I’ve recently become fascinated with the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German artist/biologist active around the turn of the century. His book ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (German for ‘Art Forms of Nature’) contains a series of 100 lithographs, each arranging groups of disparate species into striking, unified compositions. Each plate is laid out as a collage, freeing the animals from their natural contexts – absent this constraint, the natural symmetries between different types of animals is astoundingly revealed.

The drawings are unquestionably beautiful, but more interesting are their philosophical underpinnings, and the application of those modes of thinking to our daily practice as digital artists.

From Olaf Breidbach’s preface of Prestel’s recent repackaging of Art Forms of Nature:

“In this profusion of symmetrical series, which seem to stem from the workshop of a brilliant designer, a fundamental formula for living things shines through for Haeckel. The many forms brought together in his work appeared to him to be a series of variations of simple constellations of symmetry. His depictions of them embrace a succession of complexities in which he saw the mechanics of evolution at work. His ‘Art Forms in Nature’ seeks to reproduce such constructions. Every plate in this work is an example of Haeckel’s notion of a principal unity of all living things. Each one of these illustrations – which for the uninitiated observer are at first only highly ornamental – was, for Haeckel, proof of his thesis. For him, the individual form, its inherent symmetry, documented Darwin’s notion of the evolutionary development of all living things..”

Catch that? Form is a documentation of evolution? It was an effective blending of science and nature, and his public ate it up. So what does it have to do with you?

Haeckel worked in the time of Art Nouveau and the birth of Darwinism – two ideological systems linked by their blurring of natural form and structure. As opposed to the theological perspective that living things came into existence in unchanging form due to divine will, the Darwinian perspective saw man as merely the current iteration of nature’s development. This line of thinking brought man much closer to nature – art nouveau synthesized this philosophy into an art of organic naturalism, realized in the decorative work of Gustav Klimt and the sculptural architecture of Gaudi, to name just a few. With these philosophies, the gulf between art and science became not only navigable, but irrelevant – art and science were merely opposing sides of the same coin.

If you’re a digital artist, there’s a similar philosophical chasm that has to be reconciled. Art is the expression of creativity, and creativity is a fuzzy, impossible-to-quantify thing. It would follow that, if the 1’s and 0’s realm of digital art is binary (and the context of art must mirror its content), digital media is unsuitable for rendering naturalism (the argument doesn’t really hold up as a snap your fingers, the art world changes-type thing, but for describing the way incremental technological changes have affected art, it’ll do). This is what we see in many forms of art today. The use of auto-tune in music gives the majority of our pop an artificial perfection. Video games tend towards increasingly stylized characters. We drive boxy cars down precisely aligned grids of roads. These forms of design mirror their digital production mechanisms, standing unified in opposition to naturalism.

But just as Haeckel saw the divide between science and nature irrelevant, so do I posit is the divide between naturalism and modernism in digital media. It’s a false choice – the more interesting places of artistic exploration are where digital/scientific/functional techniques and analog/naturalistic/formal patterns – merge and push each other forward. Examples?

• Frank Gehry, through the use of the program CATIA, construct the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as less structure and more sculpture.
• Some of the textures in Dan Deacon’s Bromst album are generated by connecting a MIDI output to a player piano, allowing the piano to play lines that are physically impossible for a human. (There’s an awesome video of this here).
• Robert Lazzarini’s Skulls series uses digital technology in hyperrealist sculptures of typical objects, skewed out of proportion. Looking at them almost makes you dizzy. (fascinating article about Lazzarini’s process here)

Each of these pieces leverage the best aspects of digital and analog technology – digital control and scalability, with organic feel and connection to history. I’m eager to explore these ideas more in my future sound and design work. Thoughts? Examples? Counter-examples? Holler in the comments.