The Mountain and the Tree

December Days: Art & science

2014-12-10T00:10:52Z

I had a choice of two icons for this post, both very appropriate in different ways. One is one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and of course he's seen as the embodiment of the crossover between the two. The other, which is of course at the top of this post, is a terrella - a spherical magnet, a little Earth - used by William Gilberd in his research into magnetism. They're both my own photography, and being in the presence of these artifacts - in the V&A and the Science Museum respectively - was a wonderful feeling.

Part of the reason I decided not to use the da Vinci icon was because the need for a crossover at all is a modern illusion. Art, as in artisan and artificial, has only recently acquired the airy & impractical ivory tower connotations it has today. In previous centuries, the artist was a tradesman, or at best a professional, on a conceptual level with a plasterer or a chemist rather than with a prince of the Church or of the counting-house, and their labours were devoted towards distinct objects rather than concepts or creations.

As so often happens, the change was (partly, or even largely) due to advances in technology. On the one hand, industrialisation and laboratory-made pigments were making true, vivid colours much cheaper and more common, and more accessible to everyone. Before that point, if you wanted a true vivid blue then you had to buy a very specific kind of stone from a particular mine in Afghanistan, and go through a long physical & chemical process which needed quite a lot of skill to do right—if you don't grind the lapis lazuli perfectly, you end up with something a lot like washing powder, a slightly bluish-grey-looking white, and your entire investment (often twice the mineral's weight in gold) is wasted. If you wanted a true vivid (and lightfast) purple, you were entirely out of luck, and your best bet was to wait four or five centuries then go to the shop. So artists had to find new techniques to maintain their social monopoly, and redefining Art was one of them.

On the other hand, Art was becoming much more available through advances in reproduction technology. Even before monochrome cameras (let alone the early and limited colour films) engravers of great and obsessive skill were making detailed copies of Great Works, but you can only pull a certain number of copies from brass engraving plates before the metal deforms and the engraved lines soften & blur. Advances in steelmaking, partly driven by weapons technology, were mitigating that, though, and once you had a film camera and a bit of chemical skill then you could churn out as many reproductions of Great Works as you had the supplies and the patience for. They could even be published in newspapers, and where were artists then? Reduced to mere suppliers of the prototype for an industrial process, and that's not interesting. So the locus of value kept shifting, and artists shifted along with it, towards Theory and Concepts, and through Romantic genius, Modernist optimism, Postmodern yesbuttery, and take-it-or-leave-it mysticism.

Which isn't to say that the people who are artists today are the same kind of people who were artists in the past. It takes a different—though overlapping—set of skills, and more critically we're working in a completely different market area.

Interestingly, Science codified itself more or less around the time that Art went through this change, and in a similar direction, embedding much more Theory into itself and synthesising all the discrete chunks of lore held by guilds, armies, and trades with the Classical Greek approach of attempting to subject the universe to the penetrating gaze of Pure Reason Unsullied By Commerce. Gilberd, whom I mentioned at the top of this article, was a very good example of that, though he was really a pre-scientist (he floreated in the 1590s, around Bacon and well before Newton, Hooke, and Boyle)—he had an absolutely burning and overriding desire to prove that the Earth had a soul, but he did this by experiment, including designing and commissioning his own experimental tools like the terrella in my icon, and he spent a great deal of time learning from navigators and sea-captains.

So one way of looking at the soi-disant split (which is much more marked amongst critics and followers, rather than active practitioners) is that they grew from the same base, the impulse to Do Things To Stuff And See What Happens, and along similar paths, but in different directions.

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Science & Religion

2011-03-14T00:56:40Z

Someone else on Twitter, asserting that science & religion are opposites as though it were too obvious to deserve explanation.

Really, why do people keep doing this?

Given the sheer number of religious scientists... "most of them" wouldn't be an exaggeration, in fact... saying that science and religion are inherently opposed basically means saying that Galileo, Gilberd, Newton, Hooke, Boyle, Darwin, Eddington, Einstein, and Burnell were stupid or deluded, rather than holding particular views about the nature of the universe that they had considered thoroughly and were eminently qualified to hold. (And that's just the Christians I could list off the top of my head. Islamic science was staggeringly accomplished.)

