Art versus Science

O'Keeffe Museum

The title for this talk tonight, "Art versus Science," is meant to be provocative, and it is a bit misleading. The Art & Science Laboratory was founded with the belief that artists and scientists are not natural adversaries, though this may go against conventional wisdom.

Tonight I will be exploring what it might mean for something to be technologically determined, and whether or not that hampers creativity. I know from working in the foundation world in New York that most funding is targeted at, and I'm paraphrasing the New York State Council for the Arts grant guidelines, non-teleological art that concerns process, not product and that breaks with tradition, eschews theorizing, and doesn't follow rules. On the one hand this prejudice prevents progress in the development of computer technologies as mediums, since theorizing and rules are important in, for instance, programming. On the other hand, it dismisses thousands of years of human history upon which an artist might build. I don't think the arts profit from a prejudice against science. And I hope to convince you tonight that a constructive dialogue between scientists is possible and desirable.

Even if you agree that this objective is worthwhile, I can assure you that no two of us here tonight will agree on just exactly what it is that artists and scientists do. What is art? What is science?

Some extreme views....

Poetry is philosophical ... for it tends to express the universal. By the universal I mean ... according to the law of probability or necessity.

--Aristotle, from Poetics

As you can see, Aristotle thought art was pretty much equated with the practices of what we now call science. Here is an opposite view:

The vocabulary of science is merely one among others. It is not Nature's Own Vocabulary. The artist's awareness that he is making rather than finding puts him one up on the scientist.

--The point of view of textualist literary theorists, according to contemporary pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, from "Textualism and Idealism"

And here is an example of the view of science that Rorty critiques:

An intellect that at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it ... could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before our eyes.

--French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), from Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.

Perhaps it will be enough simply to acknowledge the fact that we have different views. If we can't find a solution, maybe we can hope to at least figure out what the disagreement is really about.

Tonight I am going to critique one, very narrow view of art and science. In this view, the essence of artistic activity is supposed to involve pure creativity and freedom; whereas, scientific activity is supposed to involve mechanism and strict adherence to laws. The conclusion being that science is not conducive to artistic work.

I don’t agree. It seems to me that this gulf between art and science has something to do with the use of tools, which are associated with restriction, loss of freedom, and stagnation. A “tool” may be a theory, a machine, a language, a software program, or a concept. A tool implies a conscious knowledge of the ways things work, and ability to predict and control. Typically we think of scientists wanting to be able to predict and control, and of artists as not wanting their work to be predictable. Or, another way to put it would be to say that artists don't want to be controlled by their tools.

However, scientists also strive to transcend their tools, so to speak. They don't want to make data fit their theories; they want their theories to capture some essential features of the data. When they find something that cannot be explained by current theories, it is considered anomalous. Scientists are then forced to resort to creative thought and inventive mathematics till they discover a principle that makes sense of it. An artist may experience a similar situation, and might experiment with various techniques until things fall into place.

I argue that both science and art involve mechanistic and creative processes, using tools until they are no longer adequate, and then modifying them. Only if one uses tools and has some sense of expectation can one discover anomalies. Only in this way is new creation possible. I would like to introduce the term intentionality to designate this complex process, a mechanistic creativity or creative mechanism.

Intentionality may be an awkward term, but the idea behind it is by no means limited to some obscure field of philosophy. It is an important concept for every one -- not just artists and scientists. To put it simply, people studying intentionality wonder what it means to have a mind of one's own, to have free will, or to have a self. One view says that to act intentionally is to act spontaneously, and everything you do comes from within yourself. In its extreme form, this idea turns into genetic determinism. Another view says, that intentionality is revealed in completely unpredictable and arbitrary actions. The only way out of this disagreement, I think, is to combine the two points of view. I'll come back to this in a minute.

It is commonly said today that to create a work of art intentionally is to make the materials conform to one's preconceptions. There are many artistic movements that are anti-intellectual or anti-theory. Generally speaking, the Romantic movement followed this line of thought. Jackson Pollack's Lavender Mist is a good visual example of the rejection of the use of theory and rules in art.

