Michael Nielson: The Artist and the Machine

From the post, which is about images produced through scientific instrumentation:

While Super-realism isn’t new, that doesn’t mean it’s yet in the artistic mainstream. Many people don’t consider works such as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field or the light-in-a-bottle video to be art. (I would not be surprised if this includes the creators of those works.) Even works more explicitly artistic in intent, such as Water in Suspense, are viewed as borderline. But I believe that each of these works reveals a new aesthetic, an aesthetic generated by the scientific principles underlying the phenomenon being represented. And insofar as they reveal a new aesthetic, I believe these works are art.

He concludes:

Super-realism has grown rapidly in the past twenty to thirty years. Three forces are driving that growth.

First, far more people can access and learn to use scientific instruments. Recall Juan Geuer and his virtuoso home-made laser light show. There are people building everything from home-made bubble chambers to balloons exploring the upper atmosphere. These are not isolated curiosities, but rather part of a rapidly expanding social phenomenon that has been called by many names: the DIY movement, citizen science, the Maker movement. Whatever it is, it’s growing...

Second, the data being taken by many of these instruments is being shared openly, online. In the 1980s if a scientist used a telescope to take a photograph, likely no more than a few dozen people would ever touch the photographic plate. Now more than a billion people can download data from the Hubble Telescope, and find new ways to visualize it...

Third, we’re collectively building a powerful suite of tools to reveal these new worlds. For example, as I write there are more than 25,000 open source visualization projects available on the code repository GitHub. Most of those projects are, of coure, experiments that will be abandoned. But there are also many powerful tools that give people incredible abilities to make and reveal beauty. It’s no wonder Super-realism is flowering.

Story-tellers say that reality is often stranger and more interesting than fiction. I believe this is true for all art. The reason is that nature is more imaginative than we, and as we probe deeper into nature, we will continue to discover new aesthetics and new forms of beauty. I believe these new aesthetics will stimulate art for decades or centuries to come.