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Interlink
I
A Symposium, integrating Art, Science and Technology
Brisbane
City Hall, 8th October, 1983,
sponsored by: the Royal Society of Queensland, A.N.Z.A.A.S., Queensland,
and the Queensland College of Art
Points for discussion included:
contacts between the three cultural aspects,
the use each makes of advances in the others, and the question: is creativity
their main link?
The purpose of the symposium was:
to strengthen the affinities between facets of our culture; to enhance
personal development by broadening horizons, to introduce forward thinking
people to each other; and to stimulate improvement in our manufactured
products competing on world markets.
Introductory Session
1. Welcome, by Professor J.M. Thompson, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University
of Queensland; Chairman, A.NZ.A.A.S., Queensland Division.
2. Opening Address, SCIENCE AND THE ARTS, by Professor N.H. Fletcher,
Se¼cretary, Physical Sciences, Australian Academy of Science; Director,
Institute of Physical Sciences, CSIRO, Canberra.
Today we are going to discuss some of the relationships between Science
and Art, or perhaps I should say between the Sciences and the Arts, for
there is a great deal of diversity within each of these areas. Indeed
we might have a useful and interesting symposium on the relationships
between Physics and Biology on the one hand or between Music and Painting
on the other. But there does seem to be a greater gulf between Science
and Art, or at least between the way they are practised today, than between
the subdivisions of either of those fields - I work with the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, and I confess that even
I find it difficult to imag¼ine it expanded to become the Commonwealth
Scientific, Industrial and Artistic Research Organiza¼tion!
We may tend to think of this separation between Science and Art as being
of comparatively recent origin - the "Two Cultures" of C.P.
Snow - and to imagine that in earlier times things were different, but
I rather doubt that this was so. In the Preface to his great work of
1870 "On the Sensations of Tone" the great German physicist,
physiologist and musicologist Hermann Helmholtz wrote:
" The horizons of physics, philosophy and art have of late been too widely
separated, and, as a consequence, the language, the methods, and the
aims of any one of these studies present a certain amount of difficulty
for the student of any other of them."
Things were apparently very much the same in 1638 when Galileo wrote
in his "Dialogues Concern¼ing Two New Sciences"
" I come now to other questions ... which to some would seem very frivolous,
and more especially to those Philosophers who are continually employed
in the more profound ques¼tions of natural philosophy ... I think I can
give you a Conceit of my own, relating to some problems concerning Music,
a noble subject, of which so many great men, and even Aristotle himself,
have written."
The same sort of problem of communication was perceived by the artist
Albrecht Durer in 1525 who wrote:
"
Sane judgement abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no
technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. The
sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error
is that they have not learnt Geometry ... The blame for this should be
laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art." Even
Plato in the fourth century BC complained rather petulantly " We
must endeavour to persuade the principal men of our State to go and learn
arithmetic" and had a sign erected "
Let no one ignorant of geometry enter my door.".
In beginning today's discussion, therefore, we are facing a problem of
long standing, but one that is caused, I think, by lack of time for consideration
and by the existence of specialist languages that impede communication
across disciplinary divisions. There are also many widely held miscon¼ceptions
about the nature of science, and probably about the nature of art too,
which need to be cleared away before we can begin.
One of these concerns technology - an indispensable part of both art
and science but one that is distinct from both of them. A painter needs
pigments, canvasses and papers with particular qual¼ities before he can
realistically begin, a sculptor needs marble or bronze or stainless steel
and the tools and skills with which to work it, a musician needs all
the technology implied by the instru¼ments on which his composition is
to be played. In the same way a physicist needs particle accelerators,
oscilloscopes, and computers, a chemist needs N.M.R. and infrared spectrometers
and a biologist needs centrifuges and microelectrodes.
In a sense we might expect that this technological dependence should
link artists and scientists together, but I do not think this is the
real point. Both art and science are essentially different from the technologies
and skills upon which they depend and which they in turn generate. Each
of them belongs to the domain of the mind; each begins in the imagination.
A true scientist does not proceed by following the rules of "scientific
method" any more than a true composer works by simply following
the rules of classical harmony and counterpoint or of twelve-note tone-rows.
It is true, of course, that some science is done this way and some music
is written this way, but it is rarely good science or good music. Both
of these must be, in the deepest sense, adventures of the spirit.
We could all gain something, perhaps, from the modest adoption of an
emphasis contrary to that usually put forward by academics, critics,
philosphers and historians. Let us think of science for a while as a
glorious adventure of the mind, taking imaginative leaps and not worrying
too much for the moment about the strict chain of formal proof. Any theory
that is beautiful enough is almost bound to contain some element of truth,
and it is sometimes better to be wrong with ele¼gance than to be right
with dullness.
Conversely let us bring some of the flights of artistic fancy a little
closer to physical reality. Let composers know and exploit the acoustical
characteristics of particular buildings, painters and perfume blenders
the chemistry of their raw materials and processes, novelists the structural
gram-7 mar of language. A deeper knowledge and understanding of technology
makes one its master and not its servant.
It is only by knowing and understanding the basic rules and techniques
of one's craft that one can ignore them with creative integrity. Einstein
would not have been able to create the theory of relativity without a
deep and thorough understanding of Newtonian mechanics; Picasso's distorted
and stylized faces would have lacked their authority had he not been
able to produce the serene masterpieces of his Blue Period; the flamboyant
creation of a white-hatted chef is suspect unless he can also produce
a beautifully judged omelette!
I might go even further than this, however, and point out that the technology
of science and the science of art both have their own sort of beauty
too. The curve of an aircraft wing, the oiled precision of a ball race,
the saturated beauty of laser light, are all aesthetically satisfying
because of their beautiful economy and appropriateness to their function.
The same is true of the grained and arched top-plate of a violin, the
overspun copper on the bass strings of a piano or the polished elegance
of an organ pipe.
At one further remove, the scientific principles that lead to the concordant
tunings of musical instruments, the beautifully ordered scalings of organ
pipes in length and diameter, the mixing of pigments to produce new colours,
and the blending of chemicals to produce new flavours and aro¼mas can
similarly excite our aesthetic appreciation. An understanding of these
principles enhances rather than diminishes our pleasure, as the intellect
joins with the senses.
I am sure that many of these matters will properly occupy our attention
today, along with the kindred themes of the contribution that modern
scientific techniques can make to basically artistic endeavours, and
the aesthetics of scientific discovery. The program is, I am delighted
to note, a Symposium in the proper classical sense of the word - a friendly
discussion structured around a restrained drinking party!
I know that you all share my gratitude to the Queensland Branch of ANZAAS
for its initiative in inviting speakers on suck a wide range of topics,
ready and waiting, as they say in the Music Hall, to display their erudition
for our enlightenment and to volunteer their virtuosity for our verification.
I am delighted to declare today's Symposium open.
Session I : Art
1. ORBITS ABOUT A THEME 1981, John Gilfedder, a composition with a scien¼tific
inspiration, dedicated to, and played by Mr Colin Spiers, pianist.
2. THE FUTURE IN ART - Mr John Rigby, Artist and Art Educator; Officer
in Charge Fine Arts Section, Queensland College of Art and Trustee Queensland
Art Gallery.
I could begin by saying it is probably well to refrain from giving title
to an address before one begins to think about it, better to leave ones
options open. There can be no specific predictions for the art of the
future and it has been said art has no need of certainties.
Life and art is a sequence.
Art is what it is today because of what it was yesterday. Tomorrow will
be the result of today and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.
Artists, visual artists, are people of images, and may be willing or
unwilling to speak about art. Verbal concepts are no less subtle than
visual ones but they are less subtle when called upon to describe the
sensory appearance of things.
For someone who has not particularly courted science and technology in
my own art, I feel a little like the wise man of the East who was eating
his dinner of dried figs, and at the same time explaining to an admiring
group the beauty and healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.
"
Look at your figs through this" said a scientist present, handing
the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were
covered with crawling microbes. He handed the mi¼croscope back and said, "Friend,
keep your glass - the bugs no longer exist."
I may have been inclined to say to the scientist, like the man of the
East, keep your micro¼scope, before beginning this short attempt to relate
art to science, which necessitated some research. I now feel the look
through the microscope was meaningful.
It is true to say that we are what we think, and not what we think we
are, hence the value to todays symposium.
Artists have never been anti-intellectual, but to many their initial
impulse towards their work is derived from experiences that are unique,
often spontaneous, subjective and at times even irrational.
It has been said that science states meanings and that art expresses
them. Scientific enquiry aims at verification and rejects emotional involvement.
The scientist places a premium on logical processes, the artist, however,
may consciously seek out the illogical in his search for a fresh statement.
Both Art and Science are certainly engaged in discovery. It is a lifetime
endeavour, a lifetime search. They are both concerned with not only the
actuality of the world one knows, but the other, ones ideas about actuality.
The certainties which previous centuries believed in are no longer certainties.
Reality, built on external visible things does not exist as it once did,
with the result that the artist in this century has endeavoured to render
visible the invisible element in reality, to give expression to that
which is hidden. The same can be said of scientific discoveries, and
we are continually having to come to grips with everchanging situations.
Science and Technology have brought about a general revolution which
art has shared. Painting has expressed the `age' we live in. The modern
artist would not put as his first criteria the mirroring of nature. Subject
takes on a secondary role, the figurative artist often subordinates natural
appearances. He will distort nature if by so doing he can convey greater
feeling through form-invention.
He has also, like science, transferred his attention more from the outward
view of the world to the inner view, to inner perception.
Great art has subjective creation, wedded to, plastic and spatial effects.
Not all modern art, in fact, only a small part is purely non-objective,
much is still nature¼derived without being transcriptive where the abstract
elements are built into the work.
Where the art work has `plastic orchestration' elements such as planes,
lines, colour and tex¼ture arranged in such a way that `movement pattern'
allows the observer to explore the picture space experiencing harmony
and a cosmic order.
To be more specific about the various links of art, science and technology
perhaps it would help to use the terminology artist - engineer - machine.
The relationship between art and tech¼nology is in no sense brand new.
It dates back to Leonardo and beyond. There is not the time here today
to expand in any depth on the artists of the Renaissance except to say
quite a few were occupied with science and technology, with logical processes,
with hidden structure, with anatomy, with machines, with perspective.
However, until Cezanne the main certainty on which all art and the whole
of tradition
was built was the acceptance of external, visible reality.
One of the great changes resulted from the invention and perfection of
photography and the film. Man now had for the first time another possibility
for capturing reality. Those who wished to possess a portrait, a memory
of something, a landscape or an animal no longer had to consult the painter.
Thus art had a shifting of orientation.
The influences over the past one hundred and forty years on art have
been many and varied. Because of the camera lens many artists felt a
necessity to express themselves in abstract rather than in traditional
illusionistic terms.
George Braque said "painting is getting closer to poetry, now that
photography has freed it from the need to tell a story. Nevertheless,
the camera did give to artists a new range of visual experiences. These
artists responded to a greatly expanded world of study that was made
possible, with new ideas and perception that is beyond the scope of the
human eye.
There is nothing wrong for an artist to be stimulated by the use of this
technology but he must be on guard against the mechanical camera that
it does not subjugate both his aesthetic subjectivity and personal vision.
There is no substitute for personal observation, for sensitivity and
feeling, for deep profound experiences from which great art springs.
We all know that technology can be used for destructive purposes. I would
hope there is more emphasis about its creative potential.
The future generations of artists will undoubtedly be attracted as many
have been already to abandoning the use of known forms of art and developing
an art using the new matrix of knowledge.
This will happen in painting, sculpture, film, music, dance, happenings,
theatre and architec¼ture, animation etc.
LASER LIGHTS, COMPUTERS, HOLOGRAMS, ELECTRONICS
Dr John R. Pierce, Bells Laboratories director of research in communication
sciences said "A composer equipped with a digital computer has no
limitations except his own. The artist can use the plotter either by
punched-card instructions or he can use a "light pen" to draw
line and shapes on the tube.
Computer films turn out animated drawings in a fraction of the time otherwise
needed. It can solve complicated design and construction problems. Computers
can work with great speed and can eliminate considerable drudgery ...
it would, I believe to true to say that it has yet to produce new sensibilities,
new intellect, new emotions.
I cannot help but ask myself certain questions regarding this aesthetic
revolution. On the as¼sumption that you cannot make others feel unless
you feel yourself; you cannot make others see unless you yourself see,
how can technology measure up? Can a machine reduce man to tears as can
great art, great music, great poems.
All art must suggest something. Mere verbal description is not literature:
It is only words; a picture, I believe, should have something to do with
the soul. Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing sounds.
Will a computer, a typewriter, electronic media with flashing lights,
rise to the heights, achieved by the expression of mind speaking through
its highest instrument, man, with often the simplest of materials.
Can we contrast the artistic with the scientific?
How questionable is the comparison between the development of art and
the natural science? Structural treatment of pictorial themes becomes
noticeable with Cezanne and Cubism. RHYTHM, PROGRESSION, REGULARITY,
LOGIC OF SEQUENCE AND ARRANGEMENT. What do we mean by the word structure
- it could be described as patterns - as energy events.
It occurs in chemical elements.
In art the word structure is used as the organisation of the picture
surface, it also is pattern,
energy, pull and push, repetition, arrangement - it is what a work of
art is built on, without it a work has no backbone, be it a painting
or a sculpture.
These forms lie deeper than surface forms.
Electron microscopes show the most beautiful spherical structures in
Diatoms, Silicon Dioxide, water-borne microplants, metals, that are as
beautiful in arrangement as any non figurative paint¼ing.
The microscope will show patterns that have much in common with formal
art. Scientific structure, where properties of matter are determined
by nature in the way they are arranged, the way they are joined together,
as in atoms. These structural laws are found in much of arts language
in its structural principles just as they are part of science and technology.
Science is continually opening up new worlds with new values which make
for new fields of endeavour.
Artists, too, have mirrored their times, with sensitivity and feeling
for the environment and the human condition. Their vision has often preceded
their times.
Many artists have seen a menace in too close a dialogue, with the structure
of scientific ad¼vance whilst others have embraced it.
In this age in which the validity of the old humanist principles is being
challenged and the efficiency of our tools has increased enormously,
in its affirmations and denials, its confidence and its doubts, which
make it so confused, it is still evident that art is reflecting the revolution
in thought, ethics and even the condition of our existence.
For myself, I still have a predeliction to love the plain, homely, common,
simple things of earth, of these to sing: to make the familiar beautiful
and the commonplace enchanting, to search for a sincerity and simplicity
of means employed.
Art will no doubt help to determine the nature and purpose of man in
the future as it has in the past, walking hand in hand with technology
and science, both of which will offer many and great possibilities for
art; but I also firmly believe that there will be individual artists,
adopting an
attitude of refusal, who will fulfill themselves both in the world and
against the world with the simplest and most traditional tools, whilst
others will express themselves in a language more appro¼priate to the
atom, the computer and to electronics.
REFERENCES
SCHARF, Aaron, Art and Photography. DAVIS, Douglas, Art and the Future.
KEPES, Gyorgy, Structure in Art and Science.
3. THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST IN SOCIETY - Mr David Siebert, Artist and Art
Educator; Senior Instructor, Painting - Printmaking, Queensland College
of Art.
ABSTRACT
The essential role of the artist in Australian European society has never
been fully realised. Very little in the visual arts has achieved much
beyond craftsmanship since the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.
On the other hand an artistic tradition was operating throughout this
continent for at least 30,000 years prior to European settlement which
seems to have been historically essential, artistical¼ly substantial
and socioculturally adequate. Unrecognised and unappreciated until recently,
Aborigi¼nal art is the only unique visual art produced in this country
which has world significance.
Essentially traditional Aboriginal culture is dead. However the conditions
necessary for the production of objects which can be recognized as having
`symbolic validity' outside the context of Australian society have finally
arrived again. We are about to embark upon making a significant contribution
to international civilization through our visual arts.
4. MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE TOTAL CULTURE - Mr John Gilfedder, Composer,
Senior Lecturer in History of Music and the Arts, Queensland Conservatorium
of Music.
