DNA of Creativity: Fusing the Energies of San Diego Arts and Sciences, the San Diego Visual Arts Network is gathering information and making connections between the art and science worlds with a goal of fusing the energies of both communities to produce a series of projects. These projects will enhance the viewing public’s perception of creativity and its role in our lives. This blog will endeavor to add links of interest and provide a way for free discussions on this subject.
QUANTUM ART GROUP INTERNATIONAL – SCIENCE & ART SECTION OF EGOCREANET (R&D ONLUS )
Theme of the international award : “Quantum art & Augmented Reality as Cultural Driver of Change of Eco-Economy for the defence of Nature and Bio-diversity evolution.” The Organizing Committee : Paolo Manzelli: <pmanzelli.lre@gmail.com> Roberto Denti : <roder53@gmail.com> Daniela Biganzoli: <daniela.biganzoli@gmail.com> Massimo Pregnolato : <maxp07@gmail.com>, Giuliana Guazzaroni: <giuliana.guazzaroni@gmail.com
Call For Proposal Submission of paintings and performances or lectures
The QAGI/EGOCREANET
encourages collaborations of artist and scientists to apply ideas,
cooperation proposals, participation, in order to coorganize a tree days
program of artist and scientists talks, performances, forums, film
screenings, and other events.
The main goal is “identifying and to develop new relationships between Quantum Science & Art in contemporary Eco-Economy.
The conference exhibition open a comparison between science and art
that represents a commitment to the development of various themes that
integrate the cognitive development of art-science and augmented
reality; among them:
1) “Energy and material information”, 2) “Water and Life”, 3) Food,
nutrition and health, 4) .. etc.. and other suggested by collaborators
and participants who want to express themselves in order to contribute
to the change of the horizons of contemporary development of culture.
Cooperation of single artists and scientists, collectives or collaborative groups are welcomed .
The deadline for artists and scientist submitting work & participation is :
01th May , 2013.
More info can be requested to Paolo Manzelli by e-mail pmanzelli.lre@gmail.com . 29th/JAN/2013
Researchers used synthetic DNA encoded to create the zeros and ones of digital technology.
A
team of British researchers has used DNA — the genetic building blocks
of life — to record Shakespeare's sonnets and excerpts from Martin
Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.
The experiment,
along with another published late last year, shows that what we think
about as life's alphabet can also be used to preserve our greatest
creations, perhaps for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
"The idea that DNA, which people think of as a biological
molecule, can be used as a physical storage tape in a non-biological
function is pretty incredible," said Drew Endy, a Stanford University
bioengineer who was not involved in the work.
"It's a really nice example of how a fundamental investment in a basic scientific tool can lead to (amazing things)."
The researchers used strands of DNA synthesized by a machine —
not from a living creature — encoded to create the zeros and ones of
digital technology. Although the two teams worked independently and used
different codes, their papers are "fraternal twins," Endy said, that
show it will soon be both realistic and practical to record vast reams
of information in strands of chemicals too small to see.
Scientists have been able to recover DNA from a woolly mammoth, dead for
20,000 years, so the researchers at the European Bioinformatics
Institute who conducted the new study said they expect information
stored on DNA will be around for a while. Also, since all life on Earth
is made of DNA, we should have the capacity to read that information
regardless of how technology changes over the next millennia.
The first team, a group at Harvard University led by geneticist George Church, published its results in Science in September.
Europeans Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, whose study appears in Nature,
said they first thought of the idea in a pub, when they were discussing
the challenges of archiving vast amounts of data on costly magnetic
tape or hard drives. By the second beer, they were sketching their idea
out on napkins.
Church, who was involved in the Human Genome
Project, said when people would ask him where we would store all the
information his genome scans would turn up, "I would respond glibly,
well, DNA's not a bad place to store it."
But both groups
are serious now. They managed to use a commercially available sequencing
machine to generate the amino acid components of DNA, which are
abbreviated as A, C, T and G.
