record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00812
Thesis Title
On Cosmogony
Author
Katarina Petrović
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
Master of Music
Year
2016
Number of Pages
25
University
ArtScience Interfaculty, Royal Academy of Art and Royal Conservatoire, University of Arts The Hague
Thesis Supervisor
Eric Kluitenberg
Supervisor e-mail
epk AT xs4all.nl
Other Supervisor(s)
Taconis Stolk
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Interfaculty / ArtScience
Languages Familiar to Author
French, Serbian, Dutch (basic), Italian (basic)
URL where full thesis can be found
katarinapetrovic.net/on-cosmogony.pdf
Keywords
cosmogony, origin, language, meaning, systems theory, poetry
Abstract: 200-500 words
This text is an inquiry into the process of creation, seen not just as the creativity exhibited by an artist, but as the problem of the ultimate origin: cosmogony, i.e. the birth of the cosmos, or the emergence of something out of nothing. This origin is intrinsically unrepresentable, in part because of the limitations of language as a finite collection of existing symbols. However, through the "calculus" of grammar, language can recursively generate an infinite number of expressions and thus create new meanings. This leads us into an exploration of infinity, limitlessness, and the concomitant experience of the "sublime", the unbounded space of possibilities that inspires both delight and apprehension. This notion can only be represented negatively, as a void, absence, or black canvas, by delimiting what it is not. These philosophical reflections propose a first exploration of the domain where art, science, humanities and technology meet, in a search for unification akin to the one of General Systems Theory. They are given concrete shape in two artworks that illustrate the limitless generation of meanings. In Lexicon Liber Novus, a technique similar to Gödel numbering is used to generate a potentially endless text out of a short phrase from a poem, by adding after each new word all the words of its dictionary definition. In the work Cosmologicus, the database of numbered words generated in this way is used to decipher astronomical measurements of the radiation from the planet Jupiter onto words. Thus Jupiter in a way writes its own poetical text. This text is visualised by a three-dimensional projection of words into the black water cube.