Bonsai

 

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Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

  • We are currently witnessing the end of an artistic world. Artists of tomorrow will no longer produce works but something yet to be named. They will no longer create objects but rather types of microuniverses in perpetual evolution.

    These universes will be woven with uninterrupted changes, with mobile networks of lines, surfaces, forms, and forces in constant interaction, produced by the coupling of mathematics and calculators. From fractal dragons to cellular automata, from zooids to logic viruses, mathematical beings move and metamorphose in their symbolic spaces. They can change or alter the very laws by which they are constituted. They can provide the virtually autonomous substance of a new, intermediary art. The metaphor of the “symbolic bonsai” has been chosen to render the intermediary “life” of this intermediary art. Why intermediary art?

    In an attempt to explain art using the words of language, even the greatest minds diverge to some extent. According to Plato, for example, art is the quest for “likelihood;” according to Hegel it aims to “reveal the truth.”Should art seek likelihood or truth? Is the artist a magician or a prophet? What, in fact, is truth? Plato said truth is a “divine vagabondage,” which undoubtedly is why it remains beyond the reach of art, why he contends we must be satisfied with a “likely” imitation.

    Since we are not gods, we cannot “vagabond;” we need laws. And this need applies to art. Thus, art must also be a science. As a product of human activity, art must obey rules inherent to the techniques used to create it. But art is also sensible representations, and as such refuses the domination of abstraction and laws. The best way to resist laws is to change them—constantly. Art itself must therefore be change—perpetual change.

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References:
    1. G. W. F. Hegel, Pénoménologie de l’Esprit, Ed. Aubier, Paris, 1977.
    2. “Like excretion, the instinct to create plastic form is an act where the animal becomes as though external to itself.” G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature.
    3. G. Bachelard, L’air et les songes, Ed. Jaié Corti, Paris, 1943, p. 235.
    4. P. de Reffye, “Modelisation de l’architecture des arbres par processus stochastiques,” Doctorat d’Etat, Paris, 1979. Also see M. Jaeger, “Representation et simulation de croissance des vegetaux,” doctoral thesis, Strasbourg, 1987.
    5. See K. Niklas, “Computer-simulated plant evolution,” Scientific American, May 1986.
    6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, op. cit.
    7. P. Valery, Introduction á la Methode de Leonard de Vinci, Ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1960.