Visual Arts and Geometry

Infusing Arts into the Curriculum for a Holistic experience

VISUAL ARTS AND GEOMETRY

“Each of us, we are all artists. If you put forth the dedication to learn the skills, it will come. We are born to create. The caveman didn’t even talk, and he was creating graffiti." Francesco Fedele

While at Georgia Tech, I have been focusing on creating ways to integrate Arts into the course curriculum. I strongly believe that students must be exposed and explore the visual and dance arts to experience deep levels of creativity, abstraction and free mind expression in simplifying natural processes to their essential roots and elements of forms and movements. As a faculty, I believe our mission is to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers by synergizing the basic and applied sciences with innovation at the frontiers of both humanistic and scientific disciplines. In this regard, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, icons of the twentieth century are and have been inspirational for generations of artists and scientists. Einstein represents modern science while Picasso represents modern art (Miller, 2001). Albert Einstein’s 1905 seminal paper on Special Relativity marks the beginning of modern sciences shaking the foundations of Newtonian physics. In 1907 Picasso had produced “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” the painting that brought art into the twentieth century and initiated the cubism movement. At the core of these rebellious changes was the debate about representation versus abstraction. In art, realism, perfection, and figuration have dominated since the Renaissance. In science, mathematicians started to explore exotic non-Euclidian geometries. Furthermore, there was the discovery of the conceptual quality of African art that influenced Picasso enormously. All of these ideas helped Picasso to free himself from earlier constraints of thinking and perfection of the Renaissance. He undertook the intellectual quest of reducing forms to geometry, leading to cubism. Picasso’s exploration of space in his groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” employed notions of non-Euclidean geometry, space simultaneity. Picasso discovered geometry as the language of the new art inspired by Poincaré’s (1902) widely read book “La Science et l’hypothèse”. Poincaré’s insights on time and simultaneity were also inspirational to Einstein’s discovery of Special and General Relativity. Both Picasso and Einstein realized that we couldn’t trust our senses when thinking about space and time. As a result, art and science become means for exploring the world surrounding us beyond perceptions or appearances. Picasso believed that the exact perspective and realism of the Renaissance art are deceiving and his cubism proposes a new notion of aesthetics as the reduction of forms to geometry. Similarly, Einstein’s approach to space and time was not primarily mathematical. To Einstein, Maxell equations missed an aesthetic symmetry, which was essential to his discovery of relativity. Inspired by the successful quest undertook by both Picasso and Einstein to free their minds from the absoluteness of our perceptions, my teaching philosophy is to aim at freeing students' minds from mechanistic concepts and recipes when they approach the solution of a problem towards an abstraction to the essential elements and forms of the solution. To do so, I had the initial support of the Georgia Tech Office of Arts. Their Creative Curriculum Initiatives (CCI) was dedicated to promoting connections between the arts and Georgia Tech’s core academic disciplines. Nurturing students' artistic sensibilities and exposing students to artistic process is essential to developing creativity and innovation. Thanks to a CCI grant, in Fall 2018 I have designed and taught for the firsthe graduate course “Visual Arts and Geometry” with the support of Atlanta-based artist Emily Vickers. We have introduced students to the geometry of space and manifolds and how these concepts influenced modern arts and sciences, i.e., Cubism and Einstein’s relativity. The 2018 course included, as the final class activity, exhibiting the student artwork at the Kai Lin Art Gallery of Atlanta (see book “Like Picasso and Einstein: lines, forms and dimensions” by Fedele & Vickers, 2018). In Fall 2019 I taught the course for the second time. The course was integrated with weekly lab sessions taught by Atlanta-based professional artist Rachel Grant. The realization of geometry is visualization, so she taught students drawing concepts, practice sketching, and both figure and geometric drawing. Students have learned how to draw and sketch by hand in order to stimulate and enhance their visual memory, imagination and practice abstraction of geometric concepts. Fluidity in drawing implies fluidity in thinking enhancing an abstraction of the essential elements and forms of the solution of an engineering problem. The student artwork was exhibited in the Mason Building on Dec 11 2019.

YOUTUBE video seminar: "Art & Geometry, unlocking Students' Creativity", Fedele-Grant, Sept 10 2021

LONG-TERM GOALS AND VISION Inspired by the successful quest undertook by both Picasso and Einstein to free their minds from the absoluteness of our perceptions, I propose a roadmap to creative intersections of the Arts and Civil Engineering Sciences promoting connections between the arts and core academic disciplines. In the short term, I propose to initiate a core of graduate courses at the intersection of art and engineering for the creation of a new graduate study minors for the college of engineering. Each course will be co-taught by a professor and a professional artist. As I want to connect with the city’s art community so that I can find more ways to link local artists with the school, I vision initiating an artist-in-residence program at Georgia Tech. The artists will be part of the campus community and will be involved in both teaching and research to cultivate interaction with both faculty and graduate students. The success of my initiative by way of a creation of a core of creative graduate courses will lay the foundation for the nucleation of a long lasting new graduate program on arts and Civil Engineering sciences which will be both broad in its scope of applications across many fields of engineering and at the same time intersecting creatively with the arts. I believe that the future of education may well be in the synergy of arts and sciences. There is not much difference; artists are scientists, they are thinkers.

- Francesco Fedele, Atlanta December 11 2019

STILL LIFE BY PROF. BARRY GOODNO