All Representations of Thoughts for Art and Science

Works by Todd Siler

Dec 4, 2007 – Mar 30, 2008
ADLS Lecture: 6:00pm, Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Todd Siler, author, visual artist, inventor and educator, will be available to meet with classes on Monday December 3rd, and Tuesday December 4th for those who wish to meet him first-hand.

“Today, art and science are seen as creative ways of knowing the world… Their similarities exceed their differences. Both show us how to explore and analyze what we are seeing; how to search life for meaning, and create meaning through our searches…”
-Todd Siler

Todd Siler was the first visual artist ever to receive a doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art from M.I.T. Through his installations of paintings, sculpture and drawing, he seeks out similarities of process in art and science, bridging historical barriers of these two domains of human knowledge.  He is the author of Think Like a Genius (Bantam, 1996) and Breaking the Mind Barrier (Simon and Schuster, 1990).

Siler will visit UMD December 3-5, and is available to meet with large or small groups of students, in the museum or in classrooms. Todd Siler will give a free public presentation on his work Tuesday, December 4, at 6:00pm. The exhibition at the Tweed Museum of Art will run through March 16, 2008. Several publications about Siler’s art, as well as his own books, will be available at the Tweed Museum of Art store. Please call or email Sandi Peterson at (218) 726-7823, sgpeters@d.umn.edu to schedule meetings with the artist.

Free and open to the public, the Tweed Museum of Art is located in Ordean Court on the campus of the University of Minnesota Duluth.  Museum hours are Tuesday 9am – 8pm, Wednesday – Friday 9am – 4:30pm, Saturday and Sunday 1 – 5pm

For more information about the Tweed Museum of Art and its programs visit: www.d.umn.edu/tma.

ADVENTURES  IN  ARTSCIENCE

“Adventures in ArtScience” is an exhibition of the work of Todd Siler at the National Science Foundation in
Arlington, Virginia. This exhibition is part of the Art of Science Project, which is sponsored by the Directorate
for Education and Human Resources. The exhibition runs from July 11 through November 9, 2007. 

Todd Siler ADVENTURES IN ARTSCIENCE explores the mysteries of creativity, the hidden dimensions of human potential, and
the integration of art with scientific research in fields such as neurobiology, cosmology and nuclear fusion. This exhibition spans Siler’s lifelong passion and quest to integrate artistic and scientific inquiry with the idea of better understanding the nature of the human mind: how we create, discover, learn, invent, collaborate, and communicate. It presents a selection of 44 artworks that include mixed media drawings, experimental paintings on synthetic canvas, photomontages of multi-part art installations, and free-standing photographic sculptures composed of artist-made and media-originated digitally manipulated images. Siler refers to these symbolic artworks as “metaphorms” (physical analogies, visual metaphors, stories, signs, premises) that interpret the workings of the human brain and its deep connections with the countless things it creates.

Todd’s opening lecture will present evocative visuals and personal stories that invite you to search these metaphorms for their meanings, and to see their relevance to urgent global concerns and challenges that affect every facet of contemporary life. His presentation encourages us all to experience this art without boundaries, without limits, and without categories. In effect, he aims at breaching the barriers between our compartmentalized fields of knowledge—suggesting how we might rethink our categories of things while stretching our imagination about arts’ natural partnership with the sciences and their interactions with the whole of life.

http://alum.mit.edu/ne/noteworthy/news-features/siler-art.html

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TODD SILER

FRACTAL REACTOR:   RE-CREATING THE SUN

SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 7 2006

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind .       Jacob Bronowski: Mathematician and Poet (1908-1974)

Todd Siler, trained in both science and the visual arts, will exhibit models and drawings derived from his studies and speculations on nuclear fusion reactor design.   Delving into an area that science and technology so far have been unable to fully solve, Siler, in his new body of work, responds to one of the most monumental scientific challenges of the day: how to recreate the power of the sun on earth in order to provide a safe, readily available, environmentally friendly energy source, that is essentially inexhaustible.  

