Science and Art, panel

October 29,1998:

With Tom Breidenbach, Mark Daniel Cohen, Jonathan Goodman, and Sharon Lattig.

Moderated by Victoria N. Alexander. The new sciences have made us realize the degree to which chance is both a principle of continuity as well as discontinuity. Regularity and structure do not necessarily bespeak the tyranny of some a priori principle. Order can evolve over time by chance operations being played out against a ground of accumulated structures. Unfortunately, much of the art today eschews the kind of complexity we find everywhere else around us. Dactyl Foundation has organized this panel in order to provide a forum for discussing the advances in science that insist that we take another long hard look at our aesthetic principles. The panel includes art reviewers who are also artists themselves, as well as poets/artists who have a science background.

Tom Breidenbach is a regular contributor to Artforum and a poet whose most recent work is entitled The Fit Debut.

Mark Cohen is a New York City-based art critic and sculptor. He is a regular contributor to Review magazine and Art New England. He is currently co-authoring, with Friedrich Ulfers, a book on Friedrich Nietzsche and twentieth- century theoretical physics.

Jonathan Goodman writes for Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, and World Art. He formerly worked at Scientific American. His first collection poetry,Metropolitan Rooms, was published in 1994.

Sharon Lattig is pursuing her doctorate in English at Graduate School at City University New York. She is currently conducting research on the relationship of Science to Wallace Stevens’ poetry. Her own poetry has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Murmur, Whatever. Sharon is curator of the Dactyl Foundation Poetry Series.