The American artist Todd Siler stands astride two worlds—art and science—and he seeks out similarities of process across the traditional barriers of these two domains of knowledge. For the past three decades he refers to this integrative work as “artscience,” as it fully melds various experiential approaches to creative inquiry and learning.

In the mid-1970s, Todd Siler coined the term "ArtScience" to describe the process by which art integrates science and science integrates art in their adventurous acts of creative seeing, inquiry, critical thinking, inventing, and innovating. ArtScience is a practice of innovative thinking that enables learners of all ages to connect and transform information (i.e., data, knowledge, ideas, experiences, events, etc.) in new, purposeful and personally meaningful ways. Ultimately, it enriches the experience of learning by enhancing the personal relevance and usefulness of information.

The first visual artist ever to receive a doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Todd Siler has discovered relationships and deep connections in the sciences and the arts where few were thought to exist before. To convey his novel concepts, he has developed new ways of using our world of symbolic languages to create a global “common language”—one that enables learners of all ages, backgrounds and interests to give form to their thoughts and communicate in ways that foster understanding and collaborative learning. His playful approach to discovery, invention and innovation naturally integrates our many intelligences and welcomes all styles of learning.

Siler has been exhibiting his artworks internationally in major museums and galleries since the early 1980’s and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City. His artworks are in numerous private and public collections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (20th Century Collection), The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The Pushkin Fine Arts Museum in Moscow and the Belsar Verlag Print Archives in Stuttgart and Zurich. His sixth solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1997 included an original composition and performance by the pioneering jazz composer and musician Ornette Coleman.

Todd is recognized as an author, inventor, educator, but first and foremost as a visual artist; and it is his singular vision as an artist that informs all his other work. In the forward to Siler’s art publication, The Biomirror, Harvard professor and former chairman of the Fogg Art Museum, James S. Ackerman, author of Palladio (1974) and Leonardo da Vinci: Art in Science (1998), has written:

Todd Siler turns the stimuli of artistic invention in upon themselves by investigating and representing the brain that does the investigating and representing. I know of no work since the Renaissance in which the concerns of figurative art and of investigative science come closer together than the dye in Siler’s drawings, assemblages, and sculptures. They are advanced research and at the same time objects of vigorous formal quality. They demonstrate to empirical scientists the potential of model and metaphor, and they point a way for the artist of the later twentieth century to regain for visual art its historical integration with contemporary life.

In that same forward, Stephan L. Chorover, Professor of Psychology and Brain Science at MIT, has written: “Todd Siler has been producing an awesomely rich and varied corpus of paintings, drawings, collages and other works which embody and express some exciting and completely original ideas about the material and conceptual connections between the arts and sciences.” Dr. Chorover continues:

It is difficult for me to exaggerate the influence that my association with Todd Siler has had on my perception of my own field and its relations to the larger world of human affairs of which it is part. I believe him to be that rarity among us: a person whose thoughts and feelings and actions seem destined to make a real difference; one whose contributions to human understanding serves simulataneously to reflect and reinforce the creative process which is the means and the end of self-conscious human existence in the biosphere.

In the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir “From Todd Siler to Marina Abramovic and Ulay: From a Neurological Art to A Cosmological Symbolism” (Saturday, August 15, 1987), journalist Claire Gravel writes:

“By means of his somewhat Da Vinci like works, Siler proceeds into an artistic horizon that could revolutionize the very perception of our perceptive tools…This astonishingly rich vision expresses a completely original art.”

In an April 1991 review of Siler’s work in Art In America, Ann Wilson Lloyd places Siler in the tradition of the most profound of all artist-scientist, Leonardo da Vinci:

…it is Siler’s small, conventionally framed drawings that best meld his thoughts about the brain’s activities and his actualization of them. Slightly bigger than sketchbook leaves, they are musingly Leonardo-like, with clear writing next to drawn and painted diagrams…Siler’s works most often take the size of wall-size gestural paintings on unstretched synthetic canvas a material with a scientific resonance because it is used for protective clothing in the nuclear industry. The paintings are frequently collaged, drawn on and casually notated as if circumstantial evidence of thinking were more important than formal concerns. In Boston, the Boston Center for the Art’s cavernous round Cyclorama building – itself a “metaphorm” – allowed Siler to unfurl his longest mixed-medium paintings [100-foot arcs], “Thought-Assemblies” and “The Brain Theater of Mental Imagery…His works drew on his concepts of “metaphorming,” or the creation of metaphors that enable us to relate information from one discipline to another, and “processmorphs: things that are alike in process but unlike in form or appearance.” He asserts that the brain reflects the universe in function and form and that we become what we think about and create.

