THE FRONTIER BETWEEN
ART AND SCIENCE



This exhibition is composed by a collection of computer-generated images, that have been made by a group of artists and scientists specialised in the representation of mathematical formulae in an unusual way.

Both the mathematical expression and the parameters used, give to each image a unique colour and appearance. Just like a painter or a sculptor transmits his personality and sensibility to his work by means of his technique, the authors of this exhibition express themselves through formulae and algorithms, by modifying them progressively until the desired goal is reached, just in the frontier between Art and Mathematics.

If we think of all these pictures as being synthetic images produced by computer, they can seem cold and mechanical but, behind each of them, its author spent hundreds of hours working on the formulae, algorithms and parameters that determine the image.  If each picture is carefully analysed, the emotions of its author will be perceived in every shape and colour.  And it is true that Mathematics can also express sensibilities.

The group "The frontier between Art and Science" was born in September, 1997.  His first joint exhibition took place in the prestigious RioCentro Gallery, in Rio de Janeiro.  That exhibition has been followed by numerous activities, individual and collective, in several countries.  It is a very heterogeneous group: its members come from different countries.  Some of the authors work in famous scientific centres and universities, while other are just mere amateur keen on computer programming or Mathematics.
 

A little of mathematical history

At the end of the XIX century and the beginning ofthe XX, a group of mathematicians, headed by Peano, Hilbert, Cesaro, Koch and Sierpinski, among others, formulated a new family of curves having disquieting mathematical properties which sneak off from any classification made at the moment.

Unlike the Geometry utilised until then (based in rectangles, circles, triangles, ellipses, etc.), this new Geometry describes winding curves, spirals and filaments that wrap theirselves giving elaborate figures whose details get lost in the infinity.

In 1977, with the help ofa computer, the french-polish scientist Benoit Mandelbrot could get the first picture of this new Geometry, which afterwards he called Fractal Geometry.  In 1980, the publication of his book "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" popularized Fractal Geometry and caused the appearance of images like those presented in this exhibition.

In fact we can understand Fractal Geometry as the Geometry of Nature, of Chaos and Order, with shapes and sequences that are locally unpredictable but globally ordered, oppositely to Euclidean Geometry which represents objects created by the man.

This exhibition has been already carried out in Valladolid, Salamanca and Leon, Spain, and then to Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Vienna, Austria.
 
 
 

JENET PRESLAR: Taupensky
LINDA ALLISON: The Coral Reef

 
MARIO MARKUS, Max Planck Inst., Dortmund
SHARON WEBB: Gateway

 
KERRY MICHELL: Big Bang
LUKE PLANT: Polygon 1

 
JAVIER BARRALLO: Oma
EARL HINRICH: Alien Blood

 
MICHAEL FIELD: Blue Columns
DAMIEN JONES: Banded Clouds

 

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