Panel Statement

Panel: Diagrams, Formulae and Models: Aesthetic and Scientific Strategies of Visualisation

Keywords: Diagrams, Art, Quantum Mechanics

This paper will explore links between art and science by focusing on Richard Feynman’s 1979 diagrammatically enhanced lectures. These lectures explore various theoretical understandings of the quantum world, revealing new possibilities that insert different realities into the physical world. These different realities will be compared with Gilles Deleuze’s writing on diagrams revealed in the work of artist Francis Bacon. Feynman and Bacon were both drawn towards the diagram as a means to visualise and explore the probability of something occurring.

• Paul Thomas is Head of Painting at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, AU. Paul is currently looking at photons and parallel universes in the work Multiverse. Paul is the co-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference 2010, 2012 and 2014. Paul has been working in the area of electronic arts since 1981, and in 2000 instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (2002, 2004). His nano artwork Nanoessence explored the space between life and death at a nano level, and Midas researched what is transferred at a nano level when skin touches gold. Paul’s recent book Nanoart; The immateriality of art has just been published.

Full text (PDF) p. 108-110