Thibaut de Ruyter
The Poetic Beauty of Mathematics (and Other Sciences)

The Dilemma
In schools it is usual to classify pupils according to their skills or interests. This helps teachers advise kids about their future; it gives young people a dream in a quite hopeless world; and it brings a modern attitude to pedagogy by emphasizing positive qualities rather than deficiencies and failures. A pupil who can run the hundred meters in ten seconds or so will become the gym teacher’s protégé and might one day compete in the Olympics in some faraway country. The one who sits in the back of the classroom, daydreaming while looking through the window and writing poetry, will be the favorite of the literature professor and, if he’s lucky, become a famous writer. Those who do well in history or geography have a good chance of becoming the next generation of journalists, professors, or big-city urban planners. And the one who wears big glasses and runs the hundred meters in twenty seconds may be cherished by one of the science teachers. But real life is probably not so schematic and herein lies the dilemma.

The Sciences
As an artist, Vadim Fishkin deals more with science than with colors on canvases, words in neon, or abstract shapes hanging on the wall – with any of the sciences and its specific rules or phenomena, whether gravity (Kaplegraf_Zero_G, 2003), meteorology (Changing the Climate, 2004), astronomy (Am I a Star?, 2004), or botany – for instance, photosynthesis (Self-Portrait, 1997). This can be something highly technical that demands specific equipment, or something that involves the physical aspects of everyday life. Every phenomenon, even the simple idea of the passing of time and its discreet application in Einstein’s theory of relativity (A Speedy Day, 2003) can potentially be a work of art for Vadim Fishkin. But the artist’s science is quite unrealistic, strange, and witty. It is not concerned with the seriousness of the scientific method or approach, but rather with the craziness that lies within a dangerous experiment.

Belief
An old pseudo-scientific belief — one almost as ridiculous as phrenology — says that if you are good in geometry, you will not be good in mathematics. And vice versa. Geometry is, supposedly, highly “realistic.” You can look at a circle, a triangle, a hexahedron, or a dodecahedron: even if you don’t really know what they are called, they all are geometrical objects based on lines your eyes can see. You can also superimpose these forms and, if this yields a new form, you can very quickly visualize what its perimeter, surface, and volume will be. Without a doubt, a square is a figure in a single plane with four equal straight sides and four right angles, while a sphere is simply a round solid figure, or its surface, with every point on the surface equidistant from the center. Numbers, and therefore mathematics, are considered to be much more “abstract.” Your eyes cannot directly recognize what they are all about, where they come from, and where they go. Here we are concerned not with a collection of objects but with a complex language of signs and symbols, lines and columns, numbers and letters. One might say that, instead of being drawn, mathematics is written. And (as Franz-Joseph Gall, the inventor of cranioscopy, the first step toward phrenology, explained it), just as we may have a longer nose or smaller feet than our neighbor, our brains might have different parts that work differently, depending on whether we are dealing with an “abstract” or a “figurative” question, a “logical” or “analogical” demonstration, or a “physical” or a “biological” problem. It might be that some people can understand language, while others can recognize figures in space. And science might be much more divided than it seems.
Geometry and Mathematics
Vadim Fishkin wears big black glasses and I don’t know how fast he would run the hundred meters. I also don’t know if, as a kid, he was better in mathematics or geometry. What is true, however, is that he studied architecture and this is somehow the missing link between geometry (space, maps, elevations, sections, etc.) and mathematics (static, square meters, engineering, etc.). He no longer works as an architect but is now known instead as an artist. An artist in between science and technology, absurdity and seriousness, geometry and mathematics. And if we look at his artworks, it is clear that they deal with all the different fields of science – not just geometry and mathematics, but also astronomy, physics, geography, and chemistry. But what his works all have in common is that they cause our minds to dream or drift into abstract theories and crazy thoughts. Vadim Fishkin uses science as a reservoir of bizarre ideas and poetic discoveries.

Art
What part of our brain is involved in understanding, liking, or disliking a work of art? Probably the same part we use when we fall in love with somebody or become emotional in front of an image we have never seen before. But isn’t this just a question of hormones?
Field
Ludwig Wittgenstein had a peculiar relationship to mathematics. He used mathematical signs and their logical links to build up his philosophy. To put together his thoughts. But today, if I try to read Wittgenstein (especially the late works like Über Gewißheit), it is difficult for me not to see the poetry that resides in the text. First of all, because I am not clever enough to understand what it is really about (didn’t Wittgenstein write, as a foreword to his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it — or at least similar thoughts”?). Second, because I have better things to do than trying to understand what it means. Third, because at school I was always much more interested in poetry than in science or philosophy. 

Sun
Vadim Fishkin, in his science and sciences, displays an enormous interest in the bizarre and the funny, all the things that can happen once you start to understand a physical process and all the crazy ideas scientists have once they decide to test certain phenomena. Like that notion of following the sun twenty-four hours a day, using video surveillance and satellite transmission to make sure the sun stays in the center of the image – even if the earth is revolving around it. Several cameras are installed around the globe and relay their pictures one after another. What remains at the end is a collection of always-similar images. As if nothing was turning anymore, neither earth nor sun. The piece Sun_Stop (2003) is one of Vadim Fishkin’s works most concerned with astronomy. Not only because it deals with the sun as a subject (he also uses stars in his artworks, and in Am I a Star? [2004] he officially buys and names one), but because it is about observing, looking at, and receiving an image from stellar objects, which is the foundation of the astronomical sciences. Thus, thanks to several cameras, the sun will always, from one point on the rotating earth, be seen and observed. (This suddenly reminds me of how certain rich people used to take the supersonic jet Concorde from one location to another on 31 December so as to have several midnight moments when they could drink champagne and exchange New Year’s greetings.) But Sun_Stop is also concerned with another science: geography. Each image is inscribed with the name of the cities in which the sun is being seen: Oslo, Berlin, Sofia, Cairo, and Addis Ababa are suddenly connected for a very simple reason, without there being any more frontiers. And, if the sun does not set, it is as though the day never existed. But, also, at the end one can ask: Why was such an experiment necessary? Or does the vain triumph of the experiment in itself make it a work of art?

