This morning I set off for the MIND08: The Design and the Elastic Mind Symposium in New York City expecting discussions of the ways in which science influences art (and vice versa). What I got was... well... I don't really know what I got. The first two presentations I saw about the shape and origin of the universe were pretty good and at least entertaining, but after that came a spate of nearly incomprehensible presentations about art that somehow involved various mathematic theorems and natural designs.
The put it bluntly, most of the artists did not know how to effectively communicate. Stuck somewhere between borrowing scientific terminology and artistic jargon, I couldn't quite understand what they were saying. The visuals themselves were quite striking and I would have loved to find out how (and why) they were made, but the lectures didn't really help shed light on the pieces being discussed. Rather than really digging into the relationship between art and science (and artistic design inspired by nature) the presentations only made vague references to formulas or patterns in nature. Indeed, the presentations focused more on the building and presentation of the pieces than the science behind them.
Maybe things were better during the afternoon session, but after three hours of uninspiring lectures I decided to head home. Maybe I'm just not a member of the target audience for such symposiums, but, my own artistic ignorance aside, many of the speakers did a poor job of communicating their ideas. I should have gone uptown to the AMNH for the day instead.
So artists can't frame their work?
Heh. Couldn't resist.
I hope my art is better at the Archosauria, Brian. I'll post pictures of my finalized pieces (like, on canvas) when they're completed.
I've been there. . . it's the scourge of working in an "interdisciplinary" community. The worst are the speakers who get up and start talking about interesting things, like the geometrical structure of ancient Greek sculpture — stuff where the science and math content might be legitimate and useful, rather than just lines drawn on top of a photo — and then foom, they segue into a spiel of mathematical terms which they don't bother to define. . . .
The afternoon sessions were indeed better. The Blue Brain presentation was pretty good, in fact. So was one about prosthetic limbs. The afternoon was definitely more science-heavy. I agree that the morning sessions were dreadful, though.