Ideas, instruments of knowledge (1)

Tatiana Plakhova, (2009) http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Links/184045

In our previous post, we discussed about the notion of cultural territory, the “art-world”. Now, it is time to talk about the ideas inhabiting this territory.

An idea is a thing of the mind, born from many minds, product of socio-cultural conditions that determine its nature and shape. Many ideas are born from a specific need or out of a sheer necessity.

Philosophically speaking, ideas belong to “a” world, to Karl Popper’s World number 3, the sphere of objective knowledge and cultural products — check the net for Worlds 1 and 2.  This concept was also introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in what he calls “noosphere”.  Resulting common ideas are ethic values, social institutions, theories (valid or not), languages, notions and in our case cultural products, meaning a product resulting from a cultural activity, let’s say “art”.

Biologically speaking, ideas are very small “beings” or “living things” generated by our brain. The biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas are doted by their own ability to auto-organize and even reproduce themselves obeying to a principle that has not been explained yet. (Monod, Le Hasard et la nécessité, 1968, p.23). Ideas live symbiotically with our own self, just like a parasite hooked on our body.

Socially speaking, ideas have their own habitats, their own territory, their own life, their own habits. An idea is not self-sufficient, it needs a strong relationship with other ideas, thus a receptive organism may it be your body or an entire population of a city, state or country (Edgar Morin).

Therefore, we now see that ideas are in fact things. Physically speaking, they are things. Like most physical phenomena, ideas are the result of quantum interactions between fundamental particles through their respective force carriers (bosons, gluons, photons, etc.). To put it simply, an idea has a mass created by an infinitesimal small amount of energy.

So, ideas are things able to travel from one body to another body (or object) just looking for its proper biological receptor in order to instigate action in the sphere of ideologies, myths, gods, etc. This action, in our case, is the creative act of making art. Ideas are also instruments of knowledge.

 My following posts will try to explain my understanding of art and its role in society. By doing so, it will also clarify the way we instruct during our painting workshops in Tuscany, the reason why we have, at Walk the Arts, so many returnees.

The big photograph above is a combination of a) a diagram used in physics to illustrate easily particle interactions and in green, b) Dr. Richard Feynman’s Diagram for quantum electrodynamic representing a particular particle field.