With the obsession of the search for the Holy Grail, Siler has pursued the premise that a thermonuclear fusion energy system might become increasingly more effective to the degree that this system more closely embodies the geometry and physics of a star, which is nature's "fractal reactor."   This perspective contrasts the prevailing scientific point of view that continues to model, describe, and build fusion reactor devices based on Classical [Euclidean] geometry as opposed to fractal geometry, which better represents nature's irregular-shapes and non-linear forms.   Siler sums up the differences this way : "Why not work with nature rather than against it, in controlling the forces that govern burning plasmas. Instead of jamming a square peg (i.e. Euclidean geometry) into a round hole (i.e., fractal geometry), why not consider the possibility of exerting intense forces on the plasmas by approximating the gravitational forces in a star?"

The artworks on exhibit are visual suppositions and premises that raise questions and act as catalysts for thought. Several small and intricately fabricated models welcome multiple interpretations and meanings; more than thirty drawings, some as large as 9' x 20', incorporate a variety of materials and techniques.   Acetates placed on transparent plastic panels provide a sense of the asymmetrical fractal forms of nature.   A video wall project presents an animated three-dimensional visualization of the Fractal Reactor concept.

Siler envisions that his concept will contribute to the success of utilizing a stellar source of energy and power, which nature gifted the universe with and which human beings can use for peaceful purposes.   As better fusion energy systems are made available to everyone and every nation, the violent conquests for finding and securing sustainable sources of energy will subside.

The models are created in collaboration with Charles Benson, architect and Chief Operating Officer of Advanced Technological Resources, Inc., sculptor Roger Leitner, and ANARK Corporation, a design productions company specializing in broadcast-quality interactive media.

Todd Siler received his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from MIT.   Public collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art.   Siler was a Forum Fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.   Publications include "Fractal Reactor: A New Geometry for Plasma Fusion," in Current Trends in International Fusion Research - Proceedings of the Third Symposium , edited by Dr. Emilio Panarella. (National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada: 2002).   An article explaining how Siler arrived at the Fractal Reactor concept through Metaphorming - using his art and neurobiology background to "prepare his mind" for this work - will be published in Leonardo Journal .  

There will be a reception September 9, 6 - 8.   Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 - 6.   Monday by appointment.
For information, contact Sarah Paulson at (212) 226-3232 or sarah@feldmangallery.com

"Arc of Light & Life"

[Model for "Arc of Light & Life," 2005]

"Arc of Light & Life" by Todd Siler

Ever-changing as weather systems. Moving as moods and pure emotions. Atmospheric as any spectrum of indescribable sounds. Subtle and obvious as nature. That's light!

Unpredictable as surprises. Colorful as chaos. Calming as order. Vividly energetic as all vivacious forms of thought in action. That's life!

The Arc of Light & Life flows with a freewheeling creative process that is always spontaneous, symbolic and metaphorical.
If you follow its freedom to the ends of the arc, you'll notice how this art blasts away the frames of mind that fasten and corner our world of ideas.  

This pointed arc conveys the phenomena of nature: Everything in the universe is converging or diverging, merging or splitting, fusing or fissioning in every way imaginable. Everything : Light, matter, energy, minds, ideas, and their meanings. Even if we can't prove this basic truth beyond belief, we can discover it by experiencing it.

Upon seeing the installation drawing for Arc of Light & Life , one viewer exclaimed: " That's status nascendi! It's the state of being born." In chemistry, this Latin term is used to describe how compounds form and evolve.

The compound canvases in the  Arc of Light & Life make it one artwork with many parts-- visually echoing this timeless piece of ancient Greek wisdom:   There's "many in one and one in many," just as there's "unity in diversity," which connects the whole of life.

Painted by nature, shaped by gravity, this tapestry of feelings bears the indelible marks of evolution embossed on its surfaces. The marks resemble everything from rock formations cut over billions of years by the elements to labyrinths of neural tissue we all use to grasp the world around us and within us. If you listen closely to  them , you'll hear aspects of Ornette Coleman's "soular" jazz playing with Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony, The Giant.

[Todd Siler, "Arc of Light & Life," 2005. Mixed media on synthetic canvas with seven wall-mounted sculptures (digital photo-metaphorms fused on aluminum plate).   30 ft. high x 75 ft. long x 2.5 ft. deep. Permanent installation at 655 West Broadway, San Diego, California; Lankford & Associates, Inc.]
View more images on Projects page >

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Inc
31 Mercer Street, New York, New York 10013
www.feldmangallery.com

CONRAD ATKINSON: COLLABORATIONS
TODD SILER: A.R.T. Strings
DECEMBER 2 – 24, 2004

The Feldman Gallery exhibited new work by Conrad Atkinson and Todd Siler in two separate installations. Both artists have been represented by the gallery for more than twenty years. Atkinson, an activist British artist who has influenced the direction of contemporary art, has engaged in controversial issues including industrial disease, Northern Ireland, and the proliferation of landmines. Siler, the first visual artist to receive a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art from M.I.T., provides an alternative vision of time, space, matter, and energy beyond the fourth dimension that takes into account the edgy, violent side of our creative nature.

