Science language. Artists have visualized the space of the universe eight centuries before modern science. Carlo Rovelli notices that in 14th century, Dante Alighieri, a genius Italian poet, writes in his Divine Comedy his vision of the world, where the sphere of angels is surrounding the universe, and the same time they are surrounded by the universe, which is the most accurate explanation of Einstein’s 3-sphere. In 1917, Einstein proposed a 3-Shape as a solution to the problem of the border of the universe. Dante was inspired by The Florence Baptistery, and the mosaic depicting Hell, by Coppo di Marcovaldo, 13th century [4]. From mosaic to poetry to physics.
Patrick Cavanagh, a co-founded the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, and leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, recognizes that Art is a 40,000-year record of experiments in visual neuroscience that reveals as much about the human brain as it reveals about the world around [5].
Roberto Zenith, researcher in fluid dynamics and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, have extensively studied David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock’s painting process realizing similarities between the paint technique to flow phenomena in other areas, which have helped explain formation of lava domes on Venus, and the Great Kavir salt desert in Iran. “Artists are fluid mechanicians” [6].
Art processes emulate the most fundamental concepts not only of Neurology, Engineering, but of Quantum Mechanics, such as superposition (a quantum state can be in multiple states at the same time, a cloud of possibility), eigenstates (the observable state of the system right after the measurement, collapse of the cloud of possibility into one state), entanglement (two subatomic particles can be linked to each other even at the large distances), and act of quantum measurement (collapse of the cloud of possibilities into an eigenstates). Through interaction and relations Information creates matter, according to quantum physics, the same way an Artist creates an Art piece through interaction and relations between IUs.
To explain how the Art process emulates Quantum theory, I will use the most reduced form of Art, a pencil mark-making drawing. At the beginning of an art piece, paper is blank, there are only Artist’s thoughts, a field of a sort, and all the conceivable options are possible. The piece is in a superposition state. As the random marks are made they contain their own properties and information content. As the marks accumulate, the relations between marks change the individual information of the mark into collective patterns (just like many single photons make interference pattern-waves like features in a double slit experiment [7]. It is as if all the possible ways of drawing the marks have collapsed into the final pattern, eigenstate. Moreover, marks are in an entangled state with each other since they are correlated and they, together, can be treated as a single object. There is a lot of information stored in a drawing but it is not stored in the individual marks but in the correlation between the marks. If you want to “see” the drawing you have to collectively observe all the IU-s or marks and their relations.
To experience, through one's hands, materialization from randomness to complex deterministic objects is an exhilarating one. Once it becomes a material object an Art piece begins a new life where an observer, a viewer, determines its information based on their superposition with it. A viewer, an observer, collapses a cloud of possibilities into ONE (just as an act of measurements of a quantum state yields only an eigenstate out of many), meaning, an observer by interacting with the piece, reduces an art piece's meaning to a single state with one well defined meaning. Every time a measurement is taken, an observation is made and the Eigenstate is different. More viewers observe the piece; the more of the possibilities of a piece are revealed. However, more views are made - revelations are more likely to be alike.
Art is about relations and becoming, not simply being. Art is not a finite object but a field of an indeterministic wave function. On an elementary level the Universe is made of events, relations and interactions, as quantum mechanics has proven. Art is made of processes, of relations and interactions. Art is not an object but an epistemological statement, or inquiry, of anything that constitutes any of our experiences and observations. Art is a continuous reconceptualization of human’s cognitive perceptions.
Why do we make Art?
Free will and freedom might be debatable concepts. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep our decisions are ruled by others’ and our own necessities, societal rules, laws of Physics, responsibilities, etc. Freedom and free will seems like a foreign concept and impossibility. But, in moments of the activity of making Art, Artists just like a mini Gods create their own Universe; Universe of an Art piece, within which Artist’s are unequivocally free to make any decision, and experience ultimate freedom. Creating an Art piece requires perpetual decision-making, but because the Artist is the only entity making the rules and/or changing them, the Artist is experiencing the ultimate freedom of free will. This feeling of freedom is impossible to experience in daily lives, and once experienced it is absolutely addictive.
This feeling of free will allows Artists to always see the reality in a unique way, re-contextualize it, or simply let the world reenact itself, instead of accepting preconceived views. IR Artists are free to observe and discover the new deeps of Reality. IR Artists do not only see the surface of the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, but are unchained, wandering in the depths of the caves much as the out of it, seeing the world for what it is and not what we are told it is.
Why does Art Matter?
Artists re-contextualize our apparent notions of Reality. Every time Artists make a piece, they reinvent thought, perceptions, the way we connote and denote the world around and within ourselves. Art might not give us answers like science does, that is true, but it questions the Reality and our perceptions of it. Capacity to perceive the world in a new way is not impractical, naive, or idealistic, but it is at the heart of any humankind revolutionary progression, through history.
References:
1. Rovelli, Carlo (2017). Reality is Not What it Seems, The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Riverhead Books, An Inprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
2. Cavanagh, Patrick (2005) The artist as neuroscientist. Nature 434(7031):301-7. doi: 10.1038/434301a.
3. Zenit, Roberto 2019 Some fluid mechanical aspects of artistic painting. Physical Review Fluids 4, 110507 (2019) Invited Articles. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.4.110507
4. Rovelli, Carlo (2021). Helgoland. Riverhead Books, New York.
5. Schrödinger, Erwin (1944). What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press.
6. Than, Ker. “World's Oldest Cave Art Found-Made by Neanderthals?” Adventure, National Geographic, 4 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/120614-neanderthal-cave-paintings-spain-science-pike.
7. “Moma Learning.” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/roman-ondak-measuring-the-universe-2007/.
8. Tate. “Cornelia Parker: Tate Britain.” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/cornelia-parker.
9. Vedral, Vlatko (2010). Decoding Reality, The Universe as Quantum Information. Oxford University Press.
March 2022
Reason and Reality
Humans love truth. Our conscious self needs it, as much as our physical self needs food. By possessing the truth of a certain idea or thing in the world we can consciously, and conveniently, justify our actions. We consciously apply logical conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. This capacity for logically concluding in the name of truth is Reason. Truth, the reason, is highly damaging for humanity and fails to be that which argues to be in its definition. Definite truth is impossible, only the truths are, the possibilities of all truths within singularity. I see it as a possibility, that there are two distinct ways of Reasoning, for the most part, the Neolithic Reasoning (based on the functionality, purpose, and hierarchy) and Quantum thinking (all the possible thoughts in singularity, universalism).
Reason ceases to be that which claims to be. Its definition is as illogical as those that employ it in practice. Its failure stems from the nature of our consciousness. Reason being the hallucinatory constructs of our consciousness and never a factual priory. Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, proposes an idea of the human mind as a “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.
How does consciousness happen? Without consciousness there is no self, no reality, no Reason; the universe ceases to exist. Obviously, answering the question of consciousness origin and function is imperative for understanding all there is. Conscious experiences are controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies, according to Seth. There are two properties of being conscious: first, experiences of the world around us and second, the conscious self, or the specific experience of being self.
Seth starts with experiences of the world: imagine being a brain, stuck inside a bony skull, trying to figure out what’s out there in the world. There’s no light or sound inside the skull; all you have to go on are streams of electrical signals, which are only indirectly related to things in the world. Seth says that perception has to be a process of “informed guesswork,” in which sensory signals are combined with prior expectations about the way the world is, to form the brain’s best guess of the causes of these signals. It’s the result of the brain continually updating its best guesses to help drive our behavior. “We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it,” Seth says. “The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in.” In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time. “It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call ‘reality.”
Artists study, throughout their art education, how to exploit the “informed guesswork” workings of our consciousness. Artists know that we do not passively perceive the world, and we use the well established tricks to manipulate the viewers perceptions; optical illusions, perspective, forms ambiguity, visual depth, emphases and blurriness of form to dictate the narrative, symbols, color constancy, just to name a few. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer shows a pearl that has no contour and also no hook to hang it from the girl’s ear, it is a smudge of a brushstroke, yet we see the most realistic pearl it can be. Every art piece is made of the particular suggestive specks of information that Artists know, will invoke a particular or ambiguous form, narrative, or reality in a viewer's mind. Artists create controlled, agreed upon hallucinations. Artists create Reality, a new Reality with every piece. By making a decision to put a mark here with such and such properties, or mark there, we split the universe into a new one, just like a coin toss and Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation. Every decision creates a new world.
My second observation based on Seth’s statement “We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside out as the outside in. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call ‘reality’” is that when we agree about our hallucinations that is what we call Reason, I would say. But Reason is nothing more than an illusion, a construct of our brain trying to make sense of our-selves and our relation to the world. This is exactly why Reason is impossible to be that which it claims to be, its definition.
