Vincent Icke's presentation @ Taiga Space, May 30 2012. It is not necessary to know what beauty is, if one wants to measure what people find beautiful. In 1883 Francis Galton, one of the founders of probability theory, investigated whether it was possible to read off the character traits of people from their faces. In an attempt to emphasize what certain faces have in common, Galton constructed some sort of "photographic average" of a number of human faces. He discovered that most respondents found such an "averaged portrait" more attractive than the individual portraits. In other words, people find the mean more beautiful than the extremes. Experiments of this type show that the human sense of beauty is extremely conservative. Of course there are sound biological reasons for this. But what does this imply for art? And more extremely, does this have any implications for science? Do people find common-or-garden science, such as botany or classical mechanics, more beautiful than extremes, such as quantum mechanics or molecular biology? And finally, does a sense of beauty help in the production of scientific insight? Part of Dutch Wednesday, Dutch Institute in St.Petersburg, www.nispb.ru. Listen to the audio: http://nispb.ru/files/dutchw/IckeArtAndScience300512.mp3

1. Science &
Art
Vincent Icke
Sterrewacht Leiden
& Alien Art

2. Vincent Icke
Who am I and what am I doing here?
• Theoretical physicist
• Utrecht, Leiden, Cambridge, Caltech,
Minneapolis, Leiden, Amsterdam
• Gerrit Rietveld Academie
• Visual artist and designer
• Discuss about science and art

3. Catalogue of retrospective exhibition 2011
Edited and designed by:
Charlotte Lemmens & Gusti de Schipper
Pruisisch blauw
Vincent Icke
VINCENT ICKE onderzoeker
In wetenschap inmiddels gepokt en gemazeld, in popularisatie van die wetenschap bekend en
geroemd. Als kunstenaar ook, voor een kleiner publiek. Daar moet maar eens verandering in
komen. Dus ter gelegenheid van een overzichtstentoonstelling in het Museum Jan van der Togt
in Amstelveen nu ook een boek over zijn onderzoek en ontwikkeling in de beeldende kunst.
Veel plaatjes, maar natuurlijk ook weer praats. Zoals een medestudent op de Gerrit Rietveld
Academie eens zei: “Stel een vraag aan Vincent over zijn werk, en je krijgt er direct een college
over.”
Prof. dr. Ruud Lapré en Hans den Hartog Jager leverden belangrijke bijdragen. Erkentelijk zijn
we ook voor de grepen uit het hart van de eigenaren van ‘echte Ickes’.
isbn 978-90-817083-1-9

4. What do science and art
have in common?
• Beauty?

5. What do scientist and
artist have in common?
• Curiosity?
• Creativity?

6. Beauty
Possible common ground of
science and art
However...
...what’s with that horsehead?

7. Space View

8. Orion

13. Horsehead Nebula

15. Solar eclipse on
Earth

16. Aurora on
Jupiter

17. Asteroid Eros

18. Asteroid Eros

19. Comet Hartley-2

20. What’s Up,
Doc?

21. Resonance with
what is familiar
• Galton 1883
• Koinophilia

22. average of 64 female heads

23. average of 32 male heads

24. average of 18 female heads

26. ©Monica Mendoza

27. Beauty Is Conservative
• What is beautiful is familiar
• ‘Koinophilia’
• No good as guide for creation

28. average of a hundred young men

29. Why do we admire white sculptures?

31. Beauty in Science
• Christiaan Huygens
• Beauty with hindsight
• Beauty (for me) is the
shock of the new

32. Epicycles?

33. Huygens Equation

34. Centrifugal Force g = v2/R
The first
theoretical-
physics
equation in
the history of
our planet

35. Enjoy
• Beauty does not advance
science or art
• Never mind, just enjoy it

39. Curiosity
Possible common ground of
science and art
However...
...everybody is curious
So why is not everyone a scientist
or an artist?

40. Attentiveness
• I see, I see...
• ...what you see too, but...

41. Miracles Retrieved

44. Windowpanes?

51. Cause and Effect
• Tous les événements sont produits
les uns par les autres
• Every event is caused by
another

52. Cause and Effect
• Dans les mêmes circonstances, les
mêmes causes produisent les
mêmes effets
• Under the same circumstances,
the same causes have the same
effects
• Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique

53. Cause and Effect
• Attentiveness in front of a window
• The same causes do not always
have the same effects
• Therefore, there are causes
without effect...
• ...and effects without cause
(Universe?)

