Computing the Future: Digital encounters in art and science when da Vinci meets Turing

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance art and science – both revered as visionary geniuses, prophets of the future. Given the continued growth of digitised materials that are daily entering global consciousness, it is only relatively recently that both da Vinci’s notebooks and paintings, and Turing’s archive, are online and searchable. Thus we are able for the first time to relatively easily juxtapose and compare their work, and see that they have much in common in terms of what it means to human in science, art and the natural world, from da Vinci’s in-depth studies of the mechanisms of the human body, mind, and soul, foundational to his art, and to Turing’s discoveries in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and morphogenesis. Considering their points of concurrence in the digital world brings into focus our global network of digital places and spaces, where science, art, and nature, including real and artificial life, become unbounded.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Tula Giannini: https://sites.google.com/view/tgiannini/

Jonathan P Bowen: http://www.jpbowen.com

Conference

Publication date: July 2020

Publication date (Print): July 2020

Pages: 16-23

Affiliations

[0001]Professor of Information

School of Information

Pratt Institute

New York, USA

[0002]Emeritus Professor of Computing

School of Engineering

London South Bank University

London, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.3

SO-VID: 950b32d2-270f-44b2-a686-1c6bd9a5012e

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of EVA London 2020

Conference acronym: EVA 2020

Conference number: 30

Conference location: London

Conference date: 6th July – 9th July 2020

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: AI and the Arts: Artificial Imagination

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.3

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] ACM 2018 Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award – Bengio, Hinton and LeCun Ushered in Major Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence https://awards.acm.org/about/2018-turing

[2] J. P Bowen 2016 Alan Turing: Virtuosity and visualisation Bowen 2016 197 204 [Cross Ref]

[3] J. P BowenG DiproseN Lambert 2016 EVA London 2016: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts BCS, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) [Cross Ref]

[4] J. P BowenG DiproseN Lambert 2017 EVA London 2017: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts BCS, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) [Cross Ref]

[5] J. P BowenT Giannini 2014 Digitalism: The new realism? K NgJ. P BowenS McDaid EVA London 2014: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts BCS, eWiC 324 331 [Cross Ref]

[6] J. P BowenT Giannini 2020 The Digital Renaissance from da Vinci to Turing V Cappellini EVA 2020 Florence Proceedings [Cross Ref]

[7] J. P BowenT TrickettJ. B. A GreenA Lomas 2018 Turing’s Genius – Defining an apt microcosm Bowen 2018 155 162 [Cross Ref]

[8] J. P BowenJ WeinelG DiproseN Lambert 2018 EVA London 2018: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts BCS, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) [Cross Ref]

[9] B. J CopelandJ. P BowenM SprevakR. J Wilson 2017 The Turing Guide Oxford University Press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turing_Guide

[10] C Des Marais 2019 25 Tech Predictions for 2020 Inc.com 27 December 2019 https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/25-tech-predictions-for-2020.html

[11] K Devlin 2019 The world’s first artificial womb for humans BBC News, BBC 16 October https://www.bbc.com/news/av/health-50056405/the-world-s-first-artificial-womb-for-humans

[12] V Dowd 2014 What was Alan Turing really like? Witness, BBC World Service. BBC News, BBC 6 June 2014 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27701207

[13] T GianniniJ. P Bowen 2017 Life in Code and Digits: When Shannon met Turing Bowen 2017 51 58 [Cross Ref]

[14] T GianniniJ. P Bowen 2018 Of Museums and Digital Culture: A landscape view Bowen 2018 172 179 [Cross Ref]

[15] T GianniniJ. P Bowen 2019 Museums and Digital Culture: New perspectives and research Springer, Series on Cultural Computing

[16] L. A Gladwin 1997 Alan Turing, Enigma, and the Breaking of German Machine Ciphers in World War II. Turing and Enigma 203 217 National Archives, USA https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/1997/fall/turing.pdf

[17] E MacCurdy 1955 Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci New York George Braziller. Internet Archive 2012 https://archive.org/stream/noteboo00leon/noteboo00leon_djvu.txt

[18] A Manevskava 2017 Reflecting the Invisible or Distorting the Visible: Mirrors in Art Daily Art Magazine 19 July https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/reflecting-the-invisible-or-visible-mirrors-in-art/

[19] J Markoff 2011 Computer wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, it’s not The New York Times USA 16 February https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html

[20] Y Rharbaoui 2016 The future Da Vinci is a robot: AI and Artistic Creation The Medium 20 November https://salon.thefamily.co/the-future-da-vinci-is-a-robot-aiand-artistic-creation-51001f12149d

[21] Scienceblocks 2018 Gardening with Alan Turing, and sketching evolution of plants with Da Vinci – Phyllotaxis. Steemit, #steemstem https://steemit.com/steemstem/@scienceblocks/gardening-with-alan-turing-and-sketching-evolution-of-plants-with-da-vinci-phyllotaxis-3a0fabaacf7c4

[22] T Swift 2019 Lover (Lyric Video) YouTube 15 August https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvUAzpn48xA

[23] A. M Turing 1950 Computing machinery and intelligence Mind 59 236 433 460 October [Cross Ref]

[24] A. M Turing 1951 Can Digital Computers Think? BBC Radio 15 May 1951 Alan Turing’s lost radio broadcast rerecorded. YouTube 24 December 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMxbSsRntv4

[25] A. M Turing 1952 The chemical basis of morphogenesis Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 237 641 37 72 [Cross Ref]

[26] Turing Digital Archive The Turing Digital Archive Archive Centre, King’s College Cambridge, UK http://www.turingarchive.org

[27] J WeinelJ. P BowenG DiproseN Lambert 2019 EVA London 2019: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts BCS, Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) ScienceOpen [Cross Ref]

[28] F Zöllner 2003 Leonardo da Vinci: Complete Paintings and Drawings Taschen