We are also entirely certain that we have, and that we utterly possess the understanding of Self. However, Seth posits that this experience is also hallucination generated by the brain. As neurologists and psychiatrists are already very well aware that these distinct elements of self can break down in all sorts of ways. In the rubber hand experiment, a person’s real hand is hidden from view and a rubber hand is placed in front of them. The real hand and the fake hand are simultaneously stroked using a paintbrush, while the person looks at the fake hand. After a while, for most people, the rubber hand begins to feel like part of your body. “Even our experiences of what our body is, is another kind of ‘best guessing’ by the brain,” Seth says.
We misperceive the world, at all times. We misperceive ourselves. Experiencing PTSD or panic attacks is a real physical experience of brain misperceptions. Fibromyalgia is a constant physical pain and the brain shutting off due to the overload of pain signals, yet it is a complete miss signaling of the nervous system. Our body hallucinates about itself and the world. How can we now use any Reason to make definite statements or actions? The only way to live meaningfully in this nonsensical hallucination we call Self and Reality is to create new realities like Artists do. Anyone who makes a definite statement by the means of Reason to justify their actions, most of the time with destructive consequences, is, as I understand it, on a very premature level of conscious development. Collective hallucinations should never be taken as true Reality, and those that do use the Reason of Conformity to blindly and unquestionably follow the group. The results are usually destruction and atrocities.
We should have learned by now thanks to thermodynamics and quantum physics, that there is nothing in nature that is definite, but it is about relations and probabilities. No purpose, only relations. “We are part of, not apart from, the rest of nature,” as Seth states, and we, and our Reason, cannot adhere to different cosmic rules. The Reason fails because it is trying to be impossible, to be definite knowledge, instead of being all the knowledge possible and their relations. Once humanity begins Reasoning this way we just might become human.
In 4th century BCE, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus understood that the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which atoms run. Atoms have no quality apart from their shape. (Rovelli 2017) explains it vividly:
There is no finality, in this endless dance of atoms. We, just like the rest of the nature, are one of the many products of this infinite dance- the product, that is, of an accidental combinations. Nature continues to experiment with forms and structures; and we, like the animals, are the product of a selection that is random and accidental, over the course of eons of time. Our life is a combination of atoms, our thoughts are made up of thin atoms, our dreams are product of atoms; our hopes and our emotions are written in a language formed by combinations of atoms; the light that we see is composed of atoms, which brings us images.
Plato and Aristotle rejected Democritus' naturalistic ideas in favor of explaining the world in finalistic terms, believing that everything that happens has a purpose, and understanding nature in terms of good and evil.
Democritus reportedly wrote over 70 treatises, all of which I lost with an exception of a few fragments. What did survive, however, is the works of Aristotle. Aristotle’s thought became a foundation and main building block for the Western thought, tragically. As many scholars are wondering, I will propose the hypothetical; what would the world be like if all of Aristotle’s work was lost and Democritus survived. Edicts of Emperor Theodosius declared the brutal antipagan repression and that Christianity was to be the only obligatory religion. Closure of schools and destruction of all the texts not in accordance with Christian ideas, was the effect of the edict. Aristotle’s work was accepted while Democritus was destroyed.
In Democritus thought there is no fear of gods, no ends or purposes in the world, no distinction between Earth and heavens, no cosmic hierarchy, only deep love for nature that we are part off, a serene immersion within nature, where women, man, animals plants, clouds are all part of whole without hierarchies; deep and profound universalism (Rovelli 2017). Had humanity followed Democritus’s thought of atomism, naturalism, universalism, how many divisions, hate, wars, abuse, atrocities would have been prevented? How many lives would have been saved? Thinking that we all are equal parts of the whole means no hate, no fear. Democritus’s luminous and serene meditation on the beauty of the world was destroyed in a name of suffering, violence, and punishments. Unfortunately, we choose to have a hierarchy, punishment, suffering for a reason, everything being defined with a purpose, good and evil, where all happens for a reason. We chose Aristotle. The only outcome of hierarchy is tyranny; hate. This is the biggest tragedy of all humanity that had consequences on billions of lost lives through time, as well as the Earth itself (destruction of nature, climate, etc.).
Lucretius (Roman poet and philosopher, born c. 99 BC), in a spirit of Democritus, writes profoundly about the unity, that we are all made of the same substance as are the stars, and the sea. Also in Democritus' words: “To a wise human (the original says man), the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” It is to no surprise that Catholic Church attempted to stop Lucretius, and in 1516 has prohibited his readings in schools. The Christian fundamentalism was losing the ground at the time and Europe was opening her eyes. The reasoning that all structures are hierarchical and adhere to the cause and the affect principles, the punishment for a reason, did not go away, though, and throughout centuries it has only dug itself deeper into the mass-consciousness. This type of reasoning seems to be the only one we humans know of, currently. If only we could reject the Reason and bring Democritus thought back in the name of peace among ourselves and peace with the environment. Thinking fluidly and universally, like Artists, should be the next reform of thought. Our thinking processes should be put in a quantum state.
Thinking is consciously connecting close and far, related and unrelated, experiences and concepts and creating and understanding the relations between them. Reasoning, however, is a logical thinking which is a very mechanical and rudimentary way of thinking: if A then B. Reason leads to fundamentalism. Thinking goes beyond automatic reason and is a free, encompassing, range of possibilities and their possible relations. Reason is rigid and usually results in misunderstanding of the world. Art uses thinking not reasoning. Artists think of all possible possibilities not just logical conclusions that are anything but logical. Cause and effect is of no use to an Artist as it is left to those that use Functional Reasoning. Functional Reasoning relies on the cause and effect, all happens for a reason, everything must have a reason, A is because of B. Thinking is a process, personal and intimate process. Reasoning is definite and relies on external influences. I Reason about B based on the facts I heard from someone else. Thinking is like an Artist making an art piece, a process through time, while Reasoning is the final definite outcome of it that others see as an art piece.
Unlike Zeno, I am not arguing that frailer of rigorous logic means that our perceptions are irrational and illusion, but that there are better, more complex, and more efficient ways to analyze the world; by the means of a continuous thinking process where all possibilities are considered and are possible. In this state of continuous process conclusive beliefs and opinions are not formed, rather the entire world is comprehended simultaneously, through time – without the time. Quantized thinking, perhaps.
Guitar. What is your first connotation; an object, strings, music, etc. We most likely have a visual image in our head seen from the front. We define it by its function and visualize it simply and most commonly. Cubist Artists would instead break its form so that every possible angle is simultaneously visualized. Moreover, the space of, the space within, and the space around are one and the same. Air is as much a guitar as the wood. Air within it and around it wraps around it, has the shape of it. When observing the world Artists think of all possibilities, then choose one that is materialized into a piece. Artists think (quantized thinking), they do not reason and make beliefs. Some who call themselves Artists do use rigorous logic of the austere Reasoning. As stated, they call themselves Artists, which does not mean that they are. Perhaps this is how we can critique Art and assess its value; by thinking or reasoning.
The world is made of quantum relations; computers and the Internet are quantum based (well, we are pretty close to making them publically available); and I think it just matter of time when the science community will announce the proof that our brains are quantum based. If the world and all in it works according to the quantum principle, why in the world would we not reflect that in our thinking? Our thinking must expand from Neolithic Reasoning (object-function-cause and the effect) to not only the digital age but to quantum. Until then, humanity will keep being inhuman, violent, and oppressive. Cause and effect Reasoning will cause our destruction.
Reason has cost humanity not only progression but most importantly billions of lives throughout history. I am not criticizing Reason like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, or many other philosophers did; I am stating that all methods of Reasoning: "private", "public", Deductive, Inductive, Analogical, Fallacious, Abductive reasoning, and so on, are all extremely dangerous for the humanity and they hold back intellectually any individual that reasons with Reason. Contradictions and hypocrisy are inevitable consequences of a Reason. Reason modifies Reality into personalized illusions. Reason makes us blind. We use Reason to justify atrocities, immorality, unethical actions, self-pity, destruction personal and global, our failures and blame.
We group people according to some random quality, which we understand to be a rational Reasoning. We than give that group a name; Neanderthals, heathens, barbarians, primitives, Nazis, etc. The name evokes Reason to conclude hate, abhorrence, and justifies violence. We conveniently use reason to empower ourselves. We create a random, yet swimmingly purposeful hierarchy. We Reason that we are the chosen ones, we are always the “good ones”; we are the ones who can “see”; we are the ones who are “looking up”. Our Ego is made of the Entitled Reasoning, and the more we self-observe ourselves through the Reason more self becomes entitled, and our Ego ever so larger. We can easily Reason why we should be immoral, corrupt, or dishonest, most commonly by blaming and accusing others of the same, or by the “Entitled Reasoning”, we are better than others. So easily are we capable of spinning it around and not only justifying our immorality but assigning it to the others and becoming oblivious to your own wrong doings, rationalizing them as morally appropriate actions. We accuse others of wrongdoing, that in fact, we are doing.
