Art and Architecture

Being Human

Sometimes I say I’m an artist. But don’t believe me. Until the ideas come off the paper or out of your head you are not an artist. I was formally trained in art history and music. I had a short stint as a sculptor (not a very good one, but do have lots of ideas on paper...) and I played in various jazz trios and an occasional classical percussion gig. I know artists and have artists in my family. Maybe I’m “art-adjacent” if that is even a thing. But I believe in the evolutionary origins of creativity and how they manifest themselves both in nature and culture. Humans have co-opted the creativity nature expresses throughout biology and exercise it throughout the cognitive niche. Because science, engineering, art, and design all resonate from this creative instinct it can be confusing to categorize how creativity shows up in human culture and in the things we make. When DALL-E 3 creates an image based on a text description is it art? If I create an exact replica of a building designed by Le Corbusier, is it architecture? 

I went on to have a career in radio, television and computer graphics, but became disillusioned when I had the revelation that the viewer is the product, not the movie or show, or even the commercials. I had to reckon with how miraculous it seemed that we could create machines that could put images into our eyes that were not really there, and I was obsessed with understanding vision, visual representation, and meaning. This fit well with my interest in photography and I became a student of R.G.W. Hunt, and Marshall McLuhan. The very idea that we are image-making creatures and that these images hold so much importance in human culture was too compelling to ignore. We create things that feed our brain, what in research parlance we call “perception-action” and not just images but anything our embodied actions affect or sense. We literally think through our interaction in the environment, not just in our heads. This is the cognitive niche. This is where we co-opt the creativity of nature toward our artistic, scientific, engineering, and social ends. I call this "Evolution 2.0. I did a talk on this topic for the Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education at Oxford University in 2009.  

Art, part of what it means to be human, has exploded into space. I had to go back to McLuhan for what art actually means in this bubbling stew of the cognitive niche. The idea is simple: like evolution, we build on what happened in the past. Change is incremental. We have to work with what we know and tools we have, even to create something new. McLuhan applied this idea to technological innovation and called it “rear-view mirror” thinking. According to his thinking, arguably, only the artist can really see into the future. I was privileged to experience the ontogeny of an artist. A very competent and original abstract painter asking the questions at a young age: how can I reinvent the medium so that it is no longer constrained to a flat gessoed piece of canvas? Can the medium be rethought to occupy positive and negative space? Can violation of the surface be imbued with meaning, not just the surface itself? These kinds of questions ask about and explore the future. 

I had a recent revelation about the role of artists in human culture and how we define art when I was invited to an opening at Postmasters in SoHo, one of New York's premier galleries. László Barabási was exhibiting visualizations from his network science lab that were presented as art in a gallery, rather than quantitative representations of connected systems for analysis. In my conversation with the gallery owner Tamás Banovich, he explained that data are increasingly how reality is represented. If art is looking forward, it is using the means of communication that are emerging and are able to be harnessed to evoke the imagination of artist and art lovers alike. Since the lingua franca is quickly becoming data in all its forms it makes perfect sense to use data representations as abstractions of reality as much as any expressionistic format. Here is the archive page from that exhibit in which Tamás explicates this idea further. And here is Laszlo's paper on the subject.​