Salon 52 // Art and Physics

Colin Goldberg, M.D.: Hello, my name is Colin Goldberg and welcome to the expressionist salon this particular salon is on the topic of art and physics and we have a guest moderator today Cynthia D Donato I'm just going to ask that if you're not sharing please mute your microphone and with that I'm going to hand it over to Cynthia. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Hello

Everyone good evening good afternoon good morning depending on where you are I'm going to start by sharing my screen I'm Cynthia D Donato as Colin already mentioned. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: and Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Can you see my presentation.

Yep.

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Okay let's see if I can get it out there. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Okay.

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Here we go.

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Okay, I have a very strong interest in art and physics, although I'm certainly a late layman when it comes to the subject some of my own work deals with this interest, as you can see here in front of you is a book that pretty much inspired this. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: salon and, as you can see the title talks about parallel visions and space time and light much of the commentary in this presentation is from shlane's book so I'll make that mention of that. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: physics is singled out because all other hard sciences are anchored to this rock shlane tells us revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: revolutionary art. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: And science and art in all times that serve this function of preparing the future he proposes that radical innovations of art in body pre verbal stages of the new concepts that will eventually change a civilization.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Space time and light with the three constructs revised by Einstein in his 1905 special theory of relativity. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: And I'm going to show you a few examples that predate. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Scientific advances according to shlane. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: The first is the Italian painter painter jato who infused space into our and redefine the artists framework of time, this is an example of artistic imagination expressed much before einstein's theory of relativity was even published.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Before Einstein made his discovery that light is the quintessence of the universe. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Claude Monet announced. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: The real. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: object of every painting is light. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: A cost of cubist work module Lee and 1911 illustrates that solid apprehensible reality located in space and fixed time crumbled einstein's formula and a cubist painting are alike in that all frames of reference are relative to one another.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Moving on Santiago remote. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: E kaha. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: drew on curgie cell of the human cell of cerebellum in 1899 he's known as the father of modern neuroscience. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: The artists kaha was the first to suggest that individual cells structure, the brain and in 1890 created detailed drawings to illustrate his microscopes aided findings now to more contemporary artists. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: At the smithsonian herschel on museum and sculpture garden Mexican Canadian artists was on a hammer exhibited in 2018 and 19. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: His interactive artwork pulse fill the museum's entire second floor galleries with evocative immersive environments that use heart rate sensors to create kinetic and audio visual experiences from the visit visitors own biometric data.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Pamela fat you know sunstrom is an artist driven by fascination with anti ancient mythology and scientific theories. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Her works on paper and art. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: And her work on paper and wood make use of a range of different media born in Botswana and having lived in Southeast Asia and in the United States, she explores the concept of identity within temporal geographic and cultural context.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Liz halloran born in Chicago Illinois and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area in this haunting photographic series dark skate. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Each work is a self portrait of the artist. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Who attaches a light to her body and skateboards in the dark, the line of movement is recorded and the resulting images are each a trajectory of the artists movement over time. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: The work blurs the boundaries of photography and become drawings as well as records of performances as the lines of light behave as physical objects or break apart into flurries of abstractions.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: This series. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: pays homage to her use as a female skateboarder and surfer and how it is merged with her own understanding and study of astrophysics takeaways. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: One art can predate scientific advances to what was only imagined can become real and three art and science can be a source of artistic expression which you will learn about from our speakers shortly. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: want to welcome our three speakers tonight, and I would like to introduce.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: them. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Our first speaker. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: And let me stop sharing before I introduce.

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Our

First speaker is. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: I should say our first. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: Three speakers. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: were in the Southampton art Center show expressionism digital and beyond which occurred early summer. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: The first is Steve Miller Steve Miller has been working with art, science and technology, since 1980. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: He has collaborated with the 2003 Nobel laureate in chemistry rod mckinnon. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: In a project about human proteins. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: He worked at brookhaven national labs and at CERN in Geneva, where he lectured to the theory group. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: His project entitled health of the planet has been published as two monographs radiographic and surf skate published by glitterati edition his third book Surfing the Cosmos completes this trilogy Surfing the Cosmos is about high energy physics.

Cynthia DiDonato

Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: At CERN. Cynthia D Donato, M.D.: And the favela in Rio that will be released this fall 2022 with a forward by Neil Neil deGrasse Tyson. He posts daily on Instagram at stevemiller.com and Twitter at stevemillerart. The floor is yours, Steve.

Great. Thank you so much, Cynthia. Thanks for the warm welcome. And yes, there is a book. This is the first copy. I guess I got to, my screen is muted. So we'll, let me see if I can just change that. There we go. That's the book. And it is on a boat coming from China. So this is the one advanced copy that I have.

Steve Miller

So let me do the screen share and get us up to speed. So, you know, Surfing the Cosmos, as you mentioned, is the third part of a trilogy about energy and the environment and how I got here was being invited to the Large Hadron Collider that was at Brookhaven National Labs in Long Island. And I was invited to work there and I did a project. And at that time, the most advanced idea of physics that they were looking at particles and trying to figure out the nature of what physical reality was at Big Bang. And what they did was collide protons together at the speed of light inside protons. We know they're works and cluons. And if you collide these things at the right angle and the right speed and high enough intensity, you have a plasma state called quark-gluon plasma.

Steve Miller

And once I got there, I realized that there was something going on in CERN, Switzerland. So they figured out the plasma state of matter. And then they had something called the standard model, which includes all of the elementary particles of the universe. Quarks, gluons, leptons, muons, all the standard particles. And they're trying to figure out a way that all of these forces could be unified in a standard model. So that's electromagnetism, radiation, the strong force, and gravity. And gravity is not as significant in the quantum level. So they were thinking, if there is a unified theory, is there a particle that unifies this all? And they thought the big challenge was unifying Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism with radiation, which was the degradation of the beta particle. And they thought that there was this...

Steve Miller

Peter Higgs and a bunch of other scientists in the 60s, they theorized that there was a particle that gave all other things and all other particles mass, a mechanism for which mass is presented to particles. And they came up with a particle, the Higgs boson. So when I was at Brookhaven, it made me realize that there was this next thing to do. And why was I interested? Because I always thought that art was working in the visual language of its time. And Cynthia showed that Jado painting. And the big revelation of the Jado painting was the one point perspective, mathematics giving the first kind of perspective after the flatness of Byzantine art. So I always thought that art was made in this visual language of its culture. And to me, high energy physics and science and learning about this new particle, which I had no idea what it was, the Higgs boson, is...

Steve Miller

It got me excited to think that, OK, I've been to Brookhaven, now I got to go to CERN. And... And I spent time at CERN. And the result of that time is this book called Surfeying the Cosmos. And Neil wrote a really interesting essay. He's, as some of you know, he's an astrophysicist. He does the program NOVA. He's the head of the Hayden Planetarium. And he gave a great essay to kind of tie this all together. Then the other person that wanted to write was someone named Arthur I. Miller, who we talked about. And again, you showed the Einstein and the Picasso, Majo Lee earlier, Cynthia. And he wrote a book called Einstein, Picasso, kind of putting together just something like you just did, which was innovations in art and innovations in science and how they might be connected. And what was interesting for his essay that he wrote is he's talking about aesthetics.