Interestingly enough, the further we Reason further we get from it and our actions become illogical, hypocritical, and deviated. Consequences of this extreme Reasoning are quite evident in law practice and its failure to rule by Reason. Any event, any case may be successfully argued by the means of Reason even if by doing so the result is anything but nonsensical. More we Reason, the farther we are from the Reason. Common sense, or Healthy Reasoning as it is laterally called in some languages, is being ever so more suppressed in modern societies; what we are left with is the Unhealthy Reasoning.
Religious texts contain narratives and instruction describing, encouraging, commanding, and rewarding violent actions by individuals, and groups. Among the violent acts are war, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, murder, rape, genocide, and criminal punishment. Gods are telling their tribes to go and kill people belonging to other tribes, ordering murder of women, children, infants, and sparing virgins so they may be brought back as prizes. Women and slaves must obey their masters, which has and is propagating abuse and racism for thousands of years. The violence is justified in the name of Reason, globally, for thousands of years.
Those atrocities were possible due to the Reason of Conformity. Social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group is an incredibly powerful tool for manipulating individuals and groups for the purpose of having followers. By means of Reasoning leaders manipulate groups into Conformity. Perhaps, once upon the time, conformity made evolutionary sense, but presently it is a dangerous doctrine and almost always results in human casualties. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine, violence, wars, racism, just to name a few. The facts are logically ignored; deviated misinformation is used for the support of the beliefs, all out of the convenience of conformity. It is intellectually incomparably easier to conform to the reason rather than to uniquely think and make individual judgments. Leaders, political and religious, have exploited this method continuously throughout history and currently. Leaders are not to be feared but those that follow them. Leader is one, the followers are by millions.
An experiment was conducted in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif to demonstrate that people conform to group norms. Sherif used the autokinetic effect. A small spot of light was projected onto a screen in a dark room; the light appears to move, even though it is still. When participants were individually tested their estimates on how far the light moved varied considerably, from 20cm to 80cm. The participants were then tested in groups of three. Two people whose estimate of the light movement, when alone, was similar were put in a group with one person whose estimate was very different. Each person in the group had to say aloud how far they thought the light had moved. After numerous trials, the group converged to a common estimate. The person whose estimate of movement was greatly different to the other two in the group conformed to the view of the other two. This showed that people always tend to conform. They tend to come to a group agreement, rather than make individual judgments. A person will look to others for guidance and adopt the group norm. They want to do the right thing, but may lack the appropriate information. Observing others can provide this information, regardless of how incorrect that information may be. This is known as informational conformity.
In the story The Immortal, Borges writes: “I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos combined them differently than I, constructed from them different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives. “(Borges 2000).
What if we can live in thought, in pure speculation? Borgues, writes about the immortals “In a self-absorption, they scarcely perceived the physical world.” What is this self-absorption extends beyond self to the universe itself? Can we be absorbed in to the construct of the universe and be oblivious to the Ego deviated self-absorption and physical world? This passage most accurately captures what I believe to be Quantum Thinking or Artist way of thinking.
Art speaks the language of immortals. Art speaks the language of no nouns and impersonal verbs, no adjectives, nor tenses, but a constant construct of impressions. Art speaks the language not of objects and/or their use, their properties, but the language of thought. “There is no more complex pleasure than thought.” (Borges 2000). Art has no words, no objects, just thoughts, impressions, with which we all create a construct of all there is, the universe itself, where all thoughts and time collapse into singularity.
November, 2021
Art
Artists are committed to uncovering that which is hidden from our apparent view. Our senses are dreadfully limiting at its best. The only tool that is available to us is our intellect, with which we are to understand the world beyond Plato's cave without ever leaving it. Art goes beyond reason, using its own language to explore and redraw the world, explore our relationship to the world, and make sense of it. Gradually, Artists offer us better images of the world, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Preconceived ideas are demolished and new regions of reality are revealed. More we are aware of, the more we know, and the larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality.
Art does not show us a mistaken understanding of the world, a subjective opinion, as some may perceive it to be, instead it shows us the way our human understanding of the world is being constructed. Art has nothing to do with craft or talent, but it is entirely a thinking process.
How do Artists represent this not apparent yet ample reality through thinking processes and not craft? Can Art help us decipher the world and our relation to it? What is the true nature of the reality and are the Art processes capable of analyzing and decoding that same world?
Current scientific understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe and its granularity, the information theory, is no different than the granularity of marks and art processes. We, the Artists, use the granular marks, whose interactions and relations create a new reality; much like information theory explains the creation of matter. Art processes emulates the most fundamental principle of eigenstates, superposition, entanglement, and act of quantum measurement. Art pieces that are simple in its construction, nonetheless very specific, make artist directly experience the above-mentioned principals, simply by the process of art creation. Information creates matter the same way an Artist creates an Art piece.
December, 2021
Art philosophy
Philosophy studies fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, existence, reason, values, mind, and language. Philosophy of art studies the nature of art, such as aesthetics (beauty and taste), expression, interpretation, representation, and form. I would propose a new and updated version of the nature-of-art definition. It is not so much that it changed as it has expanded. Art is the list about the aesthetics and form and mostly if not all thinking. It seams obvious that philosophy of art is studied externally, by non-artists. How else are we to justified studding art through sheer aesthetics, form, and emotion? Epistemology of Art is been criticized greatly throughout ages, and disturbingly, contemporary philosophers are continuing the tradition. In 1992 Jerome Stolnitz writes “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art” that art does not and cannot contribute to knowledge primarily because it does not generate any sort of truths. He goes on explaining why, and may I emphasize -in his opinion- and not scientific method, art’s influence on social structure and historical change has been inconsequential. His trivial opinions are exactly what he is claiming Art to be. If art is trivial cause it is not using scientific method than is that same scientific method used for his own conclusions about the art or does his opinion have no value or significance and is just as trivial as art is in his view.
The problem here is that majority of people that write about art are not artists themselves. They base their opinions on the external views of the subject without ever experiencing the process and understanding it. Art is epistemological. My thoughts on the subject are not philosophy of art but Art philosophy. It is a philosophy of an artist for an artist.
Many of the contemporary art schools are trying to minimize, or entirely get rid of, the knowledge of traditional art and insist on conceptually based art. This cannot be done unless educational institutions are willing to teach Art Philosophy. Unlike artist statement, which is personal introduction to artist work or specific project, Art Philosophy reflects reality and its relation to ourselves. The reality is analyzed ontologically, epistemologically, or through axiological inquires, not by philosophers but by Artists, who present observations through Art language.
The epistemic fundamental nature of things should be analyzed and correlated with the art processes.
December, 2021
Should we define Art or explain it
The difficulty in defining the word Art lies in the sheer nature of it. Art is ubiquitous. It emerges from anything and nothing. Art does not show us a mistaken understanding of the world, a subjective opinion, as some may perceive it to be, instead it is presenting the way our human understanding of the world is being constructed. It is making us aware of constructing the meaning rather than receiving the preconceived and established information. Art presents the possible models of how our understanding of the world could be. Art is not limiting in any way. All materials and mediums are at its disposal; all the possible ideas, existing and yet to be discovered, are available, with which we are to explore the world, with which we are to explore our relationship to the world, and make sense of it.
From the very first cave painting to present, art is what separates humans from other animals. In the La Pasiega cave in Spain, scientists have found a ladder shape made of red horizontal and vertical lines. The artwork dates to more than 64,000 years ago, suggesting Neanderthals created it. In Maltravieso Cave in Spain a three hand stencils on a wall has been dated to at least 66,000 years ago, also suggesting it was left by a Neanderthal. However, there is also a possibility that the modern humans have reached Europe tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The world’s oldest known cave painting made by humans is a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia. The urge to understand the world, the reality, and our relation to it is what has propelled Homo sapiens to a modern age and distinguish us from other animals. Why would early humans be creating art, a useless activity, when they should be minding their survival and building functional tools to help them with the survival? Because, making sense of the world precedes using and altering that very same world. Thinking precedes doing. Art is thinking. It is a philosophy. Art is an essential and obligatory part of human progression. Art makes us aware of the things-in-the-world. More we are aware of, the more we know, and larger the world becomes. Knowledge expands our physical reality, which I will expand upon in section 5. Creativity, curiosity, ability to see the unseen, and urge to understand is part of the art process and because it is materialized as a physical tactile entity, with its physical presence Art provokes creativity, curiosity, thinking and awareness in others. Art instigates freethinking and liberates people from self-inflicted decrees.
