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Livres récents

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A partir de 2002

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S. Wolfram

A new kind of science

Wolfram Media. 2002

Les automates cellulaires promus paradigme universel

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J.P. Delahaye

L’intelligence et le calcul

de Gödel aux ordinateurs quantiques

Belin. Pour la Science. 2002

Les chroniques de J.P. Delahaye, informaticien, dans Pour la Science.

Ces chroniques élucident de très nombreux thèmes de l’informatique, de la logique et du calcul, qui se trouvent à l’arrière plan de bien des considérations contemporaines sur l’art et la science. Culture scientifique essentielle.

Ce livre est la suite de celui paru en 1995 dans la même collection :

Logique, informatique et paradoxes

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B. Clarke and L.D. Henderson, eds ;

From energy to information:

Representation in science and technology, art and science.

Stanford University Press. 2002

From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature

Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
364 pp. Illus. b/w, paper $35.
ISBN 0—8047—4176
1. Technology—History.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)
pepperell@ntlworld.com

"From Energy to Information" is an avowedly interdisciplinary project both in subject matter and in construction. The introduction states: ". . . the differences among the practices of scientists, artists, writers, and engineers may be seen not as fundamental disciplinary barriers but as a matter of local variations due to divergent representational goals." (p. 14). What results is a collection of essays that seeks to chart the complex interactions between different kinds of representation in the arts and science, proposing as its binding thesis a general shift in recent history from an essentially thermodynamic understanding of nature to an essentially informatic one. The book itself originates in a 1997 symposium of the same title at the University of Texas, and claims to be the first to deploy so diverse a range of scholars in such a tightly focused way in this field of inquiry.

In his introductory essay, co-editor Bruce Clarke sets out a chronology of what he calls: "the historical movement from energy to information regimes" (p.33). He explains how we arrived at our modern notion of energy, how it was integral to the growth of nineteenth-century science and industry, and how it was represented in the popular and literary imagination, most notably in the widely disseminated idea of the impending "heat death of the universe". The capacity of ordered energy to do useful work, and hence drive human progress, was coupled with an inevitable tendency to dissipation, disorder, and decay — the entropic underbelly of energetic vitality. This dualism found resonance in mid-twentieth-century theories of information, particularly in attempts to ensure the integrity of useful data and avoid the loss of signal in dissipative noise. By the end of the last century, according to Clarke, the transition was complete, and information enters a transcendent, autonomous phase — for some becoming virtually detached from any material base and almost the very condition of posthuman existence.

The book then proceeds to interrogate the central thesis from a number of theoretical standpoints. Norbert Wise, for example, proffers the idea that nineteenth century thermodynamics radically altered the prevailing conception of time. Prior to the emergence of energetic theories, the temporal dimension was regarded as essentially circular and permanent — like ideal planetary motion — and, in keeping with its feminine designation, symbolised by cycles of rebirth and regeneration. As the transformative power of energy and the irreversibility of entropic decay was revealed however, time took on a linear dimension which was represented as masculine and progressive, or potentially destructive. Wise points out how this gender based demarcation of time was played out in the social theory of industrial capitalism, themes that are developed in Bruce Clarke’s essay "Dark Star Crashes", which examines the imaginative treatment of universal heat death in Camille Flammarion’s "La Fin du Monde".

In an essay entitled "Energetic Abstraction" Charlotte Douglas traces the brief span of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde, and in particular the decisive influence of the energy-centred theories of both Wilhelm Ostwald and Alexander Bogdanov. This is an outstanding piece of work — ideas are lucidly expressed, research is effortlessly presented, and it illuminated a whole period of art which I had always imagined as being embroiled in turgid political idealism. Ostwald, a prodigious chemist, propagated a monistic world view based on the fundamentally energetic constitution of nature: "Everything that happens in the world, " he maintained, "is nothing but a change in energy." (p. 77). His work profoundly affected the psychologist Bogdanov who, through the worker’s educational network that he established, Proletkult, spread radical theories of art and creativity to serve a progressive social purpose. Bogdanov’s fluid and dynamic conception of universal energetic change brought him into conflict with Lenin’s stiff materialism, with the consequence that he was denounced. But his ideas were to promote a vital rush of creative activity in which artists sought in various ways to capture or depict energetic change.

In "Lines of Force" Bruce Hunt gives an engrossing account of late-Victorian attempts to model — quite literally using brass wheels and elastic bands — the evanescent ether then thought to pervade physical reality. In doing so he reminds us of the risks of allowing theoretical models of reality to stand in for the reality itself, and hence confusing analogy with explanation. The employment of analogy in the absence of explanation is central to Ian F. A. Bell’s essay on "The Real and the Ethereal". Commenting on the modernist verse of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Bell considers the limits of analogy in literature and science, especially when used to try and visualise something like an imponderable ‘Aether’. At the same time he recognises the creative potential of analogy which: " . . . depended upon a yoking together of conceptual dissimilarity and relational agreement, laying the ground for revised notions of difference that could be both objectively and speculatively exploratory." (p. 121).