Steve Miller

And many artists... This came out of a discussion at SVA when I first met Arthur. Artists were arguing at SVA, some artists, that aesthetics was in the realm of, you know, fine art and visual culture. And of course, if you talk to a mathematician, their idea of aesthetics would be a perfect formula. So this is a really interesting essay that he wrote about how perfect formula and what this perfect formula means. And if it's a formula is beautiful enough, then that means it's valid. So that's an essay that's coming up. And so the book, the low energy story about energy is what's going on in the favelas in Brazil. And it's this massive land clearing and the need, this sort of like chaotic need for resources. And what I found in Brazil was this very, very unruly, unlawful place. And... Interesting story is you have to get permission from the drug dealers to go in.

Steve Miller

And to get into CERN, I had to get security clearance. So it's kind of ironic that in both of these places, you have to get some security clearance to get in. So I saw in these wires, the story of human activity. And I use these wire images as sort of sources of paintings that represent a kind of activity that is itself a kind of energy and visual drawing.

Steve Miller

And I'm going to go way forward now and flip through and get us to the CERN part of this discussion. And what happened in the favela is that I'd also had this experience in CERN, where I spent a couple of weeks over a period of two years. And I had this incredibly stimulating interaction with the scientists. And they gave me their perspective on what they're doing. One short story is...

Steve Miller

When I got there, I was able to have lunch with these guys. Lunch and dinner, actually, for a week with the leading particle physicists in the world. And I said, OK, tell me what you're doing. Pretend I'm a Labrador retriever and explain to me what's going on in CERN. And he said, well, pretend... This is the collider, by the way, and I'll finish the story. This is 30 stories underground. You can see the guy in the background and the top tier to give you an idea of the scale of this thing. So this detector is actually eight stories tall. And you can see in the center of the screen, horizontal blue line. And just above that blue line is actually the proton beam line. So when the detector is up and running, the left side of the image and the right side of the image come together and they become tight and they collide those protons right in the center of that image.

Steve Miller

So that space and those panels there actually measure the energy going through in every direction right at the speed of light. And they're able to measure the collisions, the energy that produces the collision. And to get back to Einstein, we know E equals MC squared. E energy equals mass, right? Forget about for this discussion that there's times the speed of light squared. But there's equivalency between energy and mass. So if you look at the energy of light, there's a speed of light squared. But if you can measure the energy of a collision, you can assign it a mass. So when they thought that they could find this particle, the Higgs boson, they figured that if they could measure all the different interactions that place all the collisions and sort them out, which is billions of collisions, they would find patterns and a certain consistent to a collision, which would be the mass of a new particle.

Steve Miller

And that's what happened at CERN. So, okay, I'm having lunch with these guys. So, okay, I'm having lunch with these guys. This is the beam line right here. And I go, okay, he said, one side said, pretend that the universe is packed snow. And you're a photon and you're gliding across the snow. You're on cross country skis and the field of snow. You're not interacting with that field of snow. You're gliding across that field, not interacting with it. Take your skis off and put on snowshoes.

Steve Miller

Now you're sinking into the field. So as a result of that, you're not interacting with the field. You're not interacting with the field. But then as a result of having the snowshoes, you now have more mass in relationship to the field. Take the snowshoes off. Now you're really sinking deeply. You're moving slowly. And in relationship to that field of snow, you have more mass. So that's the kind of this sort of area of potential that takes place that gives these other particles their mass. You have a field of potential where things take place and that assigns mass to other particles. It's a mechanism for assigning mass. And he said, OK, so what we do is we take a stick of dynamite, we throw it into the snowfield and we try to find a snowflake. So that's kind of what got me there. But I was very interested in the visual culture of CERN and how things looked and taking some of these source imagery and combining them with some of the chalkboards at CERN and coming up with a series of images, as I had done with the favela earlier.

Steve Miller

And the idea was to get this conversation about energy and understanding that it's operating on a lot of different levels. And the low level in the favela is that, you know, we're raping the earth and we're clearing the earth to have this energy. And it's unlikely that human behavior is going to change any. And there's this sort of general sustain, not in this room, but for science and some aspects of culture. And I wanted to really make the idea that this stuff is accessible and that science is really. Kind of if anything can happen, that's positive. It might come through science. This is actually a real photo of one of the scientists at CERN. It's his desk and it's crazy. And these are cables that are connecting all the experiments. So all of those panels that you saw early on get connected to banks of computers.

Steve Miller

And they're able to look at the collisions, take place and analyze and decide whether they found the boson. So that's kind of the idea. Of course, who doesn't like a chalkboard? And the visual graphics at CERN really remind me of those spaghetti wires that we saw in the favela in Rio. So I thought there was this very interesting discussion between high energy physics and the sort of need for survival and human resources. This is actually an MRI of my brain, of all the blood vessels in my brain. And there was a lot of humor in these chalkboards. Like you can see a battle ax in the lower left hand corner, like a medieval ax and a bottle of wine. And I just really started thinking about these are great images and to get them out into the world. I had this idea that I had done earlier with the radiographic, the first book in the series.

Steve Miller

But number one is to figure out a way to get this information out into the world. And I thought surfing and skating was a way to bring these out in a different kind of context. Other than fine art. And that's also the reason for doing the book is to make this work accessible. Make it something that sparks curiosity and brings in another discussion about what's the nature of science and can we get interested in it? This is a well-known chalkboard, which I photographed when I was there. And I would use these and make the chalkboard, the previous chalkboard image, lay it on top of this crazy image of the wires and the favela to kind of put this discussion in one place. So a lot of the book is about source imagery and where it comes from. So this, if you looked at this long enough, you'd find the part of this.

Steve Miller

There's an infinity symbol on the left side of the chalkboard. And this is one section of that particular painting. I just went crazy with the expressive possibilities that came through science. I love the kind of art historical connection to expression. And that's sort of how the Techspressionist thing was part of. And I think that's part of the discussion. And putting these images in lots of different ways. This is a rug company in Nepal that commissioned me to make a rug. And this is one of the chalkboards that I took a section of. I altered it a little bit for clarity's sake. And here it is as actually a finished product. So it's, you know, on the left you have now, best, future. Things that just evoke language and visual thoughts to get you connected. And then get you around. The curiosity of science.

Steve Miller

So you mentioned earlier Rod McKinnon, Cynthia. He did a particle on human protein. He understood how ions move across cell membranes. So that's the electricity in your body. So that white helix structure below is one of his models of human protein. With the wires of the favela. And this chalkboard that you're seeing right here. Silkscreen on top in yellow. And for me, this painting embodies really the story of electricity. And the body. As it's used. And as it's considered to look at the universe deeper in theoretical physics.

Steve Miller

And the person I originally asked to write for the book is Tom Stoppard. Who's this gentleman here. He's a playwright in England. Sir Tom Stoppard. He loves physics. And his children are friends of mine. And he loves my stuff. They gave him my fashion work as a present. Which you're seeing. So here he is modeling that chalkboard. You saw earlier. That's now put into sustainable Mongolian cashmere. And then I started making masks from this stuff later on. And there's lots of interesting connections between art history and science at CERN. And I love these crazy posters that they have around CERN. And the language. Like neutrino town meeting. Right. It's. And we talked about the standard model earlier.