After thousand years of the decline of European civilization and intellectual inexistence, it took the influence of artists to change it all. In 15th century the Medici family supported Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello and Fra Angelico Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci. Besides Art and Architecture Medici supported scientists like Galileo Galilei. Art and science have different methods and use different language but essentially the same creative and cognitive processes are required for creation of either. Art and Science go hand in hand and feed off each other. In a 15 century Europe, seemingly useless vanity objects produced by artists and heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the sun proven by Galileo[1] ignited the intellectual freedoms that even Girolamo Savonarola[2], who destroyed and burned numerous art pieces in a name of his religious ideology, could not stop the spread of reason. The reform was inevitable across Europe. Even if Art was, useless, good for nothing vanity, which of course was not, it brought a liberation of freethinking that began the landslide of reforms, Religious, Scientific, and Artistic, moreover the exponential progress is still propagating, I hope.
When we are within the Dark ages, within a cave, our eyes adjust and we are no longer capable of perceiving the situation that we are in. We should never again have to rediscover that which has already been discovered in the past. The potential power that Art institutions have of supporting the right Artists, just like Medici family did, is a heavy responsibility and matter of humanity‘s progress.
Unlike any other field, Art in its most fundamental nature is so encompassing and vast in its universality that it is perhaps somewhat difficult to explain it. If we were assigned the task of explaining the entire world, the Universe itself, in one sentence, we would miserably fail just like we are failing in explaining the Art. Universe is too encompassing to be summarized into one sentence. Art explains the world and as such is as vast and complex as the world itself. Art can explore the world by exploring life, property of matter, motion, energy and force just like Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. But just as well, Art may explore cognition, sociology, politics, culture, emotions, perceptions, aesthetics, imaginations, and pretty much infinite other possible possibilities through which Art may explore the experienced and mind-independent reality. Art is not specialized as already mentioned subjects and fields. Art is not limited by seeing the world only through a specific narrow view of a particular profession, but is limitless in the possible ways to explore the world. All the possible possibilities are possible just like the most fundamental structure of the Universe, according to Physics. Art liberates humanity from self imposed chains and ideological imprisonment. Art’s purpose is to advance humanity.
In a narrow sense, Art is philosophical exploration of the world and its recreation, metaphorically, symbolically, or objectively. Every time a piece is created, Artist creates a new reality within the collectively experienced reality. By doing so Artist not only explores the existing collectively experienced reality for the sake of understanding and/or being aware of a particular part of it, but through this process of exploring, through the physical activity of creating the Art piece, Artist creates a new reality. In a sense, Artists are like mini gods constantly creating new sub-Universes that adhere to the same or the similar laws as the collectively experienced reality. This is the power of Art; the infinity of the possible creations, limited by absolutely nothing other than our own intellect. The Universe is just one big Art piece; within which artists continuously keep recreating small sub-Universes with each new art piece.
On an elementary level the Universe is made of events, relations and interactions, as quantum mechanics has proven. Art is made of processes, of relations and interactions. The brain that conjures an art piece, the body that physically creates it, and the art piece itself exists according to the identical principals as particles that make them. The most fundamental structure of the Universe is no different than the Art process. This parallel between the fundamental workings of the Universe and Art process is the underlying theme of all that follows.
Artists must understand, fully, the reality that they are recreating. One thing that unifies all humans from the very beginning of our species is the urge for understanding the Reality. First, religion, mythology, science, and art have been, each in their own way, trying to understand Reality; seen and unseen, known and unknown, presentations and representations. Every art piece that has ever been created is a self-portrait of reality. In the following pages I will explore the most fundamental nature of Art processes, its relation to reality, and the relationship to the world as an Artist.
Following are observations of the similarities between, seemingly random and unrelated, occurrences. Some observations may seem, or even may be, contradictory. However, contradicting statements may not necessarily exclude one another but compliment by providing more complete reasoning.
I am not attempting to define what Art is but I will try to explain the Art process.
[1] Don’t mind the fact that Aristarchus of Samos, c. 310 – c. 230 BC, an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. Or, Hipparchus who already calculated the Earth’s distance to the moon, and Aristarchus calculated the distance to the Sun. Around 500 B.C., most ancient Greeks believed that Earth was round, not flat. Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first person to determine the size of Earth. Yet in a 21st century we have the annual Flat Earth International Conference, held in suburban Dallas, Texas, with hundreds of attendees (I am sure the attendees flew to the conference in a plane and looked on their phones to get information about the conference and the location. I wonder how the navigation system works and those satellites in a flat Earth scenario.
[2] Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian Dominican friar and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He was known for the destruction of secular art and culture. Savonarola held the infamous bonfire of the vanities, on February 7, 1497, at which supposedly sinful objects including artworks and books were destroyed.
February 2021
Reality
Is the Reality that we see around us just made up from the random collection of unrelated rules and events or is there a common underlying thread from which these all derive? (Vedral 2010).
Why is there a Reality? What is Reality? In order to understand anything we must break down our observations, decode the bits and intricate connections existing between them, and only then use this information to reconstruct a better and more understanding picture of Reality. Art questions reality and its perception. Art brakes down the observed and reconstructs it. Art links different aspects of reality and attempts to understand the Reality. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a perfect example of questioning the realness of the reality and connotation and denotation of the perceived. The piece consists of a chair, a photograph of the chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph depicts the chair as it is actually installed in the room. If we say chair, what is the first thought that comes to our mind? Do we envision a chair as a 3D object in space? What material is it? Is it just a meaning of the word chair that we see? We can continue asking numerous questions and each of us will have a different answer. So, what is a chair? This is exactly what Plato’s Theory of Forms is asserting. The physical reality that we experience as real is imperfect and changing. What is a Chair if we all connote a different chair in our mind? Even if we do agree on a Chair, that same chair is changing, physically, through time. What is the ultimate chair? What is a true blue or any other entity that is in the world? If we cannot agree on a physical reality how are we to agree with concepts and ideas? This is a world of shadows as Plato stated. According to Plato the true reality is in a Realm of Forms. This is the world of ideas, ideals, and abstraction. This is the world where concepts live. This reality of true Forms is perfect and unchanging. It exceeds time and space and as such they are more real than the physical reality of temporary shadows. Just like Kosuth’s Chair, there is a chair that belongs to the physical reality; imperfect, changing and one of many other interpretations of a chair, a shadow. The two dimensional image of a chair is a simple connotation of a Chair. And finally, the dictionary explanation of the word Chair is a denotation of it, a concept, an abstraction, a Realm of Forms.
What is to be taken from Kosuth and Plato is that our perceptions of a physical reality are not true reality, or at least not a complete reality. Just like in Plato’s Allegory of a Cave, our physical perceptual reality is a shadowy illusion and should not be blindly trusted. If we apply what we know of a physical world to our cognitive perceptions instead of simply relying on a sensory perception, the world becomes much bigger. Perhaps that is what Plato envisioned with his image of walking out of the cave.
Simply think about what color is. Think of photons and Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR). We can visually perceive only a tiny part of the entire spectrum, 400-700 nm, the rest we know of but cannot perceive (I guess we are out of the Plato’s cave now). Radio and TV waves, infrared Rays, ultra violet, x-rays, gamma rays, and secondary cosmic rays, all of those frequencies, frequency of 3 × 1026 Hz to 3 ×103 Hz, or wavelengths 10-18 m to 100 km, and we can only perceive a minuscule part of it. That tiny part that we do perceive is our prerogative for what reality is. It appears to me that we see less than if we were chained facing the wall in Plato’s cave. Picture all the frequencies waving around, rushing through things, reflecting, bouncing off, piercing, and being absorbed. Picture neutrinos, right now, going through our bodies, going through objects with the speed of light not even the slightest being disturbed by the solidity of “real things”. Picture the vast empty space of all matter around yourself including yourself. Not only that the visual is astonishing, but the knowledge has allowed us to see more of the reality. The world made of light. We are fundamentally all the same part of Nature, our bodies and our desk. Painting that reality with knowledge, where space is waving with speed of light photons, and not only the visible color, but all frequencies and energies, in the space within the objects, in space around objects, where time and space just is, well that would be as close as one can get to Plato’s World of ideal forms. This view makes us comprehend the oneness with all. We can comprehend and feel the Reality. This is a power of Art, we can perceive, feel, and perhaps even understand with our mind and not only our eyes. It is a prerogative to understand things in reality. Limited knowledge and perceptions result in limited reality and we should question if it is reality at all or a Platonian world of shadows and illusion. Knowledge gives us power to see and go beyond the realm of shadows and out of the cave.
What we perceive and what we call physical reality is no more than the cave wall an inch away from our faces, which, as real as it feels, is in its best an extremely reduced and deviated perception of reality. With our faces so close to the wall, seeing only the shadows made by the fire behind us, and not having any knowledge whatsoever of the reality of fire, cave, and chains, we would, understandably so, create our own fictional explanations of what the experienced reality is. Evidently, this is a part of human history and the present, we just have to look at the politics, conspiracy theories, religion, cults, etc. We are experiencing it therefore it is our Reality, except it has nothing to do with the Reality.