Before such a distinguished audience I must say I appreciate the privilege
of presenting the contribution of that Tonal universe, Music, to the
synthesis we seek.
The "Interlinks" between Music and Science present themselves
powerfully in 3 areas ... I The Scientific Bases within Music itself
II Parallel expressions by all the Arts and Sciences, of the cultural
spirit of an Age III Science as stimulus to Musical invention.
I- Among Scientific Bases - we know that those wave-like ripples in the
air are initiated by a vibrating Source, thence experienced as audible
- Sound ... a strange and rich phenomenon ... For Primitive man the Universe
was an audible encounter as much as anything else. For our Aborigines,
just as the Painting was the visible sign of the Dream-Time creators,
so was Music the audible sign, their very voices (Jones, T.).
So much for Mythology, which can speak beyond illusion to great truths
about the Universe. Scientifically, Sound's parameters of Pitch, Duration,
Intensity, Timbre arise from such source ele¼ments as Size, Tension,
Rate of oscillation, Amplitude, Harmonic partials in the overtones, and,
importantly, cavities and materials, auditoriums to at once resonate
and clarify.
Most of all this was well-known in ancient Greece (what wasn't well-known
to the Greeks?) as witness the theatres at Delphi and Epidaurus, where
the slightest whisper from the stage, or Scena, is clearly audible on
the highest rim of those conch-like cavities. (Aristotle in Cohen and
Drabkin, 1948)
Quite recently, the new Concert-Hall in Melbourne is found to throw the
sound upwards to "The gods", partially because the ceiling
over the stage itself is too high to concentrate and clarify in the stalls.
(The problem is more acute with large orchestral forces than small ensembles).
Acous¼tics presents a facinating field for the meeting of Science and
Music, raising other issues, such as Reverberation, Interference, Absorbtion,
Decay-rate, and placement of Choirs and Orchestras. The great composers
have possessed keen acoustic awareness, as in Handel's choice for the
Water Music (1717) of Trumpets, Horns, Oboes, Bassoons to solidify the
Strings in the open air.
Yet the Incantatory power of Sound, as our aborigines sensed it, and
the Sistrum players in the temples of ancient Egypt (they called the
Sistrum Sehem, meaning "spiritual power") is not ex¼hausted
when we know its Material and Efficient causes, as Aristotle and Aquinas
termed them - when the Problem is solved there remains the Mystery. The
Magic, the poetry of it - the numinous power of Zeus the Thunderer -
is spiritually real, binding and haunting composer and listener, from
Paleolithic man to Electronic man. The proper response is a certain reverence
and awe, not unmixed with delight and excitement.
I would crave your indulgence to pause for a moment on this question
of the Problem and the Mystery, for I believe we have here a classic
meeting point for Science and Art. Too much of the "Two Cultures" debate
since C.P. Snow has been weakened by too little emphasis on the com¼plementary
values of the Scientific and Artistic approaches. On the one hand Science
has been sometimes mis-represented as an anti-cultural activity, or Art
mis-represented as a sort of fringe gliding to the realities of a Technological
society. (Jones, B., 1982).
It can be illuminating to consider any object for enquiry in the double
aspect of a Problem to be solved and a Mystery to be contemplated. In
the vision of Aristotle, supported by Aquinas, solution to the Problem
lies in studying 2 causes - the Material cause (what it is made of) and
the Efficient cause (what forces act immediately on it.) Thus Beethoven's
5th Symphony is a succession of sounds, powerful and tranquil, struck
by players from a larger instrumental mass than in Mo¼zart's day - its
physical impact has been overwhelming since the first performance in
1807. Fur¼ther dimensions are revealed in the forming of the sounds to
striking and unified shapes and relationships, and in the spiritual theme
that it is possible to encounter and contain the almost intolerable.
The Mystery resides in the Formal and Final causes. The Formal cause
is more than the Musi¼cal Form, it is the Idea in the mind of the artist,
and all the forming of the matter that follows. The Final cause is the
ultimate purpose or vision for the completed design (Aquinas).
Now the further the insight into a Problem, by Science, the richer the
values revealed in a Mystery to be contemplated. More recent minds of
significance have expressed a similar vision, in differing terminologies.
For Cezanne it is "Significant Form", for Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Ins-cape." I
was delighted to hear the artist John Rigby term it "The
inner element in Reality." Teil¼hard de Chardin (1957) has his own
strange window upon this dimension.
" Like those translucent materials which a light within them can illuminate
as a whole, the world appears to a Christian mystic bathed in an inward
light which intensifies its relief, its structure and its depth."
The Japanese physicist, Yukawa ascribes the split in our cultures to
the secondary role to which intuition and imagination have been relegated.
He deplores the elimination of everything that cannot be directly documented,
and points to ancient Greece, where "not only were intuition and
deduction in complete harmony with each other, but also there was no
such thing as the estrange¼ment of Science from Philosophy, Literature,
and the Arts" (Yukawa, 1973). The communicating fascination of Professor
Julius Sumner Miller's presentations have perhaps their roots in a simple
fact: he sees the Poetry in Physics.
II - Parallel expressions of the cultural tone of an age, its World-view,
or Weltanschauung, have drawn me for more than 20 years - I still hold
it to be the most meaningful way to present the History of Music.
As one example, Geometric design in Art recurs in Stonehenge, Egypt,
Greece, Gothic. There is marvellous Scientific skill in these great constructions
(we are now clearer as to how Stonehenge was built), but as Plato confirms,
the value is also a Symbolic one - Geometry reveals something of the
Divine mind, ordering the web of the Cosmos ...
(Slides shown, of Stonehenge, Greece, Gothic)
Related to Cosmic order is Number-symbolism, a curious cast of thought,
yet a recurrent one. Pythagoras would appear to have encountered it in
his visit to Egypt as a young man, and devel¼oped it in such a compelling
scheme, at Delphi, and later at Croton (where his "monastic" cult
was partially based upon it) that it lingers from the Parthenon to Bach,
and re-appears today in the thinking of Messiaen.
The classical playing out of Number-symbolism would run in this fashion
: ONE is the primor¼dial unity of the Creator, TWO the dualistic principle,
as between Father and Son, or Lovers, or Yan and Yin, THREE is the product
of love, as the Holy Spirit, or again the means of balance, or of reconciliation
of opposites. If the principle of 3 applies to the Deity, it must be
not only a basic constructive element in all things, but Divine.
If THREE is the number of God, the 4th, created thing is Earth, with
its 4 "Elements" and 4 points of the compass, and 4 seasons.
Seven is the sum of 3 and 4, and Twelve its multiple, and both symbolize
union of Spirit with Matter (Male, 1961).
Whatever the degree of validity of assumptions such as these, the principle
of meaningful Order may be valid, and there are certainly moving expressions
of it in the high Gothic (c.1150-c.1300), and these expressions are parallel.
The Music is in 3 parts, both vertically (Tenor, Duplum, Triplum) and
horizontally (3-time), like the facade of Notre Dame cathedral, and its
3 towers. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is in 3 books, each of 33
Cantos, on 3 levels of meaning, and every 3rd line rhymes. Science postulated
a "Tertium quid", a 3rd element to connect Spiritual to Material,
by medium of influences through the "Ether" (Lewis, 1963).
Even more central in Gothic culture (at least in its finest aims) was
the harmonious penets ation of Matter by Spirit, in a Synthesis. In Philosophy
Aquinas married Revelation with Reason, in Science his teacher Albertus
Magnus and the astronomer Roger Bacon believed they balanced Phi¼losophy
with Science. Despite genuine achievements of the (Tripartite) Guild
system the most bril¼liantly successful synthesis remains the Cathedral.
Chartres is the Parthenon of the Gothic.
The centuries from 1400 to 1900 are of course the seed-bed of the 20th
Century, both in its aspects of achievement and crisis. From so complex
a panorama we do best today to recall but a few of the most central issues.
In the Renaissance (c.1400-c.1600) man's fascination with the horizontal
dimensions of his world (as contrast the vertical of the Gothic) is manifest
in the perspective vanishing-points and shadings of the Paintings, that "hole
in the wall" effect that is omnipresent, in the Barrel-vault and
Loggia of the Architecture; the Music likewise gives forth dimension
through Polyphony - lines interweave with artful grace on many planes
- Tallis's great motet, "Spem in Alium" is in 40 parts!
Now Science begins to take wings after the restless curiosity of Leonardo,
and the Baroque (c.1600-c.1750) presents a multi-planar cosmos, an endless
whirling motion, whether Harvey speaks of the circulation of the blood,
or Laplace and Newton of planetary motion, or Spanish mystics of swirling
angels. Few are the resting-points for Music either - if we enter into
Bach's great
Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, we are swirled across the pages in
unstoppable, energizing scrolls.
From around 1740 the Enlightenment hovers behind the Rococo and Neo-Classic,
energizing certainly, but at once both liberation and deception. In Music
the Sonata Form, wielded so cogent¼ly by those emerging genii of the
Middle Class, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, reflects in musical logic
man's new conviction that he can solve his own problems, now and in the
future, in the "Coda" so to speak.
Romanticism rediscovers Feeling, Imagination and Nature, and yet more
importantly, the Numinous ... that aspect of the Mystery rather than
the Problem-solving initiated by the Enlighten¼ment. Tragically however,
as Barry Chiswell has reminded us, the 2-Culture split was widened by
the grim landscape sowed and harvested by the Industrial Revolution.
Though Scientific improve¼ments to instruments benefited Music (as in
the Boehm valve system for Winds and more brilliant escapement for Pianos)
Music, like Poetry, turned its back on Science, to Nature and Fantasy.
Tolkien (1964) reflects this revulsion - p.54 -
"
Escape ... may proceed from a considered disgust from so typical a product
of the Ro¼bot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with
ugliness." Impressionism has affinities with Scientific interest
in Light and Photography, and evokes magical overtones in the prismatic
scattering of Timbres, as does Debussy, scoring as he does with a Pointillistic
palette. Yet this very scattering is portentous ...
" What the Debussyan harmonies reveal no words can tell, but the overtones
explain the jerry-building of our universe shudders in imminent ruin to engulf
us all."
This remarkable poem by O'Dwyer (1941) is epic in style and theme, and
was awarded the C.J. Dennis Memorial Prize in that year. I was privileged
to live with it for over 20 years, completing a setting for Reader, Flute,
Cor Anglais, Harp and Quartet in 1972. It was recorded in 1976.
If one were to ask, as we come to the 20th Century, what are the central
themes, amid its myriad directions, then surely the answer would be -
Fragmentation ... and Renewal ... Fragmentation - in the Relativism of
all values, the yawning confrontation of Capitalism and Leninism, dissolution
of the nuclear family, dissolution of the Nucleus, "Isms" rampant,
Post¼Expressionistic nightmares as in Bacon's splintering screams, and
the barely-stifled screams of Webern and of Stravinsky's and Picasso's
clowns.
Renewal - in the Neo-Primitivism of the Fauves, Stravinsky, Orff and
his Schiilwerk, a clear¼ing of the ground of bourgeois illusions since
the Enlightenment by Becket's tramps, Ionesco's Rhinosceri, the clowns
of Picasso and Rouault, and Cage's relinquishment of the Renaissance
Ego, and by the shock of events themselves; by genuine renewals in approaches
to Race and Nature and Science, and by Charismatic infusion of unlooked-for
gifts and powers from the world of the Spirit (Meyer-Baaer, 1974).
III - Scientific inspiration for the invention of highly original Music
has been a theme since at least Pythagoras. Whether Pythagoras leapt
to his great principle after hearing a blacksmith's ham¼mers, as legend
has it or by comparing the divisions of a Monochord, as he is represented
at Char¼tres, it is difficult to exaggerate his later impact. The proportions
2:1 produce the Octave, 3:2 the 5th, 4:3 the 4th, 9:8 the Whole-tone.
Apparently a Harmony of sublime and methodical design underlies Music,
and more than Music.
Inspired by Pythagoras (as handed on through the Neo-Platonists and the
De Musica of Boethius), the high Middle Ages elevated the Octave, 5th
and 4th like a giant, gaunt Musico-Ar¼chitectural skeleton, filling the
rounded hollows of Romanesque, and vertiginous, flame-like tracer¼ies
of Gothic. These were the intervals of Divinity.
Through Boethius also the poetic vision of the Music of the Spheres,
Musica Mundana, more than lingering through Palestrina and Bach and Beethoven,
and inspiring Contemporary composers - Orff (Der Mond), Crumb (Night
of the 4 Moons) and the transcendental Messiaen. Stockhausen too has
come to see that we must sink our petty Egos into the Cosmoic Harmony
before we are reborn.
(I heard Stockhausen speak along these lines in London in March 1982,
while introducing his "Inori". His "Sternklang" or "Star-sound" is
his most committed expression of a Musica Munda¼na concept.)
Stockhausen's "Song of the Youth" (1955-6) also carries a Musica
Mundana feeling, with its quadrophonic Sound-sources; though only one
boy's voice is used, praising God, a vast multitude of voices is heard
in the final Montage, reaching
our ears through a shower of Electronically generated inter-stellar momements
of music.
Nebulas, Quasars, Planets, Black holes, and so much that is spatial and
astronomical! In Me¼tastasis by Xenakis, 61 separate glissandi of the
Strings are as calculated slopes, Sound-spaces of continuous evolution.
These very glissandi, which he compares to surfaces and volumes led to
the Philips Pavilion at Brussels Exposition, 1958, with Le Courbousier.
Geometric progressions, espe¼cially the Golden Section, abound. Elsewhere,
as in Pithoprakta, we seem to float through clouds of Sound-events, Eke
the Siderial dust, their impingement upon us regulated by the Laws of
Large Numbers (Laplace-Gauss, Poisson) ... (Xenakis).
No less than 7 Scientific phenomena are stimuli to Composition in my "Orbits
about a Theme" (1981), and I warmly appreciate the suggestion raised
by John O'Hagan and so definitively realized by pianist Colin Spiers,
that it should open the Conference. In summary they are -
1. Orbiting motion 3.
Planetary shapes 5. Density
variation
2. Phasing ambiguities 4. Gravity 6.
Galaxy spindle 7. Probabilities, with semi-structured systems.
Of these, to mention one that composers find fruitful - Phasing ... Two
themes, or two Sonic fields may meet exactly, or on opposite beats, or
somewhere between, or just miss, depending on their position in phase.
Just as we seem to have grasped their relationship, it shifts ...
Such dimensions can be further extended by Electronic and Computer creation
of Music - there is no reason why great works cannot be composed without
conventional Sound-sources. Yet often limitation of the means available
to him stimulates the Artist. With a computerized Studio at his fingertips
the Composer is still wise to compose in the spirit of some of the great
minds I have tried to outline here - still in need of that creative flash
of intuition. So given, let us go forward, Science and Music into that "freedom
of the Beautiful, wherein oceans remain unknown", more than disciplines
of mutual regard, interweaving rather, Bach-like, in unfolding dimensions
of Glory.
REFERENCES
AQUINAS. Summa Theologica la,xiv,8 - relates formal cause to the minds
of both Creator and artist. COHEN and DRABKIN, 1948. A Source Book of
Greek Science, McGraw-Hill, New York. quoting Aristotle, Concerning Audibility
- "Sounds stifled when they arise are dim and misty; but if they
are closer they thrust forth and fill all the air around them".
JONES, Barry, 1982. Sleepers Wake! O.U.P., Melbourne.
JONES, Trevor. The Art of the Didgeridu, a field recording of this ethnomusicologist,
Monash University - Peter Mann Records.
LEWIS, C.S., 1963. The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press. MALE,
Emile, 1961. The Gothic Image, Collins, Fontana Edn., pp. 10-14. MEYER-BARER,
Kathi, 1970. Music of the Spheres, Princeton University Press. O'DWYER,
Joseph, 1941. The Trojan Doom, in Poems, Melbourne, Hawthorne Press.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, 1957. Le Milieu Divin., Collins Fontana Edn., 5th
Impression, 1966, p. 130. TOLKIEN, T.R.R., 1964. Tree and Leaf, Unwin
Books, London.
YUKAWA, 1973. Creativity and Intuition, Kodado, Tokyo, pp. 108, 555.