There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part Romanticism rejects science because it is assumed to be analytical and reductive. It is supposed that science forces nature to conform to its theories. Think of Hawthorne's "The Birthmark." The mad scientist in that story couldn't accept that his wife's birthmark might be beautiful from some point of view. Think of contemporary novelists who criticized Aristotelian poetics -- like the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who has said that the idea of a plot is deadly to fiction. In his novel Immortality, he has an image of an Aristotle as a cowboy controlling fictional characters with a whip, leading them like cattle through a narrow pass.

According to some postmodernists (who have heard about but haven't read Thomas Kuhn critically), all theories are arbitrary "paradigms," and no one paradigm is any better than any other. Compare the statement by Rorty. Dave Hickey's exhibition over at Site Santa Fe right now addresses the fact that having a conception of "beauty" has not been tolerated in the arts in recent years.

According to these views, a science-minded artist, that is, someone who acts intentionally, is guilty of trying to force nature to conform to theory. And, if this is so, the artist can never grow, create anything new, or learn. I think this is a very limited view of intentional behavior. In fact, I 'm sure it's incorrect because the more we use theories the more they are changed by new situations. Intentions can never really be completely predetermined. Our goals are always based on what we currently know, and as we collect more information our goals change even as they are realized. Tools, then, are not to be feared. If one fears theories, tools, science, then one is giving them too much power. If scientists aren't afraid of them it's because they realize theories are generally only very good approximations, and they aren't surprised when sometimes theories fail.

Science, in the sense of conscious knowledge of the way mediums work, will not automatically make you a bad artist, incapable of creative thought. And in any case, we cannot exist in the world without forming theories about it, or developing tools for predicting and controlling it. Unconsciously or consciously we learn to make regular responses to regular stimuli. One might think of a physical habit as a kind of theory that the body has of the world. This is what William James thought. And we learn to develop new responses to new stimuli. In other words, we adapt.

As long as we do not think of intentionality as the process of realizing predetermined goals, then we can define a work of art as something that is or seems intentional. Again, to act intentionally, in my view, means that one uses tools till they are no longer adequate, then invents new ones. (The mechanisms behind invention or "pattern discovery" as Jim Crutchfield calls it, is something I'll come back to in a minute. For now let's just accept that new tools are discovered through some mysterious punctuated process.)

Despite the argument for nonintentionality in art, audience end to think everything created by an artist represents some intention, models some theory, or expresses an idea. Because of this tendency, anything can appear to be a work of art if hung on a wall, exhibited in a gallery, or signed by an artist, even "ready-made" objects like shovels. Even if the work represents nothing, the audience may still sense a ghost of an idea or purpose -- They ask why did Duchamp choose this shovel -- and it is this false sense of purpose, I believe, that makes ready-made art provocative.

The use of ready-made objects in art is not always arbitrary. Woody Vasulka's sculptures combine various pieces of military equipment. In this case, there does seem to be a real reason why particular kinds of objects are selected. They seem to represent Woody's strange relationship with the designs of war. As a child in Czechoslovakia after the second-world war, he found abandoned or wrecked planes, tanks, and other equipment in the fields and forests. They became his toys. In his art, he has appropriated the use of these tools toward very different ends than the originally intended ones. Woody's sculptures seem intentional, not because they conform to his view of the world, but because they develop a new and more complex view of the world.

We should also look at representational art and its relationship to intentionality. Representational art is a standard example of intentional work that uses the science of image. In Sir Adolph William Bouguereau 's paintings, for example, we easily find evidence of sophisticated use of modeling tools: three-point perspective, color theory, chiaroscuro, which together make a two-dimensional model of a three-dimensional object. These tools are not so mysterious to us today because they do not go beyond the language of our current understanding. This painting is similar to what Thomas Kuhn called normal science, more proof that the current language works to represent nature as we know it. However, imagine that you had never seen a picture or a mirror, never seen a three-dimensional object represented in two dimensions. Studying this painting, then, would help the viewer develop new tools for perception, and this adaptation would constitute an intentional act.

Steina's video pieces are characterized by a unique editing style, which seems affected by her interest in music. Her videos almost seem like jazz improvisations, which require a great degree and technical skill and the ability to feel so "at home" in another language that she can use it without conscious of it. Because video language has become a second nature to her, she is able to notice when it doesn't work. Thus, she can recognize the opportunity to expand that language.

