Artists in the laboratory and the studio
By Tim Hazell (Mar 10, 2006)

"Our perception of a two-dimensional image is conditioned by the visual experience of the natural environment we bring to it." 
-Graham Collier

"The heart of the problem is not so much how we see objects in depth as how we see the constant layout of the world around us. Space as such, empty space, is not visible but surfaces are." 
-James J. Gibson, Constancy
and Invariance in Perception

In microscopy, images of benign or malevolent substances can be generated and interpreted by acoustic waves and scanning probes and recorded through time-honored methods of hand drawing or modern innovations of photographic film and video.

These traces of encounters with microcosms are frequently beautiful to look at. We enter shimmering worlds of the microscopist's art in scientific displays, identifying with an object's internal nature and external characteristics simultaneously. A challenging photo montage of crystalline or radial growth in mineral and organic cellular structures engages us by a continuum of experience with form and time.

In responding to the challenges of rendering a universe in miniature, microscopy gives researchers the tools to reveal shape and contour, and microspectroscopy unlocks the key to understanding composition. The range of possibilities for image enhancement available to technicians and craftspeople in studio or laboratory ateliers increases with advancements and innovations in technologies. Digital development of spatial dynamics and our deliberate exploitation of perception still involve classic elements of graphic design produced on a flat ground. Our senses are further engaged because of implications with physical surfaces, things in the world of air and space. Principles of physics applicable to form and function within the pictorial realm were understood by luminaries of the Renaissance, Social Realists such as Goya, and painters of the Impressionist school, who chose to capture light's impossible, fleeting passage on canvas. Paul Cezanne, Georges Brague and Pablo Picasso forever changed our ways of interpreting our concepts of the "congruent" and "meaningful."

In his role as artist/scientist composing flurries of line and marks on paper, Paul Klee used agencies of design and pattern delineated with pencil, ink and paint. He allowed that which remained unseen-the negative space intrinsic to a bidimensional surface-to pool as it was contained and released in the act of drawing. Architectures of structure and void were freed of conventions, succumbing to dynamics of extemporaneous movement and rhythm.

In the realm of science as art, much has been done recently to accelerate the process of refinements in the area of computer specialization. Superconductors, materials that have a resistance of zero below a certain temperature, allow unimpeded currents to flow without decay. Their proposal in the 1950s, followed by experiments over the next seven years, led to new theories about the behavior of lighter and heavier isotopes of elements and superconducting mechanisms. Principles of electron attraction and repulsion, mobility through latticeworks of atoms, and the trajectories of infinite wavelengths through high-resistance metals are results of deliberate preoccupations with motion occurring beneath seemingly constant and fixed dispositions of surfaces.
 
In today's use of technology as a writing tool, wordsmiths are free to shift images arbitrarily until they become mediating devices. Word processing tools and graphic design programs control angles of displacement in language, using distortion, saturation and tonal shifts. Poems of this genre are subject to expansion and contraction. The wheel is reinvented each time artists produce an interactive piece. Within the text of "Random Burning," Kurt Cnejevici muses and makes connections that send out showers of sparks. These references to color and forces of nature create powerful updrafts and explosions:

Someone has given me the
random feeling of the flame
combusted brightly
at the crossing between night
and ever after
searching for a known color
in different hemispheres
or maybe it was just
another definition
for reality.

The only thing left
was silence

Poems avoiding tonal centers are precarious creations utilizing imbalance in a manner similar to the way conventions of figurative painting were cast aside, radically transformed by the abstractionists. Language naturally contains the contrary attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable. Authors interacting with other disciplines revel in today's freedom of choices. Sound bites combine evocatively with tactile associations as words are released within sonic frameworks. "Eye of the Storm" creates a vortex moving over a landscape. Its vocabulary is percussive, free-flowing and constantly revolving as we speak the words out loud:

So synchronized in the dance of simulated silence
the night was descending upon us like an icy claw into the warm womb of a beast
leaving rotten labyrinths of flesh and plasma behind
still pulsing like two open wounds bleeding one into the other
we didn't understand why time was being swept back into the shell
we could only cry watching it disappear from the edge of darkness.

An ever stranger silence tells us about the improbable, 
about the rain season in which we are still finding our way by the absence of the Sun
- Kurt Cnejevici 

Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx  or at his website, www.timhazell.com