My work is about light, although in an unfamiliar guise. It is work that has been deduced from a physical analogy of the quantized structure of light. I have tried to build interdisciplinary bridges between art and science, to give art a voice in science.

My entry into art was informed by an interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and my participation in the evolving computer revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that led to smaller, more powerful interactive systems. While admiring a Frank Stella Protractor painting, a red field of color reminded me of physical waves of energy. Later, his Black paintings evoked memories of symmetry and geometry. Inspired, this incident recalled the analog waves that I had plotted in math class, digital waves entering or leaving a transistor, and waves that fill empty space.

To create the thousands of waves on the scale I envisioned, I modified a bandsaw to emulate a laser. Now I could cut with a point, create any series of waves imaginable down a long planes of wood. For other materials, like PVC or metal, computer controlled cutting equipment was employed. Separating the two halves, one side was labeled positive the other negative. They could be organized into a single piece, two separate works, or butted together to emphasize their complementary structure, or, for that matter, woven together. For me, art became a study of structure, different ways to pass a wave through a point, line or plane, then another wave or waves.

With so many ways to juxtapose the waves, I did not have to repeat myself. Making art seemed to be a form of play, it was fun and interesting. Some titles from this period are: Analog-Digital, Blinded by Science/Sighted by Science, Self Portrait, Point in Space, Diagonal Line, Diagonal Plane, Volume, Future City, Cosmos, X ⁶ , The Philadelphia Sound, Space City, Made in America, Spacetime and Challenger.

The piece X ⁶ convinced me that I should repeat myself. Out popped the reflective symmetry of a crystalline geometry, and, to my surprise, much more. Self-organizing, self-similar patterns inside of patterns emerged, for example, the diamond, and inside that diamond was another diamond, and so on. Other fractal geometries like the cylindrical or hexagonal lattices followed from the same process of the interaction of a single cycle of electricity, magnetism and a photon. These fractal structures reminded me of the chaos theory, a hidden order, geometric constructions that reflect the real world.

In these patterns, looking at the work in the vertical direction the waves are continuous, in the horizontal direction the waves are discrete, very important. Because the light waves I would later become interested in are discrete, quantized, made of particles of light, called photons.

Through all of this, I was reminded of an undergraduate humanities class about Plato’s ideal forms and his book, Timaeus. From this point on, interested in the relationship between art and science, I began each day with an hour or two of art or popular science literature.

Looking into the writings of other artists, I came to believe that one of the great successes of Modernism, the harbinger of a new way to think about Nature, is the motif of intersecting lines or planes and their connection to the structure of light and physical reality. Several drawings of “intersecting planes” by Picasso in late 1919 were perhaps inspired by published confirmation earlier that year of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the bending of starlight.

Referring to his mature work that began in the 1920s, Piet Mondrian wrote in a 1942 essay, referring to his use of primary colors and the intersecting lines and planes of his painting, that for him, “It is the task of art to express a clear vision of reality.” From my perspective, Mondrian was looking into the intersection of the planes, into the eye of light.

In the 1930s, Charles Biederman began creating three-dimensional painted aluminum sculptures of intersecting planes and in his supporting essays referred to the “structural process of reality” and the importance of “symmetry.” Taken together with the work of I. Rice Pereira, Charles Shaw, Jean Gorin, and other trail blazing pioneers in the 1940s, I realized that these artists are speaking of the same fundamental structure -- intersecting lines or planes -- a shared metaphysics.

In an effort to create the idea of a particle in the language of waves, three pieces were executed and titled Quanta I, II and III. Years later, when I learned of physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s great discovery of quarks, the Quanta titles were changed to: Two Mesons, Proton, and Neutron, respectively. In the ongoing Quantum pieces I created an experimental space where I could weave together new elements of structure, form, and pattern. Inspired by my daughter who was an art and philosophy major at Hampshire College, I worked on Minimalism/What You See Is What You See and Conceptualism/ Parallel Universe.

In Fire in the Mind and Fever of Matter and earlier pieces, we see the double helix structure of DNA. The titles of both pieces were taken from George Johnson’s influential book, Fire in the Mind, which brought me up to date with what was going on at the Santa Fe Institute, and other research centers, in the interdisciplinary search for elusive keys to Nature’s “hidden order.” Singularity and Event Horizon titles were inspired by cosmologist Stephen Hawking. With a simple rotation, the wave portion of Wave Particle Duality was deduced from the particle structure of a quark. In the Creation pieces, I tried to tell the story of creation in the evolving language of symmetry.

With symmetry as a guide I have been exploring the tension between unity and diversity in our understanding of the physical universe. The body of work calls attention to the spectacular advances in our understanding of physical reality, the symmetries that underlie the laws and forces of Nature, and the speculative, mathematical picture of extra dimensions and parallel universes, the multiverse. Probing Nature’s depths from various perspectives I began to see things simply, to understand the disparate theories of Nature in a unified way, in terms of the quantized structure of light and matter, space and time, and the physicist’s language of mathematics.

From Native American, African, and Islamic art forms, I understood early on that the mathematics of symmetry, group theory, was one of the backbones of my process. A few years later, at an art and mathematic conference, I learned that light is described by partial differential equations. In my scheme, illustrations of the two maths are nestled in each other. To help communicate many of these abstract ideas, I am developing a mathematical grammar of my process that includes the idea of “curl,” that is congenial with Maxwell’s equations of light; a metaphor of the structure of light as Nature’s loom; a connection between the physical characteristics of threads and Nature’s four forces; and a workshop.

From the patterns created, I have been able to call attention to several open questions in science, such as: Why is there order and complexity? Why is there life? Is the universe bio-friendly? Like energy and matter, are time and space quantized? Why are photons and electrons always detected as a single particle?

Einstein believed that the order we see in Nature is not the result of a purely random quantum process, like the roll of the dice. He believed that the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics, which is based on probabilities, is incomplete, and that there must be hidden deterministic rules, a hidden order to be discovered. I think it is safe to say that world wide there are thousands of scientists trying, indirectly, to prove his assertion. Electromagnetism is involved, perhaps it hides a key. My thesis is that photons are not only the carrier of the electromagnetic force, but also the carrier of information about the origin of self-organization in Nature.

By turning what might seem uncertain and random into tangible, beautiful art forms, by illustrating universal mathematical laws and symmetries of Nature through works of art, I have tried to build interdisciplinary bridges between art and science – that is, to give art a voice in science.

Mel Fisher September 2014