Todd Siler, “The Brain Theater of Mental Imagery,” 1983. Multi-part art installation, 12ft.H x 100 ft. L, with mounted paintings and white light hologram. Boston Center for the Arts, 1990. (Accompanied by a broadcast quality videotape.)

Through his drawings, collages, markings, and writings, observes Claude Gosselin, Director of the Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, “Todd Siler presents us with an open work in which the spectators’s eagerness to decipher the different levels of interpretation is sustained by a strange power of seducation which gives the work its strength and metaphorical quality. It is a clash of pleasure and a fear of emptiness. There is in his work the lure of light following the passages through darkness.”

Todd Siler Metaphorming Minds (Old Jaffa, Israel: Old Jaffa Press, 1991). Mixed media monotypes on 37 multi-colored serigraphs on Arches 300gm paper; each image measures 40cms x 60cms (16” x 24”). Integrated with some of the images
are collaged reproductions. Also, behind a select group of images are hand-written notations on the “Possibilities” of the
human mind and its hidden potential.

In reviewing Siler’s exhibit, entitled “Psi-Phi: Hidden Territories,” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Phillip Evans-Clark writes in the Italian journal, Tema Celesta: “Aesthetically, his work can enrapture the senses by the expansiveness of its scale, the poetic awesome-ness of its subject matter, the delicate contours of its abstract choreography, and the mysterious nature of its strange visual alphabet.” And Mr. Evans-Clark elaborates:

Siler fills his images with nervously drawn, concise sentences, which disappear at a distance. Conversely, when the viewer approaches the canvas, the linguistic dimension reveals itself and also signals an important change in the relationship between the work and the spectator. As one journeys into the image, picking up meaning from cryptic aphorisms, one slowly enters Siler’s own mind and abandons the comfortable, disinterested posture of normal perception to become a reader and a thinker. Siler is therefore not simply an image-maker, but a theoretician, a poet, and a dreamer. Siler, like Hermes, enjoys traveling everywhere: in formal and applied sciences, in literature, in art and in the difficult and delicate regions where they all connect
or separate.

Todd Siler Metaphorms: Forms of Metaphor.
(The New York Academy of Sciences, 1988

Reviewing the same exhibit, Patricia C. Phillips writes in Artforum about some of the darker aspects of Todd Siler’s cosmology:

We all know that the human mind creates many marvelous and menacing things, but Siler’s work transforms this fact into an idea of great consequence. He manages to evoke in us a palpable sense of horror at the possibilities of imagination, as well as an equal sense of wonder at the strange and delicate operations within the mind. The world does not exist independent of human cognition or symbolic activity. Siler’s drawings and paintings do not suggest some a priori reality. He makes the Harvard psychologist Nelson Goodman’s idea of “world-making” visually concrete. He depicts through a recursive and additive vocabulary what others are just now attempting to describe.

As other artists before him, Todd Siler is fascinated by recurring images, that of the human brain, the well-spring of all human creation and civilization. His works of “artscience” (art that fully integrates science) interpret the life and potential of the human mind and its relation to the world. ArtScience represents both the physical processes of the brain and the figurative mental activities, which cannot be completely measured, defined, or put into a dimensional context with any certainty.

Todd Siler: The Art of Thought (Montreal, Quebec: Saidye BronfmanCentre, 1987).
Catalogue for solo exhibition, July 21 – August 20, 1987.

A New Yorker by birth, Todd Siler attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Fine Arts in 1975. He earned a Master in Visual Studies from MIT in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art in 1986. He was a Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1981 to 1983 and a Visiting Artist at the Computer-Aided Design Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 1986-88.

Todd Siler’s books include, Think Like A Genius (Bantam Books, 1997) and Breaking the Mind Barrier (Simon and Schuster, 1990 and Touchstone Books, 1992), which was nominated for the 1994 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for “a work of outstanding educational achievement with potential for worldwide impact.” Both critically acclaimed books have been translated into many languages.

