ARTIFICIAL AND

NATURAL

ARTIFICIALAND

NATURAL

Natural

Artifi cial

The labels for the things that exist have been established along time ago by the past thinkers of our western civilization.

We divided things between Natural and Artifi cial. Nature comprises all life in general, all existing matter. But then came man, able to make things out of natures ingredients. We now call this things Artifi cial, man-made. Actually the two word are oppositions. Artifi cial means something that is not Natural.

How can it be that one of the most important abilities of man, that of mak-ing tools, became that of the artifi ce, the artist. Actually, the ability to make arti-fi ce is as natural as the ability for a bird to make a nest. We make stuff. All this stuff we made so far comprises our cul-ture. A song, a gun, a building, a paint-ing, a clone, a genetic modifi ed rabbit, all of it. Its our culture. Who dares to say that all this is artifi cial, that its human, as if human had the same powers of Nature?

Introduction: The Artifi cial and the NaturalState of the ProblemBernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman

Physis and Techne in Greek MedicineHeinrich von Staden

The Three Pleasures of Mimesis According to Aristotle’s PoeticsFrancis Wolff

Art and Nature in Ancient MechanicsMark J. Schiefsky

Art, Nature, Alchemy, and DemonsThe Caseof the Malleus Malefi carum and Its Medieval SourcesWilliam R. Newman

Forms of Art in Jesuit Aristotelianism (with a Coda on Descartes)Dennis Des Chene

The Artifi cial and the NaturalArcimboldo and the Origins of Still LifeThomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Renaissance Histories of Art and NatureAnthony Grafton

Leibniz’s Theater of Nature and Art and the Idea of a Universal Picture AtlasHorst Bredekamp

Spinoza on the Natural and the Artifi cialAlan Gabbey

Eighteenth-Century WetwareJessica Riskin

Overtaking Nature?The Changing Scope of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth CenturyJohn Hedley Brooke

Reconfi guring Nature through SynthesesFrom Plastics to BiomimeticsBernadette Bensaude-Vincent

Concluding CommentsRoald Hoffmann

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The Artifi cial and the NaturalAn Evolving Polarity

Edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman

Genetically modifi ed food, art in the form of a phosphorescent rabbit implanted with jellyfi sh DNA, and robots that simulate human emotion would seem to be evidence for the blurring boundary between the natural and the artifi cial. Yet because the deeply rooted concept of nature functions as a cultural value, a social norm, and a moral authority, we cannot simply dismiss the distinction between art and nature as a nostalgic relic. Disentangling the cultural roots of many current debates about new technologies, the essays in this volume examine notions of nature and art as they have been defi ned and redefi ned in Western culture, from the Hippocratic writers’ ideas of physis and techne and Aristotle’s designation

This book by the MIT press is a collec-tions of essays that explore the concep-tual history of the nature and artifi ce. Without looking deep in the book we can see that there is no clear border between Nature and Artifi ce. As the author says, “we cannot simply dismiss the distinction between art and nature”. There is a distinction, but subtle.

of mimetic arts to nineteenth-century chemistry and twenty-fi rst century biomimetics.

These essays—by specialists of different periods and various disciplines—reveal that the division between nature and art has been continually challenged and reassessed in Western thought. In antiquity, for example, mechanical devices were seen as working “against nature”; centuries later, Descartes not only claimed the opposite but argued that nature itself was mechanical. Nature and art, the essays show, are mutually constructed, defi ning and redefi ning themselves, partners in a continuous dance over the centuries.

Form MIT press website

“Artifi cial” has been used to criticise. It is nowadays a depreciative word. It stands for fake, unnatural, mislead-ing. This would mean that our culture, which is man-made, is artifi cial there-fore unnatural. This supposes a lack of balance between man production and human existence as part of the natural world. This could mean that our artifi cial world, with its weapons, medicines and spaceships, could be doomed to self-destruction.

The Artifi cial world is unlimited, and it lives by the words that nothing is impos-sible.

The problem is that by thinking that we are doing something different, we don’t see the limits of that universe. We divided our doings from our nature, because that way we can develop them as an individual system, push-ing the boundaries as far as possible. If our doings were artifi cial, why would they have impact on nature? And if we include the limits of nature in our creations, don’t we get a better result?

Natural

Artifi cial

I say that the “man made” is natural. It’s the essence of human beings, that of building culture, memories. A social structure is also natural. Nature claims the ever changing shape of things. Indeed, Culture is always changing, it is the accumulation of knowledge over the generations, following the same pat-terns as evolution.

If Nature is all existing matter, then, the human capacity for creating culture is also natural. It’s a small part of it.

CONSIDERING ALL THE UNIVERSE, IT’S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE, CAN WE REALLY SAY THAT OUR CREATIONS DO NOT BELONG TO THIS NATURE?

BBC News1 July 2009Matt Walker

“A single mega-colony of ants has colonized much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fi ght one another.

(...)

“The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society,” the researchers write (...)”

According to a research published in Insectes Sociaux in 2009, a journal dedicated to the study of social insects, three Argentine super colonies formed a world wide mega colony.

Ants show us that you don’t have to be an “intelligent” species to have a society, to modify an habitat or to make things. They have developed some good skills in a way that anyone would call natu-ral. They have communication, defence, learning, nest construction, food cultiva-tion, navigation, locomotion, coopera-tion, competition and relationships with other organisms. And all this is done between all the ants. One ant on its own, looses all its powers, just as humans.

MAN HILL

ANT HILL

If we conclude that all human culture is indeed Natural, we will fi nd out that our actions are even more dangerous then what we thought. It’s important to understand that Nature has no notion of good and evil. A nuclear explosion is just one more event for Nature’s exist-ing matter, but not for Humans.

This means that nature will never try to stop us or warn us about something, it’s up to us to fi nd out what works better. We will also understand that we need space for evolution within our culture. We need to embrace change, make it part of our continuity.

ARTIFICIAL IS HUMAN NATURE

Culture, being natural, it’s the nature of humans. This means that besides being social we are also cultural. As birds have wings or as ants have pheromones, we have culture.

To spread it, we made a language, books, internet, etc. We have the means to keep track of our past achievements. Now that the world is connected by the internet, the idea of humans being defi ned by culture is stronger and more present.

It’s this culture that has the power to change our society and nature.

Jan. 2010Rotterdam

Dário Cannatà

Editorial Design ExerciseWillem de Kooning Academy

ARTIFICIAL AND

NATURAL