I never really appreciated mathematics until I took a calculus class. It was then that I began to see how math could be cool and even pretty amazing. So now, I can better understand why math is even used in art in the first place. Math often deals with concepts that seem really mind-blowing or profound, like multiple dimensions and complex systems. From my understanding, these concepts are deep enough that artists would want to use them or explore them. For example, in Flatland, different dimensions are used to display the somewhat limited perspectives and worlds of the shapes. The ideas explored in Flatland could potentially be applied to many different things, but using math creates something that is very easy to see and understand for most people.
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| An image from Flatland. To a 2-D shape, a 3-D sphere that moves looks like a circle that changes size. http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/ |
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| Painting by Piero della Francesca, who studied the mathematics of perspective. |
Math can also be really simple and model the ordinary things around us. For example, in the lecture video we learned about how painters used math to control the perspective of a spectator. It seems pretty simple to paint a realistic painting, but in actuality there is a lot of math involved to make it look so real in its proportions.
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| The Mandelbrot Set |
As mentioned before, I didn’t really have any interest in math until recently. However, in high school I did look into chaos theory, which also involves looking at fractals, like the Mandelbrot set. At the time, I thought fractals were really interesting because it was order within disorder, and they show up in nature everywhere. I also thought they looked really cool, but I never thought of them as having to do with art because I was looking at them from the point of view of a physical scientist. But it is no surprise that artists use fractals in their work. I had no idea that Jackson Pollock used fractal patterns in his drip paintings. I think it is fascinating that he used such complexity and tried to stick to fractal dimensions that were close to those in nature so that perhaps they would be more pleasing to the human eye (though I don’t think he had a way of measuring fractal dimensions).
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| Blue Poles, by Jackson Pollock http://www.jackson-pollock.org/ |
From this week and the last, I’ve been exposed to more art that uses math and science, but still not really any science or math that uses art. So I would say that the juxtaposition of mathematics, art, and science is somehow one-sided.
Sources:
Abbott, Edwin. Flatland. 1884. Web. 09 Apr. 2016.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. By Edwin Abbott. 1884. Transcript.
Ouellette, Jennifer. "Pollock's Fractals." Discover Magazine. Kalmbach Publishing Co., 1 Nov. 2001. Web. 09 Apr. 2016.
Vesna, Victoria. "Mathematics-pt1-ZeroPerspectiveGoldenMean.mov." Youtube.com. Web. 9 Apr. 2016.
I agree with you thoughts on the juxtaposition between mathematics, art and science because it does seem that it is a one-sided issue. It reminds me of what we read last week about the sciences and arts being like two different cultures and how they can't seem to blend together in today's society. Even though there is a growing field of using science to influence art how come art isn't influencing mathematics and science?
ReplyDeleteI think your view on pictures is also interesting because if the paintings are in 2D then different mathematical principles have to be implied in order for the observer to see the painting as realistic.