Conrad Atkinson
The past and the present coalesce in Collaborations, an exhibition comprised of paintings, drawings, and everyday objects that interact with curatorial and museum practices and codes, weaving art history, the tradition of poetry, and contemporary sensibilities and events. An embroidered suit, “theorized” to have been worn by Wordsworth whilst writing the poem Daffodils, and an accompanying curatorial text reveal microscopic evidence of now extinct species and early Industrial Revolution pollution. Using the metaphor of the West Nile virus as an early Jackson Pollock painting, Atkinson comments on the penetration of the developed world by the underdeveloped world and the awful symmetry of their mutual destruction. Referring to contemporary news events, Atkinson has created a work based on the theme and size of Picasso’s Guernica (Fallujuernica?) that uses wounds depicted on paintings in The Metropolitan Museum and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London. Related to his signature newspaper works, Atkinson “uncovers” Van Gogh’s partially severed ear, multiplies it like Warhol’s soup cans, and places it beside wounds rendered on a vase by Euphonious. Atkinson investigates our damaged world, questioning who controls the meaning of politics, history, and aesthetics.

Atkinson’s 1972 exhibition Strike was the subject of a recent tribute by one hundred British artists. In New York, his early work was a recent subject of debates at White Box with Tim Rollins, Alfredo Jaar, and others. A Distinguished Visiting Professor to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2002, Atkinson was the first artist to exhibit in its collection. Other recent solo exhibitions in England were mounted by the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the British Center for Romanticism’s 3ºW Gallery (Grasmere). Public collections include: the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, The Museum of Modern
Art, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the
Australian National Gallery. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California at Davis and the official artist of the U.S. campaign to ban landmines (Vietnam Veterans Trust).

Todd Siler
Siler’s multi-media installation, A.R.T. Strings (All Representations of Thoughts) consists of paintings on synthetic canvas (“Metaphorms”) and freestanding steel sculptures (“Subliminal Stories”) that depict a world of information we experience daily that is radically shaping the future of life as we know it.

[A.R.T. Strings Concept Drawing]

In describing the digitally compressed and distorted photographs in his sculptures, Siler writes:

“We compress and expand everything, as naturally as gravity distorts time and shapes space. These compressed expansions and expanded compressions affect everything under the sun: from our sense of truth to our experiences of beauty; from blissful joys to beastly horrors. Today we find ourselves staring at the edges of things, wondering about the subliminal stories our minds create to cope with our eternally turbulent universe, and potentially terrifying future. Are we, as physicists and string theorists relate, merely anonymous creations of invisible strings of matter too subtle to see? Does each nameless string contain a world of information that will forever elude the touch of human understanding? Does every string embody All Representations of Thought? Do A.R.T. Strings link everything from tranquility to terror? Perhaps life is only one pattern nature represents in infinite ways with all strings attached.”

Todd Siler founded Psi-Phi Communications, LLC in 1993, a Denver-based company that creates and develops innovative, multi-purpose learning tools for education and business, such as the Think Like a Genius® Program for Lifelong Learning. He is the author of Think like a Genius (Bantam Books), Breaking the Mind Barrier (Simon and Schuster), as well as scientific concept articles including “Fractal Reactor: A New Geometry for Plasma Fusion” published in the Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion (NRC Research Press, Ottawa, Canada, 2003). Public collections of his work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum in Moscow, and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He was a Forum Fellow at the 1999 and 2001 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea. Siler holds a number of patents on a wide range of inventions, including textile printing technology and a computer-graphics input device.

For information contact Laura Muggeo (212) 226-3232 or laura@feldmangallery.com.