The science writer, George Johnson wrote in The New York Times Book Review (December 30, 1990): “The author’s visions of strange parallels between the universes inside and outside the mind come across strongly in some of his paintings and sculptures reproduced in his book…hard-edged technological images are played off against softer images that evoke the elusiveness of things mental.” Breaking the Mind Barrier was “Noted With Pleasure” in The New York Times (February 3, 1991). Also, the MIT nuclear physicist and former director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and International Security, Dr. Kosta Tsipis, wrote:

Like the great Renaissance minds of the sixteenth century, Todd Siler sweeps Art & Scienve along unexpected dimensions of understanding. His Breaking the Mind Barrier does for art what quantum mechanics did for our understanding and appreciation of the elegance of the subatomic world: it reveals the seminal connections between our minds and the physical world around us and allows us to understand both in a new space of conceptualization. Breaking the Mind Barrier will prove to be the work of a genius.

The Mayor of New York City, CEO and founder of Bloomberg News, Michael R. Bloomberg has written:
“Think Like A Genius challenges the reader to think and perform on an inspired level. Siler’s simple approach to individual ‘genius’ is the key to every great success story.” In his testimonial for Think Like A Genius, Robert W. Galvin, Chairman of the Executive Committee, Motorola, Inc. has written: “Todd inspires us to energize the least used talent of our brain: exceptional creativity, so readily activatable and rewarding.” Adding to the critical acclaim for Think Like A Genius, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow and Creativity, has written: “Creative artists can rarely express what is at the root of their genius. Todd Siler is an exception: his concept of metaphorming is an ingenious and useful tool for enhancing everyone’s creative thinking.”

Todd Siler is a recipient of an I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to Paris, France (1975-76), a Fulbright Fellowship to India (1985-86), and a Meitec Fellowship (1989-91), awarded by the Meitec Corporation in Tokyo, among other fellowships and awards. He received the 1995 “Artist-of-the-Year” Award from the New York City Teachers Association and United Federation of Teachers. In addition, he holds a number of patents on a wide range of inventions including "Spatial-Tactile Human-Computer Interfaces for Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing” Systems; “Textile Printing Technology for Producing Design Patterns In Materials” (for security printing), and “Metaphorming: Methods and Apparatuses To Enhance Cognitive Functioning and Its Manifestation Into Physical Form and Translation Into Useful Information” [patent pending].

The culmination of Siler’s thinking to date is reflected in Metaphorming Worlds (Taipei Fine Arts Museum) and Cerebralism: Creating a New Millennium of Minds. Bodies, and Civilizations (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Inc), with an essay that sets forth the principles of a new artistic tendency. One insightful essay in Metaphorming Worlds, titled “Todd Siler: Exploring the Possibilities of ‘Art as Science’,” by Dr. Robert S. Root-Bernstein, a distinguished physiologist, science history, MacArthur Prize Fellow, and co-author of Sparks of Genius (1999), has written:

“Todd doesn’t just paint pictures that integrate fields such as art, science, and politics; he doesn’t just talk about integrating; he actually lives integrating. The science in his pictures isn’t there just as a subject or an icon, as it is in so much art about science. The science in Todd’s pictures is there because it has to be. The art is science, and the science, art—artscience and scienceart, to use Todd’s neologisms. In fact, one could easily think of Todd’s art as one neologism after another, but made by combining the disciplines of art, science, and philosophy. Indeed, the neologism, be they his verbal creations or his visual ones, emerge out of the necessity of finding a new language for discussing how things are linked within a vocabulary that has been almost completely shaped by making distinctions between things. If some people have problems understanding his new language, it only proves how ingrained this divisive analyticism has become, and consequently, how difficult it is for most people to see over the barriers that their education has erected between them and every aspect of existence. Todd, in short, for all of the incredible scope of his images, does not use science or engineering as arcane symbols to overawe the uninitiated or to impress the gullible—he uses all of his knowledge for the purpose of creating understanding.”

Cerebralism was published in conjunction with Siler’s fifth solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, “Radical Futures.” 

From this exploratory artwork grew Todd Siler’s exhibition, "A.R.T. Strings [All Representations of Thoughts] Link All
Things,” which was organized by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Denver,
Colorado. Thisexhibition traveled to the Ronald Feldman Gallery, for Siler’s seventh solo show (December 2 – 24, 2004).
A.R.T.Strings is also part of an ever-evolving body of artwork, called “Adventures in ArtScience,” which is being presented at
the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia (July 9 - Nov. 9, 2007) and traveling to the Tweed Museum of Art a
the University of Minnesota-Duluth (Dec. 4, 2007 - March 30, 2008). 