There's a quotation from Burnell in particular that I want to share:

"I find that Quakerism and research science fit together very, very well. In Quakerism you're expected to develop your own understanding of God from your experience in the world. There isn't a creed, there isn't a dogma. There's an understanding but nothing as formal as a dogma or creed and this idea that you develop your own understanding also means that you keep redeveloping your understanding as you get more experience, and it seems to me that's very like what goes on in "the scientific method." You have a model, of a star, its an understanding, and you develop that model in the light of experiments and observations, and so in both you're expected to evolve your thinking. Nothing is static, nothing is final, everything is held provisionally."

I really ought to remember not to argue with atheists unless they actually demonstrate that they have some knowledge of religions—and by "religions" I don't mean white Protestant Christianity. Any attempt to assert facts about "religion" as a whole generally brands them as a clueless Dawkins cultist, unlike any of the sensible atheists I know & like.

Do any of you lovely people know of a short, easy-to-understand resource online for educating people about different denominations' & religions' attitudes to truths & the natural world?

(Comments are open & encouraged. I reserve the right to moderate or friends-lock if things get heated. I do not mind being disagreed with, but be civil, and especially to other commenters.)

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Eastercon report

2009-04-15T12:27:43Z

It turns out that the best thing for my (usually rather unpleasant) travel sickness is milkshake. McDonald's thick milkshakes particularly, but others will do, and "Primo Coffee" (if I'm remembering the name right - found one at a random service station) does one which is rather tastier. Five hours on a coach is still not fun, but at least I met a couple of other London fans on the way up.

The Midland Hotel is lovely - delightful Victorian interiors, comfortable quiet rooms, friendly staff, and very functional showers. Not staying in the con hotel was a bit of a pain, but on the plus side it meant I got a decent amount of sleep and could get up in the mornings. The Midland coffee, incidentally, is shite, but the breakfast is otherwise v. good.

Didn't manage to get to much of the Friday programming, since I was travel-lagged and worrying slightly about my first ever con art show. (Which proved of course not to be worrisome in retrospect, but that's the thing about retrospect...) Went to a panel on Re-creating History - the only notes I have from that are a sketch of a ruined abbey and the legend "*MEMENTO*MORI*ARCH.*", which refers to the 18th century habit of constructing false follies (as seen in Arcadia and Headlong Hall) as a kind of large-scale equivalent of keeping a skull on your desk.

After that, I went and signed up to the Kunji Revolt LARP, and found myself playing a commander of the revolutionary army. This carried on throughout the weekend, and makes a very good way to meet people (which I am admittedly quite crap at generally). I did actually mostly ignore the note on my character sheet about looking for any excuse to abandon the revolution and find myself a cosy niche elsewhere, but then I don't find roleplaying that sort of thing fun... and frankly, the rest of the revolution were making up for it! Weirdly, the game was actually scored at the end - apparently, the con committee had asked for that. I've never had that done for a LARP before. No idea what I scored, or for that matter how the GMs knew. I'm happy with having survived it.

Saturday: Alternate Socialist Britain, which mostly concentrated on the 80s and got sidetracked into the minutiae of socialist infighting. Music of the Spheres, which was rather good - all about the way music and mathematics and historical ideas of the structure of the universe map onto one another. It's Grim Up North, which looked at depictions of the North of England in SF - is it a grim post-industrial wasteland, or a quiet folksy reservoir of old magic? I brought up Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for the latter, and we agreed that the North varied widely - consider Liverpool, Sheffield, Bradford, and York. I'm a White Rose person myself, since I went to university in God's Own County, but North Wales where I grew up has a lot of similarities too. I'm tempted to suggest a panel on Welsh SF&F for next year, since there's plenty of depictions around - even if you ignore Torchwood, which I really rather would.

