Art

2022/12/15 8:372026/8/2 7:30

日本語

Art / アート2023/3/0 7:222026/3/0 8:42

What is Art?

Whenever we put art into words, someone is listening — if not another person, then the mirrored, objective version of ourselves. So before anything else, and to spare us both some trouble, let me set down what I mean by art.

Art in the modern sense is certainly not art as Hippocrates used the word: the craft of medicine. Most people recognise art as material — paintings, sculptures — or as the word itself. The word carries whatever image its signifiant lends it, but I don't believe it holds any meaning of its own to begin with. And still I cannot stop turning it over.

What follows weaves together the words of Takeshi Yoro and Masaya Chiba with my own, written while the heat of recognition is still on me.

Whoever uses the word environment has already split themselves off from it, tacitly admitting they are not inside it.

There is a social structure that dulls the sensitivity to flux we were given at the beginning.

A society growing steadily more monotonous is spreading, concealed inside the vocabulary of digitalisation. Readings that were once plural keep collapsing into good or bad, zero or one.

The structure that makes everything feel pressed for time has its own machinery, but there is no denying that a collapsed way of thinking is cheap to run. That cheapness is precisely what this society needs, and it is bound tightly to the logic of cost- and time-efficiency.

In a society that produces that logic, monotony is actively affirmed. Energy expended per unit time — surface value — keeps rising, and the entropy of our sensitivity is stripped away.

Affirmation and revolt are codependent. The more we affirm urbanisation, the more decisively art is affirmed, whatever any individual happens to think. That, I suspect, is why art stands out so sharply now. In a world without urbanisation, what would the concept of art be for? There, we ourselves would be the art.

The existence of affirmation and rebellion (denial) is interdependent. The more we endorse urbanization, the more art is emphatically affirmed, irrespective of individual consciousness. That is why I think art stands out in moern times. In a world devoid of urbanization, what meaning would there be in employing the concept of art? Because we are art.

Pulsion as an Expression

Art is finally the imaginary and the symbolic that language produces, and the signifiant governs most of it. Yet something always remains that cannot be put into words. That it resists language suggests it belongs not to the surface world but to the Real — the non-linguistic unconscious, the substructure. Whatever that remainder actually is, I have decided to call the drive to do something about it expression.

It is internal and external at once. It moves back and forth between affirmation and revolt, and I think it is born in the passage itself — or perhaps in the passage between the surface world (the imaginary, ruled by the symbolic) and the Real.

So what I mean by art necessarily becomes expressive arts: what affirmation and revolt express through each other, nested. In it I see the struggle between the return to the primal — ultimate peace, which is death — and the survival instinct, the revolt against death, which is life.

I use pulsion to mean these inner drives.

Expressive Art

Set the unchanging (the record) against the changing (memory), and both modern and contemporary art turn out to look mostly at the record.

Museums and galleries make this clear. So does the work of restoration and conservation. The promise restoration holds out — the accumulation of historical knowledge — is easy enough to imagine. But why do we never look for meaning in a work as it decays?

Art should change the way nature changes, and instead we hold it artificially still. Wasn't art supposed to be the counter-evidence to urbanisation? It leaves me at a loss.

We pay no attention to how we change from moment to moment. Our ego, governed by overdeveloped neural circuitry, produces the illusion that we are somehow permanent. A moment from now we are already not the same.

Don't look away from the signifiant I am using deliberately here. I am saying this to you and to me.

Why do we take life and death as one or the other, never as coexisting? That habit spreads through other people and through society. It manufactures an invisible warden. Society has done this all along and is doing it still. We have sensitivity; we should be allowed more than one reading.

Because monotony is advancing, we have started saying diversity out loud. Something about that is very strange.

Diversity once verbalised is diversity in the Western sense, and probably something with no diversity in it — diversity as a frame convenient to a simplified society, papered over with the word individuality. It is not the diversity we were originally given by Mother: singularity, with madness in it. It is precisely over such a collapsed society that art lays its light and shadow, gracefully.

Once art is understood as expression, digital work is obviously art too. Sculpture and painting you can touch change in appearance as time passes; but if painting was born as a counter-existence to urbanisation, then everything of that kind must be art, digital or not.

If you approach art from the side of the unchanging record, you may come to feel that what matters is what decays with time — sculpture, still images — enough to prevent their natural decay and repair them unnaturally.

Decay is not usually imagined for the digital. But if we grant significance to the drift of the computing environment itself, and to the memory of the person who receives what was generated, then time is born in the digital as well.

Fractals

Working in mathematical physics, I poured almost all of my science into waves. More than once, in the middle of research, I was seized by the delusion that the world could be written in waves. I saw self-similarity in the shape of a flower, a leaf, a coastline, a shell, the Mona Lisa, the human body, a galaxy cluster. I saw self-similarity between those and myself. This periodicity, I think, is mathematical expression itself.

The strange recursion found in cellular automata, in Escher's prints, in the canonic scales of Pachelbel and Bach, has less to do with mathematical taste than with a mystery that resists explanation. The nonlinear regularity and recursion of fractals, of the Mandelbrot set, of Voronoi diagrams — that these ride on the golden ratio across dimensions is enough to induce a kind of elation.

Among expressive arts, generative art is the approach that joins art to fractals, and because it is digital it may be able to update what art is defined to be and what it is for — including the question of how the digital decays.

If such structures can be rendered as generative art, then nature has been visually reproduced, partially at least. This whole procedure of thought is a demonstration of the simulation hypothesis.

That is why generative art holds me, and it is one of my ikigai in Ken Mogi's sense.

GLSL

How do I want to make art generative? The programming I picked up through science is something I can lean on. I chose GLSL — a shader that renders on the pixel plane with ray marching on the GPU. Multifractals can be ray-marched with fractional Brownian motion (fBm), and Perlin noise makes it easy to imitate the visual structure of nature.

The balance between minifying the code and maximising fractal character is exactly where the simulation hypothesis comes into view. I work inside twigl.app's geekest (300 es) constraint, generating each piece in 300 characters or fewer. The character count matters.