In her key essay, co-editor Linda Henderson proposes the notion of "Vibratory Modernism" to describe those works of early modernist art that were imbued with contemporary scientific theories of waves, X-rays, wireless telegraphy, and ether. Works by Boccioni, Kupka, and Duchamp are examined in the light of both the artists’ own comments and popular theories of matter, space, and energy. The resulting confluence of science, art, and occultism represents a deliberate attempt on the part of some artists to render the ethereal into the aesthetic domain.

The materialisation of fleeting energetic impulses was also being undertaken in the scientific domain, with the development of various devices of inscription which turned energetic fluctuations into permanent graphical traces. A rather beautiful essay by Robert M. Brain acts as a kind of pivot for the whole argument of the book. By tipping us from the inscriptive devices of the nineteenth century to the servo-mechanisms of mid-twentieth century analogue computers, Brain identifies a continuity between two strands of technical development that often seem dissected by the second world war. The subsequent digitisation of information, despite its economies of storage and reliability of transmission, took many years to match the direct-drive efficiency of analogue calculators such as William Thompson’s tide predictor or Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer. Closing the section of the book dealing with the graphical inscription of energy, Christoph Asendorf describes in "Bodies in Force Fields" how a theory of biological membranes was invoked by Paul Klee and several Bauhaus students to reconcile conflicting energetic pressures in social life, art, and architecture.

As the focus of the book then shifts to informatics, N. Katherine Hayles uses an analysis of three literary works to critique the currently popular notion of an imaginary "free information": ". . . thereby puncturing the dream of an informational realm that can escape the constraints of scarcity." (p. 254). The origin of this (literal) debasement of information is often traced to the enthusiasm for cybernetic ideas in the latter twentieth century, where information comes to be seen as autonomous and self-liberating. The post-war emergence of cybernetic theory and its application in the design of human-machine interaction is the background for Edward A. Shanken’s account of Roy Ascott’s engagement with systems and feedback in the experimental art he produced in the 1960s. In Ascott’s "cybernetic vision’, art is less a repository of information than an "intelligence amplifier" (p. 275) working through and between organic and mechanical processes to increase human creativity. In his contribution Marcos Novak describes his vision of "eversion" as ". . . a casting outward of the virtual into the space of everyday experience" (p. 311). Novak’s essay is a glittering evocation of sensory space — a void filled with reactive sensor units, or sensels, which link the user’s actions with invisible computational data. Just as Michael Faraday had speculated on a void filled with electromagnetic waves of energy, so Novak’s enverted space is a fog of information which ultimately is about: "puncturing the barrier of computer screens as we know them and letting virtuality pour out and saturate newspace . . . Eversion brings reality to sunlight." (p. 323).

Despite the enthusiasm that this book embodies, and will hopefully generate, one is left with some uneasiness about the symmetry of the narrative on which it’s based. It’s easy to forget that the ‘Age of Steam’ was also the age of the telegraph, which by the mid-nineteenth century had seen the laying of transatlantic cable. With the rise of mass literacy and cheap publishing, information was already a ubiquitous commodity, and it seems likely this would have had some impact on literature, if not visual art. At the other end of the story, the post-war period was marked not only by a growth in informatic theory but also by the massive cultural impact of the ‘nuclear age’, promising on an unthinkable excess of energy. Although this impact is played down by W. J. T. Mitchell (". . . it was really only a quantitative extension of the age of energy (p. 362)) it arguably had as great, if not a greater, effect on the global psyche during this period than the processing of data. Thus, the historical transition from energy to information is perhaps not as orderly and comprehensible as many of the contributions would suggest. Moreover, one might be left with the impression that the age of energy is somehow over, whereas in fact the current enthusiasm for permissive social intercourse conducted in data-space may be reaching its zenith as its very promiscuity debases its exchange-value. In which case we might turn away from the distractions of easy information toward an appreciation of our embodied nature, which after all is the ultimate source of all energetic experience.

There are a couple of other tendencies that should be noted, not least the impression given of a sort of scientific determinism in which artists and writers are engaged in a game of ‘catch up’, trying to give expression to the advanced speculations of the laboratory. Whilst there is little doubt, especially from the prodigious evidence presented here, that this is often what happens, the influence of literary and artistic ideas on scientists and theorists would benefit from being given greater weight. It would also have been worth pointing about that despite their intimate connections, energy and information are also essentially different insofar as energy can be nothing other than itself, whilst information as a signifier is always something other than its energetic self.

In the current intellectual atmosphere one can be almost suffocated by the excess of theory devoted to digitality, information, virtuality, and cybridisation. Any wide-ranging and imaginative consideration given to the cultural economy of energy, by contrast, is extremely rare (and in this respect the book is worth getting for the references alone). Those of us who have been taken to task for deploying the concept of energy outside the domain of science or engineering will strongly welcome this thoroughly researched, and by and large, clearly written anthology. I suspect that it is as an early and vivid contribution to the emerging field of cultural thermodynamics that "From Energy to Information" will leave its trace.

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A. Bureaud et N. Magnan, eds.

Connexions

Art Réseaux Médias

Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Paris. 2002

Ce livre est un recueil de textes sur les pratiques artistiques qui sont catégorisées sous les termes « Net art » et « art de la communication » c’est à dire qui prennent les moyens et les technologies de la communication (médias)comme matériaux et lieux de la création et comme enjeux artistiques, culturels et politiques.