Conrad Atkinson: Collaborations
Todd Siler: A.R.T. Strings
by Donald Goddard © 2005

[Installation of sculpture. Photo: Emily Poole Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York]

Art Review — NewYorkArtWorld ®It is necessary to reduce the phenomena of the world, to picture them, in order to apprehend them, a process that most literally and latterly characterizes our construction of religions. Whether the process is automatic or not is impossible to know. It seems likely that there are assigned (learned) values that cannot be disentangled from things themselves at the beginning of any given perception. Any picture, or product of the human brain-body, most intentionally a visual or other work of art, a scientific or philosophical proposition, is full of cross-generational urgencies, from place and time, id, ego, and superego. There would be no life if its profusion were self-canceling, because meaning imbues everything, every axis of complexity; it cannot be avoided.

All meanings are hidden, in the image, in the language, in the equation, no matter how obvious and open they may appear to be. And so we examine those things for meaning, however decorous they may appear to be (though the décor has a way of stopping us). The photo aluminum sculptures Todd Siler put up in the center of the gallery, dated 1975-2004, are clustered like a forest of obelisks--a cemetery--that constantly get in our way and convey changing meanings as we move through and around them. They twist and turn in space, like Brancusi's Bird in Space, revealing images distorted, at the edge, as we, moving through the world, and the universe, see them out of the corners of our eyes, and our brains. One place melds with another. On the back of a soaring fragment of Munch's The Scream is a tangential scene of Explosions of Infinite Dimensions. Behind the New York Stock Exchange is Nuclear Cooling Towers. Bound to Sweating Mosquito Life is The Deep Taproots of Global Terror. Different kinds of connective meanings--emotional, cosmic, political, biological--all made physical.

On the surrounding walls is the context, mixed-media paintings on synthetic canvases of varying shapes, perhaps cut out of or pieced together from some larger context, from Believing 'Nothing is New Under the Sun,' or Seeing Everything Anew? to Releasing Our Powers on Unprecedented Scales. They could be states of mind--Grasping Synapses, Surging Anxieties--but they seem to have gone beyond that, into conditions held in common, and some, like the long earth-red Spotting Seven Patterns of Nature in One Pattern, appear to represent a form of geologic history, of striated rocks crushed together over aeons of time, with tiny photographs of landscapes caught within them like fossils. The photographs have a double identity, as image and reflection. They begin to orient us within the larger worlds of the specific paintings and their accumulated presence, and they also seem to be tangible, visible consequences of forces within the paintings, infinitesimal moments of stasis, landscapes or groups of people as beginning and end, cause and effect.

The events in this gallery room, having become and still becoming, are connected through our perception of them. Nothing is exactly amorphous. Though the obelisks and paintings are shapes on their way to formation, they have not arrived at final forms, any more than have we, their interlocutors. None of this mediation would happen without the light that (makes photography possible), reveals buildings, streams, a child on the beach, the night sky, underwater life, but it is the dark light of a canyon, or within the earth, or beyond it, and everything seems to move toward both darkness and the light within it simultaneously.

[Spotting Seven Patterns of Nature in One Pattern, 2000-2004 Photo: Alan Zindman Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York]

Conrad Atkinson's light, on the other hand, is luminous, as it is in the work of the artists he engages: William Wordsworth, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and the light of their landscapes; Pablo Picasso and the bursting bombs he alludes to in Guernica. The path is better lit, but no less difficult or treacherous. And the nexus of viewer and art is quite similar; one is forced to recognize certain facts, ideas, and events revealed in a way that it is painful to avoid or deny them, rather than the other way around. Meanings normally concealed by our habit of viewing art as something apart from life are deliberately reclaimed. The collaborations are introduced by wall texts that describe Atkinson's connection to or meetings with the aforesaid artists (all of them dead) and their agreements to redo certain important works, all of this in rather vulgar terms that jolt them into the present.

In the case of Wordsworth the collaboration, or in this case the adaptation, is with a countryman (both were born in West Cumbria, England) who was passionately concerned with nature, with ordinary human activity and speech, and with the politics and economics of his day. The main item is a red pinstripe suit embroidered in gold thread with images of insects and plants, touted as the very suit worn by Wordsworth when he and his sister Dorothy strolled by the field of daffodils about which he later wrote a poem. According to Atkinson's text ("Suit"), "The suit contained pollen from the English native wild daffodil Narcissus pseudo-narcissus," which is now threatened by genetically modified hybrids. How proudly he, or we, would wear such an encrusted suit, tailored in Savile Row, still hiding what has not quite disappeared in the pockets of our civilization. The suit is close to us; it might fit anyone, or no one.

