Science and Art; True Science or Science Fiction? #1: Tinguely, Oliver Byrne, Vredeman de Vries and the Theatrophone

JF Ptak Science Books   LLC  Post #79

There are encyclopedias to be written on the not-obvious in the history of science, dictionaries of "what is it", codexes of "is that real?", handbooks to distinguish things that look like scientific apparatus but are actually works of art, and vice versa. This is my first installment looking at the occasionally squishy visual line that distinguishes images that are "true" scientific creations from those that are not. 

Case #1.  FALSE 
Our first example comes from Jean Tinguely (1925 – 1991)  a Swiss painter and sculptor, best known for his Dadaist kinetic sculpture, officially known as metamechanics. This photo shows Tinguely in the midst of trying to make his self destructing sculpture, Homage to New York (1960), self destruct. His collection of wheels and cogs and connected motors and techno bric-a-brac, which in their way stood for the embarrassment of overproduction and  self-satisfaction with material goods, embarassingly failed to self destruct during its unveiling at MOMA.

Case #2. TRUE.
Oliver Byrne's semi-insane but gorgeous interpretive work of the first six books of Euclid  published by William Pickering in London, is more than problematic--seen but some as "unusual" Byrne's color coded effort has been ripped apart by Augustus de Morgan (in is Budget of Paradoxes) as being terrible.  Byrne's use of color in place of letters in defining and explaining the propositions just doesn't work--it is a great, perhaps the great, example of something that is visually pleasing, beautifully rendered, and sort of functionless.


Case #3. TRUE
This is the distributing board of the central London "theatrophone", a telephone relay device that "broadcast" theatrical and symphonic productions to telephone subscribers.  The idea is base on installations of this device during the International exposition in Paris in 1881.  The article appears in Scientific American, Supplement No. 1002, March 16, 1895.  The second image is the switchboard in the central office of the Theatrophone Company.
   






CAse #4.  TRUE
Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527 – c. 1607),a Dutch Renaissance architect and engineer, produced a superb book on perspective in 1604, from which this image was selected.  Of course we manipulated it a little in p-shop, dumping it into mosaic, cheating a little, but, well, there you have it. Vredeman's production was
luscious and smart, and was highly utilized and prized for hundreds of years as a
useful tool in determining perspective.  It's a mysterious image, bizarre, even--why, for example did the humble artist use a prone/dead/injured human there on t he floor when he could’ve selected something more benign? The odd figure entering the room through the secret door adds to the general threatening atmosphere of this interesting image.  Base line though--it is undeniably an excellent instructional on drawing with perspective.