The painting machine

Pythagorean Nightmare from Owen Schuh on Vimeo.

Pythagorean Nightmare opening!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening and made it a success!  Here’s some photos taken by Chris Hamilton: http://thehamiltonbrand.com/news/archives/787

And check out the article in the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/03/NS0P1C9LTQ.DTL&type=art

Pythagorean Nightmare

I haven’t updated in a while now because I’ve been busy with my new project: a large scale painting machine with movement controlled by a handmade clock escapement and paint dispensing based on light sensors and algorithm.  The whole thing is made almost entirely of recycled/reclaimed parts the most obvious of which include an old ladder, a door, some chemical separation funnels, and some bike parts.  I’m still working finishing up the valve system, and fine tuning things, but here’s a video of what I’ve accomplished thus far:

Pythagorean Nightmare

The opening is on Saturday Feb. 27th at Six PM at Receiver Gallery 1415 Valencia St.  San Francisco, CA 94110

http://receiverdesign.com

Article in the San Francisco Examiner

I forgot to mention the nice write up I got in the San Francisco Examiner in the lead up to my show a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the link to the final piece – The Math Behind the Art

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who made it to the opening last Friday!  I’ll post pictures soon.  The show is up until October 17th.  Check out the Cain Schulte Gallery page for more details.  I’ve also updated the my main website with new images and a new artist’s statement.  I was having some trouble with spam in my comments so I deleted a lot of them, installed an anti-spam plug-in and changed the settings.  Hopefully this fixes any problems anyone has been having with the page.  Also, if you look to the right of this page I’ll be adding a link section to other artists, publications, and institutions that I find of interest.

New work!

I haven’t had much chance to write recently because I’ve been trying to finish up some work for a show I have coming up in September at Cain Schulte Gallery in San Francisco.  The opening is on Friday the 11th 6-8 pm, so if you’re in the city stop by!  Here’s just a little bit of what I’ve been working on:

Julia Set

Ossification

Culture

As a final thought I’d just like to offer a quote from Peter Stevens’ classic work Patterns in Nature, which was in no small part the inspiration for my previous entry on nature.

“The plant is not in love with the Fibonacci series; it does not seek beauty thought the use of the golden section; it does not even count its stalks; it just put out stalks where they will have the most room.  All the beauty and all the mathematics are the natural by-products of a simple system of growth interacting with its special environment.” – Peter S. Stevens.  Patterns in Nature. 1979. Little Brown & Co. P.187

reflections on nature

I have grown comfortable using the word ‘nature’ very frequently in my writing, in spite of the fact that to some extent I believe it to be overburdened with unwanted connotations and ambiguity.  It is one of those words that is familiar, but upon closer examination proves difficult to define. My own tacit understanding of what ‘nature’ signifies is something along the lines of “the collective phenomena and regulating forces of the physical world.”  Yet, throughout history there have been radically different notions of what nature is.  Even today one only need to consider such phrases as “human nature” “against nature” or “natural ingredients” to see that ‘nature’ has as much to do with social norms and values as the kind of phenomena it is meant to signify.  In the realm of human behavior especially, ‘natural’ or ‘un-natural’ is generally used as a moral judgment rather than a statement of biological or psychological fact.  It is my purpose in this piece to question and clarify my initial definition, and hopefully in the process make some observations of greater significance beyond the parsing of words.

‘Nature’ can also be defined by what it is not, i.e. the opposite of human-made or artificial.  Although I do not take this to be this is not a false dichotomy, some trouble does occur when one tries to draw a line between nature and artifice.  The natural sciences are by definition concerned with nature; physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology all seem like pretty clear-cut examples of the study of nature.  The study of the human body, brain and psychology are concerned with the nature of human beings.  But how about architecture, history, poetry, and mathematics?  In so far as they are activities associated with the behavior of social animals – namely Homo sapiens – they too seem to be part of nature.  Indeed cities seen from space take on an organic complexity.  Poetry has evolving forms and structures and can reveal the deeply woven complexity of meaning and language.  In a similar respect mathematics can be seen as a way of understanding the underlying structures and possibilities of logic available to the mind (though because of the special role it plays in our understanding of nature, I will return to it later).  Even the mind itself and the content of its thoughts, since it arises in nature (from the physical brain) can be seen as part of it.  So everything is nature, right?

