During the making of the presentation for this unit I came up with the phrase (as a presentation title) ‘at the junction between science and art’ which aimed to sum up my practise as an amateur electronics engineer who is aiming to make interesting and stimulating electronic instruments. This seemed to be quite representative, quite apt, in that my creations are neither wholly in the camp of science (my engineering is amateur and scrapped together from disparate knowledge bases, entirely un-elegant in execution; besides, my goal is not to create an engineering marvel, but rather to create an interesting and artful instrument that is as complex as it is peculiar) nor wholly in the world of art (I spend a great deal of my time crunching numbers and trialling different topologies, measuring and metering, recording my results in a scientific manner – not very artistic, really).
In an effort to reference my work to related practitioners who lie/have lain on a similar boundary, I referenced some of the creations from the book “Instruments and the Imagination” (which has been introduced in a previous post) to illustrate that there are many notable examples of instruments that are both scientific curios and yet also devices of tangible artistic beauty. The foremost notable example is the Aeolian Harp, which is detailed in a prior post, but also as equally notable are the Chladni Figures demonstrated by Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, a German physicist and musician. These figures (pictured below) are achieved by exciting a metal plate with a bow, upon which a thin layer of fine sand is laid. The sand arranges itself in different patterns according to different frequencies that the plate is excited to; the sand lies at the boundary of two opposing vibrational forces: nodes, as labelled by Chladni.
His research is heavily involved with the science of acoustics; these discoveries are related to the study of ‘room modes’ that is a common acoustic consideration when designing acoustically treated rooms for studios in the present day, it is also strongly related to the study of harmonics and the harmonic series, along with instrument design (the image below shows Chladni figures for the backplate of an acoustic guitar).
However, these slides present a beautiful picture of art in their own right. Scientists of previous ages would ascribe these to be an aspect of ‘natural magic,’ demonstrating the inherent beauty of the world; today, these are known to be related to the solutions of the Schrödinger equation for one-electron atoms. I seek to find a middle ground between these two perspectives. These patterns, if presented as art generated by a human, would be perfectly viable for a gallery show or exhibition, and yet they are patterns inherent to the physical world that we exist within. Perhaps there is more to ‘natural magic’ than we give credit to; beauty can be found in the manipulation of inherent natural forces for artistic means, and that is exactly what I hope to express with my own creations.