Todd Siler, A.R.T.Strings (All Representations of Thought), Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC

“Adventures in ArtScience” includes some of Siler’s most recent explorations, such as the “Fractal Reactor:
Re-Creating the Sun,” which was shown at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York City (Sept. 9 – Oct. 7, 2006)

Todd Siler, “Fractal Reactor: Re-Creating the Sun” Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York City

Reviewing this exhibition for Art In America (February 2007 Issue, pages 141, 142), Lilly Wei's art review,
"Todd Siler at Ronald Feldman," noted that “This star system—unlike some others—does seem to be a better way. Certainly the premise is appealing [constructing a fractal reactor based on a thermonuclear fusion system that closely replicates the actual physics and geometry of a star], and so is the art, in a Buckminster Fullerish manner. But like all marriages, this one of art and science has its ups and downs. Maybe, though, Siler should run for president with Al (An Inconvenient Truth) Gore. I’d vote for them.”

Todd Siler, “Fractal Reactor” (sculpture/model) 2000

Mary Lee Grisanti’s insightful art review of “Fractal Reactor: Re-Creating the Sun” in the NYArts Magazine (January 1, 2007 Issue) emphasized the following points about the possibilities of Siler’s concept: This is not a matter of approaching science aesthetically or viewing scientific imagery in an artistic way. It is not taking science and making it art. It is not even a fusion. “Recreating the Sun” is an extraordinary return to the source, wherein these are not two ideas or phenomena, but one.

Ronald Feldman deserves credit for recognizing Siler’s visionary potential early on. Even before Siler went to MIT, Feldman understood his relevance. “When Todd was starting out, people used to ask: Is he an artist or is he a scientist?” Feldman says. “But really art has been doing this for years. Think back to the Renaissance when people didn’t do anything without understanding that the aesthetic was a metaphor for the idea.”

The true revolutionaries not only change the fields in which they work, they change the world around them. Many artists change or expand what we recognize as art, but very few leave the landscape so transformed that life is different. Todd Siler might just be one of them.

Journalist Joy Overbeck’s article,  “Local artist goes nuclear as he fuses art and science…and who knows, maybe he’ll win the Nobel Prize,” in Colorado Expression magazine (October/November 2006, pp. 72-74) explores the origins of Siler’s concept and its premises: 

Essentially, physicists attempt to use the [fusion] reactor to recreate the energy-making process of the sun and its millions of fellow stars. The goal is to use the limitless energy released by the fusion process to power our cities and liberate the world from fossil fuels. The artist was thinking along these power-generating lines when suddenly a brain tsunami rocked him—the reason the fusion reactors aren’t working, he theorized, is because they’re using the wrong geometry! Siler thought using fractal or irregular geometry in the reactor design rather than Euclidean geometry would more closely replicate nature’s own star design.

As much as he’d love to see his Fractal Reactor leap out of the New York art exhibit and into a university research lab, Siler’s not counting on it. Given the vagaries of science and the monumental costs of fusion research, he knows it would take millions to get his idea even part way off the ground. Content to be a mind probe, Siler says, “I think of my model as a way to ask questions; it’s like a sculptural Rorschach for the physicists, offering a different view for them to think about. I’m really just a truth seeker, more interested in whether this can spark fresh thinking than whether it’s art or science.”

Todd Siler, “Fractal Reactor: An Initial Computational Model for An Alternative Plasma Fusion Reactor,” 2003. Two scenes from an interactive 3D visualization created by Jason Giles, content developer for the Anark Corporation; the animation is based on Siler’s storyboards and sketches.

In 1999, 2001 and 2003, he was invited to make a formal presentation of his peer-reviewed concept paper, “Fractal Reactor: A New Geometry for Plasma Fusion,” at the Symposia on Current Trends in International Plasma Fusion Research, in Washington, DC. This Conference was organized under the auspices of the Global Foundation, Inc. and in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory.

In 2007, Siler was invited to present the Fractal Reactor concept at the International Conference series on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems (ICENES) in Istanbul on June 3-8.  

