Panel Discussion - "Grasping Infinity"

The ancient Greeks are the first culture credited with recognizing the concept of infinity, although they were not appreciative of its potentialities. To be without limits was not a desirable state. It lacked the order and perfection the Greeks valued. Arab and Persian cultures were more comfortable with irrational numbers, and as a result, they made numerous advancements in mathematics, particularly algebra, that have present day applications. However, the concept of infinity has many functions and definitions spanning a variety of fields of study including philosophy, theology, physics, astronomy, mathematics and the visual arts.

This panel discussion will bring together scholars from different disciplines to discuss and understand the concept of infinity from a variety of frameworks. The panel discussion will feature:

JESSICA ANGEL: is an artist whose work is architectonic in nature. She takes over interior spaces to explore the possibilities of visual illusion and perspective. Her immersive environments are landscapes inspired by structures found in computing, urban environments and anatomy. Her interdisciplinary practice is predicated on the belief that complex patterns and information lie at the core of everything we perceive.

JACLYN AVIDON: is a member of the Board of Directors of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York, the Chair of the Association’s Education Committee, and an instructor for the Association’s classes. Jaclyn graduated with honors from Lafayette College with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and a minor in Mathematics. She spent over two years researching the subsurface conditions of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, including a summer spent at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

GIANLUCA BIANCHINO: is a multimedia artist living and working in Northern New Jersey. Originally from Italy, Gianluca attended an Architectural magnet school in Avellino before relocating to the US where he enrolled at New Jersey City University to receive a BFA in painting. In 2011 he completed his studies with an MFA from Montclair State University focused on sculpture/installation. Gianluca has maintained a studio practice for over ten years in Northern New Jersey, for nearly a decade in the thriving arts district of Newark NJ, and currently in Jersey City. Bianchino exhibits regularly throughout the greater New York area. Recent exhibits include The Painting Center, NY and at Chashama Chelsea Project Space, NY and a solo exhibit at Index Art Center, Newark, NJ which is reviewed in the April 2013 edition of Sculpture Magazine. Gianluca’s current body of work is inspired by cosmology and physics.



MANFRED MINIMAIR: is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and Director of the certificate program in Data Visualization and Analysis at Seton Hall University. He is a computing scientist and applied mathematician with a strong interest in symbolic computation, data science and collaboration software and frequently works with other researchers, including scientists in psychology and biology. He earned degrees from Johannes Kepler University and North Carolina State University.

MEHMET ALPER SAHINER: is currently the Chair of the Department of Physics at Seton Hall University. He earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 1995. Before coming to Seton Hall University, he worked as a beamline scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a senior scientist at Evans Analytical Group, a network of distinguished laboratories. His current research interests lie in the area of semi-conductor materials and solar cells. Dr. Sahiner is also the recipient of many prestigious grants to support his research and serves in the editorial board of (Elsevier) Material Science for Semiconductor Processing Journal.

TRAVIS LEROY SOUTHWORTH: lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson (2004) and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). He has shown at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL; and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX among many other venues. In 2013 he completed a residency at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland.

JEANNE BRASILE: moderator of the panel, is currently the Director of the Walsh Gallery and curator of “Getting to Infinity.” Philosophically, she sees the gallery as a place for asking questions rather than a framework for imposing meaning. I am most interested in developing exhibitions that challenge visitors to re-think their perceptions about art, art-making and the role of the museum/gallery. She frequently curates exhibitions that investigate topics in an inter- disciplinary fashion.

The panel discussion is free and open to the general public.

The Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University 400 S. Orange Avenue

South Orange, NJ 07079

973-275-2033

walshgallery@shu.edu

Hours: Monday through Friday, 10:30am to 4:30pm



Sponsors

This program is made possible, in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and administered by the Essex County Division of Cultural and Historic Affairs.

Aldous Huxley - The Ultimate Revolution (speech at Berkeley 1962)

Analogy as the Core of Cognition - Douglas Hofstadter

Analogies are the mechanism that allows categorization to happen. They can be simple or complex. They happen all the time for no purpose and they appear to rapidly go away. We find analogies everywhere, when we perceive a common essence between two or more things, when external impulses trigger associations in relation to our memories, our ideas and interests. "They are the interstate freeway of cognition", therefore, I have chosen a specific analogy to address the challenge of submerging my personal research to Vancouver's cultural and historical circumstances in order to write my project for the Vancover Biennale 2014. The Sky-Train is to Vancouver as the Internet is to the World.

Non-Euclidian Translation: Crossing the River Delta from the Arts to the Sciences and Back Again.

Roger F Malina

Draft April 25 2011

Michael Punt in his LRQ editorial asks some simple questions: as we move into a new cultural context, of e-culture, what is gained, what is lost? When two cultures interface there can be constructive or destructive interference. What knowledge is being transferred, or constructed, by whom and to whom?  Is the e-book really that important in the context of global culture? His skepticism I think rightfully argues that we are very much in the ‘dark’ ages and not yet the “middle ages” of the way that digital cultural is re-shaping texts. Martin Zierold in his LRQ commentary, points to the writing of Vilem Flusser who emphasized that these  new cultural tropes have to be learned, and this takes time.

One way to think of this is as a problem of ‘translation”.

