Turing (1912-1954) is widely acknowledged as a genius. As well as codebreaking during World War II and taking a pioneering role in computer hardware design and software after the War, he also wrote three important foundational papers in the fields of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical biology. He has been called the father of computer science, but he also admired by mathematicians, philosophers, and perhaps more surprisingly biologists, for his wide-ranging ideas. His influence stretches from scientific to cultural and even political impact. For all these reasons, he was a true polymath. This paper considers the genius of Turing from various angles, both scientific and artistic. The four authors provide position statements on how Turing has influenced and inspired their work, together with short biographies, as a starting point for a panel session and visual music performance.
It was in his Quartet for the End of Time that Olivier Messiaen began a lifelong process of discovery, not only into his inner world of colour but, also, into a sound world which eliminated conventional notions of musical time. He regarded himself as a composer and rhythmatician and the task he set himself, in his Quartet, was to produce a rhythmic system that could emulate the patterns of nature. The Apocalyptic inference of the Quartet's title was deliberate; it followed directly from the vision Messiaen experienced when he was a prisoner of war, in 1940. My own visual interpretation of Abîme des oiseaux, the 3 rd movement of the Quartet, has been influenced by two key facts. First, Messiaen's ability to see his own music, and that of other composers, in vivid colours. Secondly, the lifelong inspiration that Messiaen gained from the shimmering stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. Details of just one Rose Window have enabled me to interpret, visually, the extreme conflicts of mood conveyed by Messiaen's music. For the composer, the Angel who announces the End of Time means the dissolution of musical time in a multitude of new rhythmic ways. My aim has been to create a pattern book of images where each of Messiaen's innovative rhythmic patterns has its visual counterpart. To achieve this end, I have explored new techniques and methods for producing Visual Music which seek to give some outward expression to the composer's Apocalyptic vision. Visual mMusic. Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time. Clarinet. Chartres Cathedral.
Cybernetics was a subject that captured the attention of some of the sharpest minds in the USA and UK from the 1940s onwards. For me, in my previous role as an architect and designer, cybernetics played a key part in solving the 'exceedingly complex' problems associated with the way large companies occupy buildings. In the 1960s Roy Ascott predicted that the cybernetic approach would 'assist in the evolution of art, serving to increase its variety and vigour'. This is an attribute exemplified by the behaviourist art of Gordon Pask whose 'Colloquy of Mobiles' took centre stage at Cybernetic Serendipity -an exhibition, held in 1968, which represented the heyday of cybernetics in the UK. But even today, in the arts' world, a bright annulus of cybernetic light continues to shine, a phenomenon that I explain with reference to a piece of Visual Music called SHAPES. We're on the brink of a cybernetic renaissance, which is why I'm issuing a clarion call for the arts' community to turn towards the task of enhancing our chances of survival for the future.Cybernetics. Feedback. Cybernetic Serendipity. Visual Music. Space planning.
Advocates an approach to of gfice design which reflects the complex and shifting needs of office users. Claims that by producing a greater sense of satisfaction at the workplace, design can become an effective instrument of organizational success.
Sci-Art was an idea whose time had come; it helped to kickstart a new way of discovery that has had a lasting impact on scientific method and art practice. The fortuitous set of circumstances that secured the Wellcome Trust’s long-term sponsorship of the idea (1997 – 2006) is related here by Terry Trickett. In responding to a leading question from New York’s Cynthia Pannucci, he de-scribes the early years of Sci-Art when artists succeeded in penetrating the realm of science and scientists discovered a new creative impetus through art.
The overarching guiding principle of Alan Turing’s work was directed towards modelling the human mind as a machine. It is extraordinary that Turing introduced, in his early papers, ideas that are only now beginning to be investigated. Throughout his life, he considered conjectures to be of great importance because they suggest useful lines of research. In my own conjecture, I am asking the question: what is the brain’s geometry? Can it ever be unravelled, or does its complexity defy any form of visual representation? Recent research reveals that the detailed workings of the brain take place in a ‘global workspace’, where conscious contents appear to be disseminated globally to a great multitude of networks throughout the brain that are unconscious. During conscious tasks, neurons contributing to the global workspace enter into a coherent activation pattern by being tightly connected through long axons. Is it possible, therefore, that my proposed geometric pattern (an Islamic latticework) can be envisaged as a useful means of interconnecting multiple long axons in a unified global workspace dedicated to conscious thought? I share and communicate my idea through a process that combines visual imagery with musical performance (i.e. visual music). It is a method that can assist in clarifying concepts that might otherwise remain elusive or esoteric.
My journey started in the City of London, where I found a building, the Cheesegrater, that generated harmony, pattern, discord, repetition and silence. It inspired me to produce a piece of Visual Music, Citirama, expressing the relationship between architecture and music. The success of the piece during presentations and performances has now led me to formulate a considered view on how music and architecture can be found to coexist: how our new understanding of the concept of space/time can bring an art form concerned primarily in mapping sound in time closer to a form focused on what we experience in moving through space. From the Cheesegrater, my wanderings led me to a building, in Berlin, where the emotions of music have been conveyed in purely architectural terms and to another structure, in Brussels, which, during its short life, offered a total architectural/musical experience in time and space. I conclude that, over the centuries, Western developments in architecture and music have tended to obscure their common roots in Ancient Greece. Although Pythagorean mathematical links still persist, its through our new 21 st century awareness of how the human brain causes us to see and hear that, once again, architecture and music will be able to sing in unison.
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