Life from geometry

One of the things always fascinated me about Escher’s work is his representation of infinity. Infinity plays a big role in many things I do such as in cosmology, and here [Development II] we have a picture in which he has a pattern of hexagons which recedes, or gets small and smaller, until infinity is represented by the infinite crowing at the central point. There’s another feature here where you have this very geometrical structure in the middle...and as you work you way out in the picture out these hexagons become living creatures. Something Escher was always playing with — this life coming out of inanimate geometry if you like.

Roger Penrose The Art of The Impossible: M C Escher and Me

Thanks to LC

Integrative experience

Carl Jung and many before him would call the integrative experience my soul, but not wanting to claim too much or depend on a word worn smooth with use, I prefer to call it my poem-self. The fusion of my three ordinary states of being heightens each one of them, and produces an excitement frequently so intense that I can’t bear it for too long at a stretch, but must get up and run outside for rests from it, then come back for some more. The poem I write during this experience will contain the experience, the more strongly the better the poem is, and will continue to contain it after the trance has left me. What I create, really, is a new body made of words and the potent arrangement of words, in which my soul as it was at a particular moment will go on existing.

A Defence of Poetry by Les Murray (1998).

In Murray's account, the three states of being are the waking consciousness mind, the occult mind of dreams, and the body.


Image: Wright Brothers' Glider Test, 1902 via NASA

Ars Nova

It will be fruitful, and great fun, to use modern resources of signal processing and computer graphics to translate the beautiful concepts and equations of physics into new forms of art. Then, physicists will be able to bring their visual cortices fully to bear on them, and people in general will be able to admire and enjoy them. In the future, artists and scientists will work together more together, and create new works of extraordinary beauty... 

Artificial intelligence...offers strange new possibilities for the life of mind. An entity capable of accurately recording its state could purposefully enter loops to relive especially enjoyable episodes, for example. A quantum mind could experience the superposition of “mutually contradictory” states or allow different parts of its wave function to explore vastly different scenarios in parallel. Being based on reversible computation, such a mind could revisit the past at will and could be equipped to superpose past and present.

How Physics Will Change—and Change the World—in 100 Years by Frank Wilczek

In a longer version of the article (pdf), Wilczek adds:

I have described a future in which people know much more about, and have vastly greater power over, the physical world than we do today. Paradoxically, perhaps, I think that this will make them more sensitive to gaps in their knowledge, and ambitious to accomplish more...Such emergent humility reflects not so much modesty, as largeness of vision.

Image via APOD

'On the materiality of colour'

Here are some images relating to Materiality of Colour: from Neolithic Earth Colours to Contemporary Interference Pigments, a seminar convened by Antoni Malinowski.

This is pigment timeline discussed by Jo Volley and colleagues from UCL (see note [1])

Here is an image that uses Indian Yellow, one of the pigments discussed by Ruth Siddall. Traditionally, this was made from the boiled urine of cattle fed exclusively on mango tree leaves.

This is the colour library in Venice, described by Malinowski as one of his favourite places

And this is from a Color-coordinate system from a 13th-century account of rainbows by Hannah Smithson et al. [2]

Notes

[1] I have turned the image upside down so that the present time is at the top and the lower down you go the further back in time you go. This is to reflect an idea, expressed at the seminar, that the pigments 'arise from the earth'

[2]  Historical European models of the spectrum can be found here or here

Threads of Light

When San shamans enter the spirit realm, a particular kind of vision closely parallels the painted line. They report seeing bright and iridescent sinuous lines along which they can walk or simply glide. They also treat these lines as ropes that they can grasp and climb as they ascend to the spirit realm in the sky. The lines they see can thus be both paths and cords. Researchers call them ‘threads of light’. Before going up to the sky, some San shamans say they enter a hole in the ground, travel underground for some distance and then emerge in another part of the country before they climb up to God’s house in the sky. There they plead for the sick and entreat God to assist them in their hunts.

San Rock Art by David Lewis-Williams (2011)

The landscape-color of heart-mind

To feel [in classical Chinese] is constructed of the character for “heart-mind” and the one for “the blue-green color of landscape”, a remarkable concept of color that includes both the green of plants and trees and nearby mountains, and the blue of distant mountains and sky. Hence, the “heart-mind in the presence of landscape-color” or “the landscape-color of heart-mind.”

from Hunger Mountain by David Hinton

Image: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains Wikimedia

"Art is not a mirror..."

Art is not a mirror. Art is a translation of that which you do not know.

— Marlene Dumas

Chromatic typewriter by Tyree Callahan

Desert

It is only in the desert that we can pay a visit to death and afterwards return to the land of the living.

from an essay by Ibrahim al-Koni for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014).