XENAKIS, Iannis. In Tempo., No. 93 - Towards a Metamusic.
Session II Science
1. EINSTEIN - written and spoken by Mr David Rowbotham, Author and Journalist;
Literary Editor, "The Courier Mail".
E=mc2 Einstein at Princeton It went off in his face.
The domed forehead was furrowed
And the mushed hair was blown more symmetrical. Into the neck stemmed
the chin's ellipse in a fold, And the bridge of the nose was cut
Between the eyes to the great ravine of vision, Ridged in a curved geometry
To the corners of jaws that had compressed Warnings to two presidents:
make
The bomb before Berlin; now Don't drop it.
The eyes burned black:
Inextinguishable fire internally consuming, And the underlapping pain
Left marks like hieroglyphs on papyrus. He simply wanted to be a man
Who brought his grain of sand To the common fund,
But gave the world a diamond mine And the blast that shaped his face
To co-ordinates of cosmic death Where equations are wiped out And what
remains is relative,
Lost to the countenance of its invention¼His friends themselves were
horror-struck When, asked once,
What were the benched experiments that drew him To his millenniums' mite
of algebra,
He answered (interstellar),
" I haven't been inside a laboratory for years."
David Rowbotham, Selected Poems, University of Queensland Press, 1975.
Published with permission.
2. SYMMETRY AND ITS EXPRESSION IN ART AND SCIENCE A Short Review. Dr
N.H. Agnew, Scientist, Materials Conservator, Queensland Museum.
INTRODUCTION
Symmetry is not a trivial matter. Its use in science is a powerful tool
in the discovery of struc¼ture of molecules, and among mathematicians
it has long been a favourite topic. In art its influence has perhaps
been less dominant but even here its use is often pervasive, as I hope
to show.
Consider your hands - they are mirror images which cannot be super-imposed
on each other. They are said to be asymmetric. A symmetrical structure
is one which remains unchanged when it is reflected in an ordinary mirror
image. That is it can be superimposed on its mirror image. The twin forms
of all asymmetric objects are often called "left" and "right" to
distinguish them, and no amount of examination of one will show a property
not possessed by the other. This puzzled Im¼manual Kant: "What can
more resemble my hand than its image in the looking glass ... and yet
I cannot put such a hand as I see in the glass in place of its original" (Gardner,
M., 1965). Alice too was likewise perplexed when she said the objects
in her looking glass `go the other way'.
Louis Pasteur in 1848, as students of chemistry have been taught, picked
out crystals of ammonium tartate which were identical except in their
handedness. These mirror image crystals when dissolved in water possess
the curious property of rotating plane polarised light - one form rotates
to the left, the other to the right by an equal amount. Clearly here
is a manifestation of asymmetry at the molecular level. So was born an
important branch of chemistry - that of optical activity. Optical activity
is shown by all chemical compounds whose mirror image are non-superim¼posable.
A familiar example is grape sugar (glucose) or dextrose, which consists
naturally of the right handed or dextro-form. Adrenaline exists in left
and right handed forms, but only one form has much effect on blood vessels.
This odd duality is found in structures with any number of dimensions,
including those with more than three. The discovery that fundamental
subatomic particles have left- and right-handed¼ness (for which two Chinese
physicists received the Nobel prize in 1957) was described by Robert
Oppenheimer as a `gay and wonderful discovery' (Gardner, M_, 1965).
SYMMETRY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
We know of the ancient Greeks' preoccupation with mathematics and the
Platonic obsession with order. There can be only five perfect polyhedra
of Pythagoras and Plato - the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron,
and dodecahedron. Each of these is a highly symmetric structure and each
was identified by the Greeks with the four elements thought to constitute
the world: earth, fire, air and water. The fifth, the dodecahedron, was
associated with the cosmos. Incidental¼ly, the notion of a fifth essence
is said to be the origin of our word `quintessence', and the dode¼cahedron
was attributed also with mysticism. Doubtless this is why it appears
in a Salvador Dali painting, "The Last Supper".
The Pythagoreans, however, believed the sphere to be perfect, all points
on its surface being the same distance from its centre. This preoccupation
with geometric and mathematical perfection was something of an illusion,
as it turned out, in its application to the natural world. Planets, for
example, do not move in circular paths at fixed speeds. And as Carl Sagan
and others, notably Karl Popper, have pointed out the Pythagoreans teachings
assumed the rigidity of religious dogma which stifled the free expression
of contrasting views.
The most impressive physical manifestation of symmetrical structures
from ancient times is, of course, the pyramids. Sir Herbert Read in his
series of lectures on art for the BBC in the 1930's pointed out (Read)
that the pyramids gain enormously from their hugh size, from the contrast
they afford to the flat landscape of the desert, and the decisive accents
they create in the strong sunlight. But, he says, "these are all
adventitious aids and are not essentially artistic. The pyramids in them¼selves
are wholly rational, and what is wholly rational cannot entirely satisfy
the aesthetic sensibility. It has always been the function of art to
stretch the mind some distance beyond the limits of the understanding.
That `distance beyond' may be spiritual or transcendental, or, perhaps,
merely fantastical; somewhere it will overstep the limits of the rational.
This does not mean that art will outwit harmony; that it must always,
in Bacon's phrase, have something strange in its propor¼tion. Gothic
architecture is an art that achieves its most transcendental effects
whilst obeying geo¼metrical laws as strict as those which control the
pyramids; but in Gothic architecture geometry is the servant of art,
and not its master".
Herein, I think, lies the key to the use of symmetry in art. Regular
geometrical, and symmetri-cal structures are too cold, analytical and
sometimes just boring - one dodecahedron is like every other one, yet
who could deny its beautiful regularity. As William Blake said: "Grecian
is ma¼thematic form; Gothic is living form. Mathematic form is eternal
in the reasoning memory; living form is eternal existence". And
yet despite this uncompromising analysis, in art both the creator and
the spectator have found aesthetic gold to be mined in the use of symmetrical
elements across the wide spectrum that separates the pyramids and the
cathedrals; or, for that matter, the art of Michelangelo and that of
Maurits Escher.
For example, consider the reversal of the figures in Figure 1. How tedious
they would be were all pairs facing the same way. Yet the mirror image
symmetry of the textile design is obvious. Contrast this with the stark
bilateral symmetry of Fig. 2, which has been described as a visual analogue
of a palindrome.
GEOMETRICAL PATTERNS
Continuing the line of argument that there is artistic value to be found
in highly symmetrical structures we look next at the wonderful designs
in the Alhambra of the Moors during the 15th century.
Here, as Bronowski has said, the artist and the mathematician in Arab
civilisation have quite literally become one. "These patterns represent
a high point of the Arab exploration of the subtleties and symmetries
of space itself" (Bronowski).
In our own times the work of Maurits Escher the Dutch graphics artist
represents a profound exploration of this theme. Escher in 1936 had visited
the Alhambra and sketched the majolica tiles (Teuber). Escher's native
genius in the design of flat tessellations predates his visit to Alhambra,
however, as some of his earliest work from 1922, when he was finishing
his training,
seems to have been influenced by aspects of Art Nouveau,
and also the current literature on psychology especially the forerunners
of Gestalt. Escher's most famous works such as Sky & Water I (Fig.
3) and Day and Night (Fig. 4), however, date from the post-Alhambra period.
Escher's work has been widely used to teach formal symmetry to students
of crystallography (Macgillavry; Glasser). The reason for its popularity
in teaching is that symmetry is essentially a geometrical concept and
diagrams such as Escher's are ideal for this purpose. There are only
17 possible crystallographic groups of symmetry structures and these
were established on theoretical grounds by E.S. Fedorov in 1891. However,
the Moors had already made use of all 17 symmetry structures at the Alhambra.
Crystals' external forms are reflections of their symmetrical internal
arrangement of atoms. When a beam of X-rays is passed through a crystal
a regular diffraction pattern can be recorded in film (Fig. 5) and mathematical
analysis of this pattern using a knowledge of the arrangements of groups
in space allows the structure of the crystal to be determined.
Escher, however, in a sense extended the theory of crystallographic groups
beyond Fedorov's 17 by using "through artistic intuition" (Coxeter;
Macgillavry) the added principle of colour sym¼metry.
It is interesting to speculate as to how art historians and critics will
eventually judge Escher's work. If one is to assess him on the basis
of his images such as "Stars" (a 1948 wood-engraving) then
one would interpret his vision as that of a mathematically ordered, harmonious
universe, or a neo-Platonic approach similar to that of Kepler. One wonders
what William Blake would have made of it. Yet Escher himself tended to
characterise
mankind as "feeling people" (most artists) and "thinking
people" (rationalists or scientists). There seems little doubt that
he saw himself as belonging to the former group.
Is Escher merely a clever draughtsman using an intuitive grasp of mathematics
to weave his intricate and sometimes surrealistic patterns; or is he
a great artist, a genius in his own field? The quintessence of cubism
is its presentation of contradictory cues (Gombrich). On this basis Escher
can be allied, in much of his work, with the cubists.
Before considering the other side of the coin so to speak, that is art
without discernible sym¼metry, or anomorphic art, it is worth looking
briefly at a phenomenon which flourished briefly during the Renaissance
- that of intarsia.
INTARSIA
Cut velvet brocade. Persian; early 17th century. Victoria and Albert
museum (from Read with permission of the publisher).
Norman mosaic in Palermo; 12th century (from Scientific
American, 1970, Vol. 223, N°2, p. 111, with permission of the publisher).
Intarsia uses the technique of wood inlay or marquetry. In Florence in
1478 there were 84 workshops where it was the main activity. It was regarded
for a short while as the pinnacle of artistic achievement (Tormey & Tormey).
The intarsiatori were masters of perspective who delighted in fully exploiting
the theory of perspective to represent the three-dimensional world on
two-dimensional wooden panels. Polyhe¼drons were frequently represented
- again an influence of the Platonic Dialogues, particularly the Timaeus,
which outlined Pythagorean cosmology. The practice declined precipitously
in the early 16th century possibly as a result of Vasari's judgement
that it did no more than counterfeit painting; and Michelangelo's castigation
that attempts to put art on a mathematical and perspective basis were
of no use to a man "without the eye".
ANAMORPHIC ART
Both symmetry or its absence are, in a sense, grist to the mill as far
as creative art is con¼cerned. While intarsia flowered briefly, another
off-shoot of the understanding of the laws of per¼spective, anamorphosis
(without form), developed. I will mention only one example here although
many anamorphic paintings, both plane, cylindrical and conical exist.
The famous painting by Hans Holbein, `The Ambassadors', 1553 contains
an anamorphic skull which when viewed on the slant is reconstituted.
As can be imagined, because of its element of concealment and artifice
anamorphic images have been popular in erotic art. Although anamorphic
art is a technical curiousity it has been introduced here as a deliberate
counterweight to the em¼phasis on highly symmetrical structures. Yet
oddly, in a way, "for Jean Cocteau it was in the corridors of a
cylindrical anamorphosis, like the Labyrinths of Knossos, that no mans
land where poetry and science meet was situated" (Baltrusaitis).
ART AND NATURE THUS ALLIED
In Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" they go to make Yum-Yum
a pretty bride. By contrast there is the anecdote about Whistler who
completed a portrait for a wealthy client who was dissatisfied. "I
really think, Mr. Whistler", he said, "that is a bad work of
art". Whistler shrugged and looked coolly at the man. He said, "But
you must admit that you're not a good work of nature".
While both artists and scientists have each sought inspiration in nature
the uneasy relationship between the two long predates C.P. Snow's "Two
Cultures". Snow in his Rede Lectures ("The Two Cultures")
recounts his irritation on frequently hearing how illiterate scientists
are. Eventually at a gathering he was stung to ask how many present knew
the second law of thermodynamics "The response" he says "was
cold - it was also negative".
Despite this sort of public teasing which artists and scientists indulge
it is my belief that their creative activities have much in common. The
two poles of Escher's and anamorphic art are facets of man's endeavour
to explore and probe to the very limits of his capabilities. Read has
said that art depends for its value on some interpretation of life and
scientists too are struggling with the same problems, albeit from a vantage
perhaps less personally expressive.
Science can offer many new ways and perspectives for us to see things.
Famous images such as an instantaneous photograph of a splash of milk
by Edgerton of MIT, and others such as field-ion photomicrographs of
metals or light patterns form a swinging pendulum (see for example 'Photog¼raphy
as a Tool', Time-Life Inc.) present many possibilities for artistic creativity.
These images may not be art; indeed, I am sure it will be argued that
they certainly are not art, but they are beautiful and offer new vision
and inspiration to artists.
Plato, one feels, would have delighted in the radiolarian forms (Fig.
6). These approximate the five regular polyhedra as well as the sphere
and semi-regular solids known as deltahedra (Gardner, 1978). In his great
classic On Growth and Form (1917) D'Arcy Thompson, describes (p. 695)
radi¼olarian skeletons as being "of quite extraordinary delicacy
and complexity ... and these complex conformations have a wonderful and
unusual appearance of geometric regularity. All these general considerations
seem such as to prepare us for some physical hypothesis of causation.
The little skeletons remind us of such things as snow crystals (themselves
almost endless within diversity), rather than a collection of animals
... Nevertheless, great efforts have been made to attach a 'bio¼logical
meaning' to these elaborate structures ...". Here we have another
example of the pervasiveness of the Plantonic influence.
Both Kepler (1611) and Cassini (1600) (Fig. 7) had studied the form and
structure of snow flake crystals which, although all based on hexagonal
symmetry, show no two ever alike.
Sky & Water (from “M.C. Escher, 29 Master Prints”, Harry
N. Abrams Inc. New York, 1983, with permission of the publisher).
Day & Night (from “M.C. Escher, 29 Master Prints”, Harry
N. Abrams Inc. New York, 1983, with permission of the publisher).
X-ray diffraction pattern of a beryl crystal (from “Photography
as a Tool”, Time-Life Inc., 1972, p. 77, with permission of the
publisher.
Radiolaria drawings by Haeckel from his monograph on the radiolarian
from the Challenger expedition of 1872-76 (from Gardner, M., 1978, with
permission of the publisher).
Volvox is one of the most beautiful aquatic algae. To see under the microscope,
these tiny green spheres, revolving slowly through the water is delightful.
Volvox has a topological problem, however. It reproduces asexually by
invagination and nipping off daughter colonies which grow and rupture
the parent. The process of invagination would place the flagellae on
the inside of the sphere of the daughter colony. This was a source of
bafflement until Mary Pocock, in the thirties, showed the immature colonies
inverting like a mathematical torus swallowing itself. They do this after
the 16-cell stage usually when the young colony is a hollow sphere but
one in which there is a small opening (phialopore) at one pole (Smith).
Not all highly symmetrical living forms are aquatic or microscopical;
Spaerotherium, the pill¼millipede and the armadillo can roll themselves
into nearly perfect spheres as defensive postures (see for example, Lawrence,
p. 98). These all have something in common with Escher's hypothetical
beast Pedalternorotandomovens centroculatus articulosus (Fig. 8) which
can
roll like a wheel when it wants to.
The beautiful double helix of DNA has replaced the familiar planetary
model of the atom of Niels Bohr as the symbol of science, yet as Bronowski
shows (p. 20) in a computer graphic display on how to draw a chalice
and the DNA spiral there are symmetry analogies going back to the Renaissance.
The Golden Section underlies much of the compositional structure of western
art, and the Fi¼bonacci series and logarithmic spirals occur in art,
mathematics, and nature as was lovingly pointed out by D'Arcy Thompson.
More recently it has been shown (Dixon) that the florets of a sunflower
- and many other plants - grow in spiral patterns that are fundamentally
linked to the theory of numbers and the golden ratio (r : 1 where T =
1.618034 ... ).
SYMMETRY IN PRIMITIVE ART
Gombrich in his authoritative book Art & Illusion, notes (p. 23)
that the primitive artist and the child tend to represent the human form
frontally, horses in profile, and lizards from above. These representations
tend frequently to be the most symmetrical, in which the bilateral symmetry
of most vertebrates is emphasised, and much so called "primitive" art
does, in fact, reflect this symmetry, although by no means all (Fig.
9).