Steve Miller

Hardest. Microsoft QCD flavor. Theory of PDFs. The standard model. This kind of language system really. Inspired me. And then this is part of the fashion. I got a minute left, Cynthia.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. I can wrap it up. So this is sort of the fashion component. Get this stuff out into the world. Source image that I made. And from one of these posters. And having it as sustainable. As really you could wear. And again, these references to art history. And you've got the Velazquez painting Las Meninas with diffraction and vector mesons. Electro weak physics. So these are like poems to me.

Steve Miller

This is imagery source imagery. This is what it's like down 30 stories below. And again, this version of wires, which is kind of neat and tidy. As opposed to the stuff that's earlier in the book. You see the beam line here on the left. And the two magnets that suspend the beam. So it doesn't touch. And it can be in a frictionless environment. And the two beam lines in yellow. And then these areas on the left. They contain liquid nitrogen, liquid helium. So this is just the environment. It's certain that I found really inspiring. And these sort of piranhas from the Amazon River in the control room at one of the major detectors.

Steve Miller

And again, these are like little. Like little. Poems and haikus for me. So the book is called Surfing the Cosmos. And it'll come out in a few weeks. It's on a trip from China. And thank you for letting me talk about it.

Thank you, Steve. I'm jealous that you got to be at CERN. And learn so much there. And incorporate in your art. Our second speaker tonight. Is Paul Miller. A. K. A. K. A. DJ spooky. He was an artist in residence at Yale university for the collaborative arts and media. He's exploring the intersection of art, science, and technology. He's working with a collective formerly based out of MIT's media lab. Art matter robotics labs. To generate paintings. Based on a series of equations. That form the foundations of modern quantum physics. And translating the material. Into multiple transdisciplinary art. Initiatives. Welcome. Paul.

Just making sure. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes. Okay. So what a treat. First and foremost. Steve. It's a pleasure to see you. Various folks. Colin. Everybody. I'm at Yale for the next year. And some change. Kind of just dealing with. They have a new program and a new initiative here. Called the center for collaborative arts and media. So.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

I'm very inspired. In fact. The introduction. And you, you guys showed a friend of mine spoke regretfully. Leonard Slane was an old friend of mine. So he passed away several years ago. And his daughter. Tiffany. And is married to another friend of mine. Kim Goldberg. Who's at Berkeley. They have the Berkeley robotics lab at Berkeley university. So.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

It, you know, it's kind of, that was really beautiful and very heartwarming. To see his book. I read that when I was a kid. So that's a. It's a good way to start the discussion. Okay. So let's dive in. Here we are in 2022. And we're in the era where misinformation. And this it's intersection with data. Aesthetics and its intersection with how we think about. The politics of perception. I'll go back to what I view as kinds of issues around how. Science and perception intercept. Now the pandemic, if it showed us one thing at all. It's that science. Is the great level or on one hand, but. The field of how we perceive what's going on with science and how it shapes and molds. The civic discourse has radically. Been just completely shattered. But in devastated by. All of these different forms of social media.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Because this is where we kind of identify everything from social media. To this kind of notion of the sort of right wing filter bubble. That has created this notion of where we doubt reality itself. Which is actually quite interesting because it's you would think. That's a project that philosophers like jumbo Drillard or do Zuma. Totally two of my favorites. Or three of my favorites are. Would have kind of thought about from the viewpoint of how things from, there's a very famous series of films and essays called The Society of the Spectacle that came out in the 1960s and so on. So what does that have to do with science and physics? Well, one could argue that physics is the nature's relationship to how human beings can perceive things with math. So from my point of view, art is kind of a situation of pattern recognition.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And I'm very intrigued by that. So I want to begin by showing you guys a couple of things from the viewpoint of just kind of giving you a sense of how art and science in my work kind of intersect. So this is two of my favorite gentlemen. They were backstage. This is Einstein and the Indian Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. They met backstage at the Nobel Prize Awards.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And amazingly enough, Einstein, when he was nervous and he couldn't finish an equation, he would begin playing violin. He was actually quite a talented violinist. And he said his best ideas and his best equations came from when he engaged with music. And he was a big fan of stuff like Bach's Goldberg Variations and so on. Now, another book that I personally actually would love to have seen earlier in tandem with Leonard Slane's book, Art and Physics, is Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Now, to me at least, when you start thinking about the issues of art in this era of information overload, we have to really question where art comes from. Now, if I told you in a funny way, like, OK, Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and a couple other folks walk into a bar in the middle of the Renaissance.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

So, you know, Galileo and Da Vinci and, all right, let's say Galileo, Da Vinci, and above all, Machiavelli, those three guys are sponsored by the Medici. And the Medici, at a certain time, were a really incredibly important catalyzer. They were the ones who were really important for thinking about the rise of humanism. And one could argue the Renaissance kind of created this moment where science, like what they called natural philosophy, and above all, the aesthetics of how the human mind worked in nature became front and center in the European mind. Meanwhile, other parts of the world, whether you're in China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and above all, the Islamic world, people were kind of moving to this notion of how we think about nature and math. There's not separate, but deeply fundamental components of how we think about the notion of how human beings engage multiple dimensions, multiple senses of time, and above all, how we think about this notion of a seamless field of perception that kind of links how we think about the human being in nature.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Now, I'm a big fan of someone by the name of Edwin Abbott, who wrote this book called Flatlands. And amusingly enough, if you haven't read Flatlands, it's called The Romance of Many Dimensions. And, one of the things that really struck me when I was preparing for this conversation was I wanted to get people to think not just about the arts as separate from science, but as science as determining how the fundamental field of perception can work. So, when Steve was showing his brain, for example, one of the things that struck me is that how we are evolving in this era of information overload is that we are becoming creatures of pattern recognition. Now, for the Techspressionism exhibition that Colin curated, I put together a painting using a series of equations coming out of both Schrodinger and Heisenberg in their engagements with later developments, which would now be called quantum entanglement.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

From my perspective, the arts are always a kind of conversation with the potential of what faces us at the edge of imagination. When I say the potential, imagine if you were back in the Middle Ages and you didn't know that you could have a brain that could do anything. Can you imagine if you were back in the Middle Ages and you didn't know that you could have a brain that could do anything? You would think the gods had spoken. Maybe Zeus just throwing some lightning bolts at you. Or if you didn't have a correct map, you would think, okay, the world ends at this certain point and the rest is just there be dragons. That was a very famous... If you ever see early medieval maps, the world would just end and they would say here be dragons. Just don't even bother. But as we move further into this notion of the Anthropocene era, we can easily see that knowledge is a gateway.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

It's a portal that we need to create in order to become more intelligent and more intelligent. Move through and then arts helps pave that path. So the painting that I generated, this is one of the first editions. I'm going to be working on the series at Yale in the next two years. So regretfully, I don't have a lot of the body of work yet because literally the residency started just a couple of weeks ago. So this is one of the first pieces.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

I'm generally fascinated with this notion of the legible landscape, how we think about the acoustics of space and time and how acoustics itself is one kind of metaphor that human beings use to navigate. So for example, the core of the COVID virus, for example, comes out of the displacement of bats from their bio. Bats use sonar and above all, the sonar allows them to navigate using incredibly powerful acoustic techniques. Now, amusingly enough, the reason I'm showing you a painting and then talking about bats is that the sonar that the bats use is one of the most complex signals in nature. They're able to encapsulate a tremendous amount of information, they can find know that we're here. When you see or hear a whale, usually they have this kind of keening sound. That's what you call an acoustic hologram.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Now, whales, depending on which species, some of them have the largest brains in the world. And they have some of the most sensitive ears in the world. And there have been actually a series of studies showing that the acoustic signals of the whales are being destroyed by humans because we're, as usual, disrupting and destroying their biome because of the way that shipping. Other kinds of acoustic phenomena are happening in the ocean. Now, again, what does this have to do with the painting? Let me explain.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

The painting you're seeing is embedded with different equations looking at complexity theory, information theory, and some of the foundations for what you call quantum entanglement. Now, this is part of a series, and this is what I call sort of 1.0. And I didn't make it by hand. What I ended up doing was working with a robotics lab, and the robots are based on this idea of sort of drawing equations. And I'm fascinated with that. Normally, you could say, okay, well, that's plotting, P-L-O-T-T-I-N-G.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And that's okay. But math, nature, and sound are truly incredibly complex phenomena. And this is the studio that I'm working out of. Hopefully, you can see that. So what I do is I send a series, a series of mathematical formulas and so on to the robot behind me. And the robot then generates pattern permutations based on kind of snapshots of where the equations would be. So when you start to think about math, it's simply a process. And one could argue that when we think about quantum physics, when we think about the fundamentals of physics, it's human beings trying to map our own perspective into the natural world. So for example, one could argue, do we discover the equation or do we somehow create a perception of what's already existing in nature? And these are issues that both Plato and Aristotle grappled with in Pythagoras early on in Greek philosophy.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

But if you fast forward to the 21st century, one of the things that really fascinates me is how we're developing new senses of literacy as we move into a world dominated by information theory. So what we are seeing right now is kind of grappling with the physics of presence. And that's kind of my nickname for this stuff. But what we're seeing right now is kind of the same thing that we're seeing right now. When you think about here we are on Zoom, every color, every pixel is being calculated in real time and being computed using various microchips in our devices and then distributed over a massive Internet. This is all stuff that would become part of it. So let me explain a little more because I think it's really important. So in my work, I can do concerts and events that are essentially part of how I think about the role of the composer and evolution in the 21st century.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Information aesthetics, sound aesthetics. Many of my concerts and events have been in all sorts of contexts. So let me just show you a couple of things that will give you a sense of context. A little while ago I had a concert at the Acropolis and we got the Greek government to let me project DW Griffith's film, Birth of a Nation, on the ruins of the Herod Atticus Theater. And if you can see quickly behind me, I'll pinch and zoom. Those are massive speakers that we got the government to let me put throughout the ruins of the Herod Atticus Theater at the base of the Acropolis. Now, intriguing enough, ancient Greek architecture was quite mathematical and they tried as much as possible to think of this idea of the tuning of the universe. And that's again where you have Pythagoras, Heraclitus and their legacy in architecture and symmetry.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Now, how does that again go back to the paintings I was showing you? Well, if you start to think about the acoustic space that would have been developed thousands of years ago, what you're seeing here is an amplification device. You would be in the theater and they had discovered that the rings of those theaters were able to amplify the acoustic waveforms of the actors' voices. And thus you have the origins of modern theater. But you also have, if you look at any movie theater's logo, they actually have the similar thing, like most movie theaters have this little semicircle. And I'm fascinated with how this notion of ancient forms of engaging with math and architecture would then imbue our modern contemporary sensibility.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

So if you go back in time to 1915, this is an infamous photograph of sound generating devices. This is the gentleman on the left with the mustache is Luigi Russo. He basically helped give us a sense of noise and chaos in modern sensibilities. He's what they call an Italian futurist. And the concerts that he would throw were essentially coming out of these what you call noise generators. In tono di rumore, if you speak Italian. Now, the science, acoustic science actually is really fascinating because at that time, this was a radical avant-garde gesture. And what ended up happening, this is generally considered to be the first sound system. So in 1915, when he had this, he wrote a book called The Art of Noise. Again, arte di rumore. But his concerts would be people cranking these machines and generating crazy noise because he wanted to simulate the acoustic dimensions of an invisible city.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Now, what's fascinating is that this was highly controversial. Audiences would riot. People would throw bottles at them. It's this kind of original punk rock here. And they said, where's the band? And he's like, the band is the invisible waveforms coming out of these speakers. Now, if you fast forward to 2022, guess what? The device you're listening to, this discussion on the screens around us, all of these, the main thing they are is acoustic dimension devices. Now, what's fascinating is those loudspeakers have been miniaturized, they've been distributed, they put through almost every electronic device that we use because that's how we engage them. Whether you're looking at everything from Siri to Alexa, on over to the voice command modules on almost any of your speakers, etc.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

All of that.

I know you have a time constraint. It's 16. You still have two minutes if you want it.

OK, give me a second. I'm just tying it all together here. So the art of noise and physics is quite interesting because noise is, one could argue, one of the most complex phenomena of physics that human beings engage with every day. So thinking of noise as a complex information system, it's actually a different kind of encryption. For example, when you create a mathematical RSA or NSA level of encryption, you're creating mathematical noise around your data so that no one else can see it unless they have a key to transcribe that. So I'm going back to this, these Italian futurists as kind of an early form of thinking about science and sound.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Now, recently I went to Antarctica and I wrote a book with Brian Green, who's a legendary physicist at Columbia, and I took a backpack and went to several of the main ice fields and ended up doing what I call acoustic portraits of ice. And that made me realize we had a series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And I'm going to wrap up in a second, but I just want to tie this all in. But the book really made me realize that we are creatures of pattern, but how we think about disruption of patterns is far more of the meat of what's going on right now. While I'm at Yale, I'm finishing two books. One book is about quantum physics and art, and that's going to be with Jack Hedery. And he just did a he just sold his company to Google. It's called Sandbox. He was the director of Google's Innovation Lab.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

So we'll be kind of riffing with that here at Yale. And then the paintings there, we're still in development. So some of those are going to be the robots we are evolving. We're keeping them in a warehouse. We're going to be building a new house near Pioneer Works in Red Hook in Brooklyn. So I'm commuting between New York and Brooklyn constantly.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And at the end of the residency, we'll have both a performance looking at quantum physics and dance, and we'll also have a series of paintings and other kinds of works. Now, by way of conclusion, by the way, Cynthia, this is the one of my favorite examples of the legible landscape, what you're seeing here is the first equations that set up Google Maps and I interviewed the gentleman who invented Google Maps. His name's Noel Gordon. And he's in my last book. Google Maps generally is considered to be the most used app in the world over the last several years, because I would imagine almost everyone in this conversation uses it. But you'll see from A to B. And that reminded me of Andy Warhol, who had a book called From A to B and Back Again, the Philosophy of Andy Warhol. But imagine if you apply this to how equations and algorithms shape the modern discourse.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