Now, let's say we do the hard work and we turn our head and learn the state in which we are, the state of our universe. Our reality will expand and change. The knowledge helps us see, understand the state of our being and ultimately Be in Reality. Currently all that is known in the Universe, neutrons, protons, and electrons that make up everything we can see accounts for only about 4% of the mass and energy of the Universe. About 70% of the Universe is what is dark energy; about 26% is dark matter, and we still don’t know exactly what this 96% is. All that humanity has ever discovered and learned accounts for 4% of the Universe. We know about the fire and we know that there is something else beyond the cave but we cannot explain what that 96% is. There is 96% that we know that we do not know. How much more is there that we do not know that we do not know? Will we ever get out of the cave?
Knowing the unknown is incomparably much more real than not knowing at all.
Is Physical Reality, the experienced reality, the only real reality? What about Mind-independent Reality? Just because 100 years ago we did not know of the existence of the Dark Matter it doesn’t mean that it did not exist. Obviously the galaxies held together then just as well as today. Earth keeps spinning, with no interruption, for dinosaurs, flat-earth-bolivars, as well as for those who have basic knowledge in astronomy and physics. How many more things hold our Reality together yet there is no consciousness to perceive it. Reality is mind-independent yet no less real.
We know that quantum mechanics works. We know it cause we use it, daily, in our gadgets. We know it is somewhat hard to wrap our minds around it. The double slit experiment is fascinatingly simple in its construction, nonetheless massively challenges our logical reasoning. It clearly implies that tiny objects can be perceived as being in 2 places at the same time. It is possible that it is not an atom that is a fundamental building block of all there is – but the Information, Information invisibly shared between fundamental building blocks / bits.
We relay and based all of the humanity’s reasoning, from the very beginning, on logic. What if we didn’t think logically? What if we don’t just deduce and conclude? What if there are the exoplanets where reasoning doesn’t adhere to the rules of logic? What if we can collectively reason on new beyond-logical principles? How much would our perceptions of Reality expand, or not? Can something other than logical reasoning even exist? If it does, would our neurology be able to recognize it? The trained mind of an Artist might have better chance than the rest in recognizing this new different way of thinking and perhaps expand our world of perceptions.
March 2021
Information Realism
Information is the outcome of uncertainty. The main component of information theory is entropy. Entropy measures the amount of uncertainty of a system. The amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process, is what entropy quantifies. The macroscopic state of a system is characterized by a distribution on the microstates. The entropy of this distribution is given by the Gibbs entropy formula. Think of a coin flip, which has two equally likely outcomes, and roll of dice with six equally likely outcomes. A coin has less information, therefore lower entropy, while dice has more information, meaning higher entropy.
Information is something that is encoded in the state of a quantum system; it is physical. Information is physical. Quantum information science focuses on extracting information from the properties of matter at the microscopic level, while Information Realists use the information properties of matter to create matter, or an art piece. The fundamental information is used to create an art piece. The amount of uncertainty involved in the Art process or the outcome of a random Art process, is its entropy. The Art piece is characterized by a distribution the randomness and uncertainty of its components, physically and conceptually, whose quantifying amounts result in a patterns and/or specific concepts.
Aristotle said that the information content of an event somehow depends only on how probable this event really is. In case that an art piece is probable, let's say pure aesthetics, it then does not have much, if any, information content. If we take information to be physical and the fundamental bit unit of our reality, as Information Theory predicts, we might be able to understand art this way as well. An art piece either consist of information, thus it exists, or an art piece has no information, therefore it does not exist in context of art reality, perhaps it is furniture. How probable is an art piece determines its information content, thus its quality. The information content and its probability is how we should view the quality of an art piece. To deduce, in order to critically look at the art piece we need two things, firstly the existence of an art piece and second, being able to witness the probability that the art piece in question is predictable or obvious. This view I adopt from one of the most brilliant engineers Claude Shannon "the father of information theory". Engineers are artists who are very good at math, anyways.
The unit of information is the bit, a digit whose value is either zero or one. Shannon’s principal idea is that unlikely messages should be encoded with many zeros and ones; frequent messages should be given a short code. How many zeros and ones should Duchamp’s Fountain have in its encoding?
As a simpleton, I see two types of information. Ephemeral Information, being the first, is the kind of the most common connotation of the word information, explaining the fact of collectively experienced reality. For example, “World is not flat” or “This is a painting” or information on your social media or news. Ephemeral Information is transient, frequently human made, and easily deformed by observer’s personal believes, psychological experiences, and sensory perceptions.
The other kind of information is the a priori information. A-priory information is one of Shannon, Vedral, Rovelli, and Quantum Mechanics. A priory information is what the Universe is made of on the most fundamental level. It is an information measured by qubits.
Ephemeral information is a manifestation, and an affect, of the a-priory information, it is our interpretation of the Reality. I see it as superficial reality, a made up one. It includes an observer, an experiencing entity, may that be a conscious mind, galaxy, or anything else. A priori information on the other hand is more fundamental than forces and particles and to understand it we need to start with the simple Double Slit Experiment.
In 1801 Thomas Young performed the Double Slit Experiment in order to demonstrate the wave behavior of light. If light passes through two parallel slits a characteristic pattern of light and dark patches show on a screen positioned behind the slit.
In the image above, the black lines represent the peaks of the wave. As the wave passes through both slits, it splits into two new waves, each spreading out from one of the slits. These two waves then interfere with each other. Where a peak meets a trough, they will cancel each other out. And where peak meets peak, they will reinforce each other. Places where the waves reinforce each other give the brightest light. When the light meets a second wall placed behind the first, you will see a stripy pattern, called an interference pattern. The bright stripes come from the waves reinforcing each other.
If one of the slits is blocked off for the moment we will find that some of the electrons will pass through the open slit and strike the second wall just as pebbles would: the spots they arrive at form a strip roughly the same shape as the slit.
If the second slit is open we would expect two rectangular strips on the second wall, but what you actually see is very different: the spots where electrons hit build up to replicate the interference pattern from a wave. The interference pattern remains even when you fire the electrons one by one, so that they have no chance of interfering. Strangely, each individual electron contributes one dot to an overall pattern that looks like the interference pattern of a wave after sufficient number of electrons have hit the screen. Can electrons somehow split?
(The image of the interference pattern of an electron is identical to a random mark making on a drawing, which always results in a pattern)
If a detector is installed by the slits to see which slit an electron passes through, the pattern on the detector screen turns into the particle pattern of two strips. The interference pattern disappears. Somehow, the very act of looking makes sure that the electrons travel like well-behaved little pebbles.
The experiment suggests that particles, such as electrons, somehow combine characteristics of particles and characteristics of waves. It also suggests that the act of observing, of measuring a quantum system, has a profound effect on the system. In Art we may observe the same phenomenon. An art piece has multiple characteristics, however, the observer, act of observing has a profound effect on the art piece assigning only specific characteristics to it.
Classical physics argues that if we knew properties for all the particles in the Universe, we would determine the outcome of any future event. Universe is deterministic. Quantum physics, however, explains that object can be in more than one state at any one time. The tossed coin can give you heads and tails at the same, which is known as Quantum superposition. The Universe is Indeterministic.
Experiment as explained by Vedral: A beam splitter is a mirror with a silver coating, and by varying the amount of coating we can control the probability with which photons are reflected or transmitted. The probability is made equal just like a coin toss 50/50. Photon that hits the beam-splitter can either go through or be reflected with an equal probability. There is no way to predict which detector will click, reflected or transmitted. The outcome is completely random.
If the experiment has two beam-splitters, one after the other, which is equal to double coin toss, a surprising outcome happens. In this case the resultant beam from the first beam-splitter is recombined in the second beam-splitter. If the photon definitely passes through the first beam-splitter, it then enters the second beam-splitter via a specific path. If it does not pass through the beam-splitter, and is reflected, then it enters the second beam-splitter via a different path. We don’t know which of these scenarios happened, but one of them must be true. At the second beam-splitter, whichever path it enters from, the photon similarly passes through or is reflected. After the two splitters the photon has four possible scenarios: RR (reflect, reflect), PR (pass through, reflect), RP, or PP. Amazingly, this is not what happens. The photon always comes out the same way from the second beam-splitter. If the photon has a 50/50 chance to be reflected or pass through after hitting the first beam-splitter then it must be the same for the second. The detectors should click randomly yet only one clicks. The only conclusion is that the photon passes through and is reflected at the same time. Photons can exist at two places at the same time. This is the only way two beam-splitters can be combined to give the same outcome, time and time again.
Two random things always give us deterministic outcome.
