Art and Science

Treating art from scientific standpoint has a millennia-long history. It complements the opposite trend of declaring art a miracle and eternal mystery, something beyond rational comprehension. As usual, both positions are too abstract to be right. The relations of art and science are to be considered within a larger scope, including other levels of spirituality.

Statistics

There have been several attempts to use information theory to assess the works of art. In the most straightforward approach, one tries to compare the statistical characteristics of "aesthetic" signals with those of standard noise. Indeed, using the 1/f discrimination between noise and art seems quite natural, and it would definitely work the same way for visual arts as for music.

However, this approach is far too primitive to describe the way art differs from the drunkard's walk. For instance, there was an article by I.Yevin [Leonardo, v.27, no.5, pp.413-415 (1994)], the main result of which was that the arts show fractal behavior near the critical region. To put it bluntly, the statistical investigation is not applicable to art, and all one can do is just register some regular violations of any regularity, which do not obey any fixed statistics. However, such fractality can be observed in almost any physical system near the critical points. I do not say that it has nothing to do with beauty. Fractals may be quite fascinating, like snow flakes, or clouds. I only observe that the same fractal behavior may produce something beautiful one time, as well as some junk the other time. This can be easily observed in the numerous fractal screen savers for personal computers.

Complementary realities

Guy Levrier has suggested that art and science refer to "complementary realities" encountered by humans in their exploration of the holistic Universe. One would better say: "complementary views of reality", which is principally the same, with more stress on the integrity of the world, any subjectivity being its necessary part. Different people perceive the world differently --- in a more fundamental formulation, the world is differently reflected in (or projected onto) its different parts; since the world is the unity of all its innumerable components, the complete world view can only be obtained through integrating these partial images, and every one of them is as required for completeness as any other.

In particular, the causal view of the world (advocated by science) must be necessarily complemented with non-causal reflections, of which art can serve as a common example. There are other kinds of reflection, which either cannot be associated with the idea of causality or incorporate both causal and non-causal pictures of the world.

So, the scientists yelling too much on those who admit any doubts about the power of the purely logical reasoning merely demonstrate their utter ignorance of anything beside their narrow profession. This ignorance naturally leads them to the arbitrariness of a much worse kind, which might be illustrated by, say, Tipler's books. Luckily, many scientists are wise enough to understand the restrictions of the physicalist view on the Universe; one might refer to the sober mental experiment by F.J.Dyson [Reviews of Modern Physics, v.51, pp.447-460 (1979)], which has been often compared, in the WWW discussions, with Tipler's "phantasms", being its logical antipode.

As one of the most fundamental principles of the Unist aesthetics states, the main function of art is to produce conceptions. Science feeds on the results of this grand preparatory work, which is the first stage of any comprehension. Scientific concepts are nothing but formalized conceptions, and they can never be defined within science, despite all the pretence of logical positivism.

One more instance of complementarity is provided the difference in the look of the same thing from either producer's or consumer's viewpoint. In particular, the author and the observer of a work of art (listener, viewer, reader etc.) are equally responsible for the result of perception.

In the USSR, V.Koren performed a number of experiments on the mechanisms of creative perception, with the basic premise that both the author and the observer may be equally creative, and there is no passive observation of the work art. He studied how the creative process is organized, and how the perception of the works of art could involve co-creation. It has been demonstrated that the observer's perception reveals two basic hierarchical structures in the scene observed, those of attractivity and significativity. For integrity, the two structures should be correlated, and they tend to merge with more observation. The author's conception of his work manifests an intention hierarchy, which can be compared with the structures of attractivity and significativity, usually with a high correlation. However, there can be no complete coincidence, since individual perception may introduce new elements into the situation. However, too small correlation says that the author failed to realize his intention --- in other words, the thing must be meaningful. On the contrary, too much correlation means suppressed co-creation, mechanical perception that makes no sense. True art implies a delicate balance between the two extremes (not necessarily 50/50), which is not too frequent among professional artists.

The author should not be afraid of interfering with people's perception, when expressing any general considerations on art or the thoughts about particular works. The observers (listener, reader) will interpret everything their own way anyway, and it is comparison that is of interest. Moreover, why not admit the existence of the ways of the author's interaction with the "consumers" of art other than exhibiting the works of art to them? The observers may as well be interested in perceiving the author in a personalized cultural environment, rather than an abstraction of an artist.

However, today's people have to be brave enough to answer the artist's claim for cooperation. Since it will require some bravery indeed, as any creativity does. This is especially so when a quite new attitude is being suggested: people have been taught for centuries to passively adore the sacred message from the heights of artistic genius --- and it may seem most unusual to co-create and be active.

The continuous and the discrete

Briefly, the basic idea can be formulated as follows: any activity corresponds to some (discrete) category, which, however, is only the topmost level of a hierarchical structure, while there is always a continuum of possibilities at lower levels. Therefore, continuity and discontinuity must be the two sides of something more general, the unity of the both. Thus, in quantum mechanics, spatially separated particles become some distributions, acquiring a continuous aspect. This results in the complementary discretization of the collection of their possible states. The total "sum" of continuity and discontinuity remains the same, it is only hierarchical structures that change (turns of the hierarchy).

In the arts, the balance between continuity and discontinuity is as important. Too much continuity means lack of sense, since any sense implies relatedness to some activity, and consequently categorization. It is one of most typical delusions of modern art that one can produce anything profound by purposeless combination of random forms. On the other hand, too much discontinuity would mean lack of content, insufficient implementability. True art combines the both aspects in a proper proportion.