Interlude blog: PAINTINGS from New York Show (May 2009)

1st INTERLUDE: Swans Realms

RELAX: Beautiful art can be seen on this link (from New York Studio School):

http://maiaibar.blogspot.com/


Art is the ultimate free expression of emotions. Its interactive aspect with the viewer is most interesting. Talking about a painting reveals the person as much as what the painting immortalizes. The interpretation of the emotions from looking at a painting is what's makes me so attracted to art, beyond the crafting skills.

The paintings by my daughter Maia drag me deep inside them with a force that exhausts me. This may be due to a sensation of whirl created by an harmony interplay between two or three layers, a local level with small details, and a large scale level that consolidates the colors, overpowers the details, integrates, fuses the small pieces together, as the image is defocused, concentrating on the overall piece. In my world of thoughts, I always see high frequency components part of a larger integrated system in a moving environment, a system and its twin shadow, the distorted and fading mirror image of itself, like if the past was the present that had started to dissolve.

Of course, you will say, I am using words of physics to relate to art, and I will answer that it is precisely my point, it reveals who I am.

I discovered, for instance, an art piece that Maia did, "Swans Realms" that reminded me estrangly a sketch that I once did , before she was born, which described my Dual-Statistics concept of interlocked kinetics (which I call Energetic Kinetics Duality). I spent hours looking at this painting at the New York Studio School, where she exhibited last month:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLHiDJ7DdZhf0MFP1tbGiPtZJk_oqDzhEUMdoapYJ-kHZDz3rWQ_Wmbqimj4AhTVyo5Q-MnehxEMTnYJX92dGZsBOS-IpMykbI2ABludeep7tjWlwFSm1nFqgp0vblC4nUtmHeESO6UyUN/s1600-h/IMG_3884.jpg

and could not understand why this painting attracted me like glue, until I realized the analogy with my own ideas in physics of interactive coupling, and the strange resemblance it evoked with my cartoon sketch of those ideas (see the Figure below).

I wanted to know what my daughter meant in the painting. The whole show was about her immense misery and sufferance after the tragic loss of her boyfriend, her love, Charlie, in January this year. How come one dies at 24? The exhibit was about Charlie, where is Charlie now, does he still communicate?

In the Swans Realms, Maia was of course making the portrait of herself reaching out to Charlie, in his new world, the connect being somewhat diffuse, as death and life after death are still not well defined. The swan from the top is "touching" the swan below through this narrow uncertain chanel, but definitely influencing its existence, defining its boundaries. The space occupied by the swans is moving, depending on their respective influence: who influences who?

This is the way I saw the painting: a 1st layer, the triangle containing the drawing, expresses the continuity of time, the fluidity of things, the arrow of time. A 2nd layer is a split between two domains that each contain a figure, a swan, a fine line separating the two domains. A symmetry between the upper and lower swans puts them in a sort of connected position, but the beakers join in what looks like a spark discharge, not a single point. One of the swans is smaller than the other, the symmetry being scaled by the size of the confining domains; the details of the swans skirts are not identical, just similar in appearance, but quantitatively distinct.

All these particular features take a special meaning when one now looks at the sketch of "a Dual Split Kinetic diagram":

I defined "conformers", an entity that could represent many small systems in physics, but that I applied to parts of macromolecules in that sketch (a macromolecular chain being a series head-to-tail of conformers). The overall shape of the sketch is not a triangular figure, like in Maia's painting, but an oval, but what matters in the analogy is that it actually defines an overall confinement system, splitted into two domains, limited by a loosely defined line, the serpent in the oval. The b-conformers and the F-conformers "occupy" each domain, and one sees details within domains, for instance two horizontal lines of the b-domain are designated tF and cgF. The same details, but looking like miniature horizontal lines, are repeated within small circles drawn inside the b-domain, and if one zooms on those details, one can read tb and cgb. Identical letter symbols, t and cg, are used to represent the same conformation of the conformers in either the b-or the F-domain. The analogy with the Swans Realms picture starts to emerge. The reality of the conformers, labelled by the letters c, t, g to describe the spatial position of its atoms, also called their intramolecular conformation, as a cis, a trans or a gauche conformation, can be found in two interactive coupling "worlds", the b and the F domain, b standing for "bonded" and F for "free".

The Dual-Phase Statistics is a set of assumptions to describe the cross-kinetics between all these conformers, the tF and tb states, the cgF and cgb states in one hand, and between the t and cg states in the other hand. All these states co-exist, and because they are assumed to stabilize in an equilibrium state where they all exist, one needs to define an inhomogeneous field of interaction, actually "a granular" field of interaction would be a better description.

In classical physics, a homogeneous field of attraction/repulsion between particles, described as a mean field, is assumed to control the statistics, and it is taken as the average value of the field over spatial and temporal scales. So, if fluctuations of the interactions exist, their influence is co-linear in spatial and temporal dimensions and in phase with the mean value, in classical stastistical theory, meaning there is no need to worry about the possibility that averaging in the space or time domain is going to provide different results. I call this a smooth one dimensional statistical theory of interactions, as opposed to my new cross-statistics, the result of this granular Dual dimension statistics, the subject of my research starting in my Ph-D thesis at MIT.

So, back to the New York Studio School. Here is the scene: I have been standing and exploring for twenty minutes the details of the Swans Realms. A secret chill is emerging from inside of me as I see the analogy with the granular statistics. I sweat and smile, I want to dance.

At that point, everything takes a magical spin, as I am living the intense experience that people could connect in spaceless and timeless spheres to reach the same emotions or ideas from completely different angles.

But the next moment I panick with a new thought: perhaps this drawing by my daughter is the proof that what I conceived in physics years ago, what I consider perhaps my greatest theoretical achievement, is purely conceptual, has no physics "reality" behind it: perhaps it's just the expression of a human conceptualisation of reality, like art, perhaps it is art, just another theory, just another sketch with equations, the cover up for BS! Oh my God!

My wife taps my shoulder and asks if I am allright, and I immediately blame the jet lag for refusing the bit of cheese on a piece of bread that she is handing me.

Like Shakespeare said, the main question remains: BS or not BS?

PS:

I turned around and grabbed that cheese, I will tell you why in a future blog.

Here is a picture of the artist, Maia Ibar: