Art and Science in Search of Non-Visible Worlds

Art and Science in Search of Non-Visible Worlds Editorial Science is mental talk ... Painting is mental talk ... -Leonardo da Vinci, 1500A.D. A 1983Editorial of thisjournal stressed amongthejournal’s aims “the search for common threads in the artistic, scientificand technological aspects of our fragmented cultural fabric” [11. In my opinion,a common thread which is becoming more and more apparent is the fact that both artists and scientists are searching for a world that is removed from immediate vision, but which displays its own ordered complexity. In the hope of focusing future contributions to Leonardo on this thread, I would like to dwell on it here. By now we realize that every person, including the artist and the scientist, is but a link in the evolutionary chain of individuals. Along this evolutionary process, the human being has moved progressively from an initial ‘biological reality’ (as biologists call the world vision imposed on early peoples by the selectivepressure of the environment) towards an ordered representation of theexternal world set in the human brain, where memorizedimagesof past eventscan be broken intoparts and then recombined to form new and unforeseen representations. Thiscan occur becausethe human memory is capable of storinga large number of events, and even more so because our minds areableto recognize an intrinsic orderin someself-consistentworlds simulated by recalland imagination. At times,this new world has been called the ‘invisibleworld’, ascontrasted with the visible one perceiveddirectly by our senses.Oncethe above definitions are accepted, we can saythat scientistsand artists doindeed parallel each other in this search for invisiblebut ordered worlds; if scientistsand artists differ, it is essentially because of the signsthey use in their mental talks. In otherwords, the same ordering processcan detect different structures, expressed by appropriate signs. Although in this search the single artist or scientist may be motivated by the wish to order the complexity of his or her mental talk to discover personal meaning, once this talk is transmitted, the community is enriched by the learning process; furthermore a new reality becomes visible thanks to technology. In this context technology isunderstood as a change in the environment whichisintended to transform humanity itself, thus closing the evolving loop. It is amazing to see that Leonardo, in his Treatise on Painting, was already conscious that the very root of both art and sciencewas in these mental talks (discorsimentali).The history of scienceandof art display somehighlightsof the process by whichan invisibleworld becomesa real one, asoccurred early in this century forabstract painting and for atomicphysics.Today we would likethesetwo kinds of talk to display more their common nature, and we would like to see traces of this unifying thread in the pages of Leonardo. Giorgio Careri International Co-Editor REFERENCE 1. Editorial, Leonardo 16, No. 1, i-ii (1983). 0ISAST PergamonJournals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/86 F3.00t0.00 LEONARDO, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 275,1986 275 ...