The Loaded Tangent

A miscellany from the crossroads of the arts, science, culture and technology

Tag: Thomas Hobbes

December 13, 2011

Music of the Futurists

Several illuminating thoughts on Thomas Hobbes – a cornerstone of The Loaded Tangent’s debut post – arise from Scott Horton’s August 2009 piece on the 17th Century philosopher for Harper’s. Hobbes was a futurist, of sorts, in the sense that he developed a theory of the future in relation to the past. As expressed in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640):

“… we make remembrance to be prevision, or conjecture of things to come, or expectation, or presumption of the future.”

Horton, an attorney who specializes in human rights law, points out that former United States V.P. Dick Cheney was especially fond of Hobbes, and suggests that “the [Iraq-bound] Hobbesians of the Bush era” – in their push to shape a post-9/11 future – may have misread their pet philosopher by elevating fear and “unreasoned reflex” above caution and prudence.

Politics aside, Horton also notes that Hobbes was an “intensely musical man” who, according to biographer John Aubrey (1626-1697), was “much addicted to music, and practised on the bass viol (pictured top right)”. Hobbes, we’re told, applied a mathematical perspective to his melody-making and, with this in mind, a swift associative leap takes us to Baroque genius Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, top left), master of formal mathematical patterns and occasional employer of the Fibonacci sequence.

Fast forward to the early 20th Century, where maths, architecture, chaos theory and futurism (and capital ‘F’ Futurism) coalesce in the work of composer Iannis Xenakis (bottom left), who collaborated with Edgard “The Father of Electronic Music” Varèse (top middle) and architect/designer Le Corbusier on the legendary Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, described in this piece by the Guardian’s Tom Service as an “interdisciplinary poly-art orgy” – 350 speakers; 20 amplifiers; one monumental audio-visual head trip.

Here’s what visitors would have heard as they entered the pavilion – Xenakis’s “Concret PH”:

Moving on to modern electronica, San Francisco’s Brendan Angelides (bottom right), aka Eskmo, merits a place in the audio-maths-futurism mix: his video for the digi-organic “Cloudlight” (below, directed by Dugan O’Neal) subtly blurs the line between the biological and the binary (note the tree trunk at 00:30), and sets the natural world against a flickering geometrical tapestry.

Manitoba native, Dan Snaith – better known as Caribou – left Imperial College London in 2005 with a PhD in mathematics. In 2010, he toured with the Russian Futurists, an indie-pop band from Toronto. (For more about the original Russian Futurists, and their 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, click here). The video (below, directed by Video Marsh) for Caribou’s “Jamelia” – from 2010’s Swim (bottom middle) – shares with “Cloudlight” a delicate tension between nature and artifice, complexity and order, fluidity and precision.

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December 12, 2011

Cross-Over Leviathans

Thanks for tracking down the debut post from The Loaded Tangent – part-blog, part-immersion in a roiling ferment of ideas fueled as much by culture and the arts as by science and technology. Connections will be forged, disciplines crossed, fields switched, minds expanded, and fresh discoveries made.

Here, the geek and the fop, the techie and the poet, the code-writer and the novelist, the rocket-scientist and the artist are on an equal footing. Men and women of letters will trade inspiration with number-crunchers, as each freely explores the others’ territory and, hopefully, somewhere down the line, thoughts new and brilliant will materialize like so many cosmic flashes. Then we can all celebrate with wine, song and fierce conversation, and the great timeless feedback loop of inspiration will keep on doing its thing.

First up, a motley crew of exceptional talents, united not only by a greater-than-average degree of genius, but also by an irresistible impulse to switch fields: to swerve off from their main area of specialism at an unexpected, hugely rewarding tangent. Post-Elizabethan philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – pictured top left – made his big switch relatively late in life, inspired by Euclid’s Elements of Geometry to apply the methods of science to politics and society. As Philip Ball notes in his excellent book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another:

“It was not until 1629 that the forty-year-old Hobbes, a committed classicist, had his eyes opened to the power of scientific and mathematical reasoning.”

The result was Leviathan, published in 1651, for which Hobbes handsomely deserves his status as cross-disciplinary hero and pioneer.

Hedy Lamarr (top middle) supplemented her Hollywood day-job with a sideline in wireless electronics, as co-inventor (with like-minded polymath George Antheil) of a frequency-hopping technology for torpedoes; Babe Ruth (top right) started out as a pitcher before immortalizing himself as The Sultan of Swat (there’s a great piece on the science of the Babe here); actress Ida Lupino (bottom left) broke more than one mould when she made her move behind the camera, and became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker (1953); and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey (bottom right) followed the field-switching example set by the likes of physicist-turned-molecular biologist Francis Crick (bottom middle) when he moved his focus from artificial intelligence to aging.

Every one of these game-changers nutmegged predictability, and sold expectation a glorious dummy, by daring to strike out in a new direction. (In the case of Babe Ruth, maybe “head off” works better than “strike out”). Their willingness to traverse boundaries, coupled with a talent for redirecting and re-sharpening their focus, makes them honorary cross-over leviathans. Expect more of their ilk from The Loaded Tangent, as the voyage into cross-disciplinary idea-space continues . . .

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