Ridiculous
Another dangerous belief is graphology, which claims that your handwriting is a deep manifestation of what (or who) you are. But when you examine the letters themselves and how they are shaped, you forget to look at the content and meaning of the words.

Toys ’R’ Us
Vadim Fishkin sees science as a kind of gigantic play, a toy or a children’s game. As many young boys might do, he takes drinking straws and bubble gum, pins and candy, and assembles these everyday elements into molecules and chemical structures. At some point in our childhood, we all have been inventors who discover an incredible cure or develop an amazing machine. And the artist photographs these “constructions” to produce lenticular stereoscopic images (Molecular, 2001–2003). This work is simple and playful, direct and funny. It is not about showing the thing in any pedagogical way; it is not about explaining some phenomenon or examining the deep structure of our world; it is merely about putting objects together so they look like something and preserving an image of the construction. We then recognize those pedagogical tools we used at school and the three-dimensional images we sometimes got as a present with our cornflakes. In the end, the image looks incredibly like something we have all seen and the 3-D effect emphasizes the make-believe aspect of the scientific approach. Not too many people will notice what the molecules are really made of and how they defy possibility. This might be the advantage the artist has over the scientist: the first will dare to do things the second will never dare even to think. Because the scientist must be a serious figure (he may, in fact, be quite crazy, but people will excuse him because he is a genius, a media figure nobody really knows, like Albert Einstein, whose fame is better known than his theories). And not all that many scientists (or artists) are geniuses. But many artists, and especially Vadim Fishkin, have preserved their childhood fantasies and illusions. By building molecules with gumballs, he evokes all the innocence and naivety of youth – and who, as a boy, did not dream of becoming an astronaut or cosmonaut? Even this particular, hard-to-realize dream has been the subject (almost) of an experiment by Vadim Fishkin, moving for a few minutes in parabolic flight (Kaplegraf_Zero_G, 2003).

Poetry
Of course, mathematics and geometry are linked. There is a formula one can write, in letters and symbols, that describes a sphere – something like: (x-x0)2 + (y-y0)2 + (z-z0)2 = r2. Where x0, y0 and z0 are the center of that sphere. I will spare you the formulas that calculate its surface and volume. But we can also try to see and read these lines as if they where nothing but a poetic text. Poetry is no longer about composing rhyming lines that describe a sunset or a desperate love (at least, not since the Dadaist and surrealist revolution in the early years of the twentieth century). It is also about destroying language and constructing new words and melodies. Nowadays, poetry is a state of mind – not a specific activity or way of writing, but simply an approach to things, facts, and everyday life.

Phenomena
Many artists today deal with science. If they do not work directly with computers and technology, they base their work on scientific research or phenomena (from Panamarenko to Carsten Nicolai, via the late Karl Hans Janke). What they all have in common with Vadim Fishkin is that they approach science not as geeks do, but as a world of flying objects, strange beliefs, beautiful experiments in glass jars, and hard-to-understand signs.

The Cave
My favorite work by Vadim Fishkin is Hot Air Balloon in the Cave, which was realized 14 June 2000. Inside Postojna Cave, one of the biggest caves in the world, the artist flew suspended from a yellow and red hot-air balloon. This had less to do with mathematics than physics (as everybody knows, hot air rises) and engineering (the balloon had to be built correctly so it would not be torn apart). But because the cave is about forty meters high (do you have any idea what it means to be in a space that is forty meters high?), because the balloon had a diameter of about sixteen meters, and because it could not really move around inside the cave, the whole piece was an absurdity (the kind the surrealists quite enjoyed). But it was also something else, too. Because the balloon could not go anywhere (the balloon will never escape; it is trapped in its cave), the scientific demonstration would be forever hopeless. Yes, one can indeed fly using hot air. And, yes, one can indeed demonstrate this in the most scientific way, setting numbers one after another to prove some kind of truth. But only an artist can use absurdity to reveal the beauty of a well-known scientific phenomenon. In 1783, when the brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier made their first public presentations of flying balloons, a hundred thousand people came to Lyon to see the miracle. We have lost such innocence, and Vadim Fishkin gives us the opportunity to wonder at things we now take for granted.

Kids
Somebody who shows a deep interest in mathematics might, in fact, be into poetry. The poetic science of Vadim Fishkin is full of craziness and strange beliefs, and it is much more fun than any of the pseudo-science used by graphologists, phrenologists, and other charlatans, because it is real science.

The Cave (Again)
Looking at the images of the enclosed hot air balloon, I realize that the artist made several collages with other flying objects, images that look incredibly real or, at least, realistic. The cave has the same light as in the version with the red and yellow hot-air balloon but the other machines are flying in the middle of the space: an airplane, a helicopter, even a rocket taking off. The main difference is that Vadim Fishkin is not being suspended beneath any of these other objects as is the case with the balloon. And now I wonder if anything ever happened? Or if the fact that this actually took place has any real importance. Does art, like science, need proof of its validity?

Logic
“In logic, process and result are equivalent. (Therefore no surprises.)” Thus writes Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.