Science and art are more alike than it might seem. This was demonstrated by physicist, computer scientist and researcher Albert Laszlo Barabasi, who brought his thinking about network science to MEET in Milan.
in his book The view from the inside (Blackwell Pub, 1993), Samir Zaki, the leading scholar of neuroaesthetics, asserts that even if unconsciously most artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, and Willem de Kooning, long before scholars, had thought of organization. And the work of the brain, especially in areas related to visual perception and therefore aesthetics. In the past decade, scientific studies have sometimes confirmed and expanded, and sometimes refuted and contradicted these axioms, opening up complex debates and charting common ground for confronting the technical counterpart. The results – both aesthetic and scientific – are amazing.
However, there are rare occasions and isolated examples when these two spirits, artistic and scientific, co-exist, share and create the same person.
Science and the arts in dialogue
Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajalwho discovered the way neurons communicate with each other – the constituent elements of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system – produced hundreds of drawings in ink and tempera in various combinations that represented the nervous system, by far one of the largest scientific illustrations in the world, and from an aesthetic point of view , a wonderful inner world in various forms: linear networks, spiky nodes, suggestive bifurcations.
Leonardo Da Vincithe greatest of artists and scientists, firmly believes that art, science and nature are intimately interrelated and can only be fully comprehended through their synthesis: it was he who produced profusely in both fields and what resulted – his astonishing scientific discoveries, together with his pictorial masterpieces – is history.
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Albert Luszel Barabassi exhibition at the meeting
The MEET Center in Milan is hosting the curated exhibition in its immersive room Albert Laszlo Barabasi (Cârța, 1967), Hungarian artist and scientist, Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and also in Budapest, at Central European University.
Albert-László Barabási is the best proof of da Vinci’s belief that “To develop a complete mind, it is necessary to study the science of art, to study the art of science. Learn to see. Know that everything is connected to everything else“.
Drawn to a wide range of topics, from brain anatomy to retinal medicine, Barabási’s work uses quantitative methods to Network sciencea pioneering subject of study that led to the discovery of scale-free networks, which help explain the genesis of many natural, technological, and social networks.
The exhibition examines, from an aesthetic point of view and through new technologies, the visual complexity of these networks, drawn from the data collected online in the last thirty years of activity by his BarabásiLab team: so important is the repetition and the striking similarity that brings them closer, in designs and themes which they recreate, from the gods natural patterns – Like fractals – establishing the belief that the natural wonders that surround us are nothing more than geometry Accurate repeating itself, perfect projects we struggle to imagine are not through graphics programs and artificial intelligence, and are used to analyze, visualize and annotate data by scientific laboratories around the world.
“through this map“- the artist explains -“I realized for the first time that completely different diseases, for which we not only go to different doctors, but go to different hospitals for treatment, are all linked at the genetic and cellular level. In this disease map, we started encoding the information in the size of the nodes“.
Martha Pesolante
Artistic events are taking place in Milan
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