Todd Lael Siler’s concept paper, “Fractal Reactor: A New Geometry for Plasma Physics,” was published in Current Trends in International Fusion Research: Review and Assessment – Proceedings of the Third Symposium (pp. 105-120) edited by Dr. Emilio Panarella. (National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada: NRC Research Press, 2002). Two subsequent papers documenting the development of the concept -- “Fractal Reactor: An Alternative Method and Apparatus for Plasma Fusion” (pp. 411-426) and “Fractal Reactor: An Initial Computational Model for An Alternative Plasma Fusion System” -- are published in the Proceedings for the 4th Symposium and 5th Symposium, 2007, edited by Dr Emilio Panarella and Charles D. Orth. Additionally, "Fractal Reactor: Re-Creating the Sun" was published in Leonardo Journal of Art, Sciences & Technology, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 270-278, June (The MIT Press, 2007).

Fred Alan Wolf, (Ph.D., Theoretical Physics and Plasma Physics from UCLA, 1963), author of the American Book Award for Science Taking The Quantum Leap (1982), and consulting physicist, writer, and actor in the popular movies, "What The Bleep
Do We Know?," has written:

"In the design of today's fusion devices it's the function that determines the form. By that I mean that plasma physicists know how to solve the usual Euclidian geometric (in my day Vlasov-Maxwell) equations of plasma physics and magnetohydrodynamics and so tend to design machines that their equations can describe. Hence they can solve the theoretical problem, because their minds have been formed to follow the functions of classical science and math.  Unfortunately, nature doesn't work that way. It seems we have turned the problem upside down-- it should be form determining function as Dr. Siler indicates . In other words we can see what Nature designs so why not follow her?" 

For more information on Todd's work and adventures, please visit these websites:

http://www.thinklikeagenius.com/highband/todd_sil/t_artist.html   (art installations)

http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/home_frame.html

http://www.newhorizons.org/lifelong/workplace/siler.htm

Or, Google Todd Siler and pick-and-choose from the many links to his work.

Statement

Metaphorming Life: The Work of A.R.T.
Realizing human potential. That’s my life’s work. Those three words sum up everything I live for and aspire to accomplish through my art.

For me, A.R.T. is All Representations of Thought: from the poetic gestures of dancers to the abstract symbolic models of chemists; from back-of-the-envelop idea doodles to rigorous proofs by pure mathematicians; from the Aha! we spontaneously utter at a moment of breakthrough thinking to the technological marvels we create in collaboratively harnessing our creative genius; from our silent inner reflections on life to our tangible responses to all the things nature shares with us every second of everyday that challenge our senses and rev our imagination.

Since childhood, my art has been one curious adventure in exploring the nature of the human mind to glean how we create, learn, invent, collaborate and communicate.

At the core of all my work is Metaphorming. Nearly three decades ago, I coined the words Metaphorm and Metaphorming to describe these ageless communication tools that everyone can use to realize their creative potential. They’re “engines” of creativity, invention, learning, and discovery that power our communications.

Metaphorming is derived from the Greek words meta which means “between,” “after,” “beyond,” “transcending,” and phora, or “transference.” Metaphorming enables us all to move beyond the constraints of verbal thought, transferring from one object to another a new meaning or set of associations.

I refer to my works of art as Metaphorms. These embody visual metaphors, physical analogies, signs, symbols, stories, allegories, puns, premises, and much more.

Metaphorming is the act of connecting Metaphorms to stimulate breakthroughs and discoveries, and to generate inventions and innovations. It increases the meaning and usefulness of all information, ideas, knowledge, experience, and wisdom.

Metaphorming is the essence of what our minds do when we are “thinking differently”; when we’re searching for personal meaning and purpose; when we’re seeing beauty and seeking truth; when we’re enjoying the complexity of nature, and exploring the nature of complexity.

To understand the world of Metaphorms and Metaphorming is to see beyond the categorization and compartmentalization of our acts of creating and our creations. It is to continually transform the meanings and uses of things and ideas by connecting and applying them in new contexts and situations. Recall the mantra of the 20th century polymath and Renaissance thinker, R. Buckminster Fuller, and novelist E.M. Forster: “Only connect.” Leonardo da Vinci may have simply said: Metaphorm it!

Know the thought through which all things are steered through all things.
Heraclitus, Greek philosopher and mystic, 500 B.C.
Don’t just know “the thought.” Metaphorm it!
Todd Siler

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