Hemant Shesh's Blog – September 2009 Archive (3)

Notes by cognitive scientist, poet and historian Piero Scaruffi

for a round table moderated by Leonard Shlain at

at Swissnex in San Francisco on 19/9/2007







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What is art? This is a question that depends on the country and the age in which you live. Art for the Romans was simply praise of the state via engineering. Art for the Greeks was the science of abstract harmony, i.e.… Continue

by Kat Clay

In 1980, Robert Hughes wrote a book about the relationship between modern art and the development of human society, especially through technology. It was called The Shock of the New. In the case of Georges Braque's comment 'Art upsets; Science reassures', it is not necessarily the words within the book that are as important as the title. What is new shocks and upsets the way people accept knowledge as truth. We return to the old, accepted beliefs to be reassured. Art is often… Continue

Science and art naturally overlap. Both are a means of investigation. Both involve ideas, theories, and hypotheses that are tested in places where mind and hand come together—the laboratory and studio. Artists, like scientists, study—materials, people, culture, history, religion, mythology— and learn to transform information into something else. In ancient Greece, the word for art was techne, from which technique and technology are derived—terms that are aptly applied to both scientific and… Continue