Context Driven Topologies
Context Driven Topologies is a collaborative effort to begin to draw the geometry of knowledge as it changes over time.
Lou Kauffman, a knot theory topologist and project participant explains it as this “For me, the key concept is that of the "pivot". An image in one field can trigger a patterned response in another field due to matching structures at some level of discourse. The surface appearance can be of a "tiny" relationship due to much that lies beneath the surface. The key to this project will be the facilitation of such pivot events. This requires the creation of space and context, not computation or classification. But computation and classification are necessary ingredients to make the images and information available for play and purvey”.
Whoa! Knot theory topologist? Other participants include a cognitive scientist and ontological engineer interested iin semiotics, a theoretical nuclear and particle physicist, a chemist and natural philosopher, a theoretical morphologist, a Los Alamos theorist and inventor in physics, neuroscience and emergent computation; a theoretical cosmologist, a sculptor interested in symbols, form and unseen concepts; an American composer of concert music, a painter using oils on canvas to dwell on the order in disorder, a painter investigating process grammars and artworks as maximal memory stores, an unusual kind of choreographer living in a small town in Germany (He makes audio acoustic clothes), a photographer from New York City who investigates the nature of light and is a painter of formal abstraction derived from physics and mathematics, an artist transforming data from non-art images to suggest a complex economical portrait of how learning and innovation evolve over time, an inventor interested in information visualization and interaction design, and more artists, animators, and archivists.
And what do I have to do with this group? One of my oddball hobbies is looking for art in nature. The person working to get an NSF grant for this project came upon a photograph of gravel I took in Point Richmond five or six years ago. It's the righthand image below:
Deborah MacPherson plans to use this in a presentation at the Fourth International Conference MATHEMATICS & DESIGN (M&D-2004) in Buenos Aires this June. [ Her portfolio ]
Weirder things have happened to me; I just can't seem to recall them right now.
Here's a Rothko that popped up in my window while flying from Paris to San Francisco a couple of years ago. I think this is Kansas:
And another Rothko trouvee, this one the beach in Nice:
Posted by Jay Cross at March 27, 2004 05:30 PM | TrackBack