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M. Livingstone

Vision and art : The biology of seeing

Abrams. 2002

Margaret Livingstone, neurobiologiste à Harvard. Avec une préface de

D. Hubel, prix Nobel ,avec lequel Livingstone a collaboré pendant 27 ans.

La perception visuelle, le sourire de Mona Lisa et les images mosaiques.

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D. Heyer and R. Mausfeld, eds.

Perception and the physical world

Psychological and philosophical issues in perception

Wiley. 2002

La perception visuelle à l’interface entre le mental et le physique.

Relation entre les données sensorielles et le résultat perceptif.

Le système perceptuel exploite-t-il ces données en fonction d’une connaissance innée du monde physique ?

Comment peut-on utiliser les principes bayesiens pour comprendre le but et les limitations de la perception ?

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R. Mausfeld and D. Heyer, eds.

Colour perception: from light to object

Oxford University Press. 2002

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P. Hamou

Voir et connaître à l’âge classique

Presses universitaires de France. 2002

Un petit livre clair et concis sur l’évolution des idées sur la vision, de l’antiquité à Kepler et Descartes. Il vient enrichir la très vaste littérature consacrée aux variations du statut de la vision dans les différentes cultures historiques. On ne peut pas valablement comprendre les arts plastiques et leur évolution sans tenir compte de ces variations qui relèvent tout autant de la science que de la philosophie et de l’idéologie.

Rappelons quelques ouvrages fondamentaux :

H. Foster.Vision and visuality. Bay Press. 1988.

J. Crary. Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth century.( L’art de l’observateur: vision et modernité au XIX ème siècle. J. Chambon. Nîmes. 1994.)

M. Jay. Downcast eyes. The denigration of vision in twentieth century french thought. University of California Press.1994.

L. Manovich. The engineering of vision from constructivism to computers.

1993. University of Texas Press.1998. (http://www.manovich.net ).

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R.E. Cytowic

Synesthesia

A union of the senses

MIT Press. 2002

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L.M. Zbikowski

Conceptualizing music

Cognitive structure, theory, and analysis

Oxford University Press. 2002

En s’appuyant sur les recherches cognitives récentes en psychologie et en linguistique, ainsi que sur les connaissances en intelligence artificielle, l’auteur montre comment nous utilisons les capacités cognitives de base pour comprendre la musique. Art et sciences cognitives.

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G. Fauconnier and M. Turner

The way we think :

Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities

Basic Books. 2002

Sur la complexité de l’imagination humaine.

Sciences cognitives et création.

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M. Borillo et J.P. Goulette, eds.

Cognition et création

Exploration cognitive des processus de création

Pierre Mardaga. Bruxelles. 2002

Cognition et création - Explorations cognitives des processus de conception.

La rencontre et le dialogue art / science vise désormais à pénétrer au plus intime du processus de création de l’œuvre d’art, à le décrire, à l’expliquer dans les termes d’une transdisciplinarité qui associe, autour du concept de computation, des disciplines aussi diverses que les neurosciences, la psychologie, les sciences du langage, enfin l’informatique et les mathématiques pour les aspects théoriques plus formels. On trouvera dans cet ouvrage un ensemble de recherches où sont abordées des questions comme l’analyse de la description des processus de conception, par exemple dans le domaine de l’architecture, mais aussi de la musique et de la danse. Sur ce socle empirique, sont examinés les problèmes que soulève la représentation formelle de ces structures et de ces processus, une formalisation qui n’est parfois qu’une étape indispensable à la mise en oeuvre de systèmes informatiques pour participer au processus de création. une coopération qui est elle même l’un des défis que lancent aujourd’hui les technologies cognitives.

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J.M. Chouvel et F. Lévy, eds.

Observation, analyse, modèle :

PEUT-ON PARLER D’ART

AVEC LES OUTILS DE LA SCIENCE ?

L’Harmattan, IRCAM-Centre Georges-Pompidou. 2002

Actes du 2éme Colloque International d’Epistémologie Musicale

Organisé à l’IRCAM en Janvier 2001.

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G. Mazzola

The topos of music

Geometric logic of concepts, theory, and performance

Birkhaüser. 2002

1368 pages!

Ce livre est une mise à jour augmentée et approfondie de l’ouvrage allemand Geometrie der Töne (1990). Encyclopédie de théorie mathématique de la musique.

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F. Jedrzejewski

Mathématiques des systèmes acoustiques.

Tempéraments et modèles contemporains.

L’Harmattan. Paris. 2002

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F. Frankel

Envisioning science

The design and craft of the science image

MIT Press. 2002

Par une grande photographe de l’image scientifique,

Auteur de très nombreuses photographies accompagnant des articles dans Nature, Science, et constituant une exposition de l’image scientifique.

Le site de Felice Frankel

présente une abondante documentation.

[ http://web.mit.edu/felicef ]

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D. Malin et K. Roucoux

Au delà du visible

De l’atome à l’infini 

Phaidon 2002

Images choisies par David Malin, célèbre astrographe australien.

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F. Bourély

Mondes invisibles

Editions de la Martinière 2002

Biologiste. Utilise le microscope électronique à balayage.