So Warhol, Duchamp, some of those other earlier artists, they were still grappling with this idea of replication copies and this notion of originality. And for me, at least in the era of information overload and in the Anthropocene era that we inhabit, science is one of the tools that I think artists have the best way to help us reimagine the idea of what the future could be. So again, going back to that Louis Jerusalo tying it in, even with what Cynthia was mentioned with Leonard Schlain at the beginning. Leonard was a very dear friend of mine, so that was very heartwarming to see his book.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And I know I'm on a tight time frame here, so I just want to wrap up really quickly with one last image and I'll just say thank you guys. So here we are. This is America's first satellite. And intriguingly enough, it was called the Explorer. It was launched by James Van Allen. And in fact, amazingly enough, the electromagnetic phenomenon that surrounded the planet was unknown at the time. And what's intriguing about this is that it was a response to the Soviets launch of the Sputnik missile. I'm sorry, Sputnik satellite. Now, at that time, we still had not explored the exterior of the planet. We'd still not explored how the phenomenon of electromagnetism operated in the atmosphere. So the Van Allen belts are what allow most of our electronic devices to work. Again, physics of presence. And what was fascinating is that when they discovered these crazy radiation belts above the planet, they didn't realize that it interacts with almost all aspects of keeping the solar winds from destroying all our electrical devices.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

If there's a solar storm, for example, the Earth's magnetic sphere helps block that. So thus our devices still work. And if there's a solar storm that was coming through, then nothing would work. The electromagnetic fields would be disrupted. So long story short, what I'm fascinated with is that not only did we launch this missile with Werner Von Braun, who was a former Nazi, but James Van Allen. When they discovered these electromagnetic belts, they named it after him. They're called the Van Allen belts. But amusing enough, this was a product of the military industrial complex competition between the Soviets and the US capitalism communism. So here we are in the 21st century with a multipolar world where science, in fact, most of the science that we're using comes out of the legacy of World War Two.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

And it's one could argue it was an information war. So Alan Turing was a mathematician whose work was basically most famously popularized by his helping crack the German Enigma device, which was their encryption devices. So this still is all about physics. It's still all about the way information and aesthetics intersect with art. But I want to kind of make a more lyrical approach. And the reason I'm wrapping up with this image of the Van Allen belts is it's kind of a cautionary tale. The first time they discovered it, anyone who's a historian buff or history buff, sorry, the first thing they did, they tried to nuke them and they sent nuclear bombs into the atmosphere. It was called Operation Starfish Prime. But here we are with the war in Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. And it's not just that the believe that it's an initial piece of support to the hit to have the entire world at its feet.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

It's that it's the deflection of the whole world. So that's things that we are as artists grappling with for all the tools that allow us to create what we do I'm going to be exploring this over the next two years and I just wanted to say colin thanks for having me I regret that I have to oh yeah heady lamar is also oh heady lamar actually she's generally considered again as a woman she helped invent bluetooth and early wi-fi so credit due so I just wanted to say thanks so much for having me I regret it I'm here at yale and we're for the launch of a residency like now. So I got to run. But if anybody wants any feedback or commentary, Steve, good to see you too. Great to see you, Paul. Yeah, I'll be back in the Hamptons in a bit. I'm going to be doing some stuff with the church with Eric Fischel in a bit.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

But love you guys. And seriously, Colin, I love this whole Techspressionism thing. We need more. So thanks, you guys.

Thanks for coming, Paul.

I want to get a copy of that book when it comes out. All right, you guys.

I got to run.

Hope to see your work in the future.

OK, thanks, you guys. All right, bye.

Well, another amazing discussion about physics and art. We've gone from the Higgs boson particle, the God particle that Steve Miller was talking about. And then on to quantum entanglement. Well, our third speaker is Michael Pierre Price, who earned a physics degree from Purdue University and did three years graduate work in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Toledo. He conducted research into early star formation with Bach globules. I hope I said that right, Michael. Using data from the Serotope. Lolo Observatory in Chile. Michael has been published in the American Journal of Physics. He is currently working on his own long term book project about the nature of reality and the story of the universe, using his artwork to illustrate and weave together the areas of physics, neuroscience, spirituality and creativity.

Cynthia DiDonato

You're on, Michael. Thanks, Cynthia.

Wow. This is a tough act to follow from the two previous speakers. So anyway, this is obviously a topic for me that has been near and dear to me for a long time. I was just realizing in preparation for talking that 45 years ago at this very time, I was just a couple of weeks. I was just a couple of weeks into being a graduate student at the University of Toledo. So it feels like a whole lifetime ago.

Michael Pierre Price

Never would I have thought at 22 that I would at 67 be an artist talking to a group like this. So, you know, life is life is strange and interesting. So it's I'm really humbled to be here and to talk about this. So let me go ahead. And share my screen. Everybody see this? Okay.

Yes.

All right. So oops. So I thought I needed a cool title for my talk. So the idea of black holes, Boltzmann brains and the heat death of the universe. That's what I want to title this. And I'll go ahead and read it. And I'll get around to what all that means for those of you who might be interested.

Michael Pierre Price

So it's people have unfortunately have very, very different ideas of what physics and science are all about. And I've been really happy to hear both what Steve and Paul were talking about. And I think it's very interesting. Because we as human beings have tried to make sense of this universe since we had self conscious thoughts about survival and what's all around us. And we invented gods and theories and things over time to try to explain these patterns like that Paul was talking about what Steve was taught we're talking about. And as time has gone on. We've developed. We've developed something that's more formalized and something that we now call physics and this is something for me that was very important growing up.

Michael Pierre Price

I've always been pretty much of a loner. I, I tend to keep to myself and I've always been a theoretician. I've always thought about what's the universe like and so for me. I knew that. I needed to pursue science and math to for that sense of understanding of how the world works. And so that's my primary reason why I went into physics. And so there the idea of experimentation and theorizing and revising is part and parcel with this whole methodology of what makes physics and the sciences is, and a lot of people don't understand that. They think. Well, I'm not. I'm not an engineer. But once we know something it's like set in stone and well no it's not things change all the time and that can be confounding to people who want certainty about how things work. And, and so therefore.

Michael Pierre Price

When we look at this. The language in which physics. Takes place is mathematics. And so to understand, to actually work through this stuff, you have to learn that language. It's the underpinnings for all of the theories and everything that happens. And as most everybody who's either bilingual, trilingual, whatever, learning a new language takes time and effort. And there are points of view, there are ways you structure your ideas.

Michael Pierre Price

And here's what's challenging about modern physics. And especially if you listen to what Steve was talking about with the experiments happening happening at CERN and being able to understand what the Higgs boson is and all these other things, you're dealing with mathematical structures that are very abstract. It's not like one plus one equals two. You're dealing with set theories. You're dealing with all kinds of ideas that take Take time. And that you have to build upon in order to learn. So you have to learn the grammar to understand how to build the sentences, understand how to build the paragraphs and write novels, etc., etc. And that's where the mathematics is involved with all of that. So I just wanted to throw three examples of mathematical discourse or structures on this slide here.

