Last weekend I went to a talk about art and time with physicist Lee Smolin and artist Robert Linsley (part of Power Plant's Hubbub series at the Rivoli). Daniel Cockburn's film Metronome was screened as an opening act.

Most physicists carry as many superficial assumptions about contemporary art as most members of the general public (art is for beauty and illustration, abstraction is some kind of elitist gimmick, artists are flighty creatures of imagination that flit about, freely dropping jewels of creative inspiration hither and yon like glittery bird turds decorating the grim grey landscape of hard work and responsibilty that everyone else must endure). Lee Smolin, by contrast, seemed surprisingly interested and conversant with art issues, especially as related to the culture at large. Robert Linsley was up on his physics, and the two had obviously had several good conversations under their belts. As per usual with Hubbub, the talk was unstructured and free ranging, which, in this case, worked out okay.

Here's some of the stuff I'm still thinking about:
There was some discussion of the fact that all our descriptions of time are actually spatial. This observation has come up a few places lately and I don't really get the implications yet.

Smolin said that artists imagine their artworks into the future. In this "world which is change", artists produce a "human-made thing that is intended not to change." Smolin said he could not "think of anything else people do with this intention." Like any self-respecting contemporary artist, Linsley poo-pooed this idea of art not-changing over time, claiming that all readings of art are context dependent, etc. Smolin said, well what about Greek Sculpture? And Linsley, after making obvious comments about missing paint, noses and limbs, made the extraordinary statement, "I don't think there is a past in art." He explained himself, conflating temporal and spatial terms, saying that Greek sculptures are "farther away from us," and therefore there are "more mediations we have to go through " to understand them. "All art is present and contemporary," but the universe has expanded, the population of the world has grown, and each individual point of view must be factored into account. There is a now "a greater distance we need to go through" between artifacts — more cultural "mediations." Linsley's conflation of the expanding universe (picture a ballloon with dots on it, etc, etc) with an expanding world population may be an audacious leap, but it makes for an intriguing and unusual cultural model.

Smolin was clearly on a mission to combat postmodern despair. He also decried "nostalgia for the absolute." (In an off-hand comment he cited the mutiple universe theory—which really gets on my tits: "of course there is life on other planets, the number of universes is infinite therefore anything you can imagine does indeed exist..." blah! dumb — as an example of such nostalgia. Yay.) Smolin insisted that there is a third option, an "ever-evolving network of relationships that defines what things are." There is an "increasing complexity in what it means to be a person" an increase in diversity, and an "opening for a hopeful point of view."

Daniel Cockburn's film Metronome had lots of Fight Club reference, including a very clever segue in which Cockburn's drained and driven voice-over melds into Ed Norton's. I related to Fight Club, and I related to Metronome. Cockburn pounds himself repeatedly in the chest, not to injure himself, but to establish a rhythm, continued all day, that becomes a narrative position from which to bear witness on overwhelming contrapuntal beats of footsteps, traffic lights, hollywood movies and, basically, culture, nature and all things of the world. Cockburn's character is uhappily trapped in his linear rhythm, aware of the miasma of related information but unable to escape the metronome and apprehend the full dynamic onslaught of the universe. "Sameness is the enemy of the soul."

Smolin attacked Cockburn's film for mistakenly conceiving of culture as an ordered, oppressive sameness when in fact, according to Smolin, it is a burgeoning myriad of diversity and opportunity. It is much more up-to-date as far as physics goes to think of time as networks of relationships than it is to think of linear tracks. I liked Smolin's attack on despair, and his investment in hopeful futures, but I think he misread the film somewhat. Cockburn was in the audience and opted to defend himself during the question period. Articulate and self-assured he spoke up, "I appreciate your comments. It is rare in this city that anybody says anything publicly negative about a work of art. Howeer, the film is not really about time but about thought." He explained that the film did depict a circular trap, but he was showing a "reverse role model, and not making a 'true' statement aobut the universe." Smolin, a cocky New Yorker with gift of the gab, actually seemed somewhat remorseful, and said that he thought the film was really good, as a film, but that he still felt Cockburn's despairing point of view was off the mark.