The substrate of primitive art, if it is symmetrical itself, often seems
to impose itself on the form of the decoration; for example, decoration
of the human body is usually symmetrical, so too are decorations on carved
representations of the human body; carved trees, and gate posts and so
on. (Berndt, Pl. 12; 68; Gardner, H., p. 19, Pl. 22-1).
One should beware of a simplistic interpretation or explanation of primitive
art, though, as decorations frequently have a totemic significance not
apparent to our analytical eye.
Snow crystals by Kepler (1611) and Cassini (1600) (from D’Arcy
Thompson, On Growth & Form, Vol. II, p. 696, with permission of the
publisher).
CONCLUSION
In conclusion I have tried to cover an impossibly large subject. Aldous
Huxley in his collection of essays The Human Situation says (p. 182)
that man, in general, has an urge to order and an urge to meaning. I
agree; I see these as compulsions with ancient roots. Perhaps the former,
the urge to
order, is linked in a broad sense with the scientific tradition of describing,
categorising, experiment¼ing; and, since no amount of science is ever
likely to provide meaning in a spiritually comforting way, the urge to
meaning can be equated with the activity of creative art.
My theme then is that there is a universality in the aesthetic appreciation
of geometrical and symmetrical form which historically is pervasive in
art; but that artistic creation extends beyond the mere recording of
what is visually beautiful and regular in nature to the personal vision
and inter¼pretation of a Leonardo, a Blake, a Picasso. But, nonetheless,
there is profit where science can show new perspectives, tools, and ways
of seeing. For example, the traditional craftsman using the computer
could nowadays draw his designs for intarsia with greater ease and flexibility
than his Renaissance counterpart. Perhaps this sort of wedding could
produce a rebirth of skills long neglected. This is not to distract from
the genius of former times - on the contrary. We should always be open
to new ideas, tools and techniques. In stagnation lies creative death.
I have not touched on symmetry in music. Mozart, I have read (Gardner,
M., 1965), wrote a canon with a second melody that was the first one
both backwards and upside down so that two players could read the same
notes from opposite sides of the sheet; and Bach's palindromic canons
were used for contrapuntal effect.
I started by saying that symmetry is not a trivial matter and indeed
it isn't. Telling left from right is a problem for some people (which
can be hazardous when receiving directions in a motor vehicle from someone
who has this problem). Also, distinguishing handedness has been the subject
of psychological investigation which has shown the difficulty children
have discriminating between b & d and p & q (Corballis & Beale).
The great Helmholtz is said to have been largely "left-right blind".
If you remain unconvinced after all this fold your arms and now quickly
fold them the other way! Its not easy without deliberation. These arm-folds
are mirror images that are not superimpos¼able.
Looking glasses are so familiar to us we seldom realise their subtleties.
Why for example does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?
Trace the outline of your face in the misty bathroom mirror and you will
be surprised how small it is - half the size of your real face, and,
what is more the mirror image that looks back at you is not the one the
rest of the world sees. To see yourself as others see you look into two
mirrors at right angles. Now, having recovered from the surprise of seeing
someone who is somehow strangely different from the familiar "you",
slowly rotate the two mirrors through 90° and watch yourself turn
upside down!
There is fun in mirrors, handedness and symmetry. One could claim that
symmetry has fasci¼nated man since Adam said to Eve: "Madam, I'm
Adam", to which she promptly replied, "Eve". Had her name
been Iris no doubt she would have said "Sir, I'm Iris". The
name of a common Japanese make of car misses being a palindrome only
through lacking the letter "A" in front of it. There is also
the publication of the San Diego Zoological Society, "ZOONOOZ" -
a palindrome which also remains unchanged when turned upside down. Another
is the year 1691, attributed with magical powers in Robert Graves' poem
(Parker), which begins:
The Two Witches
O. sixteen hundred and ninety one, Never was year so well begun, Backsy-forsy
and inside-out,
The best of all years to ballad about.
A final example of things, that like Alice's looking glass images, "go
the other way": "Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity"
Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged. Until he died,
and so reached that vicinity: in it he
found that the damned things diverged.
Piet Hein, Grooks VI.
Escher’s curl-up animal (from Gardner, M., 1978, with permission
of the publisher).
Bookplate illustration of goannas (from “Australian Aboriginal
art”, ed. Ronald M. Berndt, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1964, with permission
of the publisher).
REFERENCES
BALTRUSAITIS, J., 1969. Anamorphic Art'. (Harry N. Abrams Inc.: New York).
BERNDT, Ronald M., ed., 1964. `Australian Aboriginal Art' (Collier-Macmillan:
London). BRONOWSKI, J., 1973. `The Ascent of Man'. (BBC: London).
CORBALLIS, Michael C. and BEALE, Ivan L., 'On Telling Left from Right',
Scientific American, 1971, Vol. 224, No. 3, p. 96.
COXETER, H.S.M., 1971. `The World of M.C. Escher'. (Meulenhoff & Co.,
bv: Amsterdam). DIXON, Robert, 'The Mathematical Daisy', New Scientist,
1981, Dec., p. 792.
GARDNER, Helen, 1975. 'Art Throught the Ages', 6th edn. (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, New York). GARDNER, Martin, 1965. 'Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions'.
(Pelican Books: Middlesex). GARDNER, Martin, 'Mathematical Games', Scientific
American, 1978, Vol. 238, Nol. 6, p. 18. GLASSER, L. 'Teaching Symmetry',
J. Chem. Education, 1967, Vol. 44, No. 9, p. 502).
GOMBRICH, E.H., 1960. 'Art & Illusion, A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation'. (Pantheon Books: New York).
HUXLEY, Aldous, 1978. 'The Human Situation, Lectures at Santa Barbara,
1959'. (Chatto & Windus: Lon¼don).
LAWRENCE, R.F., 1963. 'The Biology of the Cryptic Fauna of Forests'.
(A.A. Balkema: Cape Town). MACGILLAVRY, Caroline H., 1965. 'Symmetry
Aspects of M.C. Escher's Periodic Drawings'. (Published for the International
Union of Crystallography by A. Oosthoek's Uitgeversmaatschappij NV, Utrecht).
PARKER, E.W., selected by, 1971. 'Discovering Poetry 1', 2nd edn. (Longman:
London).
READ, H., 1936. 'The Meaning of Art', 2nd edn. (Faber & Faber: London).
SMITH, Gilbert M., 1950. 'The Fresh-water Algae of the United States',
2nd edn. (McGraw-Hill).
TEUBER, M.L., 'Sources of Ambiguity in the Prints of Maurits C. Escher',
Scientific American, 1974, Vol. 231, No. 1, p. 90.
THOMPSON, D'Arcy W., 1917. 'On Growth and Form'. (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge). TORMEY, A. and TORMEY, Judith Farr., 'Renaissance
Intarsia: The Art of Geometry', Scientific American, 1982, Vol. 247,
No. 1, p.116.
3. ORIGINS OF THE GREAT DIVORCE - SCIENCE AND ART Dr
B. Chiswell, Scientist, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and in the History
of Science, Univer¼sity
of Queensland, Hon. Secretary, Royal Society of Queensland.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony
rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images,
where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket
no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.
from The Wasteland (Eliot 1922).
Down what long road had Western society travelled by 1922 to arrive at
this agony of T.S. Eliot? What was the rottenness that he saw at the
core of the modern technological/scientific soci¼ety?
The historian is concerned not with the rights and wrongs of society,
but with the accurate description of the road travelled by society. But
such description can never be a simple objective task; understanding
of the past requires subjective empathy with the travellers on the road;
for history is a study not simply of a collection of facts, but of facticity
in relationship to definite individuals and groups of individuals.
In the following discussion I will not deal with the minutiae of history,
but will take a broad general view of how a very large group of individuals,
namely Western Society, has, since the 17th century, changed its view
of Nature. My composition will demonstrate how such a change has led
to the Divorce of Science from Aesthetics and Art.
Let me acknowledge some sources for my views and some steps in the development
of such views.
Firstly, T.S. Eliot delineates most clearly the agony of modern man in
a mechanistic universe. Secondly, George Kubler's "The Shape of
Time" (Kubler 1962) opened my eyes to a new way of looking at Art
and Art History.
Thirdly, my lectures to students at the University of Queensland on the
History of Science have forced me to study the development of modern
science and of how its commitment to a me¼chanistic view of nature has
been seminal in the growth of our modern technological society. Such
a study, when cast in a human context, quickly demonstrates the divorcement
that arose between the Romantics of the 18th and 19th century and the
Technologists and Scientists of the Industrial Revolution.
From these sources I will proceed to argue the following thesis:
Seventeenth century Western Society perceived science as one of a number
of aesthetic pursuits; it was an art as were music, painting and literature.
All such pursuits were seen as expres¼sions of the prevailing concept
of nature; a concept of an ordered mechanical system (somewhat similar
to a complex clockwork mechanism), grand in its operation and perfect
in its form.
Having established this 17th century viewpoint, I will then move to discuss
the changes wrought in it by the Romantic Revolution of the turn of the
18th into the 19th century. This Revo¼lution was an important manifestation
of a profound readjustment of Western Society's view of Nature; a profound
readjustment associated with one of the greatest Revolutions ever experienced
by mankind - the Industrial Revolution. This change in our view of Nature
has been the major force leading to the divorce between aesthetics and
science.
In their standard work, History of Aesthetics, Gilbert and Kuhn (1953)
state the belief that, since the mid-19th century, aesthetics has narrowed
to cover only the arts of painting and sculpture (and to some extent
architecture). To them, literature appears to have been displaced from
the canons of things beautiful to man, while music, like science, is
not discussed as an aesthetic pur¼suit. Such an approach reduces aesthetics
to the study of some of the visual arts.
We may well not agree that modern aesthetics is as restricted as Gilbert
and Kuhn claim, but within the context of this study it matters little.
The question of relevance to us is not whether literature and music are
aesthetic pursuits, but whether modern-day science is perceived by modern¼day
man as possessing beauty - "that quality or combination of qualities
which affords keen plea¼sure to the senses (especially that of sight)
or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties" (O.E.D. 1959).
I believe that Gilbert and Kuhn are essentially correct in discounting
science as one of the aesthetic pursuits of modern man. Let me hasten
to add that I am not claiming that scientists today
do not see beauty in their work, but I am claiming that the great bulk
of humanity do not see modern science as a thing of beauty.
THE MECHANICAL WORLD VIEW OF THE AGE OF REASON
For much of the 17th and 18th century, Britain was in the Augustan period,
otherwise known as the Age of Reason.
Let me refresh your memory with some famous names:
Science Isaac
Newton F.R.S. 1642-1729
Robert Boyle F.R.S. 1627-1691
Architecture Christopher Wren F.R.S. 1632-1723
&
Design Earl of
Burlington 1695-1753
Painters William
Hogarth 1697-1764
Joshua Reynolds R.A. 1722-1792
Thomas Gainsborough R.A. 1727-1788
Writers Joseph
Addison 1672-1719
of Poetry Jonathan
Swift 1667-1745
and Prose Alexander Pope 1688-1744
Daniel Defoe 1660-1731
Joseph Fielding 1707-1754
John Dryden F.R.S. 1631-1700
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784
The most important feature to notice in the work of all these men is
their commitment to the concept of a mechanical universe, to an order
and rationality in both nature and in man. Pope's (1956) epitaph to Newton
sums up the coalsecence of views between literature and science:
" Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night God said Let Newton be! and
all was light. or consider Johnson's (1759) Rasselas:
" The business of the poet ... is to examine, not the individual but the
species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does
not number the streaks of a tulip, or describe the different shades in
the verdue of the forest"
As the President of the Royal Academy (of Art) Sir Joshua Reynolds (1769)
put it "the genuine painter forswears minutiae for loftiness and
grandeur". The artist must reveal "the perfect state of nature".
The two very famous scientists in my list above, Newton in Physics and
Boyle in Chemistry, described their scientific work in aesthetic terms
consonant with the artistic commitment of their work. Indeed their descriptions
are similar to the aesthetic language used by the other famous men upon
the list. It is well-known, for example, that Newton's major output was
in what we today would call theological writing, but we miss the point
if we assume that Newton had two sides - a Physical and a Theological.
To Newton, as to the Augustans in general, there was a prevailing sense
of beauty which could be seen in the grandeur of order of the mechanical
universe.
Boyle (1772) also described how he was constantly struck with the order
and discipline of God's work whenever "with bold telescopes I survey
the old and newly discovered stars and planets that adorn the upper region
of the world; and when with excellent microscopes, I discern in other¼wise
invisible objects, the unimitable subtility of nature's curious workmanship,
and when in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of
chymical forces, I study the book of nature ..."
In Faces of Modernity, Calinescu (1977) argues that Western man's concept
of beauty was basically constant from Grecian times through to the end
of the 18th century A.D. He claims that beauty was seen in the harmony
between man and nature (or God) which led to a view of harmony between
all pursuits of man. Whether Calinescu establishes this broad claim is
debateable, but there can be little doubt that he demonstrates the close
correlation of aesthetic approach of the Grae¼co-Roman and the Augustan
periods. In both periods there is a drive to explore the beauty of nature,
and to describe the perceived beauty in terms of the cyclical recurrence
of perfect forms which demonstrate the perfection of the finite mechanical
world.
THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE
In the year 1769 two important British patents were granted. Two patents
for machines that, with their progeny, were to change the face of the
western world. There is no reason to suppose that the registration of
the "births" of Arkwright's waterframe and Watt's separate
condenser (Cardwell 1972) attracted any greater attention than did the
birth of Schleiermacher in the previous year, or of the births of Beethoven
and Wordsworth in the year that followed. Yet all these births were revolutionary
in their outcome. The Industrial and the Romantic Revolutions are indeed
very closely connected.
"
Whatever else is said about the Romantic movement, no one can deny that
it really did hap¼pen. There really was a time in the early 19th century
when to be a Romantic meant more than to be a dreamer or a lovesick youth;
when an artist could accept the name with pride and take it to imply
as the writers Stendahl and Beaudelaire did, that he was courageously
facing the realities of the age" (Vaughan 1978).
It was Schlegel, Professor of Literature and F' e Arts at Jena, who,
in the opening years of the 19th century, is credited with introducing
the word Romantic and with postulating the opposi¼tion of the Romantic
to the Classical. He saw the Romantic as that which emphasised the associa¼tive
(symbolic) side of art, whereas the Classical dwelt on the formal aspects.
But it was Schleiermacher who was in the forefront of the Romantic Revolution
in his attack upon the Classi¼cal God of the Age of Reason. Like Wordsworth,
his God was personally internalized and under¼stood by reference to Nature.
Little surprise that he, like Wordsworth was accused of pantheism when
he attacked Enlightenment theology, calling it "the artifact of
calculating intellect ... (in which) ... everything elapses into callous
argumentation ... (and where) ... even the sublimest sub¼jects are made
pawns of controversy between competing schools of thought" (Schleiermacher,
1821).
Romanticism saw Nature (and God) in terms of individual, highly personal,
concepts of beauty and truth. Such a view was diametrically opposed to
the generalised form of Classicism's concepts of ideal beauty and truth.
The developing aesthetic of the 19th century moved rapidly away from
the societal-wide acceptation of certain artistic forms as being expressions
of beauty, to embrace the idea that beauty was the internalized response
by the individual to artistic material. Thus, to Scho¼penhauer (1819),
art had become a mode of expressing reality, and the more challenging
the indi¼vidual found this reality, the greater was the art.
The attack by the Romantics upon the prevailing concept of God was to
be expected; the Classical view of God was inimical to the Romantic spirit.
As beauty could no longer be found in art which expressed a societal
view of morality, the aesthetics of the 19th century concentrated upon
what made the particular artistic expression beau¼tiful. The idealist
Augustan belief, that beauty was found in art that pointed to moral order,
was discarded, and beauty came to be perceived as existing in the individual's
response to the art object. But science did not partake of this aesthetic
revolution during the 19th century, and, with one important exception,
has still not shifted its philosophical viewpoint. Science was, and still
is in general, committed to a mechanistic, non-personal philosophy. It
believes in the order of Nature, and in the reality that can be understood
by experimentation upon Nature.