[ http://www.francebourely.com ]

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L. Gamwell

Exploring the invisible : art, science and the spiritual

Princeton University Press. 2002

Director of the Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton, curator of the Gallery of Art and Science at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Gamwell défend les origines scientifiques de l’art abstrait.

From Publishers Weekly
This beautifully illustrated volume is a surprising synthesis of two seemingly disparate cultures: a revealing look at more than a century of science and the art it has influenced. Gamwell, curator of the Gallery of Art and Science at the New York Academy of Sciences, brings her rare and expansive view of creativity to bear on the impulses common to both pursuits. Opening with a consideration of Romanticism, illustrated by Caspar David Friedrich's lonely "Wanderer above a Sea of Fog," and J.M.W Turner's paintings of light and darkness, Gamwell gently tugs readers along on a tour of the Western mind. She sees Darwinism as the beginning of a "pursuit of the absolute" destined to obsess both scientists and artists. From there, Gamwell tracks the explosive rise of the scientific worldview with hundreds of artworks from the major movements, pieces that reflect a fascination with exploration and discovery, as well as mixed feelings about technological advancement. While the influence of science is easier to see in Wassily Kandinsky's amoeba-like forms or Alexander Calder's constellation mobiles than it is in Jackson Pollock's energetic splashes, the author draws careful lines from science to painting and sculpture, allowing even art (or science) novices to appreciate her argument. Ultimately, Gamwell argues for the direct relationship between scientific knowledge and abstract art, and after such an eloquent and visually exciting journey, the link is perfectly clear. 156 color and 208 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The director of the art museum at SUNY at Binghampton and adjunct science professor at the School of Visual Arts, Gamwell attempts to enumerate what we've suspected all along: art, science, and religion are entwined in a dance, each affecting the others. Text and images flow nicely from epoch to epoch, as Gamwell illustrates the zeitgeists that created some of the world's great ideas. One of the first images in the book is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog,... read more


Book Description
This sumptuous and stunningly illustrated book shows through words and images how directly, profoundly, and indisputably modern science has transformed modern art.

Bginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and exciting new world came into focus--a world of microorganisms in myriad shapes and colors, prehistoric fossils, bizarre undersea creatures, spectrums of light and sound, molecules of water, and atomic particles. Exploring the Invisible reveals that the world beyond the naked eye--made visible by advances in science--has been a major inspiration for artists ever since, influencing the subjects they choose as well as their techniques and modes of representation.

Lynn Gamwell traces the evolution of abstract art through several waves, beginning with Romanticism. She shows how new windows into telescopic and microscopic realms--combined with the growing explanatory importance of mathematics and new definitions of beauty derived from science--broadly and profoundly influenced Western art. Art increasingly reflected our more complex understanding of reality through increasing abstraction. For example, a German physiologist's famous demonstration that color is not in the world but in the mind influenced Monet's revolutionary painting with light. As the first wave of enthusiasm for science crested, abstract art emerged in Brussels and Munich. By 1914, it could be found from Moscow to Paris.

Throughout the book are beautiful images from both science and art--some well known, others rare--that reveal the scientific sources mined by Impressionist and Symbolist painters, Art Nouveau sculptors and architects, Cubists, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists.

With a foreword by astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, Exploring the Invisible appears in an age when both artists and scientists are exploring the deepest meanings of life, consciousness, and the universe.

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A. Grafton

Leon Battista Alberti :

Master builder of the italian Renaissance

Harvard University Press. 2002

Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance.

By Anthony Grafton
Harvard University Press,
2002 417 pages, 24 halftones, 2 line illustrations,
ISBN: 0-674-00868-5, Price $18.95 paper

Reviewed by Amy Ione,
PO Box 12748,
Berkeley, CA USA 94712-3748

ione@diatrope.com

Anthony Grafton¹s well-researched and extensively annotated biography of Leon Battista Alberti is a superb book. Reading through this engaging publication I was particularly impressed with Grafton¹s ability to effectively breathe life into Alberti as a human, and to simultaneously place Alberti¹s achievements in the context of his culture. Born out of wedlock (in 1404), his illegitimacy created some measure of complication for him within the structure of his society. Grafton exposes this and examines how the social difficulties were abated due to his father¹s commitment to providing him with a quality education. Building on this fine educational foundation Alberti went on to achieve recognition in a number of fields. When examining the various trajectories Grafton acquaints the reader with Alberti¹s role in building the Italian Renaissance in art, architecture, and engineering. We come to better understand how this historical figure made manifest his desire to fuse distinct cultures and occupations. In addition, Grafton not only analyzes Alberti¹s work as a humanistic writer, he also speaks in great detail about how his training in rhetoric influenced his theories in other areas. As a result, we come to see why Alberti defined creativity as "not making something complete new but as reusing a classic idea or theme in a novel way." Finally, Grafton¹s evaluation of Alberti¹s extensive use of rhetorical techniques and facility in applying them in other domains is useful today. As we re-examine how pictorial communication interfaces with efforts to communicate using language, be it written and spoken, looking at historical approaches will no doubt prove useful.

