ABSTRACT
Art and technology not only connect by way of shared characteristics; the technologist may also manifest an inherent sensibility for beauty which we may call the technological aesthetic. To put this concisely: In some domains of technology tech-works are also art-works.
In this chapter we consider this particular aspect. Toward this end we begin with what the mathematician G.H.Hardy, the physicists David Bohm and Werner Heisenberg, and the astrophysicist S. Chandrasekhar had to say about the place of aesthetics in their respective domains as a kind of prelude to the thoughts, ideas and practices of our principal technological protagonists: a Nobel laureate synthetic chemist, two preeminent structural engineers, and two distinguished computer scientists.
Unlike writers on aesthetics over the centuries — predominantly philosophers and art theorists — mathematicians, scientists and engineers are not particularly interested in aesthetic theory. Their sense of the beautiful lies entirely in certain values governed by their respective craft and are grounded in such criteria as order, structure, harmony, simplicity, economy, coherence, connectedness, unity, and the Keatsian criterion — beauty as truth.
The technologist is of course primarily concerned with utilitarian ends. But our protagonists reveal that rather as people do not live by bread alone, technologists do not live by utility alone. Their choice of technological solutions, their decisions informing such choices are also deeply compelled by the aesthetic sensibility. We see how their utilitarianism and their aesthetics were inextricably entwined. Just as Hardy rejected ‘ugly mathematics’ so also these creators of tech-works rejected ‘ugly technology’. They seemed to espouse a philosophy of technology that was a fusion of the utilitarian and the affective. More to the point, it was not enough that tech-works are also art-works: there is a constraint on this condition: that constraint is that aesthetic choices must cohere with technological choices. We call this the central dogma of technological aesthetics.
Providing the central dogma is met tech-works are also art-works. This connection between technology and aesthetics is the ninth bridge between art and technology.
While the artificers’ aesthetics dominate this chapter, there is also the consumer — whether lay or peer, observer or user. We near the end of this chapter with a personal experience : the manifestation within this writer, as a lay consumer, of a sensibility toward kinematic beauty, a perception of beauty in the harmony of motion of a mechanical automaton, in this case a complex machine. Finally, we consider the unintended manifestation of the technological aesthetic in the realm of a celebrated 5th century CE metallurgical artifact.
