Entering the Uranium Age of the Digital Arts?

By Roger F Malina, July 24, 2024

Illustration: Cosmos Kinetic Mural, Oxford, UK in Patrick McCray:

Preface To Catalogue Raisonne of the work of Frank J. Malina by Camille Fremontier-Murphy

To be published October 2024.

This blog is the draft of an article that will be published in a forthcoming book by Camille Fremontier-Murphy: a Catalogue Raisonne of the work of Frank F. Malina. Frank Malina was the father of the co-founder of the UTDallas ArtSciLab: Roger F Malina

This pre-publication version has been sent to all whose name, or work, is referred to in the article. There will be final corrections of ideas and facts, We welcome your thoughts and additions. Send an email to rxm116130@utdallas.edu

Introduction

This book by Camille Frémontier-Murphy has the difficult task of reinventing this kind of publication for the artist Frank J. Malina. He had multiple overlapping careers. Most Catalogues Raisonnés focus on the artistic production of one notable artist. In this case, Camille documents the work of my father in the sciences, engineering, and the arts but also international diplomacy and publishing and the work of his colleagues.

As the author emphasizes, these hybrid careers are deeply connected. We look forward to seeing how a “retrospective” of his work can also reinvent the concept of a “retrospective” when the materialization of creativity takes such different forms, with the display of artworks, science works, and engineering works.

Complicating Camille Frémontier-Murphy’s task is that my father was deeply inter, multi or trans–media. He used string, Christmas tree lights, tapestries, motors, electronics, and more to express his artistic ideas. He even used trimmings from his beard. However, he never used the digital computer, though his colleagues in music, like Iannis Xenakis, were doing.

 This was by choice, he was rarely ‘gadget driven’ and would have been suspicious of the current enthusiasm for AI, VR, AR, and the metaverse; after all holographic art came and went. As Harold Cohen mentioned to me, neither “Steam Engine Art” nor “Ping Pong Art” are of lasting interest.

1. From the Individual Creative to Collective Consciousness

We mostly live in cultures where we often privilege the memory of individual ‘geniuses’ over groups that ‘behave with genius’. As the author emphasizes, Frank J. Malina only succeeded not only because of his skills and passion for collaboration across professions, but also across the planet. Frank J. Malina was a scientist and an artist involved in creative projects with social and cultural implications, which he carried through different levels of their realization with a variety of interlocutors.

Camille Frémontier-Murphy describes how the work of several young professionals, some graduate students at Caltech, others working people in local industries, led to pioneering work in rocket science under the guidance and protection of Theodore von Kármán. This group of intellectual risk-takers was described by their peers as a ‘Suicide Squad’ at the time, the 1930s. It led to fundamental patents in rocket technology, the founding with Martin Summerfield and their lawyer Andrew Haley of Aerojet General; the company succeeded and was  bought by General Tire, now named Aerojet Rocketdyne. Together with Theodore von Kármán and Hsue-shen Tsien, and others they led to the founding of the Jet Propulsion Lab more than a decade before NASA was imagined.

Later, a group of artists worked with my father to create a studio in Boulogne-Billancourt, France; there the technologies for kinetic art would be developed. Thanks to Robert and Camille Frémontier, we can now also remember, and see, the work of Nino Calos, Valerios Caloutsis and the others who created kinetic art together in the 50s and 60s.

This studio would now be called a hacking and co-working space; it included engineers Dominique Bouffier and Didier Bouchet, but also painters Anniki Luukela, Claudia Nichols and David Smith who are remembered in this catalog. We have largely forgotten the friends and colleagues of Leonardo Da Vinci. This book raises the standards for collective memory of important groups who changed the history of ideas and human cultures to make our futures more desirable and beautiful.

2. Leonardo Journal: If you have to plug it in, it can’t be art

Ironically, as my father once mused aloud, his triggering of the founding of the Leonardo Journal in 1968, may prove to be one of his most interesting and impactful legacies. The journal is now hosted by The International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technologies at Arizona State University. It is run by a ‘group’ headed by CEO Diana Ayton-Shenker with J.D. Talasek as Editor in Chief.

The obvious name “Leonardo” was suggested by Frank’s colleague Joseph Needham, with whom he collaborated when they were involved in setting up UNESCO. But the group that was on the founding board of Leonardo reflects the collaborative transdisciplinary and trans-national nature of my father’s work and the dream of UNESCO. There were arts, science and engineering professionals across the world from France, to Chile, to Japan to Poland. Soon, the Chinese government appointed an official representative to the Leonardo Editorial Board.

F.J.Malina’s colleagues also included György Kepes; he had set up in 1967 the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Others included Experiments in Art and Technology in N.Y., and Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in Paris. In Japan, Itsuo Sakane, originally a journalist, made readers aware of the similar art, science and technology movements there. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, pioneered a number of art projects in orbit.

There were several reasons why my father felt it necessary to start a new academic journal.

First, existing journals in general had no interest in kinetic art; “if you have to plug it in, it can’t be art”, was usually the response. Fortunately founding editorial board member, the late Frank Popper was a frequent visitor to Malina’s studio; Popper thought otherwise and became a historian and advocated of this new art movement, now called Kinetic Art.