In a sense this statement is true. However, it would be just as easy to arrive at the opposite conclusion: namely that everything is artificial. The natural sciences, mathematics and reasoning are first and foremost activities of the mind.  Even perception to some extent is conditioned by language and conceptual categories.  However, I think the fact that both formulations appear to be legitimate on first blush belies a deeper truth.  It is the perspective from which one approaches something that determines its classification as natural or artificial.  More specifically, to approach something from the point of view that it is “other” or determined by forces beyond one’s mind or human minds in general seems to imply that it is natural.  In the modern era this has come to mean adopting an objective or even empirical perspective.  If something can be considered from a detatched objective point of view then it is part of nature.  This would also imply a distinction between the objects towards which consciousness is directed as natural, and the products of consciousness as artificial.  Is it fair then to say that poetry is an artificial construct, but is natural in so far as it may be classified and studied with respect to social, psychological, or linguistic considerations?

Nature, as understood by the empirical sciences, is regulated by laws and causality.  If one takes the mind’s ability to discover such patterns and laws to be a free and creative act this leads to the rather odd conclusion that nature is deterministic and artifice is free.  It seems like it should be just the opposite.  After all what could be more archetypically artificial than the cold mechanism of a formal system of immutable rules?  However, I’m not sure it’s proper to conflate our understanding of nature as regulated by mathematical law with nature itself.  Although, if nature were not regulated by some kind of law or causal principle wouldn’t such correspondence be vanishingly unlikely if not impossible?  Is the very notion of causality an artificial construct of the mind to be force upon nature?  To make things worse, is the notion of an ‘event’ a conceptual construct as well?  Nature may just as easily proceed as continuum rather than a series of discrete finite interactions.  Or is the use of concepts like ‘events’ and ‘causality’ a natural adaptation itself, used by humans and animals alike?

The nature described by the laws of physics appears immutable, even as humanity’s understanding of the laws that regulate nature have changed over time.  This poses an interesting question: the third law of motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) held true before it was formulated by Newton, but could it really be said to be a law of nature until it was recognized as such.  Such a precise formulation was not relevant or necessary to the culture up until that time.  Certain predispositions and facts about a culture’s physical and conceptual tools and way of life may lead it to search for certain patterns in (its conception of) nature rather than others.  But doesn’t that which it searches remain the same regardless of how it is understood or formulated?

On the other hand, because nature is understood as regulated by law, the specific content to which the law is applied appears to be interchangeable. The third law of motion applies just as well to billiard balls as rocket ships and planets.  Similarly, the formalist mathematician David Hilbert went so far as to say that geometry could as easily be about chairs, tables and beer steins as line, planes, and points, so long as their defined relationships remained the same.  It is the fact that natural relationships are applied universally and independently of their object that allows for the diversity observed in nature.  Even something seemingly un-natural like bioengineering works because it does not break the laws of what is necessary create and maintain life.

Before I conclude, I must acknowledge a problem that I have thus far been trying to avoid: that of freedom vs. determinism.  I have indeed outlined a somewhat paradoxical situation where the mind emerges from the physically determined brain bearing with it the concept of causality that leads to the theory that nature is deterministic in the first place.  I think much of the ambiguity surrounding which human activities may be natural or artificial arises from this debate over which parts of the mind are free (if any) and which are determined.  Honestly I don’t loose much sleep over the matter, but it does mirror nicely my concluding formulation of nature.

Nature is that which is perceived as determined and conditioned by immutable laws, even as those laws are historically bound and contingent upon human consciousness.  Because of their contingency upon historically based consciousness, I hesitate to include the laws of nature in my definition.  Yet, that there is movement within nature that can be understood through laws seems undeniable.  Nature exists through its laws even as it is the source of them.  The ability of the mind to reliably grasp patterns and rules in nature may be as much due to its creative ability as the fact that it has arisen from and bears the markings of nature in the form of its thought.

slime mold!

Slime mold has long sparked the interest and imagination of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians concerned with emergent behavior, spontaneous order, and self-organization.  The basic concept behind these fields is that complex systems and unexpected behavior can arise out of a profusion of relatively simple interactions.  Central to all these theories is the notion that such organization takes place without any overarching control.  For example: schools of anchovies move in giant seething formations as if they were a single much larger fish, but though the school may react like a single organism it has no brain, no central nervous system, no leader, only the individual actions of each of its constituent members based on how the fish around it are reacting.  Other examples of emergent behavior include termite and ant colonies, swarms of locust, weather patterns and traffic jams.  Because these systems rely on the aggregate actions of individual components and/or actors these theories are closely tided to chaos theory.

There are actually two major types of slime mold – plasmodal slime molds and cellular slime molds.  Once thought to be related to fungi, slime molds tend to live in decaying plant matter and feed on bacteria.  Plasmodal slime molds (like the yellow one on the videos) begin life as unicellular amoeba.  When they encounter another amoeba, they fuse to form a larger multi-nucleic organism – basically a single giant cell – that feeds by engulfing its food (bacteria).   As you can see in the time-lapse video it travels in fan like patterns by streaming its cytoplasm (or is it technically protoplasm?) through vein like fingers.  Once it has exhausted its resources, or conditions become too harsh it will produce fruiting bodies and spores, which germinate into new amoebae.

The second type, cellular slime molds, is even stranger.  They too begin life as single “swarm cells” that will form together into slug-like blobs in order to locomote and reproduce via spore, but with one crucial difference – they retain their cell walls and individual identity.  When food is low individuals send out chemical signals telling nearby cells to group together to form a blob capable of migrating to better conditions and producing spores.  When conditions are correct to form fruiting bodies, some cells will form into stalks, while others become the “fruit”.  For a long time it was something of a mystery (and fodder for critics of evolution) why some cells would sacrifice their genes so that others might reproduce.  After all, since they were autonomous cells it seemed impossible that stalk forming genes would be selected for since such genes would preclude reproduction and thus passing on of those genes.  It is now thought that, rather than possessing different genes, it is the cells timing in joining the blob and thus their position within it that determines whether a given cell becomes a stalk or a fruit.

What I find so fascinating about slime molds and similar systems is how predominant they are in nature, and yet how utterly alien they are to traditional notions of consciousness.  Even in a very well defined emergent system capable of being accurately modeled mathematically there seems to be a huge gulf between the linear language used to describe such systems and the aggregate of simultaneous, autonomous, actions. One can understand the components of a system.  One can understand the rules that govern it.  One can understand how the rule is applied to each of the components in any given case.  But one cannot simply intuit the emergent form any more than any individual component within the system can know how its actions affect the overall group dynamic.  In order to understand the emergent form one must physically go through the procedure for creating it. An algorithm must be applied to each component one after another step by step making this as much of an empirical pursuit as a mathematical one. Perhaps that is why the complexity of such emergent systems is so surprising.

Further reading on slime molds and a bit of emergence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWGA7kIeE0Q documentary on cellular slime mold (In German).

Conover, Adele. Hunting Slime Molds: They’re not animals and they’re not plants, and biologists want to know a lot more about them. Smithsonian magazine, March 2001 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/phenom_mar01.html
Barone, Jennifer. Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence: A creature with no brain can learn from and even anticipate events. Discover January 2009 http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/071
StarLogo – modeling environment for exploring properties of emergent systems including slime molds http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
Hofstadter, Douglas.  I am a Strange Loop.  2007.  Basic Books – Very accessibly book about emergent systems and their relationship with consciousness and identity.  His postulate of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon leads to an interesting discussion of how one can understand neurochemistry or physics to be deterministic and yet perceive conscious thought as a free act of the will.

One more video: not slime mold but quite beautiful:

Morphogenesis – New work by Owen Schuh – Mar 6th-27th – Opening

Just to get things started here’s some pictures from my recent opening at space47 in San Jose, CA (www.space47.org) on March 6th – “Morphogenesis – New Work by Owen Schuh”.  The show will be up until the 27th of March – please see their website for location and hours.  I’m personally sitting in the gallery Saturdays so if you’re in the area stop by and say hi.  (If it’s not clear, I’m the one in the sweater =)

Nothing to see here yet

In a couple of weeks this will become a venue for the release and discussion of some of my new artistic projects and ideas.  Please visit my main site: www.owenschuh.com for images of my past work.