Michael Pierre Price

The first one is the field equation from Einstein's general theory of relativity. The second one is the famous Schrodinger equation for quantum mechanics. And the last one is a diagram, a Feynman diagram, that actually shows the interactions, like Steve was talking about, about proton-proton interactions that the Higgs boson comes from. So those are just a few examples that I just wanted to put on here to demonstrate the mathematical discourse that physicists and others, speak in. And the challenge is, how do you go from understanding mathematically that in the standard model, if we're not talking about string theory, in the standard model, that an electron is a point particle? What does that mean? How do you wrap your head around mathematically? You can see how that works and how you... You can see how you derive the wave equations for probabilities of where an electron might be.

Michael Pierre Price

But how do you explain that? How do you know? We see the graphical model of the electron going around the neutron and the proton in the standard symbology that we see about nuclear physics. But in reality, the electron isn't orbiting like a planet around the sun. It's much more complex. It's much more complex than that, because the nature of quantum physics is statistical and it's not deterministic in the sense of Newtonian mechanics. And, you know, so it becomes very challenging to figure out how to go from math to explaining things in verbal language. And then as an artist, how do you explain these things visually, artistically? So going back from my days at the University of Toledo, this was my published paper in the American Journal of Physics dealing with the motion of mercury around the sun and the effect that the outer planets have on it.

Michael Pierre Price

So this, again, shows a little bit of that published paper. And then what I was working on... That I thought I might get my doctorate in was early star formation. I left. I left graduate program before that happened. But so Bach globules are these very small, dense areas within nebulae, which are particles that are high energy. But there are also very dark, dense areas within these nebulae. And... And what's been theorized, and it's still an area of research, that these are potentially early star formation where the... The matter starts coalescing and collapsing.

Michael Pierre Price

And through that gravitational attraction, it heats up the matter. And then if it's enough mass, it can start nuclear fusion, which then starts a protostar. That's what my research is. That's what my research was in before I left graduate school. So my journey 40 years on since then, I've been very interested that for me, physics didn't become a career. But in retrospect, I realized it was for me a path to understand... The sense of beauty in the world from a perspective that I needed in understanding the mechanics and understanding the workings of the universe.

Michael Pierre Price

As the intervening 35, 40 years since then, I followed in a number of ways, a very spiritual path that connects physics to that. And I've also been very interested in psychology and neuroscience and how they all connect. And so for me, this circle here is really a representation of the various areas that are at the heart of who I am as a human being, but especially as an artist.

Michael Pierre Price

So I did it. I did a solo show two years ago, which the T-shirt I'm wearing is from called the square root of negative one. And there were three truths that I shared as part of that exhibit. And the first one is really at the heart of my search into physics, that the world is not as it seems. And I'm sure Steve could attest to that as the things that he's decided to do. And I think that's what I discovered through his work and his art that the world in which we normally live day to day and the world in which we still talk about today is very Newtonian.

Michael Pierre Price

We haven't caught up to the realities that came about 100 years ago. That the quantum world, the relativistic world. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do. And I think that's what I'm trying to do.

Michael Pierre Price

And I think that's what I'm trying to do. The lesson about Newton, but moved it forward and actually explained what some of these things would be. I think modern science wouldn't seem as magical to people today if the education system kind of caught up with what's been going on in the last hundred years.

Michael Pierre Price

The other truth here is I'm a heretic and for me that means I've always walked a very lonesome path and I don't like adhering to dogma or convention and I'm always looking how things can be done in a different way because I'd like to explore new paths, new ways. And the last truth here, this sense that nothing is sacred, for me the sense of nothing is sort of the Buddhist concept of nothing.

Michael Pierre Price

And that from that not being, that nothingness, comes everything. And that's where for me that's where that sacredness is. So as an artist now, I always ask myself, what am I trying to say? How do I know what I know? And how can I express it? And those are really things that really direct me in my art practice. And that's why abstraction algorithms and surrealism are very important to my work because I'm trying to take people out of the ordinary, the everyday to express that the world is so much bigger and so much more fantastic than what we think it is today. So that's fantastic than we recognize.

Michael Pierre Price

We see within a visible spectrum that's so much smaller than what the wide spectrum is. And we live in a very, very controlled environment when you look at the entirety of the universe. And so for me, I'm trying to utilize those things that I have learned along the way from physics, from my spiritual practice, and share that and imbue that in my work. So I just wanted to share just a couple more, or just a couple examples of some artwork. This was a piece I did a few years ago, and this was in relationship to my graduate work. And this doesn't look very much like the one picture that I showed just a little bit back and forth, but it's a great idea. And I'm going to show you a few more of them. A few slides ago, but from a mathematical, from a physics standpoint, it represents very much the inner dynamics that are happening between the interplay between light and energy and gravity, and how you get these eddy currents that happen and how things coalesce.

Michael Pierre Price

And so for me, the lighter area of yellow is the bright energy, the dark areas are the dark gravitational forces that are starting to work and the interplay between the two.

Michael, you have a minute.

Okay. Deep muon is directly from a physics particle experimentation. And I took this into some, AI programs to accentuate the 3D aspect of visual. And then the last part here, black holes, Boltzmann brains, and the heat death of the universe, which is something I wanted to talk about, but I guess I'm not going to have a chance to, so maybe we'll have to leave that to another time.

Michael Pierre Price

Cosmology is something that I've always been very interested in terms of how the universe started, where we're at and where things are going. And that's what these images are trying to portray. They're works in progress, working with AI. And I'm not happy with them all, but I just wanted to show kind of what I've been working on fairly recently.

Michael Pierre Price

All right.

Thank you. Michael. I really enjoyed seeing your art as I did Steve Miller and Paul's art. It's just been a special occasion to learn what art ticks within your world. So without further ado, I assume we shall go on to open up the salon to discussion. I thought maybe the easiest way to do that would be to go to the next slide.

Cynthia DiDonato

Function of Zoom, or if you want to keep your hand up like this so that we can have a discussion.

And you can find the raise hand icon under reactions at the bottom of your Zoom menu. I think they might have moved it in the last couple of versions.

It certainly is a heady topic. I particularly enjoyed hearing Michael talk about getting people people's become aware of physics, even as lay people, because there's so much beauty there. So hopefully some of that beauty was able to come through. So feel free to. Oh, we have Renata. You're on, Renata. You're muted.

Okay. Thank you so much to all the presenters. The topic is fascinating. I do have a question, however, that applies to all three presenters. Each presenter stated the scientific involvement, understanding, inspiration, and then juxtaposed it with the artistic expression. And corresponding to it. However, I'd like to hear a little bit more about the middle ground between those two phenomena. Is there, has any of the artists or had any of the artists perceived something that they could describe as activity that filled the point of involvement in physics, understanding, appreciation of physics? And the manifestation of the artwork, creation of the artwork. What is that middle ground like, subjectively speaking?

If I understand the question correctly, I'll take a shot at it. If I don't, Michael, you can go for it. I mean, the middle ground is somewhere between what Michael was saying. Our view of the world is Newtonian, right? We know what gravity is. We know what gravity looks like. We know when an apple falls from the tree. We have our eyes that give us our perceptions of the world. And that's been the major interpretation of reality, as Michael talked about.