The author¹s deft balancing of perspectives in this biography is at its strongest when he examines Alberti¹s talent with words and the degree to which this facility was tied to his later success. By 1432 Alberti¹s literary accomplishments led him to become a secretary in the Papal Chancery. His ongoing employment in the service of the Church insured him the income he needed to pursue his many interests. Grafton¹s review of these pursuits, including his balanced approach to the theoretical and applied components of Alberti¹s work is also well done. Equally noteworthy is Grafton¹s excellent summary of where his analysis of Alberti fits in relation to earlier scholarship. The author reminds the reader that contemporary discussions continue to see Alberti through the lens of Jacob Burckhardt¹s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt established Alberti¹s reputation as the quintessential Renaissance Man, claiming that no less a figure than Leonardo da Vinci was merely a second to Alberti when he wrote, "Leonardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante." (p. 107). Grafton, to his credit, grounds Burckhardt¹s exuberance without diminishing Burckhardt¹s (or Alberti¹s) achievements. Exposing more of Alberti¹s human struggles, while still recognizing his far-reaching influence is perhaps Grafton¹s most significant contribution.

A close second is Grafton¹s discussion of emendation. Before reading this study I did not realize the importance of this practice to Alberti¹s work. Briefly, emendation, a process of circulating texts among other scholars for correction, was a common practice in Alberti¹s time. While occasionally described by classical Latin writers, it was the humanist writers that worked with Alberti who turned this approach into an art form. Alberti, in particular, was among those who saw emendation as a stage in composing a work as well as a specialized service the learned could offer to others. The author conveys the degree to which Alberti valued the collaborative nature of this practice and how he used emendation in conjunction with his work in rhetoric. More fascinating is seeing how he adapted the technique when moving from rhetoric to art, architecture, and engineering. Even his theory of perspective was open to emendation, as becomes clear in Grafton¹s excellent description of the two versions of On Painting Alberti published. The Italian version was dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi with a request for emendation and, as Grafton explains, Alberti offered the book to Brunelleschi because he saw him as the most learned of his time. We learn, too, that Alberti made this offer with a flair that served to elevate his own position.

In summary, all who want to enlarge their understanding of Leon Battistia Alberti will welcome this easy to read, thoughtful, and comprehensive book. Grafton writes with grace and his survey of Alberti¹s work as a humanist, inventor, and engineer reads like a novel. I particularly appreciated Grafton¹s sensitivity to the difference between theory and practice in general and how he applied this appreciation to Alberti work. Reference: Burckhardt, J. (1995/1860). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. New York, Random House/Modern Library Edition.

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C.P. Bruter, ed.

Mathematics and art :

Mathematical visualization in art and education

Springer Verlag

2002

Les actes du Colloque de Maubeuge organisé par l’ARPAM

( http://arpam.free.fr ) en Septembre 2000. Communications en ligne sur le site.

Thèmes : Perspective et géométrie, Polyèdres, Noeuds, Surfaces, Systèmes dynamiques et récurrences, Retournement de la sphère, Mathématiques et musique.

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D. Mumford, C.Series and D. Wright

Indra Pearls

Cambridge University Press

2002

David Mumford. Le “pattern theory group” de la Brown University.

[ http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford ]

From the Introduction:

This is a book about serious mathematics, but one, which we have written primarily for non-mathematicians. It is an account of our exploration of a family of symmetrical but infinitely convoluted sets, part of the modern investigation of how chaos evolves from very simple rules, producing intricate complexity on every scale from the very large to the very small. In our case, two rules, each on its own producing a pair of spirals, are allowed to interact. Our scheme is not at all arbitrary; it forms parts of a century old mathematical dream, involving much of the deep mathematics of the 19th century, conceived by the great German geometer Felix Klein. With the aid of modern computers for rendering the results, the answers to our `What if...?' questions turned to be not only intellectually fascinating but also strikingly beautiful. Sometimes the outcome is simple, sometimes it is total disorder and sometimes -- and this is the most exciting case -- it has layer upon layer of structure teetering on the very brink of chaos. There is no religion in our book but we were amazed at how well our constructions reflected the ancient Buddhist metaphor of Indra's net. Mathematicians often use the word `beautiful' in talking about their proofs and ideas, but in this case our judgment has been confirmed by a number of unbiased and definitely non-mathematical people.

Most mathematics is accessible, as it were, only by crawling through a long tunnel in which you laboriously build up your vocabulary and skills as you abstract your understanding of the world. But the mathematics behind the figures we drew turned out not to need too much in the way of preliminaries. So long as you got through high school algebra with some confidence, everything we say should be understandable, given a bit of careful reading here and there. And if not, then browsing through the figures alone should give a sense of our journey. Our dream is that this book will reveal to a larger audience that mathematics is not alien, cold and remote but just a very human exploration of the patterns of the world, one which thrives on play and surprise and beauty.

8 See Indra’s home page (stills) with movies here.

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L. Simonot

Etude expérimentale et modélisation de la diffusion de la lumière dans une couche de peinture colorée et translucide.

Application à l’effet visuel des glacis et des vernis

Thèse de doctorat de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie

( PARIS VI )

soutenue le 4 Novembre 2002

En ligne sur le site du CNRS

[ http://tel.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/archives0/00/00/22/38/index_fr.htm ]

Travail réalisé au Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) Paris. Un laboratoire situé à l’interface

entre les arts et les sciences.

