What makes a work of art beautiful? What makes an equation aesthetic? The conceptions of beauty in art and science are quite different yet not dissimilar, in that both strive to strike a responsive chord.
What I’ve been looking at in this book is a new sort of art, where artists and scientists work together. But does that mean we also need a new definition of aesthetics? Is beauty even a relevant criterion for a work of art anymore? And, to paraphrase Richard Taylor, who spotted fractal patterns in Jackson Pollock’s paintings, can science “throw some narrow beam of light into those dim corners of the mind where great paintings exert their power?”
Is aesthetics simply a matter of taste? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is it possible to make an objective aesthetic judgment? Recently neuroscientists have claimed to be able to do just this using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brain of a subject looking at a work of art. It seems that a particular part of the prefrontal cortex sparks when a viewer perceives a painting as beautiful.
These are the origins of the new field of neuroesthetics. One of its proponents, Semir Zeki, a brain researcher at University College London, has suggested that the artist has always unknowingly been “in a sense, a neuroscientist,” in that artists instinctively know how to stimulate this particular part of the brain.
Art historians and psychologists have also contributed to the new field of neuroesthetics, but thus far there has been no consensus. It is too early to know whether, as neuroscientists claim, aesthetic judgments can be explained using the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them today. And even if aesthetic judgments are totally physiological, this still doesn’t help us understand what beauty is, why certain works give aesthetic pleasure and others don’t.
There is a whole vast body of philosophical works defining and redefining aesthetics in both West and East. But while beauty in art is an ongoing discussion, in science the question of beauty is more cut and dried. The great mathematician Henri Poincaré, whose work also crossed into art, wrote, “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.” For science, like art, is all about the quest for beauty. In biology there is symmetry of form and proportion, as in classical art. Nature favors the symmetrical, which is perhaps why symmetry is often something that we find beautiful.
When Einstein wrote his first great relativity paper in 1905, he used aesthetics as a guideline for his research. He made it clear in the first sentence that his doubts regarding the scientific theories of his day were not to do with the equations of physics but rather with their interpretation, which led to “asymmetries that are not inherent” in nature. Fired by an aesthetic of minimalism, he shaved away all the redundant explanations and inessential concepts. The result was his theory of relativity—a response to aesthetic discontents.
In physics there is an objective definition of the aesthetic. An equation is beautiful if it retains its form even when certain of its component parts are altered, such as switching right and left. If this switch leaves the equation unchanged, it is said to possess mirror symmetry, meaning that if that experiment were performed in a mirror world the result would be exactly the same. In physics symmetry is a form of aesthetics—a form of beauty.
But what of artists and scientists working today? What do they have to contribute to the debate? With a great deal of struggle, they have encountered the sublime, the aesthetic, the beautiful. What they have to say may be of value in understanding aesthetics and beauty in the context of the new art movement.
In 1933, the famous Harvard mathematician George Birkhoff published a work called Aesthetic Measure, in which he reduced aesthetics to a mathematical formula, stating that aesthetics is in the inverse ratio of order to complexity. In other words, the less complex an artwork, the more aesthetic it is. Inspired by this, the German philosopher Max Bense—later to utter the prophetic words to Jasia Reichardt, “Look into computers”—explored the possibility of using computers to generate a scientific notion of aesthetics. He also investigated how one might program a computer with algorithms in order to produce artifacts with aesthetic qualities. He called this framework “generative aesthetics” and the resulting work Generative Art, a term which continues to be used today. The early computer artists Frieder Nake and Georg Nees, whose work is geometrical and linear, were influenced by Bense. Their work fits Birkhoff’s notion of the aesthetic rather well.
Neri Oxman, at the MIT Media Lab, links algorithms with aesthetics in a way that touches on Bense’s generative aesthetics. She has, she says, an “aesthetic fascination with forms in nature, form generation as given by nature.” For one of her projects she investigates the load-bearing properties of calcium, the way calcium distributes itself to form strong bones. She “tries to spec out algorithms that describe this conversation between matter and distribution of loads.” The guiding force of the algorithm is aesthetic. Ultimately she wants to find new ways to use concrete in buildings, leading to a bold new architecture going beyond what is possible today. She sees this as encompassing engineering and art: engineering in the use of materials and art as it incorporates aesthetics, which emerges in the process of working.