Likewise, there is the Suit Worn by Manet Whilst Painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" and Passed on to Van Gogh for his "Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear." The bloody ear from that self-portrait Atkinson has had embroidered several times in gold along with images of a wound on a sixth-century B.C. Greek vase by Euphronios. The ear has been unbandaged to emphasize the fact that Van Gogh actually did cut his ear off, and felt the pain, if one wants to look closely at the painting, despite the fact that he was wearing Manet's suit (or perhaps because of it), pointing out once again the oversensitivity of artists. A Few Bits Like Guernica then becomes a compendium of the wounds that have pervaded Western art since the beginning of the Renaissance, "inkjet printouts with watercolor of scars depicted in artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Courtauld Institute," the wounds that Picasso left out. The huge rectangle within which these wounds appear is the exact size of Guernica, but obviously it is not big enough.

[Rethinking Aspects of Earth, 2000-2004 Photo: Alan Zindman Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York]

Star deserves to shine brighter locally
By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic from Boulder

Few, if any, Denver artists have accomplished as much nationally and internationally as Todd Siler yet remained so little-known locally even within the arts community.

His résumé is impressive by any measure, beginning with his representation for more than 20 years by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, an important New York gallery that shows noted artists ranging from Komar & Melamid to the recently deceased Leon Golub.

But that's only the beginning. His works are included in the collections of such significant institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York City and Pushkin Fine Arts Museum in Moscow.

And Siler has had dozens of solo exhibitions everywhere from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan to the Allen Center in Houston, and from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to the New York Academy of Sciences in New York.

[Below Clouds of Consciousness]

It would seem that with such an impressive record Siler would be something of a local art star. So far, that's not the case.

His relatively anonymity largely can be explained by the simple fact that his work has been shown surprisingly little in Colorado, where the Long Island, N.Y., native has resided for about 10 years.

Siler was nowhere to be found, for example, among the artists featured in "10+10," last year's Colorado biennial at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Denver. Indeed, his work never has been shown there at all.

Although the Denver Art Museum owns two major works by him, it rarely shows them. The Kirkland Museum recently acquired six of his pieces but has had little time to give them much exposure.

In fact, the last display of any consequence of Siler's works in the Denver area took place in 2000, when they were showcased in the grand-opening exhibition of the Museum of Outdoor Arts' quarters in the Englewood Civic Center. His odd four-year absence from the local scene makes an exhibition of his work continuing through Jan. 16 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art even more welcome than it might otherwise have been.

It is the second installment of a show that first opened in September. Many selections from the first round of works are included in a related exhibition that closes today at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

[Roping Out Representations of the Brain Universe]

The current permutation of the Boulder offering contains 15 works from 2004 - almost all collaged, semi-abstract paintings on irregularly cut, unstretched canvas. Many are large-scale compositions more than 10 feet wide.

Although aspects of these paintings are certainly beautiful, this is anything but art for art's sake. The show is titled "A.R.T. Strings," an allusion to string theory, a complex scientific postulate that tries to explain how everything in the universe interrelates.

Along with that underlying thrust are references to a range of other subjects, such as cognitive understanding and the nature of creativity. In "The Family of Matter," Siler relates the "texture of violence" to physical textures.

Perhaps more than anything else, he is a thinker and visionary who constantly blurs the boundaries of art and science. He was the first visual artist to receive an interdisciplinary doctorate in art and psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

However important it is, his art is just one of the interconnected ways he expresses his thoughts and ideas. Others include workshops, lectures, articles and books, such as "Think Like a Genius" and "Breaking the Mind Barrier."

Given that, it is open to question just how much of Siler's thought process a casual visitor to this exhibition can really glean from his art.

Contradictions abound in these works, starting with the medium itself. Although he is clearly wrestling with some of today's most advanced scientific and intellectual concepts, he does not use digital or other equivalently vanguard technologies, as might be expected.

In fact, his paintings can be quite crude in their construction. In "Learning the Cosmic Ropes and Cerebral Strings," he has attached an old loop of rope and bunches of string to the canvas in a slapdash manner to evoke the heavy-duty concepts to which the title alludes.

Let's hope this exhibition leads to others in the region in the near future so that viewers have further chances to more fully explore Siler's multifaceted work and grasp its many implications.

Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.

[Human Nature]

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