Like Picasso and Einstein: Lines, Forms and Dimensions

LIKE PICASSO AND EINSTEIN Lines, Forms and Dimensions

Francesco Fedele Emily Vickers School of Civil and Environmental Engineering with the support of the Office of the Arts Georgia Institute of Technology

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.”

– Albert Einstein “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

– Pablo Picasso

Study of a portrait in various dimensions of Picasso's cubism

by Francesco Fedele.

Contents 1

COURSE Description and rationale (Francesco Fedele)

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ARTIST Teaching art to engineering students (Emily Vickers)

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EXHIBITION CEEatGT news: Art and Geometry (Joshua Stewart)

14 STUDENT ART

Omar Alrawi

Erik Anderson

Bahar Asgari

Dennis Frank

Jiaxin Li

Xiaoyu Li

Ashish Gupta

Ranjita Pai Kasturi

Tianhui Zhao

Joonho Jonathan Kim

Kelsey Kurzeja

37 INSTRUCTORS

Francesco Fedele

Emily Vickers

53 REFERENCES 56 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VISUAL ARTS AND GEOM

“Each of us, we are all artists. If you put forth the dedication to learn the skills, it will come. We are born to create. The caveman didn’t even talk, and he was creating graffiti.” – Francesco Fedele There is no doubt that Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, icons of the twentieth century have inspired generations of artists and scientists. Indeed, modern science is Einstein and modern art is Picasso. On the science front, Albert Einstein’s 1905 and 1915 seminal papers on special and general relativity mark the beginning of modern sciences shaking the foundations of Newtonian physics. On the art front, in 1907 Picasso had produced “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” the painting that marks the beginning of the cubism movement and that evolves art into the modern form of the twentieth century. Drawing on Miller (2001), at the core of these rebellious changes was the debate about representation versus abstraction.

In art, realism, perfection, figuration have dominated since the Renaissance. On the contrary, the twentieth century trademarks the need for freedom of expressions and emotions resulting in the emergence of new artistic movements like the impressionism and its various forms represented by the artwork of Van Gough, Manet, Monet, Gauguin and Cézanne. In Science, mathematicians started to explore exotic non-Euclidian geometries in dimensions greater than three, especially four-dimensional spaces, with its implication to space or time. Furthermore, there was the discovery of the conceptual quality of African and Japanese arts that influenced Picasso and other artists enormously. All of these ideas helped Picasso to free himself from earlier constraints of thinking, perfection and exact perspectives. Together with George Braque, Picasso undertook the intellectual quest of revealing the essential elements of the natural world using geometry, leading to cubism. Picasso’s exploration of lines, forms and space in his groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” exploited notions of four-dimensional space, non-Euclidean geometry, spacetime simultaneity and the fourth dimension. Picasso discovered geometry as the language of the new art thanks to Poincaré’s (1902) insights on time and simultaneity. These were also inspirational to Einstein’s discovery of special relativity. Both Picasso and Einstein realized that we couldn’t trust our senses when thinking about the perceived absoluteness of both time and space surrounding us. As a result, art and science become means for exploring the world surrounding us beyond perceptions, beyond appearances. The deceiving exact perspective and realism of the Renaissance art in perceiving space and time, led Picasso to propose his

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cubism as a new notion of aesthetics. Picasso’s new aesthetic was the exploration of forms to their essential geometric elements of lines, forms and dimensions. On the other hand, Einstein’s approach to space and time was not primarily mathematical. To Einstein, the Maxell equations missed an aesthetic symmetry, which was essential to his discovery of relativity.

Inspired by the successful quest undertook by both Picasso and Einstein to free their minds from the absoluteness of our perceptions, my teaching philosophy is to aim at freeing students' minds from mechanistic concepts and recipes when they approach the solution of a problem towards an abstraction of the solution to the essential elements and forms.

To do so, I had the support of the Georgia Tech Office of Arts. Their Creative Curriculum Initiatives (CCI) is dedicated at promoting connections between the arts and Georgia Tech’s core academic disciplines. Nurturing students' artistic sensibilities and exposing students to artistic process is essential to developing creativity and innovation. Thanks to a CCI grant, I have designed and taught in Fall 2018 the graduate course “Visual Arts and Geometry” (see course content below). I have introduced students to the geometry of space and manifolds and how these concepts influenced modern arts and sciences, i.e. Cubism and Einstein’s relativity.

The realization of geometry is visualization. The course was integrated with weekly lab sessions taught by the Atlantabased professional artist Emily Vickers, who taught students drawing concepts, practice sketching, and both figure and geometric drawing with a special focus on both exact representation (Renaissance art) and geometric abstraction (cubism, modern Art). Students have learned how to draw/ sketch by hand in order to stimulate/enhance their visual memory, imagination and practice abstraction of geometric concepts. Fluidity in drawing implies fluidity in thinking.

The course included, as the final class activity, exhibiting the student artwork at the Kai Lin Art Gallery of Atlanta.

I wanted to connect with the Atlanta’s art community so that I can find more ways to link local artists with Tech, perhaps even through an artist-in-residence program.