Bit is a basic unit of information and it has values of 0 or 1. Qbit is a quantum system and can exist in any combination of the two states, 0 and 1.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, first posed by physicist Niels Bohr in 1920, a quantum particle doesn't exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once. It's only when its state is observed that a quantum particle is essentially forced to choose one probability, and that's the state that is observed. This state of existing in all possible states at once is called coherent superposition. The object's wave function is the total of all possible states in which an object can exist. When we observe an object, the superposition collapses and the object is forced into one of the states of its wave function. The act of quantum measurement, popularly known as a ``collapse of the wave function’’, was mathematically proven by Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.
On the other hand there is The Many-Worlds theory of quantum mechanics, which supposes that each possible outcome of quantum measurements is physically realized in some "world" or universe, and the universe splits to accommodate each one. This theory takes the observer out of the equation. No longer are we able to influence the outcome of an event simply by observing it, as is stated by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Many-worlds theory is also called the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Many-worlds are explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence, which have been widely explored and developed since the 1970s. The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many universes, perhaps infinitely many, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized.
The tossed coin has two possible outcomes. In reality it will land on tails or heads because we as observer have collapse the wave function and forced it into only one of the possibilities, according to the Copenhagen interpretation. According to Everett, however, as soon as the coin is tossed all the possibilities do happen, the coin does land on heads and tails simultaneously but in the different worlds, we just happened to be conscious of this particular one. Every time a decision is made or event happens the world splits in different realities as so do we.
Just 200 years ago we would miserably fail in convincing anyone that Earth is spinning at a speed of 460 meters per second, or roughly 1,000 miles per hour. They might even have an experimental proof by tossing an object in the air. If the Earth was spinning the object would not fall straight down. But now we know better. We presently have a hard time comprehending the Everett’s many-worlds idea, perhaps, cause we experience this reality as the only reality. Just like 200 years ago we wouldn’t believe that the Earth is spinning because we don’t feel it we might have hard time comprehending the idea of the infinite number of universes.
What does this say about our direct experiences and the Reality? What is Reality? Is there realness to Reality or just perceptions? What is the implication of all this in Arts? What is an observation? Does an observer collapse all the possibilities of an art piece simply by observing it? Does Art go beyond tactile direct experiences? Should the traditional Art education include reasoning that exceeds representing direct experiences of the physical world? Should Art education include the facts of what Reality truly is, on its most fundamental level? Could we, as artists, go beyond quantum mechanics and Everett’s theory by observing with reason and not just our eyes? Can we, the Artist, present the true nature of reality, no matter how counterintuitive it may be? Can we go beyond conceptualism, which is the last century’s movement anyways? Is a qubit Art, art that can be in multiple places and/or have multiple characteristics simultaneously, as much Art as a bit Art, Art that makes definite statements of this or that (0 or 1)?
Reality is made of information. As an Artist, as someone who Represents reality and the nature of things in the world, I must understand the information that Reality is comprised of. The Reality is made of Realities, may that be decoherence, coherent superposition, indeterministic, deterministic, etc. For an Artist these distinct realities are not proposing mutual exclusivity but are mutually contributing to the omnipotent vision of the reality by connecting far different visions into one complete, or as complete as it can be. Every profession, may it be science or philosophy, is limited in studying only its own specialized language, however Artists’ job is to redefine its language, to expand and go beyond Art language. Art has a freedom and responsibility to use other languages and present it as its own. Physicists are concerned only with Physical Reality, mathematicians Knowledge Reality, philosophers meaning reality, etc. Artists on the other hand must be concerned with all of the existing models of reality, not orthogonally, encompass them and present them in Art context.
Focusing on the superficial appearances of Reality and our distorted interpretation of Reality by our beliefs (ephemeral information) has profound consequences on the world and humanity. We see only differences (which are so superficial and inconsequential for anything at all), we select and group each other, we hate, we don’t reason, we destroy, and we are shortsighted and aggressive. On the other hand, if we are to focus, observe, and comprehend the Reality of Nature with all its unknowns and known (the a priory information) we would be preoccupied with reasoning, contemplations, and creativity that will consume us by the realization that we are all the same, a simple part of the universe, we are made of stars anyways, that our experiences and perceptions have more to them if observed by reason. If for once we could stop being short sighted and so closely and obsessively be looking for the entirely irrelevant differences among ourselves, and instead, just for a moment try to comprehend the vastness and the complexity of the universe as a whole, I am convinced that the atrocities would not exist, we would simply all be humans. Can Art help in this respect? Can Art reform human perceptions on a large scale and make us more human?
May 2021
Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning
The quantum is the smallest quantity of energy, the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. In Art, mark is the smallest quantity of energy, the minimum amount of the art piece involved in interaction. Mark is random; caries its own information; interacts with the space and other marks; copious number of random quanta creates physical entity of a deterministic art piece.
Numerous random marks within the space of a blank paper make a drawing, with the random space between them creating clusters of visual matter, random fluctuations, and as a whole creates drawing’s identity and purpose. Can anything else capture more beautifully the workings of the Universe? The fundamental informational bits, randomness, particles, forces between them, space in between, clusters of matter, perceivable objects, perhaps a life itself, caring information that exist within reality. Art piece appearing as Boltzmann brain (thermodynamics), perhaps. The purpose of it might not be any more than simply that it is, random accident. Yet, it is an imperative for the reasoning of the external, equally randomly conceived minds, to implement or project a purpose to anything that is. The observer chooses a purpose that will be attached to the existing cluster of matter, thus creating one’s own reality. These are fictional purposes. Collectively agreed upon purpose by those that choose to accept previously conceived purposes without questioning them, was so simply questioned by Man Ray with his piece The Gift, an iron with fourteen thumb tacks glued to its flat bottom. Questioning the preconceived notion of reality, questioning the identity of all and ourselves, might lead us towards better understanding of the Universe and us within it.
Understanding self or Universe, which is one and the same, is not an easy task, resulting in two types of human reasoning. Indolent reasoning accepts fantasy, believes, creating its own discriminative reality, selecting fantasies and assigning fictional purpose to the reality. This reasoning egocentrically creates an imaginary omnipotent lookalike who implements a particular rules and decrees in a name of reason and consequences. Absurdity is justified by all means as the omnipotent one always has a reason for it. All is justified, atrocity included, in the name of the decree. Anyone who cannot identify her/himself with the all-powerful is to be treated with utmost brutality by the ones who have projected themselves into this almighty fiction. It is a shortsighted vision of us versus them. There are no consequences for the individual actions as all can be justified by the will of the omnipotent one. As easy as it may be to put our hands in the air and blindly believe fictions, not to think, question, reason, analyze, observe, not knowing oneself, and not studying, the result is oblivion. Deviated fantasies and oblivion have created more incomprehensible atrocities that one can ever count. Every war since the beginning of humanity was led in a “name of”, “for a reason of”. By the indolent reasoning we have imprisoned ourselves in the self-created prison of fiction giving all the power to the imaginary almighty one, leaving no freedom, no power, no responsibility. The result is blame, hate, and aggression. Like an abused one who becomes an abuser. Tragically though, the abuse was self-inflicted out of idleness to observe and Reason. Interestingly enough the word Indolent came from the Latin, in- ‘not’ and dolere ‘suffer or give pain’.
The second kind is the inquisitive reasoning. The observers. By observing a caterpillar crawling on the branch Einstein thought of the curved space and special relativity. Brownian motion (Robert Brown) was based on observing the dance of the speck of dust or pollen suspended in the still air, which was later mathematically explained by Einstein. By observing the wearing down of the wheel, Democritus concludes that it is due to the slow flight of particles in 460 BC. Democritus comprehended a world of quantum physics that we just recently started using on the daily bases (your gadget would not exist without the quantum mechanics), simply by observing the wood on the wheel. All, more than fifty works by Democritus were destroyed by the Indolents. Perhaps that explains why it took from the 5th century BC till 20th century for humanity to rediscover the fundamentals of the Universe that we now call quantum mechanics. If only there were not for the indolent ones, maybe people in the Dark Ages could have communicated to each other on the iPhones.
Observations by reason have made Democritus realize the boundless space that makes the Universe in which innumerable atoms run, simply by observing the wearing down of a wheel concluding that it could be due to the slow flight of particles of wood. Space is without boundary; atoms have no quality apart from their shape. Atoms push and pull, a wave of the reality, and all in it is a by-product, an accident of the atom’s movement and their combination. There is no purpose, just accidental combinations. And we are no more than the result of the same random dance of atoms, our soma, our thoughts, and dreams.
Inquisitive ones are free and part of the universe, while the atrocious indolent ones are imprisoned in the self-created fiction.
We are made of the same materials as stars and all the rest of the matter in the universe. There are no them versus us, but only the universe. We are all and the same. Understanding yourself is understanding the universe and vice versa. Understanding wooden wheels or the speck of dust is understanding the universe. There is a universe in all. Reality is to be comprehended with the Reason and not for a reason.