The computer artist Ernest Edmonds takes as his guideline “minimalism in my means as well as in my aesthetics: simplicity,” an aesthetic which seems to echo Birkhoff’s. “Writing computer programs helped me in thinking about art problems. The less complicated in doing it, the better” is his take.
Similarly, Bernhard Leitner, a pioneer of sound art, favors a minimalist aesthetic characterized by clean lines and clear-cut patterns, as in his meticulous drawings depicting lines of sound and the locations of the speakers which will produce it. The ability to sense what is aesthetic is learned from experience gained through experiment.
Paul Friedlander, physicist and magician of light, also says aesthetics has to do with simplicity of design, as in ancient and primitive art, which he loves. The pseudonymous Jim Miller of the American artists’ group EyeCandy ArtWorks wrote of him, “In a time when so many artists resort to bizarre and shocking gimmicks to achieve originality I take solace in the work of Paul Friedlander and others like him. They prove that beauty still has a place in modern art.”
Ken Perlin, who won an Oscar for creating Perlin noise, for rendering animations more natural, agrees that “simpler is better” but adds that in order to be aesthetic, a work also needs to be pleasing to the eye. The question is, of course, whose eye? We are back to the riddle of individual taste.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, asserts that functionality is the essence of beauty. To him, functionality is aesthetic and “goes along with beauty.” He gives as an example the alignment of cables laid out in parallel, like a work of minimalist art. “If it functions well,” he says, “it has to be beautiful.”
To Julian Voss-Andreae, whose sculptures evoke the ambiguous quantum world, aesthetics is satisfactory design. “To me, form and function are always a unit and both together make a good design, like in math or engineering,” he says. “I cannot separate the experience of discovering or understanding such a solution from a beautiful aesthetic experience.”
Rick Sayre, a supervising technical director at Pixar, says, “I don’t have a precise definition of aesthetics. For us an element of aesthetics is when there is intention behind the work and the intention is to create a certain emotional response in the viewer and that emotional response is going to be motivated by the story and is also going to be influenced by specific desires of the director.” Thus, in The Incredibles the aim was to create a simple skin texture that, like real human skin, responds to light. The real test, says Sayre, is whether the audience likes what it sees. If not, Pixar changes it until they do. The viewer’s response is the filter that tempers the end result.
Jonas Loh, who creates extraordinary sculptures depicting data, such as his eerily organic The “Gestalt” of Digital Identity, or Emoto, the mountain range depicting emotions communicated in tweets during the 2012 Olympics, sees himself as searching for “new aesthetic forms while also researching how to communicate them.” For him, aesthetics involves the communication of facts, which is what data visualization is all about. Aesthetics is a visual thing tied in with information content, he says. The higher the information content, the greater the aesthetic value.
A concrete example is Harry Beck’s 1931 map of the London Underground. Its function is to navigate below ground, so Beck didn’t worry about topographical features like hills, roads, or tunnels. He used his extensive experience drawing electrical circuits made up of horizontal and vertical lines and lines at forty-five degrees to the horizontal to produce a visual representation containing a great deal of information in a minimal graphical style. The map of the London Underground is a supreme example of the aesthetic of functionality. It has become iconic, serving as a model for tube maps of other cities.
Scott Draves, maestro of the computer-generated image and creator of Flame and Electric Sheep, sees his work as a collaboration between himself and the computer, in which the computer is an equal partner. “I want to give up control [to the computer],” he says. “I want to exceed my imagination.” Electric Sheep is driven by the principles of Darwinian evolution. The public makes aesthetic judgments, choosing from among endlessly generated abstract animations which Draves’s software changes on the basis of their decisions, even though their choices may not be to his liking. Thus aesthetics functions as a Darwinian device in which only the most interesting or beautiful survives.
Similarly, the computer artist William Latham, who creates spectacular images of virtual organic life forms, uses aesthetics to select from among the myriad forms he creates, following the guidelines of “symmetry, elegance, and balance.”
Aaron Koblin, wunderkind who created the mesmerizing graphic of flight traffic across the US, not to mention The Sheep Market, takes data and applies standard software to it. If something interesting emerges he writes new software, hoping for something to appear that will stimulate a gut feeling, pass his emotional test for what is aesthetic: Is it exciting? Does it resonate? Is it clearly designed?
