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Interviews: Ask Jonty Hurwitz About Art and Engineering 31

Posted by samzenpus from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.
samzenpus (5) writes "Jonty Hurwitz is an artist with a degree in engineering who says each one of his pieces is "a study on the physics of how we perceive space and is the stroke of over 1 billion calculations and algorithms." Recently, his nano sculpture project drew a lot of attention. With help from the Weizmann Institute of Science and using a 3D printing technique by the Institute of Microstructure Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Hurwitz created a number of sculptures that were so small they could fit in the eye of a needle, or on a human hair. Jonty has agreed to answer any questions you have big or very small. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post."
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Interviews: Ask Jonty Hurwitz About Art and Engineering More

Interviews: Ask Jonty Hurwitz About Art and Engineering

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  • Would you consider these microsculptures works of art, or a craft? We usually consider replication or fabrication of predefined forms (with challenging technique) a craft. If you believe it's art, what distinguishes it as such? Or, does the distinction not matter to you?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by steveha ( 103154 )

      Would you consider these microsculptures works of art, or a craft?

      Question for you: Would you consider photographs to be works of art, or a craft?

      I think there is no serious disagreement that photographs can count as art, and these microsculptures were carefully planned and posed as art. If you are going to suggest that they may not clear the bar as art, then it seems to me that you would have to rule out photography as well.

      We usually consider replication or fabrication of predefined forms (with challengi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by digsbo ( 1292334 )
        I guess I'm looking for him to respond in much the way you did. Everybody's got a different definition, and I'd like to hear his. Case in point, my wife wasn't allowed to enter her glasswork in an art exhibit, because stained glass was defined as a craft by that body. Funny, huh? But I see tiny machine generated sculpture, and I'm thinking more along the lines of exquisitely carved furniture, than, say, the Mona Lisa. But that's just me.
        • I feel your wife's pain. I have been excluded on several occasions from art competitions and events on the basis of me not having an art degree (an Engineering degree, it appears is not considered artistic enough). Its a human quality to create definitions and boundaries to allow our brains to categorize concepts. One of the core questions I'm raising with this work is "What is art?" Well spotted :-)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by digsbo ( 1292334 )

            Glad to be of service. As a student of classical and jazz music styles, I struggled (as did my current piano teacher) with exploits into jazz being labeled "not legit" by the classical crowd, so I, too, have a taste of the seemingly capricious rejection you speak of. This rejection was often strange, considering I frequently surpassed the same critics when playing in the classical.

            I've come to appreciate the finer points of the extraordinary difficulty of raising the performance of classical pieces to an ar

    • Hey. Great question for me the relationship between art and craft can be defined like this: All craft is art, but not all art is craft. I remember being taught this concept by my English teacher in high school. It goes like this: "all dogs are quadrupeds but it does not follow that all quadrupeds are dogs." The concept must have a name in the world of logic. Can anyone help with this? Here's another way of looking at the same question: The art is a subjective opinion in the eye of the beholder. The craft

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by digsbo ( 1292334 )

        Funny, as a musician I'd say all art is craft, but not all craft is art. I.e., I can lay down a genuinely good cover of a swing tune that would evoke a sense of Sinatra or Dean Martin, rehearsed and refined, but in no way profound or transcendent or relevatory. Craft - in a sense, little different from a well-build handmade cabinet.

        John Coltrane can write and perform "A Love Supreme", which people might say is chaotic, self-indulgent, lacking in refinement, poorly structured, and be able to bring to bear s

  • The Tate Modern had a piece of art which was very big, in the Turbine Room, but other than its size it was utterly unremarkable. Are you in danger of reproducing this problem; your art is small, but...so what? It's already well known that machines can be used to make small things, such as the IBM logo being produced using individual atoms back in 1989. Does your art bring anything to the table?

    • Does size matter in art? To take this question down to its most basic form: If you take away the properties of size and color in the context of sculpture ... you're left with nothing ;-) The size of an object obviously has a fundamental influence on how it interacts with the physical world around it, and it is that interaction that defines the nature of its existence. An elephant and flea have a very different relationship with the Universe. In the context of my series of nano sculptures, it is *partly* t

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Threni ( 635302 )

        > As an analogy, you may ask "is harmony important in music?"

        Odd thing to throw in there. No, it's not, whether you're talking about music consisting of a single line, or some variety of dissonant music which has no tonal centre and where it makes very little sense to talk about harmony other than in the very basic "more than one tone at once" sense which is utterly meaningless if you ask me.

        Elephant/flea: well, you're making art for humans. Again, with the musical analogy there's stuff like John Cage'

  • So how much did YOU actually do? It sounds like you're taking all the credit for what others did. Way to go.

    • Have you ever taken a moment to look at the credits on a film? So did Stanley Kubrick make 2001:A space Odyssey? Actually you are touching on a very important point though, the film industry shows a huge amount of respect to all the amazing talents involved in the creation process. The art world is not nearly as respectful and you generally find every major artist taking 100% of the credit for the creation of their works which inevitably involve teams. I specifically decided to break the mold in my nano

  • You clearly have interests in engineering. With a Degree in engineering, and Art, you can probably get a good paying career in engineering, using Art to improve your engineering designs. However you choose the opposite route using engineering to improve your are in a career where there is a lot of risk of not getting your next paycheck.

  • Jonty, I'm mixing hacking and art and becoming increasingly aware of the self-segragation of creative work into either "art" or "hacking". Here in Vancouver, for example, we have "art" events (art crawls, galleries, etc.) and "maker" culture (maker faires, hackspaces, etc.) with almost zero crossover. The presumption is that art will be expressive, shown in public, and saleable, and hacking will be insular, self-funded, and have limited appeal outside other hackers.

    I've exhibited technological work on a sma

    • I've exhibited technological work on a small scale to an art crowd and gotten a positive response, but I worry that going further on that side of things will be an uphill battle. The knee-jerk response may be "that doesn't belong here".

      Sounds like you're pigeonholing yourself here - just keep going until you fail, and then pick yourself up and start again. I good friend of mine makes work that might be thought of as 'technological' [eyecontactsite.com]. Worrying about whether or not other people will like his work hasn't stopped him, and it shouldn't stop you.

    • hey pHalec. Don't give up pushing the boundaries and challenging others to do so. I face so much artistic and scientific pigeonholing - I'll have you know though that pigeons are remarkably intelligent creatures. Fly with it my feathered friend! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org] Being an artist is about challenging the accepted societal mean. Its about creating outlying data points that eventually shift the average opinion.

  • Can software be art?

    • Direct link to the credits for all aspects of this work are here: http://www.jontyhurwitz.com/na... [jontyhurwitz.com] In several online interviews I have explained that the background images were composited with the sculpture images to help viewers with a sense of scale. Please could Gavin Scott do a little more research and then clarify exactly what his "accusation" is.

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