PROJETS / STATUT ESTHETIQUE DE L'ART TECHNOLOGIQUE / BIBLIOTHEQUE DU COLLOQUE

Jacques Mandelbrojt (Honorary Editor)
Leonardo Vol.26 ,4, 1993 p.272

For the past 25 years LEONARDO has been a professional journal of unique interest for mainly two reasons:

- It publishes articles by artists on their own works, their motivations, their techniques in an objective manner akin to that of scientific articles. This aspect of Leonardo is very original and I consider it as particularly interesting.

- It gives artists access to recent technological progress that can be of use to them.

How can these aspects be improved and enlarged, and should new aspects be introduced?

Articles by artists:

Editors should ask articles from all artists they consider as significant, whether they use or not special techniques or technology. This could lead to documents of interest both for artists and for art historians.

The interaction on art of science and technology

There are several ways for science and technology to influence art

1. Artists can use new technology.
2. They can represent or express new scientific concepts as did for instance Pevsner when he represented algebraic surfaces.
3. They can more generally express scientific culture, the way scientists understand the universe or relatioship of man to the universe .
4. The very existence of science or of new technologies can influence art by contrast: after the invention of photography, the "photographic" resemblance of a portrait could no longer be considered as a goal to be achieved in paintings, a painting could not compete with photography on this ground.

How could LEONARDO analyse these different aspects?

Technology

There is a great need for an aesthetic appraisal of art produced with new technologies. Is it enough to master the possibilities of these technologies to produce works of art? Some objects made with new technologies often look like what was produced with traditional materials. This is a technical feat but brings nothing to art. Concerning computer art Roger Malina suggested that "artistic significance should be sought in works that could not have been made without the use of a computer"; this holds for all new technologies. Conversely objects made with the use of new technologies are sometimes new but are simply decorative and not artistically meaningful (whatever "meaningful" can mean). An artisitic object must both be new and meaningful.

Scientific concepts or scientific culture

It is not easy for artists to have access to recent developments in science. It is still more difficult for them to know the real scientific significance of these developments and it is practically impossible for them to know how the scientists obtained these results, how their mind worked to get them. And yet this is perhaps the part of scientific research that is the most relevant to art and where art and science sometimes join. This impossibility for artists to "be inside" the mind of a scientist is the reason why so many articles in LEONARDO which refer not to technology but to science are written by artists who are at the same time scientists.

All these considerations tend to suggest that three new sections should be developed in LEONARDO:
- One which would develop the basis for an aesthetics evaluation of art produced through new technologies or the use of new scientific concepts. The use of a new scientific concept in art does not automatically insure the works produced has artistic significance anymore than does the use of new technology . For instance the artistic status of fractals is not clear, although it is a new concept and although it also uses a new technology, the computer. The shapes are new and could not have been made without the concept of fractals or without the computer, but are they "artistically meaningful" (expression, I repeat, which has to be defined) or are they only decorative? Does the artist who produces them have enough control on the result or should they be considered as what Duchamp called"objets trouvés" ("ready-made")? If so does it shed light on the concept of "objets trouvés", can a stone you find on a walk be "artistically significant"? Here again there is an obvious need for an aesthetic evaluation which might lead to an interesting debate that would shed light on the meaning of art in general.

-Another section would inform artists about developments in science that can be relevant to art (the choice is of course difficult to make). New development in the theory of perception, of course, but also changes in our way to understand the world,for instance in physics, just as the discovery of Copernicus was relevant to art.

-Still another section would deal with the way science is made, and also comparaison with how art is made, how scientists think, for instance the role of intuition in science. The intuitive part of science is perhaps the part which is most relevant to art. This section would include both "naïve" epistemology, that is the way scientists describe the way they work, the role of intuition... , and more elaborate epistemology.

These three sections would contribute to make artists aware of the aesthetic impact of new technologies and scientific results and show them the "invisible part of the iceberg", which underlies scientific results.


Reference: Roger F. Malina "Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo" Leornardo Supplemental Issue "Computer Art in Context " (1989) p. 67

Editorial paru dans Leonardo en 1993

Document mis à jour : Thursday, January 29, 2004 09:29 AM

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