Huxley (1869), introducing the opening number of Nature in 1869 revealed
the stance of 19th century (and 20th century) science, when he defined
science as "the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture
of herself, in the mind of a man". To science the reality of Nature
imposes its own "picture" upon the mind, and, as the individual
personality plays no part in what constitutes this reality, there can
be only one form of Nature common to the understanding of all men. For
Huxley (1868), "that man ... has had a liberal education ... whose
intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine with all its parts of equal
strength, and in smooth working order." Who can deny the crudi¼ty
of this identification of science with the triumphs of technology?
What a far cry are Huxley's statements from those of Wordsworth (1798)
some seventy years previously, when he so aptly summed the Romantic approach
to Nature in his famous lines:
" And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense
sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light
of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue
sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things"
Tintern Abbey, 1798
Thus, the Romantic Revolution hardened the commitment of science to the
mechanistic tradition. It may be arguable that science could have chosen
to follow the 19th century aesthetic spirit and have cast itself in a
Romantic mode; indeed such modern philosophers of science as Feuerabend
(1978) claim that it should make this transition now; but a new and developing
connection precluded such a choice being made. For, as the Industrial
Revolution progressed, there grew rapidly an ever ex¼panding interdependency
of science and technology (Musson and Robinson 1969).
Although many of the earlier inventions and discoveries of the Industrial
Revolution were basically "seat-of-the-pants" in style, during
the 19th century the scientist and the technologist in¼creasingly cooperated.
The full flowering of such cooperation is obvious in the modern industri¼alised
state. I have distinguished between scientist and technologist, for during
the 19th century, but decreasingly during this century, such a distinction
could be made. Whereas the scientist, like his forebears, studied Nature
to see how it worked, the technologist used the knowledge of how Nature
works to change such workings towards desired industrial goals.
Herein lies the origin of the great divorce. 19th Century aesthetics,
coupled to Romanticism, was based on a philosophy of the importance of
the individual and of the personal understanding of beauty and truth.
On the other hand 19th century science, coupled to technology, was divorced
from the artistic/aesthetic movement of the age and became conjoined
with the work-a-day world of the mechanic turned technologist.
C.P. Snow (1959) became famous, at least in part, for his championing
of the concept of the western world's Two Cultures. His cultures derive,
as we have seen, from the divorce between Classical science and Romantic
aesthetics; a divorce that Snow sees as springing from the very dif¼ferent
educational backgrounds of the Scientist and the Artist.
FORM AND SYMBOL IN ART AND SCIENCE
Form and symbol are concepts which the historian of art and aesthetics
uses when analysing works of art (Kubler 1962). The concepts are not
always readily separable in art, because the unity of work can make such
arbitary, critical constructs meaningless. Nevertheless, because generalised
concepts are essential for any verbal discussion, the terms have found
wide acceptance.
Form is the technique and the materials used in the work of art. The "formal" way
in which materials are used to express shapes and relationships; the
functional method whereby meaning and feeling are imparted to the work.
Symbol is the meaning and feeling in the work. The perspective of reality
offered and created by the form that has been used.
Kubler (1962) claims that Cassirer's definition of art as being "symbolic
language" has domi¼nated modern art studies; the Romantic aesthetic
has dealt with symbolic meaning as distinct from Classical form. It is
of very great interest to note that while aesthetics has dwelt upon symbol,
science and technology have increasingly concentrated upon form to the
exclusion of symbolic meaning. As Eliot (1934) pointed out nearly half
a century ago, there was no meaning for science and technology within
the then current aesthetic ethos.
" The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness, Knowledge of speech,
but not of silence;
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance
brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God"
from Choruses from `The Rock" 1934
In the aftermath of Romanticism, Western man began to look at Nature
with the Romantic precept of seeing beauty with his own eyes. What he
saw was Nature transformed by industrializa¼tion, and like that great
prophet William Blake he disliked the "dark Satanic mills" of
the trans¼formation.
REFERENCES
BLAKE, William, Milton (preface). BOYLE, R., 1772. Works, Vol. 1, p.
167. CARDWELL, D.S.L., 1973. Technology, Science & History, Heinemann.
CALINESCU, M., 1977. Faces of Modernity, Indiana Univ. Press. ELIOT,
T.S., 1922. The Waste Land, Faber & Faber.
ELIOT, T.S., 1934. Choruses from `The Rock', Faber & Faber. FEYERABEND,
P., 1978. Science in a Free Society, New Left Books. GILBERT, K.E. and
KUHN, H., 1953. A History of Aesthetics, Dover. HUXLEY, T.H., 1868. A
Liberal Education, see Science & Education, undated, p. 80. HUXLEY,
T.H., 1869. Nature, Vol. 1, see The Popular Science Monthly, 1872, pp.
113-115. JOHNSON, S., 1759. Rasselas, Oxford, 1927.
KUBLER, G., 1962. The Shape of Time, Yale Univ. Press.
MUSSON, A.E. and ROBINSON, E., 1969. Science and Technology in the Industrial
Revolution, Manchester Univ. Press.
POPE, A., (date unknown), Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster
Abbey, quoted in Penguin Book of English Verse, 1956.
REYNOLDS, J., 1769. Discourses, Dent.
SCHLEIERMACHER, F., 1821. On Religion, trans. T.N. Tice, John Knox Press,
1969, p. 55. SCHOPENHAUER, A., 1819. The World as Will and Idea, trans.
Haldane and Kemp, 8th Edn., 1937. SNOW, C.P., 1959. The Two Cultures
and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge Univ. Press. VAUGHAN, W., 1978.
Romantic Art, Thames and Hudson, London.
WORDSWORTH, W., 1798. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,
on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.
4. THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY
Dr. J.E.O Hagan, Research
Scientist and Public Relations Consultant; Hon. Secretary, Queensland
Division, ANZAAS,
Principal, John E. O'Hagan, Public Relations Consultancy.
ABSTRACT
Compared with the vast scientific literature published, there are but
few records of the emotional experiences of scientists related to their
discoveries.
Examination of the available reports however, mainly in biographies and
letters, re¼veals the often great ecstatic responses on the making of,
or confirmation of, new discover¼ies, amounting to a state not unlike
that attained in some recorded religious experiences.
There appear to be an even less number of reports on the feelings of
artists about their work. Perhaps they are content to have it revealed
in the work itself, which relies so much on emotional response. Technologists
appear to be even more reticent in sharing their responses.
However the available evidence reveals a common bond between all three
practitioners of intense feeling about their work which could form a
basis for mutual appreciation and co-operation.
"
EUREKA! EUREKA!!" - "I've found it! I've got it!!" To
discover - to behold the new, to be where no one has been before, to
find enlightenment where there has been darkness - is one of the most
overwhelmingly satisfying experiences a human can enjoy.
Archimedes, the celebrated physicist and mathematician of Ancient Greece,
had been commis¼sioned by King Hieron II to report on his new elaborate
crown which he had ordered to be fashioned of pure gold. Hieron suspected
the metal was a gold-silver alloy but how could this be proved?
Archimedes must have pondered at length on the problem. He knew the alloy,
if such it was, would have a different specific gravity from pure gold,
but how could he calculate this without melting the crown and casting
to a shape of regular geometric form to determine the volume?
He was musing on this problem as he went to the public baths. Lying in
the water, he suddenly realised the significance of the rise in the level
of the water in the bath - it represented the in¼creased volume of the
contents due to his submerged body. He could find the volume of the intri¼cate
crown in the same way!!
Without concern for clothing, Archimedes is reported to have rushed home
from the baths shouting - "EUREKA! EUREKA!!", no doubt to try
an experiment to test his hypothesis. The metal in the crown turned out
to be an alloy and the jeweller was executed, sad to say.
Hieron II is little remembered, but every schoolchild on first encounter
with science will ob¼serve the experiment of Archimedes using an irregular
body suspended in water, and deduce his Principle of Buoyancy - that
a body immersed in a fluid loses as much weight as the weight of fluid
displaced.
Not only is this the first record of non-destructive scientific analysis,
so common today, but also the first of innumerable times when science
has come to the aid of the law and of art in detecting falsehood.
But to get back to Archimedes - his most powerful emotions of surprise
and delight at his solution of the problem completely overruled his other
natural reaction to cover his body.
Such detachment is, of course, not confined to scientists. The novelist
J.B. Priestley expresses it so succinctly in his book "Delight" -
" The coming of the Idea. There is nothing piecemeal about its arrival.
It comes as the ancient gods and goddesses must have manifested themselves
to their more fortunate worshippers. (And indeed it comes from the same
place.) At one moment the mind knows it not. The next it is there, taking
full possession of the mind, which quivers in ecstatic surrender. - Lord,
let me live to welcome again with all the old abandon, not knowing whether
I am dressing or undressing, whether it is Tuesday morning or Friday
evening, the sunburst of the Idea!"
And apparently Priestley concurred with Albert Einstein's statement that
- "All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree."
In the scientific literature as we generally know it, it is impossible
to find evidence of the emotional responses of the discoverer; he and
his editors carefully eliminate them. This is quite proper, since scientific
results should rest on knowledge, not feelings. So we have to go to biogra¼phies
and letters of scientists to find evidence of the excitement of discovery.
Thus Einstein - mistakenly thought by many to have been cold and impersonal
- having waited for many long
years for tangible proof of his theory expressed his suppressed emotions
when other scientists found that refined measurements of the motion of
the Planet Mercury confirmed his mathematics. He wrote, according to
Hoffman, -
" But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing,
their alterna¼tions of confidence and exhaustion, and the final emergence
into the light - only those who have themselves experienced it can understand
that."
To his friend Paul Ehrenfest he wrote -
" Imagine my joy at the feasibility of the general covariance and at the
result that the equations yield the correct perihelion motion of Mercury.
I was beside myself with ecstacy for days."
Perhaps no wonder - he had succeeded the immortal Isaac Newton! Some
of this excitement of new discovery is conveyed by Bickel's report of
the first experimental use of penicillin, purified by the biochemist
Ernst Chain and injected into white mice previously infected with haemolytic
streptococci, of the type which causes childbirth fever and death.
" On the Sunday morning Florey stood in the laboratory with the evidence
of success be¼fore him. Four white mice lay still and dead in the bottom
of the cage. The other four were still living, and only one, which had
had a single, minute injection, looked unwell. - Florey was joined by
his two colleagues. Chain was thrilled and almost dancing with excitement;"
Edward Derrick, whose work led to the founding of the Queensland Institute
of Medical Re¼search, sought assistance from Macfarlane Burnet in identifying
an organism causing a typhoid-like illness in abattoir workers in Brisbane.
Derrick had developed a technique for specific diagnosis of the-disease
by studying the immunological response of guinea-pigs injected with blood
from the patient, but had not characterised the infecting organism. Burnet
injected mice with the organism and sectioned and stained their spleens.
Sections, according to Burnet -
" to our imense pleasure contained large numbers of tiny rods staining
in the typical fashion of rickettsias. There was no shadow of doubt:
we had identified the agent of `abattoirs fever'. Derrick and I were
both delighted - "
As well they might, since the disease was a widely-spread one throughout
the world and here was the knowledge to diagnose, and suggest treatment
for it. It is commonly referred to as Q fever. Louis Pasteur wrote, according
to Vallery-Radot, -
" When you have at last arrived at certainty, your joy is one of the greatest
that can be felt by a human soul."
Eve Curie related her mother's description of the parent's visit to their
dingy laboratory after the children had been put to bed -
" "Don't light the lamps!" Marie said in the darkness. Then she
added with a little laugh: Do you remember the day you said to me: "I
should like radium to have a beautiful colour?"
The reality was more entrancing than the simple wish of long ago. Radium
had some¼thing better than "a beautiful colour": it was spontaneously
luminous. And in the sombre shed, where, in the absence of cupboards,
the precious particles in their tiny glass receivers were placed on tables
or on shelves nailed to the wall, their phosphorescent bluish outlines
gleamed, suspended in the night.
"
Look ... Look!" the young woman murmured. - Their two faces turned
towards the pale glimmering the mysterious sources of radiation, towards
radium - their radium. - She was to remember forever this evening of
glow-worms, this magic."
Charles Darwin had an experience of enlightenment of similar impact -
" I can remember the very spot on the road, whilst in my carriage, when
to my joy the solution occurred to me."
Peter Kropotkin also expressed this feeling of transcendence -
" He who has once in his life experienced this joy of scientific creation
will never forget it."
An when the desired successful experiment or the required inspiration
does not come, the scientist can experience similar emotional feelings
of despair to what St. John of the Cross referred, in a religious context,
as "the dark night of the soul". But when the desired results
flow, the soul is back in grace and as Claude Bernard tell us -
" The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man
can ever feel."
I have dealt mainly with scientists in this discussion, but I am sure
these feelings are shared by artists and technologists as well. My literature
search, although by no means a complete one, re¼vealed that they seem
less inclined to express
their feelings in writing. Artsitic expression is that of the emotions
anyway, and perhaps artists are happy just to have their joy expressed
in their work. Technologists are "doers" rather than writers,
and perhaps they are content to convey their thrils by having their work "shine
in use".
All three groups are capable of much more intense concentration on their
activities than the public at large, and this I believe, is partly why
they would appear to have much greater rewards emotionally. But is this
all they share, and is this not a reason why they should engage in more
mutual appreciation? Perhaps there is more.
C.P. Snow, a scientist as well as a creative writer, in his novel "The
Search", describes the emotions of a physical chemist when his results
were confirmed by another -
" Then I was carried beyond pleasure ... as though all the world, the atoms
and the stars, were wonderfully close to me, and I to them, so that we
were part of a lucidity more closer than any mystery.
I had never known such a moment could exist. ... Since then I have never
quite re¼gained it. But one effect will stay with me as long as I live;
once, when I was young, I used to sneer at the mystics who have described
the experience of being one with God and part of the unity of things.
After that afternoon, I did not want to laugh again; for al¼though I
should have interpreted the experience differently, I thought I knew
what they meant."
We need both the scientist and the artist to describe this Oneness, this
Unity. Newton's Principle of Universal Gravitation - "Every particle
of matter in the Universe is attracted to every other particle of matter
with a force inversely proportional to the square of their distances" -
beautiful though it is, needs Francis Thompson's poetry to complement
and extend it -
" All things by imortal power, Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star;"
And Newton would not have been able to make his observations without
the help of technolo¼gists to prepare the materials for his instruments!
Long before Newton, during the Middle Ages when science and technology
were still classed as "art", and Leonardo could practice in
all three, St. Francis of Assisi made this statement -
" He who works with his hands is a labourer,
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman,
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
We should all aspire to be "artists" of one form or another,
and having experienced the thrill of discovery ourselves, may also be
able to shout - "Eureka! Eureka!!"
REFERENCES
ASIMOV, I., 1978. Asimov's Biographical Encylopedia of Science and Technology.
(David and Charles: Lon¼don).
BERNARD, C., 1865. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
(English translation). 1927. (Macmillan: New York).
BICKEL, L., 1972. Rise Up to Life. (Angus and Robertson: Sydney).
BURNET, M., 1968. Changing Patterns: an Atypical Autobiography. (Sun:
Melbourne). CURIE, E., 1938. Marie Curie. Translated by V. Sheean. (Heinemann:
London). DARWIN, F., 1888. Life and Letters of C. Darwin. (John Murray:
London).
EINSTEIN, A., 1950. "Moral Decay", in Out of My Later Years.
(Philosophical Library: New York). FRANCIS OF ASSISI, St. n.d. Quoted
by J. Burton in Glass; Philosophy and Method. 1969. (Pitman: Lon¼don).
HOFFMANN, B., 1973. Albert Einstein Creator and Rebel. With the collaboration
of H. Dukas. (Hart-Davis, MacGibbon: London).
KROPOTKIN, P., n.d. Quoted by W.I.B. Beveridge in The Art of Scientific
Investigation. 1961. (Vintage: New • York).
PRIESTLEY, J.B., 1949. Delight. (Heinemann: Melbourne). SNOW, C.P., 1958.
