Event 2: Lecture by Ellen K. Levy

The second event I have chosen to attend is the online event, Lecture by Ellen K. Levy. Ellen K. Levy is an American multimedia artist and scholar known for exploring art, science, and technology interrelationships since the early 1980s (1). She has conducted art sci research on D’Arcy Thompson. D’Arcy Thompson wrote a famous book On Growth and Form, which is “an easy introduction to the study of organic Form”. (2)

D'Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form

So far in this course, it has seemed to me as though the science culture has had the advantage of finding solutions and cures, and that the art culture has been trying to catch up by offering meaning in art instead of mere aesthetic pleasure. This event by Ellen Levy has shown me that the art culture has a different advantage over the science culture: Art has more truth than does Science.

Ellen Levy D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influence in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms

Science has proven over and over again that it makes mistakes. As quoted by D’Arcy Thompson in his book On Growth and Form, “[t]he reasonings about the wonderful and intricate operations of nature are so full of uncertainty that, as the Wise-man truly observes, hardly do we guess aright at the things that are upon earth” (2). Art doesn’t make mistakes because there is no right or wrong in Art, so it can never be false. Another example of the juxtaposition of art and bio sci is shown in Stephen Wolfram’s MathWorld (3).

Stephen Wolfrom Cellular Automata Numbers

Works Cited

(1) Levy, E. (2024, May 17). Ellen Levy. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Levy

(2) Thompson, D. W. (1968). On growth and form. Cambridge University Press.

(3) Wolfram, S. (n.d.). Elementary cellular automaton. from Wolfram MathWorld. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html

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