Bad Sex in SF - a riotous collection of readings, including of course "Houseplants of Gor" and some Israeli SF in translation. (Apparently, Hebrew just does not have the native vocabulary to talk about sex.) Excelsior Victorianus talked about the medical uses of the violet wand (there aren't any, but it's still fun) and demonstrated various attachments on volunteers from the audience. The comb didn't noticeably make my hair stand on end, which was mildly disappointing, but it was still fun. I hadn't been electrocuted since 2001.

Sunday: I headed in for 9am, for the Easter service, but the vagaries of the shuttle bus meant I got there at nearly ten past. Late enough to miss singing Lord of the Dance, but not quite late enough to miss the prayer, which was talking about "going back amongst the mundanes". Mundanes? I've never even met someone mundane. It was a lovely service overall, though. After that was The Appeal of Steampunk, moderated by Kim Lakin-Smith, with Tim Powers, Peter Harrow, Toby Frost, Cory Doctorow, and Venetta Uye, which I actually paperblogged going along. Herewith! [NB: This is not an accurate transcription of a whole conversation, just a set of scribbled notes about things I wanted to remember or comment on.]

Frost: Steampunk allows us to use a colonialist view of other cultures without feeling guilty about it, and ignore the servants. [Ed. note - yeah, I have problems with this too.]
Powers: Steampunk doesn't come within miles of saying anything important about this world, or any world. Mine certainly doesn't.
Uye: The darker underbelly of Victorian society is implicit in the genre. [Cites Perdido Street Station.]
Harrow: Steampunk can embody the Victorian values of self-improvement and philanthropy. [Ed. note - cf. The Diamond Age. Also, values? Debatable.] Is the current recession returning us to a more Victorian idea of nation-states, rather than the corporate states cyberpunk shows?
Doctorow: [Cites The Maker Manifesto - if you can't open it up, you don't own it.] One important feature of steampunk iconography is gauges and instrumentation. Steampunk answers powerlessness.
Powers: Steampunk iconography assumes beauty is a good thing. Victorian floridity and excess of ornamentation. [Ed. note - a lot of the Victorian obsession with random twiddly bits is because it had just become possible to do that on a large scale, with the beginnings of mass production. Still, he's got a point.]
Frost: The importance of individualism. Decorating it makes it personal.
Uye: Form follows function, but steampunk appearance is mostly cosmetic.
Harrow: The ornamentation is there to make it unique & personal - allows us to have pride in our possessions. [Talks about the importance of recycling and re-use, and how steampunk allows us to do that to consumer electronics.] [Ed. note - I'm dubious. It might work in theory, but I doubt he's actually going to recycle any useful bits out of that pretty iPhone's internal works himself. It sounds more like lampshading the culture of obsolescence to me.]
Doctorow: Legibility in computing. For instance, someone I know runs workshops to help schoolchildren build chemical sensors into robot dogs, and then sets flocks of them free on cleaned-up land to demonstrate that it isn't really very cleaned-up after all. The Clock of the Long Now is a good example of this. [Ed. note - cf Anathem, which is a takeoff of that idea too.] Don Norman says "The natural state of technology is broken". So a lot of our response to technology depends not on how we use it when when it works, but on how we feel about it when it breaks. Making Harrow's iPhone beautiful really does make it work better.
Harrow: Yes, actually, it does! It started working more reliably after I did this. Maybe it's to do with animism.
Powers: Modern car engines baffle me. They say "This is for an expert, and you aren't one". [Ed. note - cf. Anathem again, and Rainbow's End.]
Doctorow: We are the Morlocks. [Ed. note - cf. Kipling's Sons of Martha.]
KLS to Uye: Does "punk" fit? Isn't steampunk rather light and frivolous, rather than really being rebellious?
Uye: It's down to the DIY aesthetic. It brings the traditional sense of "punk" back.
Doctorow: The best embodied text I can think of is Disney's Tomorrowland.
[Your editor asks a question about William Morris and the Victorian movement towards mindful hand-crafted objects.]
Doctorow: Nothing to do with us, guv. Steampunk is about the subversion of modern material culture - Morris wasn't street. These days, we can leverage information technology to reproduce & distribute data, blueprints, FAQs, howtos everywhere cheaply. [Ed. note - this still sounds like another instance of the same principle to me, albeit an integral thereof. It's the same object/process distinction as calculus and wave-particle duality.]
Frost: Some kind of pastoral fantasy. Ref. Orwell. [Ed. note - I'm not entirely sure what this means in context, but it's in my notes.]
Doctorow: Steampunk means that other peoples' technology enables us. It's not something to reject, it's something to subvert.
Question from the audience: To what extent does steampunk embrace Victoriana without actual machinery? That is, how much science rather than engineering turns up in steampunk texts?
Frost: Well, there's Jekyll & Hyde. Steampunk is about attitude as much as engineering - looking at characters as well as machines. [Ed. note - Clute on thinning?]
Q: How about biology? Is The Island of Doctor Moreau steampunk, and if not why not?
Doctorow: That's a really great book. I'd say it was, on the principle of "if you can't open it you don't own it". This is how cyborg technology turns up.
Same Q: Optimism without a cautionary element...
Q: Aren't we just applying a Xena lens to the Victorian period? The Victorian writers were writing techno-thrillers. Steampunk is not derived from Victorian SF.
Powers: It's as much derived from Mary Poppins as from Mayhew.
Q: Victorian sewage works are temples to technology, with all that vaulting and that stained glass. Are we trying to get back to that?
Doctorow: Remember, the Eloi who designed the sewage works didn't have to work in them. We're Morlocks.