Intelligent design came up and Smolin had four extremely interesting things to say. First he said that "society is just begining to digest the implications of Darwinism as slow metaphor of change," and that there "should be skeptics" as the idea is a "wild scheme." Secondly, however, the real question is whether or not natural selection in the "modern framework" including molecular biology and genetics, is "explanatory of everything we know about life." And the answer is yes, "overwhelming evidence and opinion is that the framework of modern biology is fully explanatory." Thirdly, the thing that frightens him most about the American Christian fundamentalist attacks on Darwinisim are not the threat to research — stem cell research can continue in other countries like China — but rather the "splitting of culture into pieces that have less and less to do with each other in a common cultural conversation." And lastly, he suggested that the Chrisitan right has a functional story that is "explanatory and hopeful in the world they want to explain," and prosthelytized that in the scientific and secular world we also need to start telling a story that is explanatory, positive, and hopeful.
And a couple of notes:
There was mention of current work in physics looking into the possibility that the laws of physics may be mutable. Linsley, with his its-all-context agenda was super excited about this, but Smolin reminded him, quite eloquently, that both art and science share the dreadful possibility of failure. "New concepts or questions are hard to implement fully. I might play with the idea that laws evolve but to implement that in the physics I do has so far been impossible." [UPDATE: I removed the quotes around "its all context" above as Robert Linsley has quite rightly pointed out to me that he did not actually say that. All the other quotes in this report are directly from my notes and should be mostly okay...further, I did not mean to give the impression that Linsley was offhand about his position on deconstruction, merely that he was enthusiastic. Further reading here.]

Xtra Note: The only two physicists (besides Smolin) invoked in the discussion were Brian Greene ("string theory is a confusing mess," says Smolin. Hah!) and Julian Barbour. Barbour's book, the end of time, was recommended to me years ago by my friend Chad and is one of the reasons I got into all this damn physics stuff. Barbour irritates physicists because his theory — time is a bunch of overlapping instantaneous moments and our perception of linearity is an illustion based on our physiological constraints— is preposterous, yet plausible enough (and the math works out okay) to warrant debate. I was very interested to hear that Barbour is, according to Smolin, a "philosophical guru" to himself and a number of colleagues.


- sally mckay 1-30-2006 5:19 am

Time has been coming up here in Grad School (GO BEARS!). Both in my history of physics class and in my game thoery class.
In the game class we're talking about how time is often one of the only constants. That time becomes one of the rules that defines the "magic circle" of game play. Interesting to contrast to the physics class, where we had a discussion about the discontinuity between how time actually works (intrinsicly linked to velocity and mass) and how we percieve it. We are like ants one the face of the earth, and can have no good idea about it's real shape from our perspective. (I'd put shape in quotes but I do that too much and it's a habit I'm trying to "break".)
- joester 1-30-2006 10:50 pm


There are lots of implications for time & art besides posterity. for instance: attention. Paying attention is a little bit like time travel, in that you mine the core samples of your past and meld them with your present, making a sort of timeless ever-morphing mental network thingy. A "mine-meld," if you will. Thank goodness for quotation marks.
- sally mckay 1-31-2006 12:59 am


I once used the idea of attention (and memory) in an argument where I insisted that all art was time based: That deceptively still works of art forced and manipulated what I noticed and when.
- L.M. 1-31-2006 1:42 am


Here is the email Robert Linsley sent me earlier today, reprinted with his permission:

Sally, thanks for your attention to all this. It is your report so I can't really quibble, except that I wouldn't be so offhand about "it's all context." I didn't really say that, but in any case, I think I have a grip on what is liberating and progressive in deconstruction, and scientists as a rule feel they have to defend a notion of truth that is really not threatened by deconstruction at all.

Check out my research web site, at http://finearts.uwaterloo.ca/abstraction.html to see how I am working with scientific metaphors, if that's what they are.


- sally mckay 1-31-2006 1:49 am


What's with all this amateurish philosophy of science (on par with yogaspeak)?