Steve Miller

Quantum. So there's something in between quantum and this sort of Newtonian notion of visual reality that we know now. And quantum, the word quantum got brought into nomenclature in terms of quantum mechanics, quantum physics. Because. What early scientists understood that when you get into the subatomic world, that the world is, you measure it through packets of energy. And those packets of energy are quantum. And the life of the quantum world is a little bit like surrealism.

Steve Miller

There's a great quote by Richard Feynman that basically the quote is nobody understands quantum mechanics. And, you know, the reason why it's so hard to understand is because. It operates on probability. It operates on something called the uncertainty principle. And you have these sort of worlds that are very, very difficult to understand. And I can read the same books over and over again. There's this other phenomena that when you observe an experiment in the quantum world, just by looking at it, the energy of shining light on something changes the results of the experiment. So it's very, very difficult to really get an understanding of what quantum is. But if you look at this idea of quantum mechanics, for instance, just by looking at it. Well, so quantum mechanics is basically like you know, like you look at it from the perspective of what this what this world is all about.

Steve Miller

So, you know, art comes through as maybe some interpretation of between. There's also this crazy notion of particle wave duality. Right. A particle like a photon can be like a particle can act as a wave. The energy emitted, the amount of energy that the electron has, it could be jumping from, you know, metaphorically right next to that particle to someplace out of the universe. So that's how crazy this world is that we're talking about this quantum world. So it's a world of unlimited fascination because there's no logic. You're trying to understand it. And as Michael said, we haven't caught up with this new reality. So, you know, for me as an artist, it's this way to really understand. So my book is called Surfing the Cosmos, Environment and Energy. I can't remember. I actually have to look at it.

Steve Miller

What is it? Energy and environment, because those are the key features for me of reality right now. And art is this, if I'm answering this question, as perhaps the middle ground in which to navigate this space and perhaps even make it more accessible.

So would you say that the light, shining, upon your consciousness, theoretically speaking, from the understanding of the physics may be insights, a, interaction within your consciousness or reaction within your consciousness that then manifests as artistic understanding and or artistic inspiration and then artistic actualization?

Verneda Lights

Does that make sense?

Yeah, if I understand what you're saying, you know, art is an activity of intellectual, visual, mental excitement, right? And it could be an escape. But, you know, what I learned when I went to CERN was I had the unbelievable opportunity to be with these guys at lunch and dinner almost every day and what was happening in my brain was like fireworks you know like every day was like the 4th of July Michael's nodding because he knows what this is like your brain is like you know exploding with excitement and that's exactly the feeling I got as a kid when I saw my first Jackson Pollock painting at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo New York I was about eight years old I'd never seen anything you know, these incredible splatters, you know, floating in the air in front of me. And it happened to be on a stairway where we looked up at it when they got the painting at the Albright connecting the two buildings.

Steve Miller

And this was this moment of incredible excitement and mystery. I was excited, but I didn't know what the hell it was because I never think anything like it. And I think, you know, if you're talking about the. Stimulation that happens both in art, philosophy, science, mathematics, it's this, you know, acute moment of incredible excitement. And it's really addictive as Michael can tell you.

Yeah, and I think, Renata, if I get your question well as what Steve has been saying, I mean, as artists, all of our experiences, everything we've, you know, understood is part of who we are. And so because I've been able to study and learn the mathematics, I have a point of view that really, you know, I can draw upon as an artist that if I hadn't had that, it would be very different.

Michael Pierre Price

It's like I went to see, you know, I went to the Grand Canyon about five years ago and I'd seen pictures, et cetera. But being there was the magic, you know, seeing the pictures is, you know, like it doesn't compare or hearing other people tell me about it. And Steve being at CERN, I mean, oh my gosh, I'm so envious of him. And so I've been able to learn all of those experiences because, you know, I've been at Batavia in the Chicago area. And so there is something very magical about seeing and being involved in experimentation because that's the physics equivalent of beauty, of something where you've been thinking about if this idea is true, we should see this result. And sometimes it happens. Other times you learn from that. Sometimes it's confirmed and you learn from that as well. And it's that process.

Michael Pierre Price

And I think as artists, we go through that as well. We start down a path. We're learning, we're learning, we're learning and we start to get better and we go down new paths. And we learn from that. And I think that middle ground for me is the experiential element.

So if you were to take string theory into your circumstance of being inspired by what you were learning in physics, okay, and it became a part of your lived reality here in that room where you are right now, okay?

Yes.

What would that look like?

Now that's, I love that question. And that was part of that one slide. It says like, how do I know what I know and how do I share that? That's the challenge. And that's what Steve was just talking about. The thing with mathematical knowledge is it's in that realm. And you can go to a physicist and you can speak that language. But then if you try to take that out of that realm and say, what does that mean conceptually, practically, artistically, you have to figure out what is that translation.

Michael Pierre Price

The way Steve translates his understanding versus the way I do. I translate my understanding. That's part of our uniqueness of each one of our artistic paths. It's a conundrum in one respect. We've been talking about quantum mechanics. And the understanding of what quantum mechanics means at the most fundamental level is still at debate 100 years from when it started to really come about. I mean. Do you believe in the Copenhagen theory? Multi multiple world theories? I mean, there's a lot of ways to interpret what the mathematics says and the mathematics is extremely accurate in the predictions. But what does it mean? And that's what we struggle with as human beings to find fundamental understanding of how we conceptualize what the math is telling us.

Okay, well, I thank the two of you so much. I asked the question because I seem to have stumbled into a series of experiences that I could explain possibly better if I had understanding of quantum physics, you know. But thank you so much for your explanations. For you both.

Okay, are we ready for Lee had his hand up. Would you like to ask your questions or make a call?

I love the discussion. It takes me back to the 1960s and early 70s. When I was talking to all these people from MIT and art and technology and even some of the synagraphic. People when I would explain to them that I was an artist and back in those days. If you were doing photography and painting you had problems with the galleries every gallery that I worked with always said to me we were happy to show your paintings, but don't mention photography to anybody.

Lee Musgrave

And most of them wouldn't show any of the photography work and then, when I would explain to them about. What I was doing. I was trying to do with computers and photography. And I would go to what I would call the science people, even the Disney imaginary people, they would say to me, if you can't take the time to learn computer programming and understand the basics of physics.

Lee Musgrave

Well, we can't help you. In other words, go away. So here I was somebody who came from the painting drawing world who discovered that these computers could help generate images I hadn't seen before and I wanted to do something with them and everybody kept telling me, no, you have an art degree, you don't have a science degree, you don't even have a photography degree, you're a painter. That's what they kept saying to me. And as a painter, the last thing you can do to an artist is tell them no you can't do that.