Because repeated letters
caused errors, the European group came up with a code to avoid them. In
their version, Shakespeare's sonnet, "Thou art more lovely and more
temperate ..." begins "TAGAT, GTGTA, CAGAC…"
Also to
prevent errors, every stretch of DNA is repeated four times, twice
backward, in overlapping strands that the computer can quickly put back
together and read accurately, Goldman said.
Reading the
DNA is the expensive part right now, though both teams predict that cost
will come down exponentially within the next decade, putting DNA
storage potentially within reach of average people. Birney predicted
that couples could soon be storing their wedding videos on DNA, to be
seen by their grandchildren.
Storage of the DNA should be
relatively inexpensive and easy, both teams said. A cold, dry, dark
place is ideal, so there will be no electricity bills. And DNA is
incredibly small and virtually weightless. One Shakespearean sonnet
weighs 0.3 x 10-12 grams, Goldman said, and information that would fill
more than a million CDs can fit in a vial smaller than a pinkie.
Church said he has heard from search engine companies and storage
media manufacturers since his publication, interested in learning more
about the technology and potentially developing it for commercial use.
"I thought this was really refreshing that they were willing to think
out of the box even though this could conceivably be disruptive to their
industry," he said.
Both teams said they would not
consider storing information in a living creature, because the error
rate would be too high and the storage less secure.
"We wanted to make something practical," Church said.
Church said security is a potential concern with DNA storage,
because of how easy it will be to store and retrieve data. It's a bit
like posting bomb-making directions on the Internet, except in this
case, the bomb ingredients would be on the same page, and making the
bomb could be as simple as "click here," he said.
Archivist Lisa Long Feldmann said she is excited about the potential to
store important documents without the expensive humidity controls needed
to preserve paper. But Feldmann, who works at the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum in Boston, said via e-mail that it will be awhile before
people in her profession will be willing to embrace such new technology.
"We are a cautious bunch."
Neuropsychiatrist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel's recent book
on the brain, art and the creative process is a fascinating look into
the brand new area of research called "neuroaesthetics." Just as
fascinating is his perspective on turn-of-the-century Vienna, the city
of his birth, which later expelled him for being Jewish.
When Auguste Rodin visited Vienna in June 1902, art critic Berta
Zuckerkandl invited him to spend an afternoon in her famous salon. As
the hostess later recalled, the great French sculptor and Austrian
artist Gustav Klimt had seated themselves beside two remarkably
beautiful young women -- Rodin gazing enchantingly at them. Rodin leaned
over and said to Klimt: "I have never before experienced such an
atmosphere -- your tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco, your
unforgettable temple-like exhibition; and now this garden, these women,
this music ... and round it all this gay, child-like happiness ... What
is the reason for it all?"
Klimt slowly nodded and responded with a single word: "Austria!"
This is the opening scene in New York neuroscientist Eric Kandel's
exploration of his native Vienna, a tome entitled "The Age of Insight:
The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from
Vienna 1900 to the Present," published this spring in English and this
month in German. It's a 656-page excursion that takes the reader all the
way to the depths of the soul, the cavernous chasms of sex and the
secrets of beauty. Here, in Vienna, the former capital of the Habsburg
Empire, the author traces a major revolution in Western thinking.
The salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna served as a meeting place for
poets, painters, philosophers, architects and researchers who were
creating nothing less than a radical new perception of who we are. They
abandoned the ideal of the Enlightenment and revealed, below the surface
of presumably rationally-acting Homo sapiens, that human beings are
driven by instincts and urges.
Sigmund Freud became the quintessential figure of this movement. But
others also delved into the realm of the unconscious: Freud apparently
saw Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler as an intimidating "double." In a
remarkable letter written on the eve of Schnitzler's 60th birthday, the
great psychoanalyst wrote to him: "I believe that fundamentally you are
an explorer of the depths."
Exile During Holocaust But Kandel is primarily fascinated by the Viennese painters'
incipient interest in sexual drives and repressed desires. In his
drawings, Gustav Klimt embarked on a daringly overt exploration of
female lust. Oskar Kokoschka saw his portraits as "soul paintings," in
which he sought to divulge the layers of an individual's inner life,
which remain invisible to the naked eye. And Egon Schiele revealed
himself in his self-portraits as plagued by extreme anxiety.