Artists observe with empathic observations, and Reason. However, instead of using the language of mathematics to show it, we artists materialize our observations and reasoning through object, language, sound so that we as well as others can experience and feel the knowledge of the observed through their senses. Parmenides (born ca. 515 BC) rejected the empirical experiences of the senses, relying instead on the pure reason, which is the way I see art. Artists use pure Reason to convey the idea or a concept, and through the art piece we communicate our reasoning and observations. Art let’s us cognitively re-experience the universe through all our faculties, giving us freedom to understand and be part of all reality. Art created with inquisitive reasoning is the only true art, the art of Information. So-called art of coping the superficially observed objects from the close proximity for the sake of physical likeness and temporary aesthetics is the Indolent art. Indolent art is pure aesthetical object and not art. It is as if the banker or accountant was to call her/himself a mathematician. They are good at math but they are not mathematicians. Just the same, an Indolent observer of art is intellectually incapable of experiencing reality’s information, thus projects his/her own fictional beliefs. A good example on this subject is Girolamo Savonarola destruction of Botticelli’s, and many others’ art for the reason of vanity in the name of god.
A Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (born 94 BC, Pompeii) in his philosophical poem De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things, didactic work about philosophy of Epicureanism, sings of atoms, the sea, and the sky, of nature. Art is Reasoning of nature and Reality. Lucretius epitomizes true Art. Lucretius observes Nature with his reason and through his art of poetry materializes his reasoning. His words may make us see and understand nature through his observations so we may expand and further our reasoning, or we may project our own preconceived fictional beliefs that are the only purposeful ones, hence reject it if it is not molded into our limited beliefs. We may accept, reject, or be inspired by the Lucretius words based on our beliefs or Reasoning. We choose how to see reality, thus we create our reality. This is Quantum Mechanics. All the possibilities are possible when the coin is tossed and once an observer looks at it is either heads or tails. Based on if our own Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning we tip the coin one way or the other, like an external physical force, a slight breeze or the invisible texture on the table that made the coin tip over one way or the other. Perhaps this is why some think the art is subjective and anything can be art if “I like it”. All there is then can be seen as subjective based on Indolent and Inquisitive reasoning, so perhaps Art, as so many other things in life, is not for Indolent minds.
In his 1917 work Einstein proposes a 3-Shape as a solution to the problem of the border of the universe. 3-Shape has finite volume but it is without borders. In 14th century, Dante Alighieri, a genius Italian poet, writes his vision of the medieval world, with the spherical Earth at the center, surrounded by the celestial spheres, in his Divine Comedy. The sphere of angels is surrounding the universe, and the same time they are surrounded by the universe, which is the most accurate explanation of Einstein’s 3-sphere. Interestingly enough it appears that Dante was inspired by The Florence Baptistery, and the mosaic depicting Hell, by Coppo di Marcovaldo, 13th century. (Rovelli 2017). It appears to be that artists have visualized the space of the universe 8 centuries before modern science. Artists represent reality by cognitively observing the world around and representing it through art language instead of math language, nonetheless equally significant.
The great minds of Miletus, in the sixth century BCE, thought that through discussion, it is possible to understand the world. Art piece starts a discussion so we can collectively understand the world more fully. This is perhaps a reason why Renaissance has changed a thousand year cognitive blackout in Europe. Art piece is created by the Inquisitive reasoning, and when observed by the same inquisitive reasoning it can progress humanity.
August 2021
The Science of Art or Art of Science
Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist founder of loop quantum gravity theory, wrote about scientific thinking in his book Reality Is Not What It Seems. I replaced word science with Art. Following is the most beautiful, powerful, and accurate explanations of Art.
“We are all in the depth of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudice, and our week senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is 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. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.”
I truly wonder if Rovelli realizes that, in fact, he was, most accurately, explaining Art in its essence.
October, 2021
Marks
Physics of Art process
The most fundamental nature of the Universe is its granularity (Rovelli), as quantum mechanics has shown us. Universe is made of bits, little packets of energy, grains, or bits of information. These tiny packets that all is made of, exist only when interacting with another. A particle, a packet of information, materializes only when it collides with another entity, a screen of the detector or a photon, for example. The cloud of probability with which we conceived of it ‘collapses’ and the electron materializes at that point only in relation to the detector screen. The act of quantum measurement in quantum mechanics occurs when a wave function, a wave of probabilities, reduces to a single state due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an "observation". In relation to any other object, the particle and the detector screen are together in a superposition. Prior to the interaction it does not have any mathematical value, hence it does not exist. The physical world has no value until it interacts with something else, and when it does it becomes deterministic but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indetermanistic for the rest of the Universe. Reality is made of interactions. Interactions between information creates physical reality.
Biological systems or humans may be observed the same way. Humanity is granular. Each human can be seen as a granular bit. In order for a human to exist, in order for any human to have a particular material value, that particular person must somehow interact with another, may that be a physical interaction, through media, or whichever other way, one human exists for another only if one is aware of the other through interaction. In relation to any other person, the interacting people are together in a superposition. We group people, we superposition them by nationality, race, profession, etc.
More interaction between particular humans, more events appear, more reality is created, more real they are to one another. We may be aware of a person’s existence by seeing them and hearing about them on the TV, let's say, and even though we know they are real, they are a part of a very tiny part of our reality. Unlike, let's say a parent, whom we have been interacting with our entire life. In this case the events are many, the interactions are numerous, so the level of created reality is vast. Your parent is as real to you as you are to yourself, although your parent does not exist for me because we have not met, we have no shared events, nor interactions. Universe exists through interactions and reality of the physical world is created through the interactions on a most fundamental level. We, as living animals, create our reality through interactions between one another. Personal life reality is created by interactions with others. Of course we must not omit the interactions between us and the environment. Vlatko Vedral beautifully applies information theory of quantum mechanics into explaining the fundamentals of biological systems and their DNA, in a most inspiring book, Decoding Reality.
We do not interact with the majority of seven billion people, hence they do not exist for us, and only a minuscule part of humanity is real to us. The rest of seven billion people we only know as possibilities, superposition, but have no known interaction value. The wave function did not collapse for our personal observations.
Our knowledge of the universe must be just as minuscule because we do not interact with the majority of it. Who can guess the existence of all the people we never heard of existing, who can guess all the forces and the information universe is made of but we will never interact with, thus never know about. We see only a small part of the universe just as we only see a small part of humanity. We are terribly shortsighted. We create reality of the physical world, of the universe, by what we see and know. Reality is only as big as we interact with it. The Universe is only as big as we manage to interact with it via intellect. Reality is created by the intellect.
We as individuals are responsible for creating our own levels of reality. Almost like a video game, more interactions, higher the level is reached and bigger the physical reality is. But, does this mean that the reality is an illusion? If we all create our own reality by our intellect through the interactions, then each of us should have a different reality. Well in a sense we do, but illusion it is not. It is imperative to distinguish two different perceptions of reality, one being personal reality and second being collective reality. Personal reality is created by our personal interactions, our experiences and the root of it are our beliefs. Collective reality is what we can all agree upon regardless of our beliefs, like laws of physics. Collective reality is created by collective intellect interactions. It is like personal computer vs quantum computer network.
We may find a proof in history. Before humans discovered the electromagnetic force, humanity was blind to it, and electromagnetism was not part of the reality. It did not exist. Humans lived, each minding their own reality as real, being convinced that their conscious reality is real and all there is to it. After electromagnetism was discovered our collective and personal realities expanded dramatically. The reality became bigger with more possibilities.
Once upon time the universe revolves around the earth and it took the intellect of Johannes Kepler to interact with the perceived reality to expand our collective reality into a much bigger one, simply by pointing out the fact that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits. Our world was also just fine when it worked on the Isaac Newton laws. We went to space by using his reality. Quantum mechanics, however, expanded exponentially our reality, personally and collectively. Intellect creates reality; lack of intellect shrinks reality.
This proposition that intellect creates reality is a reflection on Information theory. Intellect is information. If the world is made of Information and information is physical as Vedral proposes then our brains, being part of the physical world, are made of information. Brain might as well be in a quantum state as many researchers are trying to prove. Quantum interactions of the information between our intellect and the world results in more information, meaning larger reality. Reality expands through the intellect. Universe expands physically with the increase of information, entropy (entropy is the information content of an object), just the same as our physical reality expands with the collective and personal intellectual information. The increase in intellectual entropy is a natural state of things.
Why does this matter to an Artist? Well, firstly because when we talk about the most fundamental structure of the Universe and its granularity it is as if we are talking about an Art piece and the granularity of marks that create an art piece that make its own unique universe. Artists are like mini Gods creating a new unique Universe every time an Art piece is created. We, the Artists, use the gradual marks, whose interactions and relations create a new reality.
Prior to the interaction, between pen and paper or one mark another, an art piece does not have any value, hence it does not exist. The mark just like a particle is only concrete in a relationship to the other physical object it is interacting with, i.e. paper or other marks. The mark, hence an art piece, does not exist unless the relation is established between paper and the pen or mark and another mark.