To Bradford Paley, the perfectionist who created the iconic Relationships among Scientific Paradigms, clear design is all. “Personally and emotionally, my driving goal is to find and reveal beauty in the world,” he says. By beauty he means not aesthetics but meaning, how well a visual representation can be understood. Thus he reworked the Scientific Paradigms image, even though anyone less perfectionist would have been happy with it. He found the “wisps of hair” in his diagram, made up of key words from published papers, too aesthetically seductive. His decision was to make them less prominent, to favor meaning over beauty.
Peter Weibel, performance and media artist as well as chairman and CEO of ZKM in Karlsruhe, takes a similar stance. “For me aesthetics starts with the Greek word aisthanomai, meaning ‘I perceive, feel, sense,’” he says. “Aesthetics is a general medium for questioning the world. For me aesthetics has nothing to do with beauty, but with information. Many of my works are not directly linked to reality, but to aesthetic problems.”
In Weibel’s universe, aesthetics is something our mind constructs from the complex interplay of our senses. In his film, Virtual Tetrahedron, an actor appears and inserts a screen with lines on it into a metal frame of indeterminate shape, and a tetrahedron magically appears. The tetrahedron never really exists. It is an illusion. Thus aesthetics has to do with the way the mind makes sense of the world around it, the satisfying moment when the parts of the puzzle click into place.
Physics-influenced artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, who use lasers to create magical works combining physics and chemistry, reach back to their heritage in Russian mysticism. When a physicist who was totally familiar with the technical aspects of a cloud chamber saw their installation, Memory Vapor, he was moved to tears, because it took him beyond everyday reality into a vision of the universe far removed from the usual cloud chamber events. “Aesthetics is to be emotionally moved,” they say.
They don’t deliberately try to make a work beautiful. The “aesthetic emerges; it has to be emergent. We hope the unexpected will appear. This is a most important ingredient, even in an artwork.” They seek, they say, “an aesthetics of the ephemeral, of the ethereal.”
For the musician, author, and composer of experimental music David Toop, “Aesthetics is intuition. Intuition is when you’re not thinking about what you’re doing. At a certain level, you don’t know what you’re doing. But at a deeper level, you do.” Intuition is experience, essential to improvisation.
The sound artist Jo Thomas, who recorded the sound of the electrons whirling around in the Diamond Light Source accelerator, includes skill—how skillfully a piece is made—as an important component in the aesthetic quality of the finished piece. The artist’s feeling for the work is also important. “A work has a belief in itself and must be able to exist in its own right.” And the work must involve a “transfer of knowledge, that is, of beauty and skill.”
Paul Prudence, who creates spectacular sound and image shows, says, “Aesthetics is complex. It’s not just about new media experience, but about much deeper modes of understanding and the history of cultures. It’s some sort of formal way of putting together sound and visual material that seduces you on a number of levels, based on experience,” he adds, deliberately specifying experience rather than intuition.
Composer Robert Rowe, the New York experimental musician who delves into the brain’s structure, says, “Aesthetics feeds into the compositions I make.” He hopes that computer models of music will offer a better handle on the elusive concept of aesthetics by producing pleasing melodies from sets of rules which may offer clues as to the rules hardwired into our minds. This sort of research program is similar to programs in cognitive science which investigate how scientists think through experimental data as they work toward discovering scientific theories.
There’s also the mystery of how people perceive beauty, as in the case of A. Michael Noll’s algorithm which produced a Mondrian-like painting that many viewers preferred to the real Mondrian, or David Cope’s computer simulations of Bach’s music, which listeners couldn’t distinguish from the real thing. Both created aesthetic objects that triggered responses in the neurology of the viewers/listeners.
“What else do we need to know to write a computer program that could do something better, that could probe more deeply into how Bach created his works?” Rowe asks. Despite still being in its infancy, Rowe is optimistic that through exploring algorithms for producing music AI may be able to reduce the gap between the present, somewhat fuzzy notion of aesthetics in music to a more quantifiable one.
Bruce Wands, media artist, musician, and composer, homes in on the happy mistake—the ability of the creative mind to recognize the melody in, for example, a musical scale wrongly played. Experience primes the mind to be alert for such unexpected experiences which can occur during improvisation, where “I let the music play me.” Speaking of his use of the computer for composing music, he is intrigued by the power of “algorithms to produce new images and sounds,” he says. For him aesthetics is intuitive in the most freewheeling sense, playing a role in and sometimes emerging from improvisation and the creative possibilities that it can lead to. Toop shares this view.