Kandel portrays Vienna as a hotbed of artistic creativity, a hub of
intellectual activity and a cradle of modern scientific ideas -- and
thus sketches a remarkably positive image of this city with which he has
had a lifelong love-hate relationship.
Indeed, buried deep in his own soul is the memory of that autumn in
1938, when his parents gave him a shiny blue battery-driven toy car for
his birthday. He still sees himself -- how he was so absorbed in
steering it throughout the apartment. In his next memory, he is startled
by a loud banging on the door. Even today, Kandel says the sound still
echoes in his ears.
The Kandels were Jews, and they had to leave their apartment. It was
"Kristallnacht," the so-called "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom of Nov. 9,
1938, in which Nazis launched coordinated attacks on synagogues and
Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria. How could the 9-year-old Eric
comprehend this? When the family returned to their ravaged apartment
several days later, the blue car was gone. His entire fascination with the dark side of the soul, his interest
in psychoanalysis, memory and neuroscience, says Kandel, dates back to
the last year that he spent in Vienna before he emigrated to the United
States. He is also left with his bitter recollections of this city,
where he first encountered the evil and brutality in mankind. It is only now, at the age of 82, that Kandel is making peace with
his native city. He says that writing this book was deeply therapeutic
for him on a personal level. It helped him come to terms with the trauma
of being driven from his home.
Brave New World of Neuroaesthetics And yet "The Age of Insight" is so much more: In addition to making
amends with his homeland, Kandel uses this as an opportunity to launch a
bold project. His late work can be read as a manifesto for a new branch
of science: neuroaesthetics. Kandel says that it's time to use the
tools of his field -- neuroscience -- to unravel the mystery of human
creativity, the enigmatic impact of art and the dark depths of the
unconscious mind. His goal is to draw a connection between our emotional
reaction to a Klimt or Schiele portrait and the electrical flickers of
individual neurons.
We still have only a vague idea of what the budding field of
neuroaesthetics can explain here. Kandel readily admits that what he
sketches in his book is "merely a beginning." But he says that he loves
to stand at the beginning and take the first step in a field of
knowledge and explore what might be worth pursuing.
And who would be more eminently qualified to tackle such an ambitious
project than Kandel himself? He has already founded an entire field of
research and explored higher mental functions down to the molecular
level. He uncovered the mystery of memory by proving that recollections
are burned into the contact points of the nerve cells, the synapses.
Kandel's attempt to grasp the secret of the phenomenon of learning
and remembering led to a career that exemplifies the scientific process
of discovery: Step by step, the researcher proceeded from dealing with
his own memory to deciphering memory storage in neurons.
When he attended university, he initially selected the obvious way of
coming to terms with the historical experiences of his childhood. He
studied history and focused on Kurt Schuschnigg, the chancellor who led
Austria's Austro-fascist regime before the Nazis marched into the
country.
Part 2: Discovery and Disappointment with Psychoanalysis
Then Kandel discovered an entirely different way of accessing the
world of his childhood. He was fascinated by the main psychological
theory and model of the day: psychoanalysis, which, like himself,
originally came from Vienna. Kandel eagerly devoured everything that
Freud had written about sexual instincts, the unconscious and
suppression. With the intent of becoming an analyst himself, he studied
medicine, subjected himself to analysis and explored the emotional scars
that remained from the time he had spent in Vienna. Kandel was dissatisfied, though, with this new approach to gaining
knowledge. Indeed, he felt that the Freudian model lacked convincing
evidence: "Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it,"
Kandel argues. "You will never know whether you've found the truth. You
may find a subjective truth, but you don't know."
When a career opened up in a neurobiological laboratory, where
demonstrable truths were waiting to be discovered, he immediately seized
the opportunity. From then on, Kandel stuck electrodes in nerve cells. His mentor told him he was crazy when he announced that he wanted to
find the id and the superego in the cerebral cortex. But he refused to
be deterred. He remained convinced that the Freudian entities had to
have their biological counterparts somewhere in the network of brain
cells. In a sensational essay entitled "Psychotherapy and the Single
Synapse," published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, Kandel revealed his radical reductionist approach.