Later reflection on the part of your editor: All industrial establishments look like Dark Satanic Mills to outsiders. We're not prepared to be outsiders for much longer.

After that, I'd planned on lunch, but annoyingly the hotel were serving from 12:30, not from 12, and the art auction started at 12:30. I couldn't stay long enough to see the one I'd bid on come up, never mind to see if any of my own work had made it into the auction (and I hadn't managed to get along to the show and check for bids since the middle of Saturday), since I had to head off to eat and to the green room for my own panel. That was on Pacifism & Nonviolence in SF, and turned out to be quite difficult - it's a complex subject, after all. I like to think I didn't make more than a slight fool of myself at my first ever con panel. It turned out later on that I'd sold two pieces (this one, and a blue and gold mask that I really didn't want to have to carry home), and both for more than the minimum bid. Next year, I shall be setting my minima higher, since the strategy of setting them very low to encourage bids clearly didn't work.

Science of Chocolate: the food chemistry was a bit basic for me, but that's only to be expected, and I could tell most people were getting a lot out of it. The low-GI truffles were delicious, but the clear winner was cocoa-dusted garlic. Will definitely have to make some of this myself.

Monday: a fairly lazy morning. Spent a while chatting to various people, found out that Juliet McKenna has a new book coming out at the end of the month (the first of her third series - Irons in the Fire, which seems to be set in the same world as the first). It's about warring dukes and a popular revolution, and looks at the problems of keeping things going after the revolution "wins", apparently. Definitely one to get. Also went to see the panel Juliet was moderating, on Merging Fantasy with Reality, in which they talked about narrative techniques and the emotional "feel" of a book - whether it felt right, rather than whether the details were all right. Given the way Elaine Isaak was talking about material culture, I'm going to have to look up some of her work too. This reminds me of something Shana Worthen said in Friday's panel on recreating history, too - the appearance of a wastepaper basket in The Hobbit means wastepaper, which means that someone, somewhere, has a mechanized paper mill using woodpulp, which needs a whole technology tree and infrastructure to support it.

After that, I went to find next year's con chair Judith, and pitched a talk about information (and materials) decay, archiving, and the tradeoffs involved in keeping data in existence, accessible, and accurate. Should be fun, and I can certainly rant for an hour or so on that from an artistic, materials-science, and IT point of view.

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