So then intentionality may be seen as relevant to very different kinds of art objects based on very different aesthetic theories. Intentionality remains an issue even if an artist decides not to act with conscious purpose, allowing the medium to find its own form. I'll give the less interesting example first: an artist might construct a work randomly. Think of an inkblot. In this case, the audience performs a pseudo-artistic act of finding a theory, which "explains" the pattern. People tend to think that any coincidental pattern, even those in nature, are intentional, that they serve some purpose. I like to think of this kind of interpretation as superstitious rather than artistic because there is no real ground for the theory; it is completely subjective on the viewer's part.

Now a more interesting example: an artist might choose to work in a way that mimics nature's tendency to self-organize. Self-organization is interesting because it seems teleological, that is, it seems purposeful or designed. For example, consider how birds fly in flocks. We ask ourselves why birds fly in formation. And who or what directs them. Each bird may be doing its own thing, as it were, minding the behavior of the immediate neighbor perhaps, but not following any one particular leader. Nevertheless, the flock, as a whole, turns and folds with a precision that implies a choreographer. It turns out, however, that there is no central director. Each bird conforms to local rules, but the collective behavior appears globally organized.

David Dunn creates self-organized compositions, by first generating sound elements that are well characterized and predictable. He makes specific adjustments and gets a specific sound. This is direct input and output. However, the sounds are then fed back into the system and affect the way additional sounds are produced. Even though the initial settings are the same, this feedback leads to music that is complex and unpredictable but not without structure. Think of the weather, not total nonsense. Each individual sound produced follows simple mechanistic rules that are predictable within a limited time frame. But over time the interactivity results in a kind of music for which no theory will ever be found that can recreate the performance exactly.

For example, to go back to our flock of birds, even if you placed each bird in the same initial position and each bird used the same local rules to determine its actions, the flock would not recreate the same formation twice. But again, this unpredictable behavior is not without some regularity. If you study birds in motion, eventually you will begin to recognize patterns. You develop new tools for recognizing more complex forms of organization.

The kinds of patterns produced by self-organization are to be distinguished, however, from patterns seen in inkblots. If one imagines there is a analogy between a pattern in the inkblot and one's own mental picture of something, the recurrence exists between two separate systems: the observer and the inkblot. In contrast, the patterns made by a flock of pigeons or by one of David's compositions are determined by feedback within the system itself, not by an outside observer.

Since the 1980s when Jim Crutchfield began to look at video feedback, his work has become more and more focused on inventing a theory of pattern discovery. How can one say that the sudden appearance of new organization is really new? A hundred years ago, scientists, like Laplace, would have said the order was always already implied in the initial conditions. This is depressing news to artists who don't like to think of themselves as deterministic input-output machines. Now with the discovery of quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, we know the future has not been specifically decided already. Jim is currently working on a quantitative theory of structure, which would enable us to say what the novel organization actually is and what is new about it compared to what it emerged from. In many ways, the questions that Jim is interested in are the same as those posed by teleologists in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Teleology, which happens to be my area of specialization, was a branch of philosophy that looked for an intrinsic cause of the appearance of design or purpose in nature. Philosophers Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, morphologist Johannes Muller. (There are those who in addition to seeking an intrinsic cause also sought an external cause, that is, they sought a supernatural being as the ultimate cause of all causes, but this is a concern of religion, not teleology proper.) Teleology was a doctrine that combined art and science. It asked one question, Where does order come from? And it had one answer that could be applied equally well to a variety of things, from art objects to animals: order emerged out of the interrelations of individual parts of a system. Teleologists believed that both intentional human behavior and self-organizing natural systems could be described by similar principles.

Unfortunately, teleology died in the late 19^th century because it sought non-reductive descriptions of emergent organization -- what I have called intentionality. At the time, all phenomena were thought to be reducible to the individual components. In which case, a flock of birds, placed in exactly the same conditions, would always act in the exactly same way. In this view, there can never be anything truly new in nature, or in art for that matter. Thus, late 19^th century scientists abandoned the search for a principle of interrelations that guided processes and lent organization to the individual unorganized movements. Now that circumstances have changed, and scientists no longer believe that complex systems are always decomposable, perhaps it is time to change our view that science is somehow opposed to art.

Victoria N. Alexander

Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities

64 Grand Street

New York, NY 10013

alexander@dactyl.org