Second, unlike science journals, art journals were largely “regional”: British Art, NY Art, Russian Art. My father felt a need, as in science, to contextualize transnationally; this did not mean that the same art was beautiful in Beijing as in Mexico City (as, for instance, by founding editorial board member Mathias Goeritz).

The group also reacted strongly to the prevailing ethos that artists can’t write; they often told: leave it to the art critics and historians to do the writing. Great scientists are often not great writers, but to spread their ideas, discoveries and inventions, they write. Leonardo advocated the same for artists.

Finally, Leonardo was originally published in English and French with the intent of becoming trans-lingual. It is often a good idea to express oneself in one’s ‘mother tongue’ and English is a minority mother tongue worldwide. Today, Leonardo has published in several languages including Russian, Spanish, French and soon Mandarin with Tsinghua University.

The Leonardo Creative Disturbance Podcast series led by Dr Yvan Tina has also published in regional, aka indigenous and autochthone, languages. This reinforced our understanding that the division of knowledge in a ‘tree structure’ is a largely Western construction and not a logical or scientifically provable structure. The aphorism “lets cut down the tree of knowledge and create a rhizome of knowledge” captures this paradox. Leonardo publishes about artworks made by scientists, and inventions made by artists and so on. It has published the work of art created by a professional dentist. The job title doesn’t define the creativity.

I note that the cartoonist Ronald Searle was also on the founding editorial board. Leonardo not only focused on institutional art but insisted that art could be local and available only in one’s ‘salon’ at home. Yes, art and new technologies can lead to very desirable throw rugs; in my son Xavier Malina’s case 3D printing can lead to the re-invention of the ‘bust’ as contemporary sculpture.

3. Beauty and Neuro-Aesthetics

A crucial influence on my father was the work of cognitive scientists and art theorists who sought to understand why art so is so crucial to human societies. This ranged from founding board member Rudolf Arnheim, the Gestalt movement, Ernst Gombrich with art as illusion, and Reg Gadney.

In the 1990s this led Semir Zeki, an expert on the visual cortex, to coin the word ‘neuro-aesthetics’. As explained by Camille Frémontier, Frank J. Malina visited in Brussels the psychologist Albert Michotte in 1956. Michotte was conducting experiments on human perception using rotating disks and other devices. This helped my father design kinetic art to emphasize changes which catch human attention; a definition of ‘beauty’ can be what captures human attention and is remembered. The word beauty has been largely absent from discussion of aesthetics for decades but is being rethought internationally.

What was considered ‘beautiful’ before the COVID-19 pandemic may not be considered beautiful in the decades to come.

My father argued that artists created experiences for humans that changed their perceptions, but more deeply their cognition; Semir Zeki called artists “experimental neuro-scientists”; they carried out experiments, sometimes using scientific understandings, of human perception and cognition to manipulate the sense and feelings of existence.

My father also insisted that artists needed to capture the ‘landscapes’ that were only perceivable through scientific instruments (telescopes, microscopes etc.). One time when he came back from painting lessons with Vic Gray, I remember him joking that he was tired of ‘painting dead fish’. This synchronized perfectly with Kepes’s notion of the ‘new’ landscape in art and science. My father’s kinetic work “Brain Waves”, which visualizes the graph of activity in the human brain, is an example of a new landscape that bridges art and science. It also captures the attention of the human viewer, who inevitable wonders what signals are going on in their own brain. He became a pioneer in “space art’ or art that could only made from perceptions above the earth’s atmosphere (looking up or looking down).

4. Enabling desirable transitions after the wars

As a graduate student at Caltech, my father found the ideas of communism promising. At the time, the Communist Party was legal in California. His thesis advisor Theodore von Kármán, and his sister Pipö, organized numerous parties with faculty, neighbors, friends and students. And some of them were communist parties.

After all, capitalism had failed in the Great Depression, so the argument went, so let’s try communism. After WWII, my father realized that communism was also failing, notably in the Soviet Union. Internationalism, such as the UN, UNESCO, WHO, was the next political frontier, within the concept of science being an international open culture.

We can only wonder what my father’s thoughts would be after the failure of the U.N. and W.H.O to contain a predictable pandemic; contingency plans had been developed and stored but took a long time to be used. The failure of international leadership in containing climate change is similarly striking, given the prior success of containing the ozone hole. The impact of carbonic acid on the temperature of the air and ground was demonstrated in 1896. It took the climate art and eco-art movements to each everyday understanding.

In the 1980s, my father attended local meetings of dissenters in Boulogne-Billancourt;  they were realizing that the United Nations was failing. They discussed the idea of a “one world” government. With the internet, which developed after my father’s death in 1981, a one-world government might be achievable. However, my father and others were very concerned about how cybernetics, now called A.I., could become a tool of government control despite the enthusiasm of their colleagues at the Macy Conferences. They anticipated our current anxiety on data privacy and A.I that should follow the Platinum Rule, not the Golden Rule.

So, what does this have to do with this book and catalog? Frank Malina’s artmaking was not only contextualized by the bridging of the arts, sciences and technologies, but deeply socially embedded in the political crises of the time. Today he would be trying to figure out what the necessary, or desirable, “kinetic art” would be today.

