Artist - Scientist - World...

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST ISSUE

​

The belief that an artist has to create, rather than to deal with science or some researches, slowly becomes a history. Understanding that an artist is the one who is based on the knowledge, comes back today with great power. Percy Bysshe Shelley – an English Romantic poet - once stated: an artist’s most sacred goal is “an acquisition of new scientific knowledge and bringing it closer to human needs, tinting the human passions, processing the nature into a human body and blood” [1].



History shows clearly that artists sometimes wrote down the forbidden knowledge in their art. An example is the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, where the message is hidden in the double symbolism, insightful researches, experiments and reality’ observation by Leonardo da Vinci, the image of Primavera by Botticelli and so forth.

Each period of art added something to scientific discoveries and took something from them. Renaissance insinuated the linear and air perspective into the painting; Impressionism initiated usage of a splitting light in a prism from Isaac Newton's discovery of the fact that the light is an electromagnetic wave. And what a movement in the art was caused by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity! In fact, a space–time continuum influenced the thinking of artists and an attempt to record a time on the image. Cubism (as mathematics) deals with a pure form, it shows things from all sides at the same time; it sets things in their order, based on the idea that the whole reality is in each part of it at every moment - as David Bohm says, explaining modern physics and its aspects. You cannot part Science from Art; you have to remember that Art is that other force, which changes the face of the world together with Science and Physics in particular. Cubism transforms the conventional perspective into experimental ways of representing the reality, which are adequate to the new knowledge. Artists challenge the idea, that our perception of the world is limited to a one point of view. Art shows, that a matter’ division is like a split of an atom; a mutual relationship and connections. Abstractionism and neoplasticism seek balance and harmony, search for a cosmic order, which characterizes new Quantum Physics. Anonymity and the mathematical precision of the composition is typical for the works of Vasarely, who has laid the visual trap for a viewer by varying contours and sharping edges in the mesh structure. Artists are able to reduce the abstraction to a minimum.

So when are boundaries of art visible? And when is it just a cursory glance? Actually, it is that moment, when in-between space of two areas is visible. This is what happens.

Nowadays, when an image has dominated a public space – it escaped from an artists’ studio and a two-dimensional space to a three-dimensional one. Its crowd is like a trash of an urban jungle, littered with a digital creativity pouring. This visual chaos - the lack of logic, consistency and mutual visual relationships – creates a glance effect. But would not that cyberworld mirror’ reality somehow be a democratic human garbage in the situation, when this "earthly world is a sign, a symbol, a mirror of the one, who allows to be symbolized and reflected by the personally determined reality", as was written by Hildegard of Bingen? This paradox ideally suits to the Hawkings’ expression - that simple life forms are common, but intelligent forms are rather not, they are not yet on the Earth, as claimed a little mockingly by the physicist.