Lee Musgrave

I didn't like you know. So I didn't deal with them any more than I had to. And when I started curating I would bring this up to the people I had to answer to my bosses, so to speak, above me and. And then. Their answer to commercial galleries that I would curate for they would say we can't sell at we can we don't know how to explain that to anybody. How can we sell it. You know, and the colleges and universities that I would curate for they would say, oh, I'm not sure that the science department or the math department will be happy about us trying to do something like that you got to you got to be able to write that down in an essay or catalog before we can even talk about it. So I didn't want to talk about that scared them all to death. It took until the 90s. Before I could convince an institution to allow me to curate an exhibit on this theme.

Lee Musgrave

Because everybody couldn't understand it and then I had a hard time explaining it. Even when I showed them the images. They would say yeah it's abstract. Yeah. So, the only way I could explain it was through my own experience. So, the only way I could explain it was through my own experience. And the only way I could approach it to talk to people about it was closer to the spiritual side of it. And the only way I could explain it was through my own experience. When I talked about Jackson Pollock, and how he made paintings in the moment.

Lee Musgrave

And they, they would listen, because Jackson Pollock had been accepted in the art world, more or less. And then you try to bring up. And then you try to bring up. Kandinsky and his writings about spiritual as it involves with abstract imagery. Okay, so then I would say yes and this abstract energy is aided by using a computer, rather than a paintbrush.

Lee Musgrave

Ooh. Yeah, they take a step back at that point. Right there. Right there scares them. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point.

Lee Musgrave

And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. And it still scares them in my opinion to this very point. Is people tend to drift closer to what I would call commercial graphic arts. A lot of the early guys that I used to meet, I'm sorry I don't remember a lot of those names, they did that. They came up through that way. They made TV commercials and they made other promotional things using computers to promote some product.

Lee Musgrave

And the people that were paying them they didn't give a damn. They didn't care if you called yourself an artist or anything else. Just get the product name and image up there however you want to get it up there. They didn't care if it came from a computer or anything else. As long as it met their commercial requirements they were happy. And from that I saw the digital artist group. Those guys started making artwork.

Lee Musgrave

But when that printer came up they were like, the digital printer came up.

And people realized that... Hey, Lee, in the interest of time, did you have a question for either of the presenters?

We're going to have to wrap this up in a few minutes.

My apologies. I have something scheduled at 7, another Zoom meeting. And I just want to thank everyone for coming. I'm sorry I have to jump out. Thank you, Cynthia, for hosting. And Michael, enjoyed listening to you. Thank you, Colin.

Thanks for coming, Steve. Appreciate it.

And Steve, there was a question. I got, when your book does drop, how are people able to get it? Is it going to be on Amazon?

Yeah, it's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, a pretty wide distribution. And there's more information at my website just for the book called surfingthecosmos.com. You can find a lot of information there. And thanks to your patience and for listening. Awesome.

Thank you, Steve.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you. It's... 7 o'clock. Do we have time for more, Colin or David?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we started at 5, at 5.35, so we can go to 7.05, I guess, for the recording. Lee, did you have a question for Michael or?

Well, my question was going to be really about do they think that there's been any improvement in the acceptance of this kind of approach to artwork within the framework of the book? And I think it's really important that people in the fine art community world.

Wow. Yeah, I think I... My feeling is that there's still a lot of trepidation from very traditional people right now. Yeah. Although I'm hoping that, you know, the Techspressionists group will help to make some headway that way, but I don't know. Yeah, people still have a misconception of what technology...

Michael Pierre Price

And I think the recent AI phenomenon and also NFTs have just completely blurred some of those boundaries as well. So I don't know how it's all going to shake out, to be honest with you. But yeah, I think for those people who are traditional, in some way, they probably look at digital stuff as scams.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to chime in. You know, my feeling is, you know, the NFT phenomenon and what's been happening lately with AI art and just in the last couple of years, really, I think mostly fueled by NFTs and the ability for people to monetize their work in that way. It's sort of created, you know, an alternative to the traditional way of working. It's an alternative art world where you jump on Twitter and there's literally thousands of people every day posting their work, publishing their work, minting work, talking about it. It might not be the same art world as the art world, you know, in the meatpacking district or in Chelsea or anywhere else, but it's an alt art world. I don't really know how to describe it. And it's bleeding over into traditional spaces, you know, slowly but surely.

Colin Goldberg

So I feel fairly optimistic that even though, you know, it's not going to replace what's come before, it's, you know, it's displacing it, I think, in some ways. And it's interesting to see, you know, and I think it's very interesting to see the sort of intersection of those spaces, you know. And Michael, I really appreciate, you know, you coming on and Cynthia also taking the initiative to come up with this topic and moderate. And we are kind of getting close to the end of this recording session. But I would like to, you know, invite you all to stick around after we stop the recording and hopefully see if we can cajole another victim to be a moderator and come up with a topic for two weeks from now. Because I think having the idea of guest moderators really, like, encourages me to think about the topic.

Colin Goldberg

And I think it encourages sort of like a culture of sort of curatorial, you know, inclusivity and also the ability for people to develop ideas, you know, in an online medium, which I think, you know, is different than just talking about digital. But like, you know, if we can look at what we're doing here as a group, as a social sculpture in a way that, you know, it's a creative process that we could all be involved in, that to me would be, you know, you know, a great way to do that. And I think that's sort of the way I would envision this project sort of moving forward in the best possible way. So I'm going to hand it over to Cynthia, though, if you have any closing remarks to wrap up for today.

I just want to say I've very much enjoyed listening to our speakers and the discussion that we had. It is a challenging subject. And I think even though it is challenging, many artists have taken on different subjects, different themes, different concepts, different themes, and not everyone understands those themes, whether it be physics or whether it be, you know, automated digital art or AI or, you know, just a theme regarding some period in history. And so it's up to the viewer to make decisions about that work and to also do the work to understand. If you're really interested in that, then you will do the work to perhaps understand. And as a lay person, I've read a number of books on physics that make it somewhat understandable for me, even though there are these mysteries. So there is hope for those who have not studied physics to gain some understanding.

Cynthia DiDonato

So with that, I'll end and thank everyone for coming and Colin for, you know, making this happen.

Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. And thank you all for attending. Thanks to the presenters. And, you know, been a great salon. One last thought. So tonight is going to be the proposed time and date or overnight early in the morning hours for the Ethereum merge, which might not mean a whole lot to people outside of the NFT space, but I was thinking about it today. And I'm going to be talking about the, you know, And if, you know, it actually works in the way that people are hoping it works and reduces, you know, the energy footprint, the carbon footprint, essentially, of Ethereum, which at least 90% of the world's NFTs are minted on right now, it's going to also have a giant global impact on the carbon footprint that, you know, artists, internet users, cryptocurrency, you know, that we use.

Colin Goldberg

It's essentially like one of the most green things that could have possibly happened in an instant of time that no legislation could accomplish when you really think about it. You know, I mean, if the entire blockchain ecosystem is going to be using 90 some odd percent less energy to operate, that's including all transactions. Right? So, you know, in terms of Ethereum, which Bitcoin notwithstanding is going to remain a proof of work blockchain.

Colin Goldberg

But I think it's pretty good news for artists personally. And I'm crossing my fingers that I see some good headlines for tomorrow. So with that, I am going to stop our recording. And anyone who wants to hang out for the advisory board session, is more than welcome to do so. And we will stop in three, two, one, contact.