The Search. (Macmillan: London). THOMPSON, F., 1937. Part of "The
Mistress of Vision" in The Poems of Francis Thompson. (Oxford: Lon¼don).
VALLERY-RADOT, R., 1948. Life of Pasteur. (Constable: London).
I am grateful to the above-mentioned publishers for permission to reproduce
material from their books.
5. Opening and viewing of Display ART IN SCIENCE AND SCIENCE IN ART su¼pervised
by Mr. Nigel Sabine, Curator, Civic Art Gallery and Musium, Li¼brary,
City Hall.
Presentation of artwork to Civic Art Gallery and Museum.
Session III Technology
1. Computer Controlled Electronic Musical Instruments demonstrated by
Mr. Colin Timms, Tutor in Recording Techniques and Electronic Music,
Queens¼land Conservatorium of Music.
2. "IS DESIGN ART?" - Mr Michael Bryce, Architect and Graphic
Designer; Principal, Bryce Design Consultants, Federal President, Design
Institute of Australia.
PREAMBLE
My contribution to today's symposium falls within the section on Technology
and I would like you to see the irony of this when I will be attempting
to explode a myth that is held to the bosom of every 'young' designer
graduate - at least in my spectrum of knowledge.
I am here at the invitation of your Scientific Convenor, Dr. John O'Hagan,
with whom I have had several interesting discussions on the interface
between art and technolo¼gy¼
It has led me to the terrible realisation that my past 20 years of practice
as a designer, during which I have strenuously denied the existence of
anything as bourgeois as ART in my design philosophy, have been a lie.
I stand here - a born again artist!
But unless you take this too literally, I will explain my realisation
in a more sequential
way.
A definition of 'art' and 'design' cannot be attempted without an analysis
of past and present values, perceptions and lifestyles; the influence
of major art movements and the realities of an industrialised society.
There is a viewpoint that design is the logical pregression from primitive
expressionism or 'art'; that the prevalence of artistic expression for
its own sake has given way to functionalism; that design is art made
functional.
In a consumer society it would be difficult to ignore the influence of
the marketplace. Both art and design are treated as commodities for sale.
The relationship between art and design, once dis¼tanced, has reached
a point of convergence. Traditional definitions of art which once only
acknowl¼edged the stereotype (paintings, sculpture etc.) now acknowledges
the machine age. Automobiles, home appliances, and tools, may now be
seen as art forms. At the same time, items that were once purely designed
for a function are now being used as vehicles for artistic expression.
Firstly, by defining design and then by looking for the art in it and
by a few illustrations proposing that there is a very shaky road to design
through art, but a firmer road to art through design.
This will mean a few definitions.
Sir Misha Black, Head of the Royal College of Art, arguably Britain's
foremost design school, and a lifetime advocate of function over form
said in 1970 (Black, 1970).
" All objects contain formal or aesthetic qualities. This is obvious enough
in the craft-based industries. In the ancient crafts of ceramics, textile
weaving and printing, glass blowing and so on, the relationship between
aesthetics and production is as old as the history of man. The new element
which causes much argument and some confusion, is the relationship of
aesthetics or art to the products of the light and heavy engineering
industries - To the design of a television set or radar electronic equipment,
electrical sub-stations and sewing machines, refrigerators and machine
tools."
Black, himself an architect, lashed back at that tenet of engineers.
Form inexorably follows function, and thus a solely scientific or technological
approach to engineering produces forms which are visually so satisfactory
as to eliminate the need for conscious aesthetic endeavour.
This he counters with the argument that society is filled with useful
objects which far from being aesthetically pleasing actually destroy
the "pleasures of city life" and set too low standards for
the developing countries.
The late Oscar Faber said in 1944 (in a paper delivered to the British
Institution of Civil Engi¼neers) (Black, 1970).
" The fallacy, which is very widely held, is that if a structure is honestly
designed to satisfy all its scientific or engineering requirements it
will of necessity be beautiful ... all I can say is that I wish it were
true, because most engineers can design a structure scientifically with
a constant factor of safety in all its component parts, and if that were
a guarantee that the result would be beautiful, the problem would indeed
be a simple one. Unfortunately, all that one can say about it is that
such
a structure may by chance be beautiful, but it will only be by chance".
I shall not bore you with a historical dissertation. It is enough to
say that industrial design as it exists today springs from two sources.
The first is the Arts and Crafts movement of the past centu¼ry based
on the theory and practice of William Morris in the second half of the
19th century. This led eventually to the establishment of the Bauhaus
in Germany in 1919; the influence of that great school still reverberates
throughout the world.
The second source is a group of American designers (Black, 1970, p.37)
who, in the great slump of the later 1920s, demonstrated that industrial
design could be a major factor in increasing the sales of specific products
even in an economic situation when total sales were catastrophically
reduced. Today industrial design is an established profession on an international
basis. The Interna¼tional Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID)
federates 50 societies and councils of industrial design in 32 countries,
from USA to Japan, the USSR to Great Britain, Norway to Czechoslovakia,
Argentina to Australia. The federated societies have 12,000 members of
which 8,¼000 are professional designers.
The ICSID definition states:
" Industrial design is a creative activity whose aim is to determine the
formal qualities of ob¼jects produced by industry. These formal qualities
are not only the external features but principally those structural and
functional relationships which convert a system to a coherent unity both
from the point of view of the producer and the user."
There are many other definitions such as:
"
Industrial design is the design of artifacts intended for production
by industrial processes and in which the aesthetic and other human factors
play a significant role".
In Australia, Design is seen to cover the broad spectrum of made to useful
objects, fashion design being one of the more desirous claimants. It
is the Design leader, but interior and exhibition design and graphic
design are obvious contenders.
The highly technical pursuit of Imagery, in the form of film, television
and theatre design, are also seen as broadly subjective and art based.
Products and machinery such as motor vehicles and appliances easily fit
the Bill as Design in the technological sense.
The Design Institute of Australia defines 3 major categories of Designer.
These are: Graphic
Product (or industrial), and Interior
Within each of these headings, there are vast ranges of differences in
the objective or function¼al response and the subjective or decorative
response.
Some would say that it is possible to grade the level of design in a
progressive "Monkey to Man" - scale.
Were this true - it would make life for the designer a lot simpler.
" You want a product so you get a solution! Never mind fashion, the marketplace,
packaging, cost, consumer persuasions, value judgments, corporate personality
and so on.
The fact is that each object has a variable degree of creative and problem
solving decisions. Take for example a simple spoon may be treated as
an art form with the most simple function, to scoop.
Or it can be highly tooled to make an ergonomic solution fitting the
hand, the mouth and the content.
Thus a spoon can take many forms and still work as a spoon.
On the other hand a Camera must express many complex functions as concisely
and objectively as possible - its form follows its function.
Obviously, the more aesthetic and sensory latitude available within a
particular range of design opportunities, the closer they resemble those
offered by the practice of "fine-art". The less latitude, the
closer design becomes to the sciences, and to fields in which the margin
of aesthetic "choice" is truly marginal. The design of a traffic
light system has an aesthetic component, but it would need a very special
definition of aesthetics to embrace the many determining factors that
must finally settle the design outcome.
That there is a relationship between this form and art is the point I
will make further on.
A definition of Art cannot be attempted without an analysis of past and
present values, per¼ceptions and changing social patterns.
But let me highlight some of the major influences on design.
The Flemish School of Painting in the C12-13 perfected technical drafting
(Lampitt, 1972).
In this movement, attention to proportion and true perspective assumed
a large proportion of the art. Textures and lighting drew attention to
fabric and form.
Interiors were related to the frame of the painting. In A Portrait of
Jan Arnolfini & His Wife by Van Eyck. The viewer was taken into an
interior and shown a lifestyle. Products were seen as worthy of atmosphere.
Baroque and Romantic movements gave way to the Impressionists of the
late 19th Century (Monet, Degas, Cezanne).
Here the romance and the allegory were stripped away and common sense
and stimulation were used.
Objects were put before us, not as copies of reality, but as thought
provokers. Visual perception, colour theories and imagery stretched the
imagination.
The shock of Cubism was to be matched by the beginning of the modern
design movement in which functionalism was to lineage as an art form.
By the early 20th Century, Abstractism had reached its zenith, Wassely,
Kandinsky and Mon¼drian, made abstractions of patterns that had remarkable
similarity to emerging architecture, while Klee and Chagall placed individualism
above tradition.
It was at this time that the influence of Bauhaus that product of 1'920
Werkbund Germany in the pre-war period that established the linear relationship
between art, products and architecture. As Tom Wolfe says in his book "From
Bauhaus to Our House" - it was the age of 15 ms - Cubists, Fauvists,
Seccessionists - generating baffling art manifestos and joining the battle
to be the least bourgeois of all."
Constructivists, Neoplasticists, Elementalists, Futurists, sought the
purist vision of architecture. But still the Bauhaus thought of its architecture
as Art. In 1922, Walter Gropius, the guru of Modern Architecture dreamed
up a new motto for the Bauhaus Compound.- Art and Technology - A New
Unity - it begins here!
At the same time Dadaism (antiart) set out to destroy the vision of art.
It was not to be Dadaism which lasted 7 years as an art form and today
is a cult.
In New York, its leader Marcel Duchamp - established The Art of the Ready
Made by send¼ing a Urinal signed R. Mutt. (something akin to Caroma)
to the exhibition of the Society of Independant Artists entitled "The
Fountain".
He added a moustache to the Mona Lisa. Was Duchamp a cynic. In 1966,
the British Arts Council held a full scale exhibition of his work at
the TATE.
Shock came with Salvadore Dali and so to a revival of Murals (story).
But it is the mid twenthieth century that broke the well established
standard. POP ART was born in Australia.
If you can build a grand replica of a Potato, in plastic, leaked to bursting
point and call it "Big Baked Potato" and have it called Art
- you are breaking new ground.
Big Pineapples are our answer to an advertising exhibition.
Derived from the Advertising Trade the signs of America began merging
art with functional communication.
Some of my slides will illustrate how this also took place in other times
and artlines.
Andy Warhol gives us everyday products, reproduced on canvas as "art" but
is the art in the product or the commodity.
Thus this merging of Art with Commercial Art and packaging is now a respectable
liaison with the difference between the painting and the product of marginal
distinction.
Robert Wraight in The Art Game lists objects called from one issue of
an art magazine in illustrations of paintings, collages and sculptures.
It is worth quoting!
A double divan, an electric toaster, a commode, a bath, a lawn mower,
stags head, Landsan, paper flowers, doll, gas mask, glass eye, pills,
pins, ping pong balls, gas stoves, wine glass, chair, door handle," etc.
Art is today an auctioneers catalogue of products. While products are
expressions of those very values that depict them.
Thus we see the major influences on this theory of whether design is
Art to be firstly its
function (technology science)
secondly its form
thirdly its expression
The First deals with a whole range of scientific engineering and technical
elements in a context
of technical capability not directed to people's use.
A solution to this problem of an object can be expressed in these terms.
However, it may well be a nightmare of visual and ergonomic failures.
The Second deals with the user. It gives the factors that most designers
are familiar with man - machine, interface and how it works, functionalism
made possible to manufacture at controlled cost.
But if so all solutions might well draw the same forms, useful and simple.
Colour may well not be a factor.
The Third part deals with art and it has everything to do with its acceptance
by people, its success as a product and its relationship to society.
Both Design and Art have largely persued different but demonstrably parallel
courses in histo¼ry. Sometimes touching, sometimes crossing.
Both Art and Design are accepted consumer products. No one would deny
that the great cross¼ing took place in the 1930's in the Bauhaus, if
only to give vent to the idea of Art and Technology having common boundaries.
Pop Art and Modern Isms have shifted public acceptance of Art to products.
Barry Davis, Head of the Sydney College of the Arts, in A Lifetime of
Study, defined art in the kind of value-free way in which I have attempted
to define design - as that commodity traded in the art industry. An art
industry demonstrably exists, and exists to deal in this commodity called
art in much the same way as the automobile industry deals with cars.
An industry can be modelled in various ways, but a useful geometric simulation
is a pyramid with, in the case of art, eminent practitioners, critics,
collectors, commentators and historians more or less precariously at
the apex. The base is made up of pre-school finger-painters and other
dab¼blers, and the various layers of the solid can be identified easily.
The aforementioned tastemakers at the apex are in the business of determining
what represents the highest possible current achievement (and has the
greatest value) in art. Their decisions diffuse down the structure.
If you examine the art industry to understand it's relationship to design,
you are led to the recognition that those artefacts which by and large
are collectable, or to coin an awkward phrase, museumable, are in danger
of being taken up as a commodity by the art industry. Putting it anoth¼er
way, those designed objects which approximate most closely to art-form
stereotypes have the greatest potential to be treated as art. Thus three
dimensional images approximating to paintings, are especially suited
for treatment as art industry material. Other products of design decision-mak¼ing
such as city plans and naval architecture are far less likely to be given
the art treatment.
Fashion can be understood in terms of the industry model as the process
of change whereby, at each level of the industry, groups move to embrace
commodity with the essential characteristic of acceptable difference.
Cf. the breaking wave of the enclosed comix. Again fashions, i.e., changing
values, diffuse downward.
Products have become Art forms in themselves: LUGER - CAMERA
As Art remained enshrined in the rectangular canvas and two metre high
sculpture, so it was distant from design but complex desires of an image
conscious world, have driven art to new levels of application.
William Morris applied his wallpaper designs to give richness to workers'
dwellings. While to¼day, my 14 year old son, reveres the black box, digitalised
product that fulfil aspirations of space adventure.
REFERENCES
BLACK, Sir Misha, 1970. The Misha Black Australian Papers, Dunhill Industrial
Design Lectures. Trevor Wilson, publ., p. 10.
LAMPITT, L.F., 1972. The Concise Guide to the Arts, Wolfe Publishing
Ltd. POTTER, N., 1969. What is a Designer: Education and Practice, Studio
Vista.
3. TECHNOLOGY AND ART
Mr Patrick Pyers, Art Educator, Lecturer in Manual
Arts, Mt Gravatt College of Advanced Education.
This is about human values and how they find expression in the many and
varied cultures that man has created for himself in a variety of environments,
from arctic waste to tropic isle. Whatever the culture the environment
plays a central role in its development. Man is a complex, dynamic organism
subject to stimuli from the total set of environmental conditions which
surround him. His survival and well being are largely dependent on his
capacity to control and use the information he constructs from these
stimuli so that he maintains a balance between his physical and psychological
needs. Not only must he eat but he must learn to hunt or farm so that
he can eat again. If he cannot learn and attribute meaning and understanding
to his being then he travels warily and tenta¼tively on an unknown path.
For his sanity, and his self esteem, he must rationalize his existance;
he must give it meaning and purpose. Because he has little data and virtually
no experience of method he mixes pragmatism with magic and myth and these
become entwined in the tools, rituals and processes of social structure;
in many cases they become unseparable. Reality and rationality be¼come
largely a constructed pattern of beliefs achieved in concert with peers.
It is in this agreement that life is celebrated and given meaning. This
is basically what we call culture. It is important here to stress the
term agreement for it is in agreement, the commonality of beliefs and
practices, cele¼brated in ritual and ceremony, transmitted in language,
symbol and legend and manifest in artifacts that any group finds its
cultural identity. It is not race nor place. It is the integrated system
of learned behaviour patterns, structures and practices common within
the group.
In this accommodating of man's physical and psychological needs it is
interesting to note that biological evolution has developed two sides
to the human brain. Of course the brain is one unit and each portion
of it acts in association with the whole. However it has specialist areas
for different categories of information and different functions. Looking
over one's nose, the left side of the brain processes largely that information
which is logical and sequential. In our complex material society, this
is usually information based on verbally or numerally codified input.
The right side processes that which is intuitive and aesthetic. We have
come to see this as being, usually, based on other sensory input such
as sounds, images or feelings, but there is much evidence now to support
that this kind of stimulus has a cognitive function as well. The rational,
sane, acceptable (agreeable) person has been conditioned to keep these
two sides of himself in balance or check through a process of acculturation.
That is, he has been taught a code of behaviour, a way of thinking, seeing
and communicating in a socially acceptable way. This is largely achieved
through the use of a common language.