Admirable exemple de l’étude scientifique de la matière artistique à la jonction de l’esthétique et des techniques picturales .

Dans l’esprit du livre de Philipp Ball.

L’étude théorique de la diffusion de la lumière dans les glacis renvoie à cette pratique initiée au XV ème siècle par les peintres flamands tels que van Eyck et van der Weyden et qui consiste à réaliser la superposition de fines couches translucide colorées, les glacis. La couleur ne se crée pas alors en surface mais à l’intérieur du volume constitué par les couches de glacis.

Dans cette thèse on a considéré une couche de glacis comme un objet optique. C’est sans doute une démarche similaire qui était adoptée plus ou moins instinctivement par les Primitifs Flamands. Une des clés de la compréhension des oeuvres d’art du XV ème siècle provient de la maîtrise

de la lumière par les peintres.

On peut sur ce sujet de la lumière et de la couleur au XV éme siècle se reporter à la thèse de doctorat soutenue à Paris 1 (1995)

W. A. Whitney. Van Eyck- La lumière et la couleur. La technologie et les techniques picturales à la Cour de Bourgogne au XV ème siècle.

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T. Johnson

Foundations of diatonic theory

A mathematically based approach to music fundamentals

Key College Publishing. 2003

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L. Floridi, ed.

The Blackwell guide to

the philosophy of computing and information

Blackwell. 2003

[ http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/blackwell/toc.htm ]

Contient un article de D. McIver Lopes : Digital Art.

Articles sur la réalité virtuelle et la vie artificielle.

L’article « Information » de L. Floridi est disponible sur

[ http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi ]

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J. Segal

Le Zéro et le Un

Histoire de la notion scientifique d’information

au 20 ème siècle

Editions Syllepse. Paris. 2003

Thèse de doctorat ( Lyon. 1998). Une histoire presque exhaustive du concept d’information dans le cadre de la théorie mathématique de la communication et de la cybernétique, de la seconde guerre mondiale à l’aube du XXI ème siècle.

Etude des controverses sur la cybernétique en RDA. L’histoire très riche de la théorie de l’information et de la cybernétique en URSS n’est souvent traitée que de seconde main et fort peu documentée. On peut regretter que « l’art et l’information » n’ait pas trouvé sa place dans l’ouvrage, même si le nom

d’A. Moles apparaît de ci de là.

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H. Hecht, R. Schwartz and M. Atherthon

Looking into pictures

An interdisciplinary approach to pictorial space

MIT Press. 2003

Actes de la conférence du ZIF de Bielefeld

« Reconceiving pictorial space ? »

de Juin 2000

[ http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/Bildkonf/picture.conf.html ]

Les théories actuelles de la vision contestent la métaphore de la perception visuelle comme prise de vue photographique et donnent des arts plastiques une vision nouvelle

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P. Jacob et M. Jeannerod

Ways of seeing :

Scope and limits of visual cognition

Oxford University Press. 2003

A sample of this book is available in PDF format. A rare interdisciplinary collaboration between a philosopher and a neuroscientist Presents a unique study of the human visual system Written to be accessible to students and researchers in psychology and philosophy Description Ways of seeing is a book about human vision. It results from the collaboration between a world famous cognitive neuroscientist and an eminent philosopher. In the past forty years, cognitive neuroscience has made many startling discoveries about the human brain, and about the human visual system in particular. This book brings many recent empirical findings, from electrophysiological recordings in animals, the neuropsychological examination of human patients, psychophysics, and developmental cognitive psychology, to bear on questions traditionally addressed by philosophers. What is the meaning of the English verb 'to see'? How does visual perception yield knowledge of the world? How does visual perception relate to thought? What is the role of conscious visual experience in visually guided actions? How does seeing actions relate to seeing objects? In the process the book provides a new assessment of the 'two visual systems' hypothesis, according to which the human visual system comprises two anatomical pathways with separable visual functions. The first truly interdisciplinary book about human vision, it will be of interest to students and researchers in many areas of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Readership: Students and researchers in psychology (visual perception), cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of mind Contents/contributors Introduction: What is human visual cognition Part I: The Purposes of Vision: Perceiving, Thinking and Acting 1 The representational theory of the visual mind Part II: Empirical Evidence for the Duality of Visual Processing 2 Multiple pathways in the primate visual system 3 Dissociations of visual functions by brain lesions in human patients 4 The varieties of normal human visual processing Part III: Perceiving objects and grasping them 5 Visual perception 6 Visuomotor representations Part IV: The perception of action 7 Seeing humans act Epilogue: The two visual systems revisited Links to web resources and related information Visit the Institut Jean Nicod homepage Visit the CNRS homepage More in the same subject area: Neurosciences; Philosophy of mind; Neurobiological theory; Physiological & neuro-psychology; Perception; Conscious & unconscious; Experimental psychology

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Aux origines de l’abstraction

1800-1914

Editions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux. Paris. 2003

Catalogue de l’exposition du Musée d’Orsay

3 Novembre 2003-22 Février 2004.

Serge Lemoine. L’abstraction avant.

Pascal Rousseau. Un langage universel. L’esthétique scientifique aux origines de l’abstraction.

Etienne Jollet. Les limites du visible à l’époque moderne.

