UNCERTAINTY
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery | ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN, PASADENA CA | October 11, 2016 – January 22, 2017
To the best of our knowledge – is never a
phrase frozen in time. It’s like asking for ten
percent of eternity, a fraction of infinity
being the same as all of infinity. What is
knowable keeps stretching out, and so does
our best of it, and it always summons the
realization
that there’s
something
else . . . and
then more.
Fractal-like, what we know drills down to reveal more places to
drill down. It’s exhausting. Knowledge is the minuend – to our best
of it, the subtrahend. Uncertainty quivers in the difference.
For millennia humans have sought to acquire and cling to
the comforts of certainty, while at the same time it was our
uncertainties that sparked imaginations, instincts, hunches,
intuitions, creativities, and curiosities that advanced the knowledge
of who we are. Through art and artifacts drawn from the
domains of science and art, the exhibition will puzzle over
and celebrate our oddball relationship with the notion of
uncertainty.
UNCERTAINTY is a science-meets-art exhibit that will include work by nine artists/scientists. The
artworks and scienceworks selected for the exhibition all have an element of mystery or are/were
at the vanguard of new scientific knowledge. They're meant to symbolize how a scientific search for
knowledge is never complete and that the principle of provisional knowledge is essential to not
only a practice of science but also to the poetic of being a human seeker. The spirit of the exhibition
is that such uncertainty is a positive and powerful sensation that activates curiosity, discovery, and
perseverance, even though it is something stereotypically avoided.
The artists/scientists in the exhibition include:
Jonathan Corum (artist, science graphics editor, NYTimes; Kepler Exoplanets kinetic graphic,
site-specific data visualization)
Jim Campbell (artist, electrical engineer ultra low-res visual perception pieces)
Owen Schuh (artist, working with mathematics)
Lia Halloran (artist, cosmic phenomena-based paintings)
Marc Fichou (artist, math/morphology-based assemblages)
Don Glaser (scientist, Nobel Laureate physicist deceased, will show sketches and notebooks
from the Caltech Archives)
Christopher O1Leary (artist, Black (W)hole Animation)
Edward Tufte (scientist, artist, Feynman Diagram sculptures, data visualization)
Tom McCauley (scientist, CERN Switzerland video of particle collision leading to Boson
discovery, CERN collider, data vis)