- anonymous (guest) 1-31-2006 7:35 pm


The role of the artist in our time: to resolve each of the fundamental questions of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics and science one blog entry at a time... Preferably while on a stipend and living in a cheap flat in Toronto.
- anonymous (guest) 1-31-2006 7:49 pm


Hi anonymous. Some of this "amateurish philosophy" is joking (ie; "mine-meld"), and you are being kind of rude, and I suspect you might be one of those people who prefers artists to just make nice things and pictures and keep their mouths shut... but you do have a point. There is a good reason why scientists are often trepidatious about hanging out with artists, and that's because in science, rigor and transparency are of utmost importance, while in art they are not. We can lapse into talking pretty flaky at times, especially when we get excited. But that's the occupational hazard of attempting to address scientific principles from an art point of view. One thing I like about Linsley is that he is openly wrestling with this, and rigorously attempting to define the territory of relationship between the two fields. For instance:

I think the interesting connections are not between art and the facts of nature as presented by science, but between art and scientific theories if we see those theories as pictures. Fundamentally, scientists are trying to making a picture of the universe, and so are artists. My pictures are fictional to exactly the same degree as theirs. When they try to make a picture to clarify some aspect of their thinking, they normally reduce the number of dimensions. An explanatory diagram will use two dimensions to illustrate some aspect of a four dimensional reality. Mathematically, and mathematics is also picture making, it is extremely difficult to work with all the dimensions at once. I don't know if art has an advantage, but I do know that scientists today are very interested in surfaces, and of course painting always entails a surface. [link]

- sally mckay 1-31-2006 8:10 pm


by the way...I didn't know there was an art-blog stipend! Where do I sign up?
- sally mckay 1-31-2006 8:16 pm


...and who said flats were cheap in Toronto??
- mnobody (guest) 2-01-2006 2:34 am


Apparently Sally's flat is cheap because her rent has been subsidized by the outgoing Liberal government. (just so she can blog her blog, one teeny post at a time) I think that Harper's going to put an end to all that because I, for one, am a bit pissy about it.

For instance, let me direct your attention to this Google Earth! visual:

sal_GVB

With the aid of this satellite image, it becomes very obvious that I am paying a lot of taxes on all the cigarettes I purchase to get from my place to Sally & GVB's place. AND, it's this tax money that directly subsidizes her meandering musings on topics that enrage me. (but only if I think about it)
- L.M. 2-01-2006 3:58 am


What's with all this amateurish trolling? My trolls have fully formed systems of thought which they disgorge with bombastic loquacity before launching into invective. Surf-by insults are weak.
- mark 2-01-2006 9:41 am


But Mark, if your trolls preamble their invective with a fully formed system of thought, wouldn't they just be someone who disagrees? (though personally, I have reason to fear anyone with a fully formed system of thought)
- L.M. 2-01-2006 7:49 pm


Ack, feh. Silly anonymous rabbit.

I think L.M. is right on about describing paintings as time-based works.

Joester, you say time is a constant in gameplay, can you explain that a little? One of the things I like about games, as opposed to watching movies, is that it takes different people different lengths of time to complete the narrative, as in bad players like me take forever to finish the level, but also one might not play that often, so the game is in your life for months as opposed to days. (Plus if you are some kind of art weirdo you can choose not to complete your tasks and hang around in the game environment as long as you want. Jim Munroe's "Trip to Liberty City" is an extreme example of this. He has a new one that's really good too called Yoga Deathmatch.)


- sally mckay 2-01-2006 9:40 pm


Hmmm ... what is a troll? I suppose the proper answer would include a full taxonomy of the varieties. What unites the various species of trolls is their motivation. Whether they are drive-by trolls or loquacious trolls, their intent is to attack and annoy rather than engage in an honest dialog.

- mark 2-01-2006 9:41 pm


Sally's troll has quite the acid tongue.

What's with all this amateurish philosophy of science (on par with yogaspeak)?

Writer knows what is amateur. Credentials: Royal Academy of I Was Too Frightened to Leave My Name. Also knows yoga.

The role of the artist in our time: to resolve each of the fundamental questions of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics and science one blog entry at a time... Preferably while on a stipend and living in a cheap flat in Toronto.

Writer repeats "lack of expertise" charge. Backs it up with peer-reviewed ad hominem arguments.

Sally, you were so lucky to have this smart, self reliant person "surf on in."
- tom moody 2-01-2006 10:12 pm


bleck! it's not important. I still want my stipend, though. And L.M.'s photo makes me want to start smoking again. Mark that sketch takes me back! thanks for the link.
- sally mckay 2-01-2006 10:22 pm


i was in a meeting at work recently and found out there's a difference between an honourarium and a stipend. apparently, with a stipend, the organization giving the stipend is supposed to fill out/give out T4's. whereas an honourarium, it's up to the person who gets it to declare it.

in that tax deduction location photograph, triangulating (or some such pseudo scientific thing that i've heard that cable companies do - and apparently not all that well from what i've heard....) from lornas house i think i can figure out where your cheap flat is. unless she turned the image upside down - which would be really tricky - but smart. nobody (not mr nobody - i mean the other nobody) wants to let on where the good places are, then they'll end up becoming a place like...."fill in recently lofted/condominiumized location here". although i do like good coffee shops.

i guess i could just say "hey sally, where you you live" next time i see you, but that is not as much fun.


- anonymous (guest) 2-01-2006 11:05 pm


OMG
that last post was me. i don't want anyone thinking i'm secretly "anonymous" troll...

myfanwy
- myfanwy (guest) 2-01-2006 11:05 pm


Well, Wyfanwy, I did assume for a moment that I had been providing safe harbour to Sally's trolls (while they paid the high price of listening to me blither all day about one of my serial obsessions)

And Sally, if you do start smoking again, then my housing will be subsidized.

(Whenever I'm turned down for funding I try to persuade my friends with regular jobs to just remit their taxes directly to me, my argument being: "Obviously a horrible mistake has been made!")
- L.M. 2-01-2006 11:32 pm


L.M. is fond of turning M's upside down as well as maps. tee hee!
- mnobody (guest) 2-02-2006 1:37 am


Shit, I just go for a consonant count with Myfanwy's name, sometimes I forget to check if they are the right consonants.
- L.M. 2-02-2006 2:05 am


i'm not anonymous......i' am spartacus!
- anonymous (guest) 2-02-2006 3:10 am


i' am spartacus... and soylent green is made of people!
- anonicus (guest) 2-02-2006 5:59 am


¿Que?
- Tino (guest) 2-02-2006 6:59 am


Computer died Sally, sorry for the late reply. Yes, you could not make your move in tic-tac-toe forever postponing the game, but it's an implicit rule that you do not. So oddly time is a rule in tic-tac-toe even though you'd never stipulate it in formal rules. Make sense?
What makes a game like Buffalo so fun? Because it messes with time also - it lasts a life time and once you know the rules you can never unknow them and are automatically playing (go on ask me, I dare ya).
I'm going to be teaching a class (go bears) next year on interactive art, and have been falling into LM's trap - oh shit, everything's time based and interactive! I think that's probably not what they want from me.
- joester (guest) 2-02-2006 10:07 pm


i've been watching my 5 year old's face while he plays tic tac toe with me. he works soooo hard at it, concentrating on his next move and i'm actually playing not quite to lose, and not to win but to extend the amount of gameplay, but sometimes i'm forced to win and then it gets ugly. he hasn't figured out how to play it defensively so there's never an x/o locked grid. one of us always wins. sometimes after waiting 5 minutes for him to decide where he's going to put his x or o, i am just about ready to impatiently give it all away and ruin the game for him forever.
- anonymous (guest) 2-03-2006 7:09 am


guh. that was my post.
- myfanwy (guest) 2-03-2006 7:10 am


yeah...it took me til I was about 27 to figure out how to play x/os defensively.
- sally mckay 2-04-2006 8:07 am


this is from an article on Nam June Paik from TNR online, it made me think of Sally's earlier comment about attention. (and it is a currency, isn't it.)

"In 1971, in Waiting for Commercials, Paik instructed a cellist and a pianist to play a piece of serious music a few bars at a time, pause for a commercial, then resume playing. The idea seemed to be that although commercial interruptions of a television program appeared to be trivial, since most television was superficial, the jolt to concentration was really as consequential for mental life as the violent suspension of any contemplative experience. If you think Paik's subtle but serious protest against commercial television is equally trivial, try imagining what the history of culture would be like if throughout the literate ages, no one had been able to read a poem without someone knocking on their door every few minutes trying to sell them a new hooped skirt or something. The history of culture is the history of attention."
- L.M. 2-06-2006 10:34 pm


'Twas brillig and the Coca-Cola
did gyre and gimbal in the wabe ...
- mark 2-06-2006 11:39 pm


cc or DP?
- bill 2-06-2006 11:55 pm





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