Perhaps the work of the late Helen and Newton Harrison would connect to him. Newton Harrison built a ‘sensorium’ where what can be detected by scientific instruments related to climate change can create a mind-altering experience. Kepes would agree that this is a needed new landscape for our time.

For the last 25 years, Leonardo Journal championed the work of ‘bio-artists’ who use biological materials and technology as the raw materials for art making. Eduardo Kac, Oron Catts and the Australians and other pioneers of bio-art.

At the end of WWII, Vannevar Bush wrote a famous report for President Roosevelt “science the endless frontier”. He argued that since science had helped win the war, let’s use it to win the peace. But the scientists and engineers who helped win WWII with rockets, radar, bombers, and atomic bombs are the wrong orientation for scientists to win our health crises; social innovation is as important as scientific or technological innovation. This requires different approaches, combining the biological, brain and health sciences with the social and political sciences to re-craft human nature and its survival.

Perhaps a better metaphor would be the Second 100 Years War (HYWII), which ended in a seven-year truce and was marked by pandemics and conflicts between ‘states’. It ended in 1453, coincidentally with the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

So, this book about the work of Frank J. Malina is but a steppingstone for the new generations of artists to appropriate science and technology, in their contemporary political context. But the new generations of scientists and engineers seek to use art making to construct desirable futures.

Instead of painting dead fish, perhaps my father would have been a student or teacher in the Paris SACRe (Sciences Arts Création Recherche) Ph D program led by Emmanuel Mahe; where ‘adaptive clothing’ is being developed using 3D printing, or where the brain waves of a sleeping person on the floor are being captured to activate water waves in an aquarium, or where new design methods are being developed to recycle plastics in Madagascar and do human signatures at a distance.

5. The End of the Stone Age of Art and Technology, Enter the Uranium Age

Were my father alive today, he would have no interest in connecting art, science and technology. He was a rocket scientist, not a repeater or capitalist. Bridging arts, science and technology has been done; it as usual as using different metals for tools or plastics for 3-D printing. Its time to move on from the stone age to the uranium age.

In 2001 I erroneously argued in the Leonardo Journal that we were leaving the stone age of the digital arts

In our post pandemic world, we now have over 8 billion humans on the planet, many of them connected by the internet. Roy Ascot, author in the first issue of Leonardo, called this a ‘global village’ enabled by “moist media” combining organic beings and AI beings; this narrative feeds into the current discussion of collective consciousness in neuropsychology.

Human longevity, in many places, is increasing with soon over a million people online over the age of 100. In the Middle Ages a “Republic of Letters’ emerged among people across Europe and elsewhere; it led to an increase in philosophical knowledge and the emergence of science as we know it.

Joel Slayton, founder of the Leonardo Book Series, and artist and troublemaker Nina Czegledy have formed a group called the Post Pandemic Provocateurs. You can find one of their emerging “Republic of Zoom” online with south African artist Marcus Neustetter and his students and a colleague in Brazil.

The emerging Center for the Study of Emergence at UTDallas has coined the term “senexism” for the phenomenon of people who have known each over for more than 30 years continuing to collaborate with total freedom of thought as they are no longer looking for paid work. Robert Stern, Fred Turner and I have a total age of 259 years. There are now growing numbers of groups who have collaborated with each other for 30 years or more; this emergence of “senexism’ is unprecedented in human history

The Golden rule was surpassed by the Platinum rule: The platinum rule is a moral principle that says you should treat others the way they want to be treated. Similarly, the stone age is being converted to the uranium age of digital art. We no longer needing to combine art, science and technology; it is normal.

Art is no longer an individual experience but a collective one; my father refused to work on the atom bomb, but he would work on the Uranium Age that combines all ways of knowing, all disciplines, all cultures in a global village with arguments but no wars.

5. We all must become Migrants and Hybrids

Frank J. Malina’s family originated in Bohemia. They migrated to Texas and then back to the Czech Republic. In 1917 they returned to Texas due to the great depression. My father left Texas for California, then to Paris in a forced migration. Today migration is often viewed negatively, but in fact, it is often a desirable intermingling of peoples and ideas.

My father was a hybrid. He began as a rocket scientist, became a UN diplomat, then an artist then a publisher and author. As Sarabeth Berk argues in her book “Not in My Title”: we need experts who know more and more about less and less, and politicians who know less and less about more and more. But we need billions of migrant hybrids like Frank J. Malina.

Conclusion

This preface, then, provides one way of extending this book with recent developments in art and science, as well as the experiences you will have when you engage with the art of Frank.J. Malina in forthcoming exhibitions and retrospectives across the planet from China to Tasmania. I need to thank Robert and Camille Murphy for their persistence and resilience, in surviving the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Palestine, and the invasion by AI into the art, science, and technology and all worlds. A.I. has its own “tree of knowledge’ but humans haven’t discovered or explored the AI world colonially, yet.

Footnotes:

The Malina family has given full access to all the archives and to the important archival work done by my mother Marjorie and we have reviewed and agreed with the content. Many works have been traced, restored where necessary, and photographed with our permission.