The dream of a new form of psychoanalysis based on neurons has never
been fulfilled. But Kandel managed to unlock the secret of memory
storage. First, he worked with sea slugs, then mice and finally human
subjects to prove that there is a biochemical change in the synapses
associated with learning processes. In 2000, he was recognized for this
discovery and became the second psychiatrist in history to receive the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Yet even for someone like Kandel, the notion of a neuron-based
understanding of how we perceive art is a bold vision. "We Jews call it
chutzpah," he says with a grin. It must have to do with his age that
now, at the end of his career, he's willing to go out on a limb like
this. After all, he doesn't have much time left to attempt a great
synthesis. "Life is a circle," says Kandel, so he's using this
opportunity focus more intensively than ever before on the city of his
roots and his lifelong passion for the Vienna Secession group and
Expressionists.
Does Neuroscience Enrich Art? It remains to be seen, however, whether advances in brain research
can significantly contribute to our understanding of the artists and
their work. Kandel is delighted, for instance, with Klimt's painting of
"Judith," who, apparently still glowing with postcoital voluptuousness,
is caressing Holofernes' severed head. This shows how female sexuality
can be combined with aggression. The painting depicts a woman who
triggers equal measures of desire and fear among male viewers -- long
before Freud coined the term castration anxiety. But are we aided here
by the knowledge that these feelings arise when a region of the brain
called the amygdala is activated?
When examining Kokoschka's double portrait "Die Windsbraut" ("The
Bride of the Wind"), Kandel is particularly fascinated by the way the
painter uses colors to penetrate the emotional world of those portrayed.
In the painting, Kokoschka depicts himself lying with his lover on a
boat surrounded by stormy seas. Alma Mahler, with whom Kokoschka had a
passionate affair at the time, is painted in green earthy tones, and
apparently calmly sleeping. By contrast, Kokoschka is rendered in
redder, thickly applied paint. He is awake and nervous, and seems to be
deeply disturbed by the emotional turmoil of their liaison. Here, too,
one questions whether it is helpful to know how these colors are
processed by the visual cortex in the occipital lobe.
On the other hand, in Egon Schiele's "Tod und Mädchen" ("Death and
the Maiden"), Kandel interprets a sense of isolation and desperation as
the artist depicts himself in a comparable situation. Schiele, shown
here as the messenger of death, has just ended his relationship with his
girlfriend, Wally, because although she is a good lover he doesn't
think she would make a good wife. They are shown in a final embrace on a
rumpled sheet, where they have just had sex. While their bodies are
still locked in an embrace, Kandel notes they are already staring past
each other into space. But isn't the emptiness of these stares also
effective without the insight that a humiliating rejection activates the
brain's dopamine system?
Potential for More Research Kandel, at least, says he is convinced that neurobiology can enrich
our understanding of artistic creativity. He even points out a number of
fascinating findings made by his colleagues. Neuroscientists have been able to prove that sudden inspirations and
insights are accompanied by characteristic, high-frequency brain waves
in the right temporal lobe. There is additional evidence that indicates
that the right frontal brain lobe plays a key role in the creative
process, while the left frontal brain lobe actually impedes such
activity.
This is supported by case studies of patients who have suffered
trauma to the left sides of the brains. A 51-year-old housewife, for
example, suddenly began to paint landscapes that she recalled from her
childhood. A 56-year-old businessman dedicated himself so
enthusiastically to painting that he won numerous awards.
Kandel admits that, at best, such findings give us only a vague sense
of what can be achieved with experimentally well-founded
neuroaesthetics someday in the future.
But perhaps, he adds, there is already a young researcher working in
one of the world's laboratories who is determined to unravel the mystery
of creativity -- just as Kandel set off half a century ago in search of
the secret of human memory.
And Kandel hopes that his book will provide this intrepid researcher with food for thought.
