Monday, January 7, 2013

Observations on Art 1.7

A friend of mine sent this a while back and I finally got around to watching it. The video itself is cool but you need to read the words as you watch or read them and than watch the video again. It reminds me of an art versus science post I always promised to do for her but is still languishing on the dark side of my mind. Easy for something to get lost back there. A funny thing about the exert is that it could easily be the two of us he is talking about.

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."


Richard Feynman - Ode To A Flower from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

An animated adaptation of an interview excerpt from Christopher Sykes’s 1981 BBC documentary about Richard Feynman, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out."
Animated by Fraser Davidson, sweetcrude.tv