A lot of our intuition comes from the Kahneman type 1 cognitive processes, and in order for us to really amplify our individual and collective intelligences, visualization and ‘super-realism’ will be necessary to bridge the gap between our faster type 1 systems and our slower type 2 systems.

Juan’s collection was donated by his family to the Arts Court in Ottawa. It is worth a visit, to experience the imagination of this inspiring man. I’ve been lucky, in my career as a biologist, to collaborate with one of his protégés, Annie Thibault. They taught me that science and art are two sides of the same face, the exploration of the unknown, the quest for originality, the challenge to be the first in an intellectual space. C.P. Snow’s two solitudes of the humanities and the sciences may be the context in which we have been indoctrinated, but it is also a lie. More scientists, more artists, need to know this.

I agree that the data visualization community is a potential source of major artworks. Some of their works are already iconic, such as the famous “maps of the internet”:

http://www.opte.org/maps/

Re Irwin’s definition, I wouldn’t be so quick to discount the first part as irrelevant to Super-realism. If we restrict ourselves solely to the “continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us” then how would we distinguish art from science?

Your speculation on major works is interesting. I’m curious as where exactly they’d come from. Movie artists? Lone artists? Alex Roman’s “The Third and the Seventh” seems to be on the boundary between Super-realism and Realism to me, and perhaps his development process is what will be used:

http://vimeo.com/7809605

On Irwin and definitions: That’s a really striking definition! I hadn’t read it before, but some similar statements from him influenced my thinking about Post-realism. The first half of his definition seems Post-realist, the second half Super-realist. So maybe he’s a boundary figure.

Regarding the question “what is art?”, I like Cynthia Freeland’s book “But Is It Art?”, which has a good discussion of the various ways in which people have conceived of art in different cultures and times. Freeland quotes two definitions of art, formulated by anthropologist Richard Anderson and environment artist Robert Irwin respectively. Per Irwin, art is “a continuous examination of our perceptual awareness and a continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us”. This definition is very congenial to your concept of Super-realism, particularly the second part, but also I think the first: It’s not just the fact that science has enabled us to expand our perception, it’s that that expansion of perception has changed the way in which we perceive ourselves: The person who can conceive of light as something that flows slowly through a bottle or that has traveled 13 billion years to reach us is a different person than the person who can conceive of light only in traditional terms (e.g., brightness vs. darkness, as in chiaroscuro).

That in turn leads into Anderson’s definition of art: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium”. The “culturally significant” part of this definition points to what I think is a fourth factor to add to your three: We have lived long enough with various aspects of science and technology that they have become part of our common culture, and thus part of the common store of items, concepts, etc., from which we construct meaning and interpret it for one another.

This process of cultural absorption can take (and has taken) a while. As an earlier example, it took on the order of a century from the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century to the point in the early 20th century at which there arose an artistic movement (Futurism) that wholeheartedly adopted industrialism as its central theme. The first half of the twentieth century saw an ensuing scientific and science-based technological revolutions–from the theory of special relativity to the elucidation of the structure of DNA, with quantum mechanics, information theory, and computability and actual computers along the way. Thus if Super-realism does indeed evolve into a significant artistic movement then it’s arriving right on schedule, and we can expect to see major works in the next 10-20 years.

How will we recognize them as major works? First, because they speak deeply to us in our current state of existence, and second, because we will develop the critical vocabulary to discuss exactly why and how they affect us. (As always, the art will come first, the criticism later.) That critical vocabulary will be informed both by science and technology and by the ways in which they affect us, and of course will depend on critics’ familiarity with both.

A few years ago I had a temporary (re)infatuation with contemporary art, and wrote some blog post on the works “g” and “Spinning Beach Ball of Death” by Jack Strange. Leaving aside their value as criticism (which I myself can’t judge), what I found noteworthy was how much my own emotional reaction to the works depended on my scientific and technical background. (For example, none of the other discussions of the work I read speculated as to why “g” is called “g” and not something else, while I think this a major key to the work–no pun intended.) As an ex-physics student I’m admittedly a special case, but I think scientific literacy is widespread enough now that an artist can conciously (or unconciously) incorporate scientific concepts into a work to effective ends.