Georges Roque. « Ce grand monde des vibrations qui est à la base de l’univers ».

Michel Frizot. Les courbes du temps. L’image graphique et la sensation temporelle.

Arnauld Pierre. La musique des gestes. Sens du mouvement et images motrices dans les débuts de l’abstraction.

L’OEIL SOLAIRE

Jonathan Crary. Aveuglante lumière.

Jacques Le Rider. L’héritage de Goethe : romantisme et expressionnisme

Pascal Rousseau. « L’œil solaire ». Une généalogie impressionniste de l’abstraction.

L’OEIL MUSICAL

Julie Ramos. Un monde de résonances. Convergence des arts dans le romantisme allemand.

Marcella Lista. Le rêve de Prométhée : art total et environnements synestésiques aux origines de l’abstraction.

Pascal Rousseau. « Arabesques ». Le formalisme musical dans les débuts de l’abstraction.

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G. Roque

Qu’est ce que l’art abstrait ?

Gallimard. 2003

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R. Mausfeld and D. Heyer, eds.

Colour perception: Mind and the physical world.

Oxford University Press. 2003

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R.L. Solso

The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious brain

MIT Press. 2003

Books December 2003 ISBN 0-262-19484-8 7 x 9, 294 pp., 138 illus., 24 color $45.00/£29.95 (CLOTH) Join an E-Mail Alert List Table of Contents TOPIC AREAS

From Bradford Books: The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain Robert L. Solso How did the human brain evolve so that consciousness of art could develop? In The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain, Robert Solso describes how a consciousness that evolved for other purposes perceives and creates art. Drawing on his earlier book Cognition and the Visual Arts and ten years of new findings in cognitive research (as well as new ideas in anthropology and art history), Solso shows that consciousness developed gradually, with distinct components that evolved over time. One of these components is an adaptive consciousness that includes the ability to imagine objects that are not present--an ability that allows us to create (and perceive) visual art. Solso describes the neurological, perceptual, and cognitive sequence that occurs when we view art, and the often inexpressible effect that a work of art has on us. He shows that there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception--the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy into neuro-chemical codes--which is "hard-wired" into the sensory-cognitive system; and directed perception, which incorporates personal history and knowledge--the entire set of our expectations and past experiences. Both forms of perception are part of the appreciation of art, and both are products of the evolution of the conscious brain over hundreds of thousands of years. Solso also investigates the related issues of neurological and artistic perception of the human face, the effects of visual illusions, and the use of perspective. The many works of art used as examples are drawn from a wide range of artistic traditions, from ancient Egypt to Africa and India and the European Renaissance.

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H. Jenny

Cymatics : a study of wave phenomena and vibration

Macomedia. 2003

Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration

Hans Jenny
2003, Newmarket, NH, MACROmedia
 Illus. b/w. & col. 295 pp.
ISBN 1-888-13807-6

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlword.com

You may have come across Dr Hans Jenny's cymatic images, often rather grainy pictures of rippling blobs of viscous matter, swirls and honeycombs, lattices and whorls, all conjured  from unpromising piles of sand and dust. This Swiss medical doctor devoted a large part of his life to the study of the phenomena of Cymatics (from the Greek ta kymatica, matters pertaining to waves), which describes the effect of sound vibrations on matter. Here sonic vibrations organise viscous substances into an infinite variety of patterns, thereby directly giving visual form to sound. In the eighteenth century the so-called "father of acoustics", E F P Chladni, had used a violin bow to vibrate metal plates covered in thin layers of sand in order to observe the form the sand took in relation to certain frequencies. In cataloguing these "sonorous figures' he demonstrated the inherently geometric effect sound can have on physical matter.

Working in the 1960s, Jenny's methods used more precise electronic resonance generators and sophisticated materials to produce controlled perturbations that he then photographed, compiling by the end of his life an astonishing collection of images. Jenny published two volumes on his cymatic research, and this book reprints those volumes in full with additional forewords and index. The work is not only highly visually seductive, but philosophically and scientifically profound. The commentary by Jenny blends a clear and concise description of his methodology with powerful observations and speculations on the nature of living matter, form and energy. His is an essentially holistic view, seeing patterns across spatial and temporal magnitudes, linking the micro and macrocosmic, and it is indeed very tempting to agree with him that from molecular biology to atomic physics "the rhythms and vibrations interpenetrate", the universe is an interwoven humming mass of resonating energy.

What is so extraordinary about the geometry of forms produced by Jenny's techniques is their visual resonance with forms produced by other means. Some images of vibrating mercury drops, for instance, are almost identical to those produced by video feedback (p. 99). There are wings and flowers, branches and forks, crystals and webs, and microscopic pictures that look like aerial photographs, all emerging spontaneously from  otherwise shapeless substances. One gets the sense that all visible forms in nature might be generated by some unseen vibrational force, in the way that Jenny's heaps of "rotational sand' swirl around like specks of cosmic dust forming the two armed spiral of a miniature galaxy (p. 33). Jenny has fused his own synthetic and analytic achievements with Plato's harmonic description of nature, the flux of Heraclitus and Goethe's "spirit' to create a compelling vision of coherence and structure. The impact of his work seems now largely confined to the spiritual healing community, but one gets the sense that there is something much larger here at stake and this valuable book makes an important contribution to bringing Jenny's work to a wider audience and a new generation of researchers.

