Science Loves Art

Carrie Witherell

from her series ‘Relics”, 2011

See more here

By KELLY CROW

What if mathematical theories could be expressed using artworks instead of plus signs and pi symbols? Dorothea Rockburne has devoted four decades to the attempt, and the results are on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., through Aug. 14.

Take disjunction, the logical argument that if A is true and B is true, their combination must also be true. Math textbooks usually illustrate this idea with a pair of slightly overlapping circles. In the 1970s, Ms. Rockburne began exploring this idea by soaking long sheets of paper in crude oil, a substance that permeated the paper without breaking it down into pulp. Instead, both materials could co-exist.

In one of her best-known works, 1971’s “Scalar,” she arranged a group of these oily, rust-colored sheets on a wall so that they slightly overlapped. Other series involved folding or layering linen or painted sheets into kaleidoscopes.

In 1972, conceptual artist Mel Bochner praised her in an art magazine for doing “some of the most advanced thinking in art,” and museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have since collected her work.

Earlier this week, Ms. Rockburne, age 78, sitting in her airy SoHo studio, said her artistic focus wasn’t always so cerebral. Growing up in Montreal, she drew nudes like every other academically trained student in the city’s School of Art and Design. When she arrived at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in 1950, she said her classmates were mostly copying the messy abstractions of Willem de Kooning— except for a pair of “handsome” friends in her photography class, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

Like them, she had wearied of Abstract Expressionism, and they encouraged her to toy with other styles. But as years passed and their work won fame, she found herself working as a New York waitress, a single mother who spent her evenings in an apartment with too little room left to paint. Then she remembered Max Dehn, a math professor at Black Mountain whom she had admired in part because he seemed to revel in the rigor of hard thinking. She started reading math texts like Henri Poincaré’s “Science and Method” and hit upon an epiphany: “I wanted to see the math I was reading about.”

She eventually showed a few pieces to Mr. Rauschenberg, who put her work in a benefit group show at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1966. Within a few years, her career began to take off.

Some of the newest works in the Parrish show, “Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind’s Eye,” depict blue and gold swirls, a nod to the theories that she’s been reading lately about what happens to star dust after neutron stars explode. “I never wanted to be a mathematician,” she said, “but I love the magic of it.”

scipsy:

A tour of the cell [interactive]

artologica:

Beautiful Blue Bugs 2 is an original watercolor of various forms of streptomyces, a type of bacteria that form the basis of many antibiotics. Under a microscope, they look like beautiful snowscapes or islands with white-sand beaches. So they’re pretty and helpful: what’s not to like?

science:

Usually, when art and science, or science and religion, intersect, they are seen as being in opposition. Art is free-flowing where science is rigorous; religion is faith-based where science needs evidence. But sometimes, the three actually intersect in ways that, at least to my eye, actually heighten the beauty of all of them. One such example is medieval Muslim ornamentation.

Imagine you have a fixed set of tile shapes, but you can have as many of each as you want. Can you tile them in such a way that you fill an infinite plane, with no gaps? If you can, you’ve got yourself a tiling. If you can shift the pattern around in some way, say, one unit to the left, so that the end result is the same as you started with, you’ve got a periodic tiling. But if any shift at all in the pattern creates a unique pattern, the tiling is said to be non-periodic. And if you’ve got a set of tile shapes that can only form non-periodic tilings, no matter what pattern you make with them, the set of tiles is said to be aperiodic. Until the mid-20th century, mathematicians doubted that there could be aperiodic tilings. But in the 1970s, Roger Penrose discovered a set of very simple tiles that—if you apply a couple of restrictions to how they can be arranged (restrictions that can be made superfluous if you give the tiles some bumps)—are aperiodic, i.e., no matter how you arrange these tiles, and no matter how large a plane you tile, you will never find a periodic pattern. They’re called Penrose tiles.

This was new knowledge. No one knew about this until Western mathematics started exploring this in the mid-20th century. Or so we thought.

Because of Islam’s restrictions on religious iconography, such as depicting living beings, Islamic artists have found ways to make the most of abstract patterns and shapes. You see it in Arabic calligraphy, and you see it in the magnificent shapes on the walls of mosques and religious schools. In 2007, physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt discovered that the patterns on the walls of medieval Islamic buildings very closely resemble Penrose tilings. The crucial invention of girih tiles, basic shapes used to build more complex patterns, allowed Islamic architects to decorate their walls with non-periodic tilings. And in the Darb-e Imam shrine in Ishafan, Iran, built around 1450 (above), the tiles almost perfectly form a pattern that can be generalized as a Penrose tiling. If you deconstruct the pattern on the Darb-e Imam shrine into Penrose tiles, you’ll find that only 11 out of 3700 are mismatched, and the mismatch is so small that it’s “removable with a local rearrangement of a few tiles without affecting the rest of the pattern”. (more)

scienceisbeauty:

Belly dance Physics by ~jarah via deviantart

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa

Trial and error.

What artist has not at some point resorted to “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better.“?

You might say that, in light of Darwin’s model of natural selection, nature itself does the same: make a genetic mutation or two, or a billion, and see what works.

Swedish programmer Roger Alsing has created a playful experiment in “genetic programming” applied to image making, in which he wrote a small program for rendering 50 translucent polygons into an image area.

He set it to mutate slightly with each iteration, so that each pass of the program produces a different distribution of the polygons (the “genetic mutation”).

The fact that the polygons are translucent allows for many smaller subtle shapes within the composition, produced by overlapping areas of color, like laying an area of yellow glaze over both blue and green shapes in an oil painting.

At the end of each rendering sequence, the program uses a “fitness function”, basically a small routine to compare the resultant image pixel by pixel with a target image, in this case an image of the Mona Lisa.

Based on the “fitness” of the image, the program keeps either the new “dna” or the existing “dna”, whichever is more like the target, as the basis of the next mutation and iteration.

Trial and error. Survival of the fittest.

There is a selection of images on Alsing’s blog showing various renders, from which I’ve pulled a few representative samples, above. (For those who are programmatically inclined, there is also a faq with some of the basics.)

Under each of the sample images is a filename that shows the number of times the program had to run to reach that particular image.

The one at bottom-right shows 904,314 incidences of “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better“.

via Charley Parker