Statement
One of the Greek oracles, the sibyl at Cumae, used to write the separate words of her prophecies on leaves and then fling them out of the mouth of her cave. It was up to the suppliants to gather the leaves and make what order they could.
Borges, in the essay "Kafka and His Precursors," suggests that our perception of the present alters our conception of the past, that we can look at art from the past in a new way, influenced by things we now understand. By the light of the computer, then, we can look anew at a long history of mystical art and combinatorial systems that reach back to antiquity. Mystical systems involving permutational procedures that purport to reveal a body of hermetic knowledge or that lead to a revelatory exhaustion of all possibilities prefigure the computer's potential to permute and, given rules, to engage in "creative magic" by finding meaning in new combinations. A number of artists in the 20th century, with or without the computer, have explored this realm in their work.
In mathematics, the three specific types of combinatorial systems are called permutation, combination, and variation. Each begins with a limited number of items, a set of things. In permutations, the positions of these things are shuffled within the whole set, as in an anagram. For combinations, one can take out any number of elements from the set and put them together in a smaller group. Variations are permutations with repetitions allowed; in variations, one can permute to infinity!
The Mystery of Art
There is nothing so strange, nothing so devastating, as an encounter with a true work of art. Such an experience always has a taste of the incommensurate. It is devastating in the sense that one is overwhelmed, swept off one's bearings. And yet, with the feeling of strangeness, of wonder, there is also a sense of deep significance. There is nothing comparable with the experience of such an encounter, unless it be a religious experience, or the experience of an authentic symbol in dream or vision; and these perhaps are really all one in the same.
Perhaps the encounter with a work of art is an end in itself and one should not look beyond it or attempt to elucidate or explain. And yet these encounters force us to ask questions, to inquire, to search. How can we interpret the significance, understand the meaning, relate the values felt with our lives? Such questions force themselves upon us and lead us to the study of art. Here we find an immense literature awaiting us: on aesthetics, on the history of art, on particular movements, individual artists. We find studies in iconography, studies in the relation between art and ideas and social movements. Above all we find the study of styles: their derivations, influences, transmutations. Now, does research in this literature help to reveal the answer to the questions which the experience of the work of art itself prompted us to ask? Unfortunately, it becomes apparent that ninety per cent, perhaps ninety-nine per cent, of art studies is not directed towards art itself, but towards the factors that condition a work of art, or the artist in the course of his or her life and work. This is particularly so in the detailed studies of movements from the point of view of style and iconography in their general relation to cultural history; a study developed with immense erudition and often great acumen at the present time. But the central experience of a work of art — or so I am lead to believe — gets forgotten, ignored. Is this because it is realized that it cannot be treated by these same methods of study, that there is no nearer approach in this way? Whatever the reason, the fact is that the mysterious encounter is habitually disregarded, either as inconsequential, or as incommunicable.
Borges, in the essay "Kafka and His Precursors," suggests that our perception of the present alters our conception of the past, that we can look at art from the past in a new way, influenced by things we now understand. By the light of the computer, then, we can look anew at a long history of mystical art and combinatorial systems that reach back to antiquity. Mystical systems involving permutational procedures that purport to reveal a body of hermetic knowledge or that lead to a revelatory exhaustion of all possibilities prefigure the computer's potential to permute and, given rules, to engage in "creative magic" by finding meaning in new combinations. A number of artists in the 20th century, with or without the computer, have explored this realm in their work.
In mathematics, the three specific types of combinatorial systems are called permutation, combination, and variation. Each begins with a limited number of items, a set of things. In permutations, the positions of these things are shuffled within the whole set, as in an anagram. For combinations, one can take out any number of elements from the set and put them together in a smaller group. Variations are permutations with repetitions allowed; in variations, one can permute to infinity!
The Mystery of Art
There is nothing so strange, nothing so devastating, as an encounter with a true work of art. Such an experience always has a taste of the incommensurate. It is devastating in the sense that one is overwhelmed, swept off one's bearings. And yet, with the feeling of strangeness, of wonder, there is also a sense of deep significance. There is nothing comparable with the experience of such an encounter, unless it be a religious experience, or the experience of an authentic symbol in dream or vision; and these perhaps are really all one in the same.
Perhaps the encounter with a work of art is an end in itself and one should not look beyond it or attempt to elucidate or explain. And yet these encounters force us to ask questions, to inquire, to search. How can we interpret the significance, understand the meaning, relate the values felt with our lives? Such questions force themselves upon us and lead us to the study of art. Here we find an immense literature awaiting us: on aesthetics, on the history of art, on particular movements, individual artists. We find studies in iconography, studies in the relation between art and ideas and social movements. Above all we find the study of styles: their derivations, influences, transmutations. Now, does research in this literature help to reveal the answer to the questions which the experience of the work of art itself prompted us to ask? Unfortunately, it becomes apparent that ninety per cent, perhaps ninety-nine per cent, of art studies is not directed towards art itself, but towards the factors that condition a work of art, or the artist in the course of his or her life and work. This is particularly so in the detailed studies of movements from the point of view of style and iconography in their general relation to cultural history; a study developed with immense erudition and often great acumen at the present time. But the central experience of a work of art — or so I am lead to believe — gets forgotten, ignored. Is this because it is realized that it cannot be treated by these same methods of study, that there is no nearer approach in this way? Whatever the reason, the fact is that the mysterious encounter is habitually disregarded, either as inconsequential, or as incommunicable.