The sound artist Tristan Perich, composer of the 1-Bit Symphony, says of the minimalist music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, “You can see their aesthetic from afar, but then you can also see how it’s built up. It’s all similar stuff—music, art, mathematics—dependent on basic building blocks—notes in music, the lines in art, numbers in mathematics, and atoms in physics. I find that inspiring, how music appeals to the same part of the brain as science.” “Simple stuff is the most pristinely beautiful,” he adds. For Perich, the scientific input of his work ends with the programming, while the music, which contains the aesthetic experience, is intuitive. Thus he separates the rational from the intuitive in his work.
Oron Catts, creator of Pig Wings and head of SymbioticA, the cutting-edge bioart laboratory, considers beauty “a strategy of seduction” and sees a “crisis in aesthetic strategies with which artists ought to be struggling.” Forms grown out of living tissue, like Pig Wings, are inherently aesthetic in that nature prefers pleasing forms.
Jun Takita, who turned a model of his own brain into a moss garden, homes in on the moment of discovery when it occurs to him “how to do the work” as his key aesthetic experience. Process rather than result is the basis of his work.
It’s not surprising that such a diverse range of artists offers a diverse range of interpretations of what aesthetics is. Key elements are simplicity, functionality, coherence between form and function, good design, and how well the finished product expresses the artist’s intention or communicates information in a new and interesting way. Then there are less tangible interpretations. Most seem to agree that aesthetics has to do with intuition; perhaps it is a quality that can only be intuited, not explained. Or it may have to do with experience. Some artists are aware of the aesthetics of the piece as they work; others see it in the finished product; and for some it’s a selection procedure, a way of choosing from a myriad of images, or the way in which the mind suddenly registers the beauty in what at first appears to be a random event or even a mistake, when the computer “takes over,” to paraphrase Draves. It also comes with the artist’s recognition that the piece is finished. The response of the viewer comes into it too.
Artists with a background in mathematics, computer science, or physics express their opinion more directly and concisely. Most data visualization artists give a direct view of what an aesthetic representation is: the higher the information content, the greater the aesthetics. William Latham gives what must surely be an appealing definition of aesthetics: “symmetry, elegance, and balance.”
These artists’ comments on aesthetics are dispatches from the cutting edge. They offer fresh approaches to a concept that is usually considered elusive, as well as insights into how the creative mind functions. All link aesthetics with intuition while taking care to note that this is the product of experience, not something fuzzy. Relating aesthetics to algorithms further demystifies it.
Different cultures have different notions of what is aesthetic, as do individuals within a culture. But might it be that there are structures in the mind, hardwired from birth, that generate notions of aesthetics from input from the world in which we live? This is what Robert Rowe and his colleagues are researching in music. Perhaps neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, or psychology, as they are today, can offer only a hint of things to come. Eventually all these subjects will fuse to create a hybrid form of knowledge, electronically based, capable of elucidating brain functions, and offering a new concept of aesthetics and its role in creative thinking.
This is not reductionism in the sense of explaining phenomena using the laws of physics as we understand them today, reducing us all to nothing but subatomic particles, dead matter. We are greater than the sum of our parts. But how can the workings of particles at the submicroscopic level produce inspiration and consciousness? Perhaps explanations derived from a new, wider form of knowledge will leave open a role for inspiration in the production of sublime art and music, as well as producing new explanations as to why the universe is as it is and we are as we are.
In 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of a “Scientific Cubism” that would move in an entirely different direction from the art of the day. It would be the “art of painting new structures out of elements borrowed not from the reality of vision, but from the reality of knowledge,” by which he meant knowledge obtained from going beyond appearances. In a similar vein, Duchamp, wrote Apollinaire, used shapes and color “not to capture appearances but to penetrate the very nature of these forms.” One word for the knowledge shared by artists and scientists might be “intuition.”
Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica, a showcase for the new art movement, speculates on an aesthetic emerging out of data visualization, a “new aesthetics of the future.” The twenty-first century marks the beginning of the age of information. Our lives are already to a large extent determined by information, by the devices, such as cell phones, that we use to access it, and by the networks we frequent, such as the World Wide Web. It will be exciting to see what new concepts of aesthetics emerge to fit the forthcoming information age.