The desert is not a place, writes al Koni:

A place has preconditions, and one of the preconditions is water, and the lack of water in the desert makes it impossible to settle there, so the desert becomes a place of absence, a place that is the shadow of another place...

Image: New Desert Myths I (detail) by David Parker.

Here is a view on Mars, January 2015

Sirens

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence never.

from The Silence of the Sirens by Franz Kafka, quoted by Marina Warner in an essay for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014)

Image: Siren XXXV by David Parker

Awe-full lines

I found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky. Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced—without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they “composed” themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere.

from Praeterita by John Ruskin (1885, recalling 1842). Ruskin writes elsewhere:

Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.

Image of European aspen by Willow

Speed

He has made a picture with real rain, behind which is real sunshine, and you expect a rainbow every minute. Meanwhile, there comes a train down at you, really moving at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and which the reader had best make haste to see, lest it should dash out of the picture, and be away up Charing Cross through the wall opposite. All these wonders are performed with means not less wonderful than the effects are. The rain … is composed of dabs of dirty putty slapped on to the canvas with a trowel; the sunshine scintillates out of very thick, smeary lumps of chrome yellow. The shadows are produced by cool tones of crimson lake and quiet glazings of vermilion. Although the fire in the steam engine looks as if it were red, I am not prepared to say that it is not painted with cobalt and pea-green. And as for the manner in which the ‘Speed’ is done, of that the less said the better – only it is a positive fact that there is a steamcoach going fifty miles an hour. The world has never seen anything like this picture.

William Thackeray on Rain, Steam, Speed by J.M.W.Turner (1844), quoted by John Barrell

"Capable of...conscious wandering"

[The product of] a mind no longer tethered solely to the here and now, but capable of a uniquely abstract form of conscious 'wandering' 

— David Edelman on patterns on a shell thought to have been etched by Homo erectus about 500,000 years ago.

Image by Wim Lustenhouwer/VU University Amsterdam, via CBC

21st century sublime

In a post on Rationally Speaking last year, Steve Neumann asked what can be sublime in the 21st century?

He argued that nature could no longer supply it, and "our feeling for the sublime, if it is to happen at all, will have to come more and more from culture." His chosen example was the music of...Led Zeppelin, and specifically their live performances.

But can the likes of Pagey, Percy, Jonsey and Bonso be the only trigger?

Turn back for a moment to Burke's 1757 treatise.  As an admirably concise video reminds us,  a feeling of the sublime is something that affects us viscerally despite the danger.  The sublime moves us deeply because it is tied to the possibility of pain. [1] When we experience the sublime we exercise the nerves that could save our lives in a genuinely threatening situation.

We may need those nerves when facing manmade effects in nature such as rapid climate change. For that reason, I'd say this sequence from Chasing Ice can arouse feelings of the sublime, as well as being scary.




Note [1] (added 4 December) "The physiology of fear and attraction [can be] so similar that we sometimes cannot tell them apart," writes Sy Montgomery.

"A world in which everything matters"

I noticed something about Angelico’s paintings that I hadn’t before. It had to do with the way his figures used their hands. His is a vision of the world as it might appear through the eyes of a compassionate God: a world in which everything has existential value and nothing is without meaning. What makes his paintings so moving is that the people in them share that vision. You see this in the way they reach out for one other, and touch everything gently, with infinite care, as though it were priceless. With every touch they seem to affirm the sacredness of the world. Henry James had understood this from the start: ‘No later painter,’ he wrote in Italian Hours, ‘learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could conceive – a passionate pious tenderness … his conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving and being loved.’ 

...It struck me that this is what faith is – not a set of propositions you hold to be true, or a set of rules you follow, but an atmosphere you live in, that changes your experience of the world, your sense of what and how things are.

—  Pelagia Horgan

Image: detail of Fra Angelico's The Last Judgement (1425-30)

A dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension

Among many extraordinary images in Cosmigraphics by Michael Benson (2014) is a seldom-reproduced depiction of the black void before the light of creation from Utriusque comsi... by Robert Fludd. [1]

Benson notes a similarity to Kazimir Malevich's Black Square on a White Ground (1915) [2]

Anselm Kiefer pays homage to Fludd in works such as The Secret Life of Plants (1987-2014). Equally striking, to me at least, is Kiefer's For Ingeborg Bachmann: the Renewed Orders of the Night. [3]  In this work, hundreds (perhaps) of small diamonds embedded in a large sheet of textured lead shine like stars as one approaches, and like rainbows as one gets even closer.  It seems like something that could emerge out of Fludd's primal black.


Notes

[1] A selection of more frequently reproduced images at Public Domain Review

[2] As Julian Bell notes, Malevich declared:

I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things...
I have released all the birds from the eternal cage...
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour!...
I have overcome the impossible...

[3] I can't at present find a reproduction of this image.