In Euclidian Geometry the three ‘orthogonal” transformations are translation, rotation and reflection. Euclidian “rigid’ transformations preserves the properties of the objects, they are”isometric”. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the development in mathematics of ‘non-Euclidian’ geometries with profound consequences in physics. We now know that the universe is “non-Euclidian”. Special and General Relativity informs us that space and time are un-separable and that we need to think of ‘manifolds’ which may be Euclidian on small scales but very much more complex on larger ones, with folds and singularities.

Needless to say “culture’ is non-Euclidian and as we move ideas, or objects or processes, around ‘the space of culture”, the move to e-culture is not isometric.

Translation Studies have recently emerged as a new focus for understanding a number of problems in the humanities, with the expansion of the métier of textual translation to cross- cultural studies, and more recently inter-disciplinary studies. I want to explore here the usefulness of some of the concepts of Translations Studies to current discussions on the relations between the art and sciences.

Find Complete Document: HERE

James Gleick on his new book The Information

Architectural Dystopian Projections in the films Metropolis , Brazil, and The Island

Written by Angeliki Avgitidou.

In the proposals which describe utopian constructions envisioned by philosophers, utopian socialists and writers alike, the uniformity of the needs, assertions and believes of each utopia’s members is considered as a given. Uniformity takes away personal expression, multiplicity and difference, essential elements of life as well as of creative expression(1), granting priority to the interests of the majority in the name of equality and justice. The determinism of this assertion as well as its inevitable bankruptcy has served as a starting point for the majority of dystopian films. Fiction films, such as Metropolis , Brazil  and The Island , are commented below in relation to the architectural environments represented

in them, the ideological basis of their choices and the timeliness of the dystopian visions which they put forward. 

According to Maria Luise Bernieri: “Utopians tend to forget that society is a living organism and that its organization must be an expression of life and not just a dead structure”(2) . The paternalistic monomania of utopian visions becomes a leitmotiv in fiction films describing dystopia, which demand that their members show flexibility and adaptability to an established social structure and a political organization.

Dromoscopy, or The Ecstasy of Enormities

Paul Virilio 

Translated by Edward R. O'Neil

"For the driver, to look is to live."

--French Highway Patrol

Movement drives the event. In making transparency active, speed metamorphoses appearances. In the accelerated enterprise of travel, a simulation takes place which renews the project of trompe-l'oeil. The depth of the landscape rises to the surface like an oilspot on the surface of a painting. Inanimate objects exhume themselves from the horizon and come bit by bit to impregnate the sheen of the windshield. Perspective comes alive. The vanishing point becomes a point of assault projecting its arrows and rays on the voyager-voyeur. The goal of the chase becomes a hearth which hurls its rays at the astonished observer, fascinated by the landscapes' advance. This axis that generates an apparent movement suddenly becomes concrete in the speed of the engine, but this concreteness is one that is completely relative to the moment, since the object which precipitates itself on the film of the windshield will just as quickly be forgotten as perceived: put back in the prop room, it will disappear out the rear window. [End Page 11]

Let's disabuse ourselves: we are before a veritable "seventh art," that of the dashboard. The opposite extreme from stroboscopy, which permits one to observe objects animated by a rapid movement as if they were in repose, this dromoscopy allows to one to see inanimate objects as if they were animated by a violent movement.

To climb into a car is at once to step on board and to cross a border ² (the sidewalk's edge, for example). But it's also for the agent of this displacement to position himself before a sort of easel composed of the windshield and the dashboard showing the instrumentation. Arranged before the eyes of the driver this instrument panel forms a totality: the agent of displacement will by turns observe the approach of objects which will not fail to hit the windshield (images --but also insects, gravel, feathered creatures) and also diverse movements which will animate the gauges and counters. In this driving fascination begins a double game of lining up the inside and the outside of the car. With the help of the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal, the author-composer of the trip will in effect arrange a series of speed pictures, which will playfully sneak up on the transparent screen of the windshield. With the monotonous unfolding [End Page 12] of roadside scenes, each object perceived in an advancing depth of field already identifies itself at that instant with a deferred crash. On the centerstage of the driver's seat, the driver, by rolling dodges, will pursue and flee at the same time, these precipitations being too unreal for their suicidal character to slow the driver's advance.

Systems Esthetics by Jack Burnham

Systems Esthetics

Jack Burnham

Reprinted from Artforum (September, 1968). Copyright 1968 by Jack Burnham.

A polarity is presently developing between the finite, unique work of high art, that is, painting or sculpture, and conceptions that can loosely be termed unobjects, these being either environments or artifacts that resist prevailing critical analysis. This includes works by some primary sculptors (though some may reject the charge of creating environments), some gallery kinetic and luminous art, some outdoor works, happenings, and mixed media presentations. Looming below the surface of this dichotomy is a sense of radical evolution that seems to run counter to the waning revolution of abstract and nonobjective art. The evolution embraces a series of absolutely logical and incremental changes, wholly devoid of the fevered iconoclasm that accompanied the heroic period from 1907 to 1925. As yet the evolving esthetic has no critical vocabulary so necessary for its defense, nor for that matter a name or explicit cause.

In a way this situation might be likened to the “morphological development” of a prime scientific concept-as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn sees science at any given period dominated by a single “major paradigm”; that is, a scientific conception of the natural order so pervasive and intellectually powerful that it dominates all ensuing scientific discovery. Inconsistent facts arising through experimentation are invariably labeled as bogus or trivial-until the emergence of a new and more encompassing general theory. Transition between major paradigms may best express the state of present art. Reasons for it lie in the nature of current technological shifts.

View full document here