“Facts do not create truth, facts create norms…

…but they do not create illuminations”. so says werner herzog in the interview below.

i recall a quote from hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach:

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved..

the limits of formalization are interesting to me, and i’m intrigued at how dogmatic some of us seem to be about facts and their related logical structures. their real use to us is in our continued development of them, and their continued evolution with us, not in treating a currently useful arrangement of facts and logical structure as some sort of natural, invariable law.

logical structure’s (in general) mutability, development, and usefulness as a method for understanding the present as clearly as possible is an index of our intellectual evolution.

in speaking with an art student yesterday about her investigations and documentation of specific biologic structures i noticed that she seemed equally passionate about the circumstances surrounding the creation of her images: the people she met along the way, the places she visited, the impulses that lead her to focus her attention on her subject (the oldest living things on this planet), etc.

i recalled another quote from werner herzog:

the poet must not avert his eyes, you have to take a bold look at your environment and see what is around you, even the ugly things, the decadent things, even the dangerous things.

and it occurred to me that what was around her work was more than the photos she had chosen to show me, and i encouraged her to express the complex interaction of fact, impulse and gesture that the images were a part (a fact, a bit).

our experience occurs at the intersection of facts (logical constructions) and impulse. when the artist creates a gesture that contains the interaction of both of those elements in such a way that they permit an experience of what herzog describes as the poet’s gaze, the quality of that moment is aesthetic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4i5WkkXdmc&NR=1[/youtube]

in the clip above he mentions an incident in the video below, that also contains the quote about the poet’s gaze.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ugQrfDrcq4&NR=1[/youtube]