Very primitive animals have little or no brain and the most rudimentary
of actions such as recoil from heat are conditioned nervous responses
in a total biological system which is pre-pro¼grammed; there is little
or no decision making. With the growth of the brain, in concurrence with
the development of language, man has developed the capacity for thinking
and decision making in abstract terms. Mostly these terms form a grid
which defines relationships and ensures sequence but there are societies
of some aboriginal tribes, for instance, where the language, because
it is structur¼ally attuned in tense and case with a non linear ideology,
is not an adequate medium for logical, sequential reasoning. A literate
society has a stable set of symbols in which its ideals and philoso¼phies
are set down ih objective terms - in black and white. Such a society
must be, by necessity, very different to ope which is not literate and
in which its "culture" is dependent on subjective images, effigies,
legends and myths. In such societies the language is usually of such
structure that it exercises a less intrusive or controlling force on
sequential patterns of thought - and so we say "they think differently
to us", or are "hard to understand". Their being however
is more holistic and less subject to the rules of the thinking game prescribed
by our linear system of thought.
Moresby taudia edea hereva koikoi meraki las Moresby men they speak lies
a little bit not
Since we largely think in our spoken language, it is the rationalizing
vehicle of objective and subjective reasoning. It is the common medium
in which we construct our shared reality, a basis for agreement, and
thus an important ingredient and foundation for culture.
It is not surprising that societies or social structures have grown up
to resemble this tripartite model of subjective and objective forces
rationalized by a third segment structured to cater for both. Let me
refer you to the works of Daniel Bell, Professor of Sociology at Harvard
(Bell, 1973). "Society should be regarded as having three analytical
distinct dimensions ... ... expressive symbolism (painting, poetry, fiction)
... economy, technology and occupational system ... the polity ... the
resolution of conflict". Elsewhere, however, in the same text he
writes:
"
art and technology are not separate realms walled off from the other.
Art employs techne but for its own ends. Techne too, is a form of art
that bridges culture and social structure and in the process reshapes
both".
From Canada and the University of Saskatchewan T.H. Taylor (1968) draws
attention to what he calls the TRI-ORDINATE CURRICULUM
" a stable and enduring basis for educating citizens -
1. HUMANICS - or the study of the ends and aesthetic dimension of life.
2. TECHNOLOGICS - providing understanding of the means by which man achieves
practical tasks.
3. SOCIOMICS - a study of society or the institutional structure".
In Australia, Professor B.M. Bullivant's work (1971) prefaces the N.S.W.
Craft Syllabus for ele¼mentary schools
" Three fundemental characteristics ... set man apart from the rest of
the world. The first is his capacity to make tools. This is a necessary
precondition for the development of culture and has enabled him to achieve
dominance over all other animals. Secondly man learns how to make and
do things according to the customary beliefs of his culture. Third¼ly
man uses language."
From these works of learned sociologists and educators it is reasonable
that we might draw now a simple frame of reference which might represent
that which embodies `culture'. It is impor¼tant to recognise that such
a diagram or matrix could not be a prescriptive model but one which might
enable us to see better the content and the relationships between different
aspects of content encompassed within such a complex concept. Given that
the environment itself must be central to any cultural entity and would
touch any criteria within it, we could say that culture is made up of
constructed beliefs, practices and ideals which embody subjective and
objective material rationalized by a common belief system or social philosophy.
Subjective material could be seen to encompass painting, sculpture, music,
drama, dance, literature or any expressive outlet which is emotionally
or spiritually based and which offers choice of action. For our purposes
we shall call it art. Objective material could be seen to be those tried
and proven facts, which we have established through our interaction with,
and objective observation of, the environment (science) and which we
have used to safeguard and extend our physical and material well being.
This would include tech¼niques of hunting, farming, fabricating, organizing
or administering things to our own benefit - the means toward desired
ends - technology. The rationalizing force of the common belief system
seems best fitted with the name `polity' - a
body of institutions for the resolution of conflict. The polity could
be seen to encompass those aspects of social management which allow or
promote the exercise and exposition of cultural reinforcement; bodies
which institutionalize forms of commo¼nality or agreement - government,
law, religion, education, information ... or to objectivise them further;
parliament, the court, the church, the schools and the media. The management
of these instruments of social control is legitimated in government through
the process of politics.
Note that whilst the diagram illustrates the environment as being central
to the whole, each segment touches and influences each of the other two.
Any movement or change in one part causes changes and movement in the
others. Also we can now see the similarity between our two diagrams -
the subjective equates with art, the objective with technology and language
with the body politic. It is important to realize that this unified whole
is never quite balanced, is always dynamic and that the size shape and
importance of each segment varies and changes from culture to culture
and from time to time. Further, there should be no clear line or boundary
between one segment and another as we shall see in the examination of
some different cultures which were so united and holistic that it seems
quite inappropriate to separate any policy from practice or any process
from product. For example, the Motu word for work is `gaukari' and the
word for art is the same. The Greek word for art is the previously encountered
`techne'.
As stated previously the frame of reference we have drawn is not a totally
prescriptive one; the boundaries are flexible; it is simply a guide.
Some criteria may seem to claim a place in more than one segment. For
instance language itself, if we follow the definition of technology as
being the means to desired ends, could be seen as a technology - a means
of communication. It is also difficult to separate and place concepts
such as in the above reference when they are extended from law to courts
to police, or from education to bureaucracy to schools. Note however
that such ex¼tension always involves a movement from the abstract/general
to the concrete/particular.
As the police are the executive of the law and schools the instruments
of education then sorcery is the technology of magic, and witchcraft
the practice of evil. Because we automatically align the means with the
end it follows that there are good and bad technologies just as there
are good and bad ends to be achieved, - and technology, far from being
the neutral tool we have been led to believe it to be, takes sides. We
would do well to avoid this tendency for in a linear, progres¼sive ideology
this makes technology an end in itself and we could (and do?) find ourselves
in a technological fix. That is - all problems are technical and require
technical answers.
Technology must not be seen as a mere influence on culture, it is an
integral part of it: but we must be careful not to overvalue its importance,
for in the cultural overview it remains only part of the matrix. To give
it the status of an overriding philosophy would place the whole framework
out of balance.
Many different aspects of society or culture might be extended in a similar
way to that illu¼strated above and some of the content criteria may be
placed in different segments playing different roles but this should
be seen as a positive feature toward wholeness or unity. The `wheel'
should be balanced and as we extend this concept in history we shall
see that once a system becomes weighted toward one set of values and
imposes its will on the others, (usually through collusion with the polity),
then the resultant instability leads to a downfall and realignment. The
examples of Rome and Wittenberg are fine models to illustrate this point
but we have not time or space enough to extend them here.
Very early societies depended for their security on a social order based
on spiritual and moral law which transcended the practical and `economic'.
(Economic is in inverted commas because it is a comparatively new concept
being itself a product of the recent industrial era). In any examination
of early societies it is obvious that the moral order (what we should
do) always exercised predomi¼nance over the physical order (what we could
do) because that moral order was based on the welfare, spiritual and
physical, of the group - the tribe - the larger set, and not the individual
or the clan. This moral order took its power through its identification
with the spiritual and super¼natural and gave an aura of sacredness to
early social organisations as any examination of their art will show.
The emergence of religious movements sympathetic to materialism in the
development of Western Society (Christianity generally, and protestant
Methodism in particular) sponsored the growth of science and its application
to secular mechanistic ends and saw a decline in the pre¼eminence of
spiritual and aesthetic values in the governing morality. Indeed it has
seen the forma¼tion of a new, but not so holy, an alliance with technics
- and the coming of the `New Industrial State' - the Global Economy.
By cultivating the sequential, logical reasoning essential to technical
progress we have neglected that part of us necessary for the full flowering
of our humanity and we could do well now to examine ourselves in the
light of this new perspective; that is, the nature of the psyche and
the environmental structures we have created in its image.
Having embraced technical progress, through technical process (the means
and the end togeth¼er) we cannot now think the alternative thought ...
will not compute ... "Technology is a political instrument and becomes
an end in itself" (Jones 1982).
At the social organizational level we have institutionalized our commitment
to material prog¼ress in a hierarchial system of commodity production
and consumption (economics) in which the instruments of public utility
serve basically to preserve the system itself. This is nowhere more obvious
than in the field of public education where occupational technical instruction
grows daily at the expense of general education and we see not only the
division of our schools on the basis of sex, affluence and standards,
but also, and increasingly from the first post primary year, into spe¼cialist
occupational areas based on a capacity to process codified information
(words and numbers). Such streaming is a prerequisite for the technological
society for as Gailbraith says "aesthetic achievement is beyond
the reach of, the industrial system and in substantial measure in conflict
with it" (Gailbraith 1967). The eminent French neurologist Henri
Laborit puts it differently:
" If the social structure rests on the existence in relations between dominant
and dominat¼ed and on social advancement, which in term rests on hierarchical
promotion in an occu¼pational framework that creates consumer goods rather
than new structures based upon knowledge of what we are, then the means
of reaching this aim may well be expansion and apparently endless economic
growth. This is how the diseases of excess arise, as well as the socio
economic and ecological disasters which we are beginning to observe."
"
... After spending centuries scientifically (that is to say experimentally)
studying inani¼mate matter, it is time to start studying, teaching, generalizing
and disseminating the structural laws of living matter and extend these
studies to human sets" (Laborit 1977)
For too long we have modelled our society on the demands of an overriding
psyche condi¼tioned by the achievements of the mechanical era and thus
favouring a pragmatic technological orientation. The hierarchial bureaucracies
of our institutions of social administration and economic management
are the artifacts of an era when two thirds of our current scientific
knowledge was unknown. The great body of information comes to us today
from theoretical science, especially micro electronics and biology, disciplines
which offer us models for new kinds of social structures based on the
open dissemination of information and cooperation rather than that of
institutional¼ized thermo-dynamics and competition. Fortunately there
is evidence that we are already moving in this direction and are taking
up the challenge of realignment.
This paper is no call for another craft based Utopia or retreat from
Science and rationalism, quite the reverse, it is a plea for a balanced
distribution of our talents and a reordering of our values in line with
our full human needs and capacities; and that includes the spiritual
and aesthetic as well as the physical and economic. Science like art
is a way of looking, a process of investiga¼tion. Through them nature
has blessed us with a kind of binocular vision. A proper perspective
of values however is only possible with both eyes open. To close either
eye is to lose the depth of vision necessary for survival.
REFERENCES
BELL, D., 1973. Technology and the Frontiers of Knowledge, Doubleday.
BULLIVANT, B.M., 1971. N.I.C.S.S.E. Bulletin No. 5. Content in Culture.
GAILBRAITH, J.K., 1967. The New Industrial State, Houghton Mifflin. JONES,
B., 1982. Sleepers Wake - New Edition, Oxford.
LABORIT, H., 1977. Decoding the Human Message, Allison and Busby.
TAYLOR, T.H., 1968. Education and the Technostate, Journal of Educational
Thought Vol. 2 No. 3.
4. "AUSTRALIAN PRODUCTION IN RELATION TO WORLD ACCEPTANCE"
Mr
Robert Dunlop, Technologist and Furniture Manu¼facturer, Past-President,
Queensland Woodcrafters' Guild.
ABSTRACT
The need to understand furniture production that will be accepted overseas
and create an export market. This is governed by our ability to design
and produce quality and the fact that we have a huge treasure of design
themes in Australia that the world is begging to see and appreciate.
The lack of foresight on the part of producers who do not try to upgrade
their production, thereby denying designers the opportunity to express
and demonstrate their ability. Putting these new designs and ideas into
production while having in mind World Markets and the gamble one has
to accept if you are to be successful. Proving a product is essential,
as also the selection of materials, before placing it on the market can
be arduous but very worth while. Presentation of the products to your
overseas customers in relation to costs and showmanship, and a professional
attitude that instills confidence in your new market area. Keeping abreast
of design and demand for the product you present. The financial burden
that has to be accepted and the lack of risk capital in this country
and the subsequent loss to Australia of designs and ideas leaving here
to be developed by others and eventually sold back to Australia.
This topic can be divided into four major subject areas:
1. Design furniture & special fittings and understanding its need
in production. Looking for the theme in Australia.
2. Deciding on the gamble of producing a new design product. Putting
into production with a world market in mind.
3. Proving the product Selling overseas
4. Acceptance by the world market
Production ability ... Financial and physical.
The production of furniture in relation to design and quality in Australia
has left a lot to be desired. First in design, which generally comes
from a glossy page of an overseas magazine and the attitude is that we
can make it from this print with some alterations to suit our production
and of course we will make it cheaper (in inverted commas). This usage
of an established design has two degrading factors:
1. We never produce a better product than the one shown, and;
2. We deprive the talents of a designer in Australia who would be well
able (if given the opportuni¼ty) to create as good if not better than
the stolen design.
I will not go into details today on copyright which is a very serious
factor. However, the ability of our own designers is retarded by the
lack of opportunity. The final accounting is, how can we face a world
market with a copied product.
Australia has been sea-locked for centuries and the pure design themes
that exist in this coun¼try are limitless. We have to develop our own
design identity and the good part about this is the world is ready to
accept good design and quality.
In 1974 ... Tom Larsen came to our factory with an idea and a glimmer
of a theme. He loved the outback and our rugged sun burnt country. So
the squatter's theme was adopted along with aluminium and knotty pine.
We spent a lot of money and many long months in prototyping the furniture
along with a large number of "knockers". "Who were we
to think that we could change the thinking of people in their attitude
to furniture ... etc... ... But we perservered and won through. The design
and production was not fully accepted at the time by Australia. It took
only 20 minutes to sell it in Denmark. While showing the agent a leather
chair ... he was aghast at the barbed wire marks, ticks and brand marks
in the leather ... which he said his customers would not accept. Australian
pine ... aluminium and design we told him ... would not allow us to use
any other leather. That is what Australian conditions produced. It was
honest and had the character we believed it should express. He sold the
chairs ... as a pure Australian product. I repeat ... the themes in Australia
are limitless and the world is begging for us to open up.
The gamble you take with a new design has to be boldly accepted. Believe
in your product and show it. You can always be wrong but I like the saying "I
may not always be right but I am never wrong". To produce for a
world market you have to first get your design perfected and the techni¼cal
problems have to be resolved. In the case of furniture it is best if
the pieces are able to be knocked down for shipment. Your selection of
fabric has to be compatible with the country you are trying to find an
export market for. Light and dark timbers vary from country to country.
The Arab States love natural skins and fur and
the units have to look plush and expensive. England likes warm dark timber
and velvet type upholstery as also Denmark ... but the latter has a varied
acceptance of all covers if it shows good design in line and colour.
The product has to be easily assembled; a mass of bolts and screws not
only over-awes people but causes great confusion. Also with ones ability
to understand instructions written by experts.
The quality of the product is as important as the design. You must not
have any feature that can be criticised by your agent or customer. We
are fortunate being Australian as we have an inbuilt innovative factor
in our nature ... given to us by our forebears ... because of the great
cosmopolitan background and thinking we inherited. "Story of Farmers
Gate".
I was trained by a Charles Kuffer from Switzerland and started work with
him in The Valley in 1937. We worked mostly in solid timber and we built
furniture that would last indefinitely. He selected timber for its weight
and quality ... even to the figure inherent in the grain and he even
rejected cupboard sides because the grain had too much movement. Everything
was dovetailed ... tennoned ... mitred ... dowelled and clamped. Nails
were used only to attach glass beads and today I am still making this
type of furniture ... but with one big difference ... I use machinery
that reduces days and hours of work to minutes and to compete in a world
market you must understand your machine to the point where it will duplicate
the hand work "almost" and put your product in a quality situation.
The additional ability needed to operate and control these machines is
not un¼derstood by the general public when they consider a cabinet maker
of today ... his ability also has to include technology involving digital
electronic machine controls.