As a whole, the physical world of an Art piece has no value until it interacts with something else, meaning an audience or when an art piece is put within an art context and interacting with the other art within the context. When it does so, it becomes deterministic or Real Art, but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indetermanistic, inexistent, for the rest of the Art Universe. Art is made of interactions. Interactions create physical Art reality.
Within the art piece interactions are many and deserve more detailed elaboration. For the sake of the simplification I will use a simple pen on paper drawing example.
a. Artist – Paper relation: At the very beginning of the piece, the piece is inexistent but all the possible possibilities are possible. Artist who faces the blank paper may contemplate the probability that the piece may be this or that way, but it will not be deterministic or specific until the relation or interaction is established. It is inexistent yet it has a potential and the Artist holds all the probabilities of a piece.
b. Pen - Paper relation: Artist is like a Universe holding all the possible combinations until the moment of the pen-paper interaction, the very first contact, the piece is indetermanistic. But as soon as the relation is established the deterministic information appears, meaning the piece begins its existence. With every new mark added the number of possible futures decreases. Increase in marks impacts and reduces the endless possibilities of a piece. The piece is starting to form in a specific way.
c. Mark – Paper relation: Pen – Paper interaction creates particular information, a mark. Information of the visual mark is determined by its relation to the space around it, meaning the character of the mark is determined by the space of the paper (composition, format, etc.). Character of a mark, mark’s information, determines the character of the entire Art piece.
d. Mark-Mark/Marks relation: As the Pen-Paper relation increases, the visual information increases as well. More interaction, more information. Increase in information, increases the entropy. The piece becomes more complex and more deterministic. Each bit of information, each mark, is now determined by its Mark-Paper interaction as well as its interaction to all the other marks. How wonderful it is to be able to recreate the most fundamental workings of the universe. This is a perfect thermodynamics reenactment by the Artist hand and not the accelerator.
A Mark, or a particle, materializes only when it collides with another entity, a screen of the detector or a photon in case of a particle, and paper or another Mark in case of a Mark. The cloud of probability with which the Artist has conceived of it ‘collapses’ and the Mark, or the particle, materializes at that point only in relation to the paper, or detector screen. In relation to any other object, the Mark / particle and the detector screen / paper are together in a superposition. The Mark is only concrete in a relationship to the other physical object it is interacting with. With regards to all the others it does not exist, until the interaction is expanded as the following two points, e. and f., explain.
e. Art piece – Art context: An Art piece, just as the physical world, has no value until it interacts with something else, and when it does it becomes deterministic but only in a relation to the thing it interacts with and remains indetermanistic for the rest of the Universe. Reality is made of interactions. Interactions create physical reality. This is why an art piece has no value until it interacts with the space of Art, meaning put in context of Art. Once put in context of art, an art piece exists only within the context of art and it remains indetermanistic for the rest of the Universe. An oil stain on the sidewalk, even if created by an artist, has no artistic value unless it is presented as an art piece within an art context; otherwise it is no more than an oil stain. Just the same, an art piece within an art context has no other value than art value. It is possible, though, due to the ambiguousness of art, for an art piece to interact with other context, like politics, science, etc., and to exist within an Art context as well as some other one. An example would be the Teeter-Totter Wall, by Rael San Fratello and Colectivo Chopeke.
f. Art piece – Observer: Once the art piece begins existing within an art context, it is in a superposition and it is only concrete within this relation and it is inexistent for all the other contexts (unless, as explained above, an art piece is interacting with multiple contexts). A viewer, an observer, collapses a wave function, meaning, an observer by interacting with the piece, reduces an art piece's meaning to a single meaning state. Art piece becomes deterministic by its interaction with an observer. An art piece is constantly in a superposition state with many possibilities, and for every observer it collapses its superposition to a different meaning. Art piece is Omni-meaningful and becomes specific for one observer perhaps differently than for another.
Where is an art piece before it is created? Where is a mark before it is drawn on the paper? It does not exist just like the particle does not exist until interacts with something. The interaction of brain that moves the pen, pen, and paper creates a mark. Mark does not exist but it is a consequential outcome of the brain-pen-paper interaction.
During his night walk in a park in 1925, Werner Heisenberg, through his intuition, came up with a fundamental equation of quantum mechanics. In the park there are occasional street lamps separated by the extensive darkness. A figure passes by, but the figure is perceived by Heisenberg only as he appears beneath a lamp, and then disappears into the dark before reappearing beneath another lamp, and then vanishing back into the dark again. From one pool of light to another, appearing and vanishing. Heisenberg reasons that man obviously does not appear and disappears, he can even easily reconstruct the man’s trajectory from one street lamp to another. What if particles vanish and reappear? What if, between one interaction with something, and another with something else, the particle could be nowhere? Particles are something that only manifests itself when it interacts, when it collides with something else; and between one interaction and another, it has no precise position. This is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, the relational aspect of things. Particles don’t always ``exist’’. They exist when they interact. Heisenberg has proven mathematically his logical observations. We know that this is the truth and the way nature reality works. We just have to look down at our phones to have a perfect example.
Particle has a wave function. A Wave Function is a wave of probability where anything can happen. It is a cloud of probability. Like the man in the dark who can be anywhere and is nowhere. When a particle interacts with something it collapses its cloud of possibilities into an eigenstate. An Eigenstate is a fixed and determined state, one out of many possibilities. Every time a measurement is taken, an observation is made and the Eigenstate is different. The way I visualize it is that man in the park walks underneath the light and we observe him as such and such. For the observer sitting ten benches farther from Heisenberg, a man will appear smaller and disappear more slowly and in different spots. If Heisenberg was walking as well every time he makes an observation of the man it will be different, too. However, the more observations are made the more we will all come to the same conclusion that this particular man is in this particular park.
The beauty of the fundamentals is that all that comes after, all that is bigger, works and is the same. What if the world is to be explained through an Artist’s view? What if the world is like an art piece instead of a man walking through the night park? We would come to the exact same conclusion. An art piece depends on the interaction/perspective of a viewer, which creates a different reality. There are many Art pieces, mine included, that change meaning/concept (piece’s identity), as well as its physical appearance. Depending on the observer’s observable distance and angle the piece changes. The piece has many different properties, wave functions. For an observer there is only one property that is revealed through the interaction with the piece, an eigenstate. However, as the observer moves other properties and meanings are revealed (as in piece: Unknown of the Known, 2017/2019, Pencil on paper, h54"x w84" each of two, 55,000 portraits and 95,000 blank portraits). In Art, an observer’s perspective reveals different previously identifiable properties. Even though every viewer collapses a piece into an eigenstate, more viewers observe it closer to the eigenstate. Piece has many possibilities, equal to the wave function. Each viewer reads it differently. Each viewer has their own interpretation. More viewers observe the piece, the more of the possibilities of a piece are revealed. Interestingly enough, more views are revealed closer they are to be alike. Art is quantum mechanics just like quantum mechanics is Art, simply because all is fundamentally information. The nature of the quantum information, a particle, is the same as the nature of the information of a mark.
Another interesting observation I would like to point out is that a simple visual experience of the mundane reality may provoke thoughts within highly intellectual people, like Heisenberg, consequently changing the collective intellect and expanding our reality. Artists are trained to observe reality, but unfortunately Art education teaches us to copy it literally, superficially and without any intellectual reasoning. We should be training our Art students to think and conclude about their observations. We should be reasoning, not copying. Maybe then, one day Art intellect will expand our collective intellect and will help us expand our reality to an ever much bigger universe. Somebody has to ask questions so we can collectively move forward and who can be better at questioning things than artists. Artists’ reasoning questions the existing perception of the Reality.
Entropy in statistical thermodynamics is understood as the macroscopic state of a system that is characterized by a distribution on the microstates, and distribution is explained by Gibbs entropy formula. The macroscopic state of an Art piece is characterized by a distribution of marks on the microstates of the p
Though Inspirations:
Jack Challoner (2018). The Atom, a Visual Tour. The MIT Press edition.
Jorge Luis Borges (2000). The Aleph and Other Stories. Punguin Books (U.K.)
Carlo Rovelli (2017). Reality is Not What What it Seems, The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Riverhead Books, An Inprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Lucretius (c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC). On The Nature of Things
Vlatko Vedral (2010). Decoding Reality, The Universe as Quantum Information. Oxford University Press.
Frank Wilczek (2015). A Beautiful Question, Finfing Nature’s Deep Design. Penguin Books.
Saridakis E. (2016). "Information, reality, and modern physics". International Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
Scientific American (2011). What Does the New Double-Slit Experiment Actually Show? https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-the-new-double-slit-experiment-actually-show/#
Stolnitz, Jerome. “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (July 1992): 191-200.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/your-brain-hallucinates-your-conscious-reality-anil-seth#watch
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/