Art and Science Serve Each Other: The Russian Branch of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics

subshapes. Finally, I briefly introduced various approaches to creativity in current research fields (8] and focused on the conflicts and possible relationship between the cognitive viewpoint and the social!cultural viewpoint. At the end of the course, the students ' final projects showed a variety of interests in relation to the issues covered and strong potential for their further research. For instance,one student analyzed a number of patterns of traditional Chinese windows in terms of translation, rotation, reflection and so on, in order to discover the underlying "hidden rule." This work recalls and continues previous research on Islamic mosaic patterns published in Leonardo [9]. Another student applied the analysis -synthesis mode to Piet Mondrian's paintings on Neo-Plasticism, analyzing the elements and fundamental variables embedded in his paintings and then synthesizing various variable settings to yield exhaustive "parametric Mondrian paintings." Figure 1 shows the results, which were generated by a computer program written in C language. As my Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology students had more domaingeneral interests, some focused on graphic effects in stylistic design by reviewing , criticizing and comparing related research articles published in journals such as Design Studies, Environment and Planning B and Leonardo. References 1. W.J. Mitchell, The LogicofArchitedure(Cambridge , MA:MIT Press, 1990). 2.J. R. Anderson, CognitivePsychology and Its Implications (New York: Freeman, 1990). 3. D. A. Schon, Educating theRefledivePractitioner (San Francisco, CA:Jossey-Bass, 1987). 4, H. A. Simon, The Sciences of theArtificial (Cambridge , MA: MIT Press, 1981). 5. Y.T. Liu, "Schematic-Designer: A KnowledgeBased CAD System for Schematic Design in Architecture ," DesignStudies12, No.3, 151-167 (1991). 6. Y. T. Liu, "Some Phenomena of Seeing Shapes in Design," DesignStudies (forthcoming at time of writing). 7. Y.T. Liu, "Encoding Explicit and Implicit Emergent Subshapes Based on Empirical Findings about Human Vision," inJ. S. Gero and F. Sudweeks, eds., ArtificialIntelligence in Design'94 (Dordrecht, Netherlands : Kluwer, 1994) pp. 401-418. 8. R. J. Sternberg, ed., TheNature of Creativity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). 9. M. Ahuja and A. 1..Loeb, "Tessellations in Islamic Calligraphy," Leonardo28, No.1, 41-45 (1995). Manuscript received 9 September 1994. Art and Science Serve Each Other: The Russian Branch of the International Association ofEmpirical Aesthetics VladimirM. Petrov To determine the scientific roots of art, to use the appropriate methods based on these roots in the practice of art, to remove the "unbridgeable gap" between the natural sciences and the humanities -these are the primary goals of a group of artists and researchers that form the Russian branch of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA). The Russian branch of the IAEA was organized during the Eleventh International Congress on Empirical Aesthetics , held in Budapest in August 1990. At that time, the foundation of this branch already existed-during the previous 20-30 years several groups of researchers and artists had been working on problems involving psychology, sociology, aesthetics, art theory and practice, information theory and so forth. Most of these researchers and artists are now working at various scientific institutions and creative associations in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm and other Russian cities. VladimirM. Petrov,Institute of Art Studies, Moscow,Rus-sia . A rather peculiar situation built up in the humanities and arts in Russia during the past several decades, which is reflected in the work of this group of researchers . Up until the end of the 1980s in the Soviet Union the Marxist approach dominated both the humanities and the arts, which were strongly influenced by socialist realism. However, many talented intellectuals (if not most) hated this ideology and, although they had great interest in the humanities and arts, they refused to participate officially. They preferred to be active in other fields-engineering, the natural sciences , mathematics-and their non-official work in the humanities and arts was usually done as a hobby. An entire parallel culture was formed, created by representatives of the underground, or dissident, branches of the humanities and arts. The official communist ideology tried to suppress this parallel culture, which therefore explored its own approaches beyond the reach of official Marxist ideology. And because many of the representatives of the parallel movement specialized in the natural sciences and...