Resignificación
Science and art are two essential forces, two powers that start from curiosity, wonder, strangeness and the restlessness of questioning our existence. Resignificacion explores the relationship between science and art in the context of generative art. The work seeks to show a harmonious union between these disciplines instead of the confrontation that is present today in postmodernism, carrying out the transformation and resignification of the planets of the solar system, representative of the scientific advances in the 16th century, in works of art from the Renaissance, possibly the artistic and cultural movement that best manifested the conjunction of art - science. The viewer can decide the system in which they want to find themselves immersed, adopting partial control over the work, just as humanity was able to begin to exercise control over the world at the beginning of the Modern Era.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
Why think about a war between the sciences and the humanities while it is thanks to human society that today we have art and we have science? Why not think about linking these two disciplines, these fires, these passions? Galanter proposes that “the seemingly irreconcilable worldviews of modernism and postmodernism can be subsumed and unified in a new synthesis called complexism.” A complex system is a scientific technical term that refers to numerous small parts that interact with other parts or nearby agents of a similar nature, and are interactions that allow the system to self-organize, without the mediation of an external agent (Galanter, 2011). Isn’t a generative art code a complex system then? Code itself is a practice that follows the scientific method, and “generative art describes processes defined by rules, processes that are automated” (Arns, 2005). Science uses rules: without the scientific method science would not be possible, just as without the rules of the programming language generative art would not be possible either.
The Renaissance is the artistic and cultural movement that best expresses the relationship between art and science. Thanks to this conjunction given in the 15th and 16th centuries, we can think of a science related to an art. This vision was buried in the postmodern times we live in, but, “What was thought and poetized at the dawn of Greek antiquity is still present; so present that its essence, still closed to itself, confronts us everywhere and falls on us, especially where we could least presume it, namely, in the domain of modern technique, entirely foreign to the ancient, but in which, nevertheless, it has its essential provenance.” (Heidegger, 1938).
Heidegger posits that “Modern science is as theory, in the sense of Be-trachten [contemplation], a disturbing and intervening reworking of the real.” (Heidegger, 1938). Science not only contemplates reality, but reworks it and intervenes in it. Art also reinterprets, transforms and reconfigures. Art intervenes in the viewer’s reality just as science can change our conception of what is real. Altering the planets is what we want to convey with the artistic piece resignificacion: the transformation of the universe that occurred in the Renaissance, where art and science were more united than ever. The planets represent one of the greatest scientific advances recorded in history: human beings had to realize that they were not the center of the universe, but rather that they were in a simple celestial body revolving around the Sun. Thus, the universe of humanity was redefined. In resignification it is the viewer who has control over what aspect of the work they want to observe; You can control and choose the system you want to contemplate, the solar or the artistic, while you tour the work in a ship that surrounds you in the void of the cosmos.
It is our role as generative artists to recapture that universe that was implanted in the Renaissance worldview: we are given the (difficult) task of reuniting science with art. We must re-examine this lost dialectic and redefine it: “Caught between cultures, artists of complexity […] occupy precisely the place where a bridge can be built to once again unite the culture of science and the humanities.” (Galanter, 2011). Speech is the manifest behavior of the human being, it is the realization of language. Therefore, the code is the manifest behavior of generative artists, it is that programming language that is our language that allows us to communicate. It is this dialectic between science and art that will allow, through the performative act of the code, the communication that we must achieve as artists of postmodernity.
Literature
GALANTER, Philip. (2011). “Entre dos fuegos: el arte-ciencia y la guerra entre ciencia y humanidades”. En Revista Artnodes, Noviembre 2011.
ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes, Julio de 2005.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. (1938). “Filosofía, ciencia y técnica”. Editorial Universitaria.