Colliding Worlds Chapters | Arthur I. Miller

Chapter 6. How Science Helped Resolve the World’s Greatest Art Scandal

Richard Taylor, the hero of this chapter, is a scientist whose research into fractals offered a way to authenticate paintings by Jackson Pollock. He believes that his scientific research may even reveal something deeper. “Perhaps it may even be able to throw a narrow beam of light into those dim corners of the mind where great paintings exert their power,” he told me (p. 173).

In this exciting TEDx lecture Taylor discusses what to him is the essential connection between art and science. […]

Chapter 9. The Art of Visualizing Data

For three months between October and December 2010, Erik Guzman’s Weather Beacon lit up the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center in New York City (p. 277 and Insert).

Guzman refers to Weather Beacon as an “oracle for the digital age.” This complex work of kinetic art merges wireless connectivity, industrial engineering, movement and light. Installing it was a work of work unto itself.

Chapter 4. Computer Art Morphs into Media Art

In the late 1960s Peter Weibel was at the center of the Viennese Activists, a wildly Bohemian group of artists who practiced what they called the politics of transgression (pp. 108-9). In the course of their “actions” they often used their body as canvases as in this video where Weibel has blood extracted from him to make an artwork while he holds forth on the end of time as well as the history and future of art and of humankind. Next to him a clearly bourgeois group lounging around on couches largely ignores him, except for the occasional snicker. […]

Chapter 7. Imagining and Designing Life

This dramatic line of research explores the body and how it will undergo radical changes in the future – in other words, what it means to be a body. Stelarc’s works are astounding examples (pp. 199-201). Many border on science fiction. […]

Chapter 8. Hearing as Seeing

Unlike visual art, sound art surrounds us and has the capacity to create an atmosphere – a world.
The first time I saw Paul Prudence perform Cyclotone was in the vault of a deconsecrated church at Goldsmiths College in London (pp. 249-250). The audience wore heavy coats, breathing steam. […]

Chapter 5. Visualizing the Invisible

Spannungsfeld “He and She” - Voss-Andreae

As in his Quantum Man (pp. 119-20), Julian Voss-Andreae explores ambiguities in quantum physics and how they manifest themselves dramatically in our daily world. The appearance of objects depends on how we view them. Quantum Man focussed on the mind-boggling wave/particle duality according to which an electron can be a wave and particle at the same time. This is beyond our senses, this is unimaginable and so unimageable. How we “look” at the electron, that is what experiment we use, that is what it is, either a wave or a particle. […]