Art@Science.137

The defining attribute of Homo sapiens is our ability to use language and communicate meaning using symbols, sounds, sights and structures. Our fluency in the use of icon, image, index and symbols allows us to understand across barriers of dialect and ideology and see the world as it really is or might be. Art @Science.137 is a work of creative consilience of the imagination, a “jumping together” of perspectives using the visual and text based languages of the arts to illuminate the facts and fact based theories of science. In doing so, we hope to create a common ground of explanation and understanding that extend the algorithmic compressions of mathematics, the language of science. The resulting visual mosaic expands the understanding of reality as only art can, imposing subjective expressions of beauty, elegance, and symmetry to the declarative “ this is “ of science. So the “I” of Art, meets the “We” of Science in an attempt to create the transcendental understanding immeasurably more diverse and pleasing than a simple equation. On another plane, this is an exploration of the boundary of languages to translate and create meaning outside of each idiom. Hence our use of the number 137. It’s a mysterious number you will find on the doors of physicist’s offices and laboratories everywhere, reminding them that science hasn’t discovered everything. It actually represents a relationship between electromagnetism in the form of the charge of the electron and relativity in the form of the speed of light, and quantum mechanics in the form of Planck’s constant. What it relates to is unknown and physicists have explored its meaning without success. It remains a mysterious expression of our reality. It consumed the interest of some of the twentieth centuries great minds including the late and great artist, bongo drummer and Noble laureate, Richard Feynman, who inspired our work from the beginning. What of these facts and theories of science? Which facts, which theories? We’ve selected Sciences' top twenty, from a list suggested by Robert Hazen and James Trefil in SCIENCE, l991. These preface the title of the verse and image in the table of contents. Similarly, the equations chosen to exemplify each fact or theory are personal selections and represent the bias and esthetic tastes of the artists. Then of course there is the visual art, the expression by the “I”, as mysterious as 137, expressing a wonder which numbers cannot. Art is the most human of all the activities that defines our inner reality. Where science and art meet is a mysterious place. It's a blurring of different consciousness and an expression of two sides of the brain. Reality is a mix of both.

L.P. Visentin & P. Visentin 1998