54. Cause and Effect
• Most people find this awful
• An extreme case of koinophilia
• The corresponding formula is
breathtaking

55. < begin |

56. | end >

57. < begin | transition matrix | end >

58. Dirac Equation

59. Find Out Through
Research
• Time sequence of works of art
• Criticism and conflict
• Critical Spiral
• Development = evolution
• Progress!

60. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1828

61. The Spanish Royal Family, 1800

62. Tres de Mayo (1808), 1814

63. Los Caprichos
Tuesday February 6th, 1799

65. Antonia de Zarate, 1811

68. J.M.W. Turner
1775-1851

70. Windsor, 1797

71. Caernarvon, 1800

72. Marly, 1831

73. Marly, 1831

74. Tobias & Angel, 1832

75. Music at Petworth, 1835

77. Boats, 1840

78. Sea, 1842

79. Deluge, 1842

80. Snowstorm, 1842

81. Research
• Helping a new generation...
• ...to discover what is not impossible

99. Research

100. Alien Art
• A few random months with mouse and
keyboard
• Weather in the Universe
• Natural phenomena in a parallel
universe

107. J.M.W. Turner, Deluge, 1842

108. binary-El-Me

109. The Critical Spiral
The method of our madness

110. New Observation
technical skill patience
invention attentiveness
perseverance
Prediction Remark
knowledge knowledge
theoretical skill invention
perseverance logic
Hypothesis

111. The Critical Spiral
• No research without criticism
• No research without failure
• Failure is common
• Allowing failure is not a weakness but
the driving power of creation

113. Failure is the motor of creation

115. Creativity
Possible common ground of
science and art
However...
...almost all work is re-creative

116. Beauty is conservative
• Koinophilia
• Active resistance against what is
too different
• Active resistance to possibilities

117. Attentiveness Revisited
• I see, I see
• Seeing through
• Being attentive...
• ...makes you see possibilities

118. Possibilities
• Seeing possibilities
• Removing impossibilities
• Not ‘creativity’, but...
• ...the art of the impossible

119. Science & Art
• The impossible we readily do
• That is our job
• Miracles take a little longer
• Some folks have all the luck

120. Who but an artist would
have thought...
• ...that this is possible?

121. J.M.W. Turner

122. Louise Bourgeois

123. Who but a scientist would
have thought...
• ...that this is possible?

125. Who would have
thought...
• ...that they have a common ground?

128. Criticism
Essential part of science and art
But they are radically different in the
way they confront criticism

129. Art Is Not Science
Letter from Theo van Doesburg
to Hanna Höch (21 May 1925)
Künstlerisch habe ich mich damit
beschäftigt eine schematischer Darstellung
für den neuen Raum zu schaffen. Habe
jetzt den tesseractischen Raum als der
einzige Universelle Raum für die
Gestaltung (inklusif Film) anerkannt.

130. Art Is Not Science
Letter from Theo van Doesburg
to Hanna Höch (21 mei 1925)
[...] Ich bin ganz sicher das eine
mathematische und klare Kenntnis
notwendig ist, und das alle Versuchen
hinsichtlich Film, Architektur, Proun
undsow, wie interessant auch, auf
esthetische Spekulation beruhen.

131. Tesseractic Space

134. Criticism
• This is where they differ fundamentally
• Science: the Universe is our critic
• Art: 7 billion critics

135. Science &
Art
Parallel & Perpendicular

136. From Science to Art
• Imagery
• Which of these is a scientific product,
and which one is art?

144. What do science/art and
scientists/artists have
in common?
• Driven by attentiveness
• Forward through research
• Subject to criticism
• Developing possibilities

145. Forward
Attentiveness
Research & Criticism
Possibilities

146. My Parallel Universe
“You create natural phenomena,
Vincent.”
Peter Struycken

147. The Medium
• To a chemist, it is ferriferrocyanide
• To an artist, it is Prussian Blue

148. Pick and work the
raw material
• A kind of multidimensional structure
• Inquiry into colour and form
• Experimentation

149. Sculpture
• On Earth, sculptures must resist gravity
• In space, gravity makes sculptures

150. Gravitational sculpture

151. Dynamics of
Continuous
Media

169. Criticism...

170. “This one has succeeded
the wrong way, daddy.”
Julia Icke

171. Research and
attentiveness

172. Vincent Icke - asymring Mb

173. Lernert & Sander - Revenge - http://vimeo.com/3950779

174. The medium
“Now I’m married to an artist, but still the
house doesn’t smell of turpentine.”
Charlotte Lemmens

175. The End
www.alien-art.nl
www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~icke