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Z.W. Pylyshyn

Seeing and visualizing: It’s not what you think.

MIT Press. 2003

Voir n’est certainement pas la création d’une réplique intérieure du monde.

Une synthèse magistrale sur la vision par un des pionniers du domaine.

L’enjeu majeur pour la compréhension des arts plastiques.

Le livre et les travaux de Pylyshyn sont disponibles sur

[ http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn.html ]

Books December 2003 ISBN 0-262-16217-2 6 x 9, 592 pp., 116 illus. $50.00/£32.95 (CLOTH)

From Bradford Books: Seeing and Visualizing It's Not What You Think Zenon W. Pylyshyn In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us "from the inside." In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience. First, Pylyshyn argues that there is a core stage of vision independent from the influence of our prior beliefs and examines how vision can be intelligent and yet essentially knowledge-free. He then proposes that a mechanism within the vision module, called a visual index (or FINST), provides a direct preconceptual connection between parts of visual representations and things in the world, and he presents various experiments that illustrate the operation of this mechanism. He argues that such a deictic reference mechanism is needed to account for many properties of vision, including how mental images attain their apparent spatial character without themselves being laid out in space in our brains. The final section of the book examines the "picture theory" of mental imagery, including recent neuroscience evidence, and asks whether any current evidence speaks to the issue of the format of mental images. This analysis of mental imagery brings together many of the themes raised throughout the book and provides a framework for considering such issues as the distinction between the form and the content of representations, the role of vision in thought, and the relation between behavioral, neuroscientific, and phenomenological evidence regarding mental representations.

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L.M. Chalupa and J.S. Werner, eds.

The visual neurosciences.

MIT Press. 2004

En 1800 pages tout sur la vision, du point de vue biologique et du point de vue cognitif.

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N. Peterson and G. Rhodes, eds

Perception of faces, objects and scenes:

analytic and holistic processes.

Oxford University Press. 2003

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J.M. Henderson and F. Ferreira, eds.

The interface of language, vision and action:

Eye movements and the visual world.

Psychology Press. 2004

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K. Hayles, ed.

Nanoculture : The new technoscience and its implications for literature, art and society.

Intellect Books. 2004

Home | About | Exhibition | Book | NANO Team | Media | Sponsors | Contact

NanoCulture:  The New Technoscience and its Implications for Literature, Art, and Society,
Edited by N. Katherine Hayles

(90,000 words with 32 color illustrations. Forthcoming April 2004, Intellect Books. Preface by Roy Ascott)
A pioneering work, Nanoculture is the first book-length critical study of the relation of nano-technoscience to literature, art, and culture. NanoCulture transverses disciplinary boundaries to explore the intricate and complex ways in which nano-technoscience becomes a cultural production and the modes by which culture appropriates and transforms what the technoscience means. The book is published in collaboration with the Nano exhibit, opening in December 2003 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and created by an interdisciplinary team of artists, scientists, and humanists led by Victoria Vesna, James Gimzewski, and Katherine Hayles in a setting designed by the architectural firm of Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee.
Exploring the relation of the Nano exhibit to changing concepts of museum space is Adriana de Souza e Silva’s “The Invisible Imaginary: Museum Spaces, Hybrid Reality and Nanotechnology.” Carol Wald’s “Working Boundaries on the Nano Exhibition” is an ethnographic analysis of the process of creating the exhibit and its implication for collaborative process.

Another group of essays explores the relation between nano-technoscience and science fiction. Colin Milburn in “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Fiction” argues that nanoscience, in establishing its legitimacy, both embraces and rejects science fiction, its complementary other. Brooks Landon in “Less is More: Much Less is Much More: The Insistent Allure of Nanotechnology Narratives in Science Fiction” suggests why nanotechnology uniquely fulfills the requirements of “science fiction thinking.” Kate Marshall in “Atomizing the Risk Technology” observes that nanotechnology is mostly a technology of the future and relates this temporality to the technology of risk assessment and reflexive modernity. In “Dust, Lust, and Other Messages from the Quantum Wonderland,” Brian Attebery argues that nanobots are not only creations of the future; they are already us.

A final group of essays explores relations between nano-technoscience and literature. In “Needle on the Real: Technoscience and Poetry at the Limits of Fabrication,” Nathan Brown argues that the scanning tunneling microscope can be understood as a writing instrument and relates its techniques to the ethical and artistic explorations of poets who also work at the “limits of fabrication.” Jessica Pressman in “Nano Narrative: A Parable from Electronic Literature” argues that narrative is essential to the emerging field of nanotechnology and shows its influence in Erik Loyer’s Chroma. Susan Lewak in “What’s the Buzz? Tell me What’s A-Happening: Wonder, Nanotechnology, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” identifies wonder as a central component of nanotechnology’s popular appeal and relates its focus on scale to Alice in Wonderland. Together, these essays demonstrate that nanotechnology does not stand above culture but rather is deeply implicated in cultural processes and significations; it also shows that contemporary culture is increasingly understanding its future and therefore its present in terms of this powerful new technology.

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