It is an incredible feeling to watch a moulding appear on the edge of
a piece of timber as it passes the shaped knives and to be able to adjust
the cutting edges to five parts of a millimetre. The furniture we were
fortunate enough to be involved with in the High Court in Canberra was
of the highest standard of precision at which we have worked. Two conference
tables we made ... each weighing a ton ... were 2900mm in diameter and
135mm thick at the centre and 100mm at the outside edges. Each table
was in seven segments (seven States of Australia) and had to be demoun¼table
for obvious reasons. The specification from the Government stated they
would not allow any deviation from the shown dimensions and the segments
had to be fitted together by hand pressure only ... then bolted into
a solid top. To be able to produce such a piece of furniture one has
to be a tradesman first and also an engineer to keep within ''/zmm tolerances
... and only by being able to control our machines and knowing how timber
will react to different moisture conditions of Brisbane, Canberra and
air conditioning can you produce the required commission. This furniture
was designed by Tony Wolfenden from Melbourne and the result of his ability
will be around for hundreds of years. European and American furniture
has great precision and is a joy to touch and use.
Proving your product is essential as you cannot replace pieces 10,000
klm away ... and if you are unlucky enough to have this happen ... the
replacement must to simple and easily carried out by the local agent.
A well produced piece of furniture ... quality checked ... does not break
down and becomes your advertisement rather than your problem.
Technology in furniture production overseas is far above the Australian
ability to both under¼stand and exploit the world markets. We tend to
look at their production methods and machines ... select what we feel
we can use and adapt it to our local market needs. Whilst in Europe and
Ameri¼ca they gear up for world markets both with design and productivity.
The manager of "Ulferts" in Sweden who's firm employs 700 people
and have 60 Pentencian trucks to move his daily production made a comment
to me ... "Son ... if you want to be good at this furniture business
... `box it' ". He qualified this by saying if you have to ship
furniture 100 klm or 20,000 klm ... the packing is the same. Shipping
distance is only relative to a few extra dollars. This firm produces
some 4,000 items per day and mainly with automated machinery.
Recently in America ... I visited the Neocon Furniture Mart in Chicago
which is staged in June each year for 4 days. The building is 18 floors
of permanent showrooms and the presentation is inspiring. Some firms
spend a million dollars for the presentation of their products for the
4 days. The designs are far ahead of anything in Australia ... including
period carved furniture and fin¼ishes. Chicago is packed with buyers
from world wide sources and it is one big shopping spree, The Fair offers
the greatest range of products I have ever seen anywhere including the
Milan Fair. The designs cater for future usage of all computer systems
and software and is usually capable of accomodating all brands of computer
equipment. To date in Australia ... our office open plan system would
have no designed ducts to take this equipment. In fact, a comment was
made of another Australian exhibitor's office system, "Why
would you bring that here? We made that 15 years ago". I had a mere
$10,000.00 worth of furniture which lasted about 10 minutes ... but truly
I was embarrassed by our poor showing. We do not lack quality and this
point was made very clear ... but we are a long way back from the winning
post in relation to production design and presenta¼tion.
How can we change this situation? First we have to give our designers
the opportunity to show their ability and they then have the responsibility
to produce that "something" Australian that is good enough
for world acceptance. We don't have an Australian image. We have to create
it our¼selves and now. The art factor in which I feel Australia has achieved
world acclaim is part of this design brief ... and designers ... you
can achieve this goal ... by searching the theme locked in the cobweb
corners or our country.
Manufacturers have to stop glueing and welding blocks onto an existing
frame and tying it down with No.9 fence wire ... with the comment ... "That's
good enough". Businesses have to give over from the traditional
employer being designer, promoter, tradesman and public relations man¼ager
and give the opportunity to those who deserve the chance to show their
talents and be prepared to back them with the resources available. The
tradesmen and women who produce these items should adopt the true pride
in their work and give their best. Work is not just putting in the hours.
You are dishonest if you work a lifetime doing work you dislike. If you
love your job it is not work ... it becomes pleasure and they pay you
to do it. It is a sorry situation when the Austra¼lian Government cannot
find tradesmen to make some of the items they wish to puchase. We do
have the talent in this country ... but for many reasons we are allowing
the basic honesty of crafts¼manship slide into oblivion. The master tradesmen
and women in this country you could count on your fingers ... but that
is another subject.
The financial ability of Australian firms to cope with a world market
is pitiful. I do not think I have to enlarge on some of our best designs
and ideas that have been forced to leave this country because finance
for production is non-existant. We have to stop this waste because it
is degrading and erodes the opportunities for many facets of production
in design manufacture and promotion. We are a sorry country right now
because we don't buy and demand Australian products. Things are not dear
... even though you will argue this point. If by not buying quality items
produced here ... and costs a man his job ... who then will buy the product
you make? ... And who will be around to train the new generation in skills
that no longer exist because that Australian product was not selected
... and the firm that made it has no profits to produce and compete for
a world market.
We should be as intensely Australian as we can ... make high quality
in design and production ... if Australians will only put that spending
dollar into an Australian product ... without that support the high quality
producing manufacturer will no longer teach the younger generation and
we will lose all we have gained in craftsmanship and we surely will be
a sun burnt country.
Concluding Section
Proceedings were summarized by Dr. L Lowe, Director, Science Policy Research
Centre and Senior Lecturer in Science, Technology and Science, Griffith
Univer¼sity.
Integrating Art, Science and Technology
INTRODUCTION
Some of the features common to technology and the arts are discussed.
When these common features are compared with contemporary science, it
is apparent that the "two cultures" are re¼combining. Science,
like technology and art, is a human activity and subject to societal
influence. At their best, all these human activities are capable of uplifting
adventures of the spirit; they are also capable of being debased to the
mundane, the mercenary or the destructive.
TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS
As has been shown by other conributions to the Interlink I Symposium,
it is necessary to revise the common beliefs that art is purely creative
and technology is purely utilitarian. The arts have a utilitarian role
in our society (Siebert 1983; Gilfedder 1983), while technology undeniably
has a creative element (Bryce 1983). In a broad sense, technology and
the arts are outflowings of contem¼porary culture, as can be seen from
the historical record. The pyramids of Egypt were manifesta¼tions of
the dominant culture in that country at that time, just as were the associated
paintings and sculptures. The English canal sysytem was just as clearly
a part of the culture of eighteenth century England as the poetry of
Blake or the music of Handel.
The same argument applies to the culture of the present day. Major technological
achievements, such as the Sydney Opera House, the Humber Bridge or the
Space Shuttle, are repre¼sentative of the culture of our time in just
the same way as the writing of Solzhenitsyn, the sculp¼ture of Moore
or the music of Cage. Even such prosaic items as motor vehicles or plastic
bottles combine the utilitarian with the aesthetic, with the ever-present
possibility of perceived deficiencies in either area.
There are also important parallels in the evaluation of art and technology.
People perceive a work of art or a technology through the lenses of their
values and attitudes. Thus an innovative technology, such as Concorde,
or an innovative work of art, such as "Blue Poles", will inevitably
be seen in different ways by different people. Opposition to a new technology
will sometimes sim¼ply be an expression of general attitudes or values,
in the same way as hostility to a work of art or a new musical composition.
The parallel is not complete, however, because technology has an important
additional dimension. Technology is a purposive activity, with an aim
of changing the world in some way. This leads to a second reason for
opposition to a particular technology; some people may not ap¼prove of
the proposed change to the existing world. The disapproval may stem from
a perception of a directly detrimental effect, as with bank tellers whose
jobs are threatened by new equipment. It may stem from a perception of
an indirectly detrimental effect, as with environmentalists cam¼paigning
to save Fraser Island from sand-mining or the Franklin River from a dam.
It may stem from a more general moral concern, as with much of the opposition
to abortion and uranium min¼ing.
Thus there are important parallels between technology and the arts. Both
have creative elements; both have utilitarian elements. Both are outflowings
of the culture of the time and place. Both are evaluated in a subjective
way, according to the values and attitudes of the observer. An important
additional factor in the evaluation of a technology stems from its purposive
nature: those who approve of the purpose can clearly not be expected
to have the same view of a proposed technology as those who oppose the
purpose.
THE CHANGING VIEW OF SCIENCE
Recent years have seen a profound re-evaluation of the nature of science.
Until twenty years ago, science was generally seen as the detached, unemotional,
objective and socially-neutral investi¼gation of the natural world, leading
to the accumulation of a stable body of eternal truths. While that view
is still held by many scientists, an increasing number of observers now
accept some or all of the following assertions (Biggins and Henderson
1978; Easlea 1973; Chalmers 1976).
1. Social factors influence the direction of science.
Modern science is largely dependent on funding from the public purse.
As a result, social atti¼tudes (as reflected by the political process)
influence the setting of priorities for research expendi¼ture. The scale
and emphasis of funding in turn influences the direction and nature of
research. While this is particularly true in the expensive sciences such
as particle physics, astronomy and nuclear fusion, it is also of importance
in other areas. Examples in contemporary Australian science are the stimulus
to energy research provided by the establishment of NERDDC, and the steady
growth in biomedical research as the NH&MRC budget has increased
in real terms, compared with the decline in basic research with the increasing
inability of the ARGS to fund proposals of merit.
Social attitudes also determine which areas of research are, at any given
time, rewarded with high public esteem; the opposite side of that coin
is that socail attitudes determine which types of research are not acceptable
on ethical grounds. As an example of the latter point, in our society
it
is generally regarded as ethically unacceptable to pursue research which
would endanger the life of another individual, but it is regarded as
ethically acceptabel to pursue research into such techniques for mass
murder as the neutron bomb. There are also extreme cases of research
being politically prohibited: obvious examples are evolutionary biology
in the USSR while Lysenko held sway, and "Jewish physics" in
Hitler's Germany.
2. Scientific observation is theory-bound and affected by subjective
influences.
Consider, as an example, our attempts to understand the nature of the
electron. An experiment designed on the expectation that the electron
might behave as a wave, such as a diffraction experiment, will confirm
that expectation. On the other hand, an experiment designed on the expec¼tation
that the electron might behave as a particle, such as an experiment on
the photo-electric effect, will confirm that different expectation. Theoretical
beliefs play a part in framing the ques¼tions which science asks the
natural world, and the questions asked influence the answers.
Subjective influences also play a part in the interpretation of the "answers" produced
by an experiment or observation. Sometimes the pre-conceptions of the
observer lead to an honest misin¼terpretation of uncertain data; the
conclusion that there were canals on Mars is an example. In recent times,
there has also been a marked increase in the number of detected instances
of data being "selected" or "massaged" to suit the
pre-conceptions of the observer. Such activity ranges across a wide spectrum,
from the omission of awkward results as "experimental error" to
outright fraud (Broad and Wade 1982).
3. The idea of a universal scientific method is a myth.
The most widely accepted version of this argument was put forward in
the opening address to the Interlink I Symposium (Fletcher 1983):
" A true scientist does not proceed entirely by the scientific method,
any more than a true composer proceeds entirely by the rules of harmony
..."
In other words, the scientific method is used most of the time, but science
also involves imagination and a "feel" for the subject. The
story has been told of Rutherford, on being asked for reasons for a hypothesis
he was advancing, saying "Reasons? Reasons? I feel it in my water!" (Cockburn
and Ellyard 1981).
An extension of the argument is the view of Feyerabend that most scientific
advances are made by ignoring the scientific method, so that there is
effectively a choice between the scientific method and the advancement
of science. This argument suggests that genuine advances are made only
when the scientist breaks free of the shackles of the contemporary received
wisdom (Feyerabend 1975).
4. Scientific knowledge is not a stable body of eternal truths.
Great advances in science, such as Copernican astronomy, Newtonian mechanics,
special relativity, quantum mechanics or plate tectonics, involve a fundamental
change to a new paradigm (Kuhn 1962). In the cases of advances such as
these, there is complete discontinuity between the old paradigm and the
new. In some cases, such as special relativity, the old paradigm (Newtonian
me¼chanics) becomes a limited special case of the new, broader theory.
In other cases, such as plate tectonics, the new paradigm completely
supplants the old, thus rendering obsolete work which had previously
been regarded as reputable science. Scientific knowledge is therefore
not a stable body of
eternal verities, but a sequence of different world-views, often separated
by fundamental discon¼tinuities.
5. The acceptance or rejection of a paradigm is not entirely a rational
process.
As Kuhn has shown, those who have spent a scientific lifetime working
within the framework of an established paradigm are inevitably reluctant
to see the overthrow of that paradigm (Kuhn 1962). In some cases, the
new interpretation only gains general acceptance with the eventual demise
of the proponents of the old view. Even distinguished scientists have
been observed to be reluctant to accept new paradigms. Einstein was never
able to accept the basic consequence of quantum me¼chanics, that there
is a class of events about which only probabilistic statements can be
made. Another example was the determined defence of the "steady-state" cosmology,
in the total absence of any observable supporting evidence, long after
the accumulation of overwhelming evidence for the "big-bang" theory.
There are many other examples of values and non-rational factors playing
a part in the acceptance or rejection of paradigms, particularly in the
social sciences (Easlea 1973).
6. Science is no longer the passive observation of nature.
In such areas as particle physics, nuclear physics and genetic research,
science is now firmly in the area of perturbing the real world. The experiments
in high-energy physics at laboratories such as CERN produce "particles" which
are not observed except under those contrived conditions. Nu¼clear fission
experiments have been producing new elements, not known to exist naturally,
for over forty years. Experiments in gene-splicing are capable of producing
new organisms, with characteris¼tics different from those of any known
organism. In these areas at least, science has acquired one of the defining
characteristics of technology: it changes the natural world.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS
There is one important distinction between science and technology which
should be noted. There is often a feeling in science that elegance is
to be valued, that "it is sometimes better to be wrong with elegance
than right with dullness" (Fletcher 1983). There is not much value
in a tech¼nology which is elegantly wrong: a statuesque bridge which
cannot cope with the design load, or a plastic vehicle which deforms
under load so that the doors cannot be closed, or a new drug which is
harmful to unborn children. The utilitarian imperative must be pre-eminent
in the case of technololgy.
There are, nevertheless, other important links between science and technology
or the arts. Ex¼perimental work in "big science" requires the
co-operative efforts of many different people, having different skills
and areas of expertise: a common characteristic of technology, and one
that also applies to some forms of art, such as opera. It has also been
argued that great advances in science are, like great achievements in
technology or the arts, spiritually uplifting manifestations of human
creativity. A report by the Australian Science and Technology Council
quoted with approval an assertion by Hailsham that "pure science
is intrinsically as much a branch of culture as history, philosophy or
poetry" (ASTEC 1978).
Thus science can be seen as having many characteristics in common with
technology and the arts. It is a human activity which may be spiritually
uplifting or mundane; it may be used to enlarge or restrict human horizons;
it may have effects which are liberating or repressive. For a
short period of human history, a particular view of science obscured
these characteristics. It has recently been argued that the new paradigm
of science is not only a more accurate description of modern science,
but also an important emphasis if science is to assist in the task of
coping with the growing problems of accommodating human civilization
within the complex eco-system of the plan¼et (Capra 1982).
REFERENCES
ASTEC 1978. The Direct Funding of Basic Research (AGPS: Canberra)
BIGGINS, D.R. and HENDERSON, I.D. 1978. 'On the Role of Social Studies
of Science in Science Teaching', Australian Science Teachers' Journal,
24 (1): 53-64
BROAD, W. and WADE, N. Betrayers of the Truth (Simon and Schuster: New
York) BRYCE, M. 1983. 'Is Design Art?', Interlink I Symposium, Brisbane
CAPRA, F. 1983. The Turning Point (Fontana Paperbacks: London)
CHALMERS, A. 1976. What Is This Thing Called Science? (Queensland University
Press: Brisbane) COCKBURN, S. and ELLYARD, D. 1981. Oliphant (Axiom Books:
Adelaide)
EASLEA, B. 1973. Liberation and the Aims of Science (Chatto and Windus:
London)
FEYERABEND, P. 1975. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchist Theory of
Knowledge (New Left Books:
London)
FLETCHER, N.H. 1983. Opening Address, Interlink I Symposium, Brisbane
GILFEDDER, J. 1983. `Music and Science in the Total Culture', Interlink
I Symposium, Brisbane KUHN, T.S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago University Press: Chaicago) SIEBERT, D. 1983. `The Role of the
Artist in Society', Interlink I Symposium, Brisbane
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