The future of education may well be in the synergy of arts and sciences. There is not much difference; artists are scientists, they are thinkers.

- Francesco Fedele, Atlanta, December 2018

METRY AT GEORGIA TECH

THE STUDENT ART EXHIBIT AT THE KAI LIN ART GALLERY OF ATLANTA.

COURSE TOPICS

HISTORY OF ART (~3 weeks) • From the Renaissance to the Modern Art period.

• Studying the Masters of Art: Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Rubens, Monet, Manet, Van Gough, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse, Rothko, Pollock.

• Einstein versus Picasso: influence of geometric concepts on both sciences and arts.

GEOMETRY (~7 weeks) • Covariant and contravariant vectors, dual spaces, Cartan’s differential forms, variational calculus.

• Geometry of manifolds: intrinsic formulation, the concepts of chart and atlas, tangent and cotangent spaces, metric, covariant derivative, connections, parallel transport, geodesics, geodesic deviations, Riemannian curvature tensor, Ricci tensor, Bianchi’s identity.

APPLICATIONS (~5 weeks) • Fluid Mechanics Lagrangian and Hamiltonian of a free particle, Euler equations of an ideal fluid, circulation and vorticity as Cartan’s differential forms • Theoretical Physics Special relativity: Einstein’s postulates, length contraction and time dilation, Minkoswki spacetime, light cone Newtonian spacetime: gravity is curvature.

General relativity: Einstein’s Gravity Equivalence Principle, Einstein’s field equations, SchwarzSchild black hole metric, Gravitational waves STUDIO LABS (~15) • Introduction to figure drawing and shadow theories.

• From line gestures, essential forms to figures.

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TEACHING ARTS TO ENGINE

“Again, and always, study the world around you. The paper will tell you nothing." – Emily Vickers

The course was integrated with weekly studio labs sessions where students were taught drawing basics from perspectives, shading, gesture, contouring to figure drawings.

Building student skill set Time was spent in the studio labs working on shadowing, contour and gesture. This was an effort to build the student relationship with his/her eye, hand and utensils. These drawing practices should be continued despite however much student talent grows. Not only does it continue to build relationship with his/her hand and materials, but it can be a great warm up before a strenuous drawing activity.

Remember always—the paper will tell you nothing! Look at your object and/or reference material more than your paper.

Study the world around you often.

Shading. Light reflects and bounces. We practiced drawing a sphere and other simple shapes to help with imagining what would happen with the curve of a cheek or a piece of bark. While shading can feel tedious, it often helps create the look of your work being three-dimensional by giving the impression of depth.

Gesture. Quick drawing studies of people were great warm up exercises as well as being a way of preventing the act of drawing from always being an intense 30 minute to 5-hour session. The student can discover new ways of drawing the human form by practicing it with quick strokes that showcase movement. It only takes a few seconds, one can do it on the train, while waiting at the doctor’s office on scraps of paper or a tablecloth. One should keep in mind that it is about capturing the “big picture” of where the body is positioned and not nuances like fingernails and facial expression.

Contours. This exercise is almost totally devoted to building the relationship of your hand and eyes. It is meant to be one continuous line, as if you are tracing the outside of an item or subject. The contour line should be slowly drawn to study the object carefully. Contour can be a useful tool to use before one starts a drawing. It is a way to study the object before getting started on drawing it. Like with stretching before a run, this is helpful in making your eye-to-hand understanding of your object easier than if you just start drawing it. Some people find contour to be a relaxing, meditative act.

Drawing Basics How do I begin drawing?

First, determine what your subject matter is. Artists who just begin drawing or painting without a subject in mind often tell me that they feel frustrated or confused with their art piece and ask me “I’m lost, what do I do with it?” When I ask them what they wanted to paint or draw and they tell me they didn’t know I tell them their art is reflecting that. You cannot begin to create a composition or story for your viewers to follow if you do not know what it is. Knowing what you want to do, even if your art piece is abstract, will guide and make a lot of your next decisions easier to make.

STUDENTS’ SKETCHES TO PRACTICE SHADING.

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EERING STUDENTS

Then, determine where the light source is coming from. Once you know what your subject is determine what light sources are involved in your piece. This seems so rudimentary that as people draw more, they quit this part of the planning process.

Don’t! If you can get into the habit of checking your light and shadow sources, you will save yourself stress or the frustration of making an obvious lighting error. Furthermore, determine where your shadows are. As stated above, once you know your subject, where your light is coming from and what sort of light it is, begin mapping out where the shadows would fall.

Remember you can measure for this.

The paper will tell you nothing. Observation of the world around you will inform you of the real behavior of shadows and reflecting light.

The Human Body In class we spent a lot of time drawing humans and their anatomy. Human beings can be a challenge to draw, there are many different muscles and the human body has different proportions based upon the person’s age. As humans we are also very familiar with what a body should look like and are able to quickly spot when an image is distorted. This can be intimidating and frustrating for a new artist to work with.

The best way to draw a human accurately is to always have reference material. I can always tell when an artist isn’t using reference material or a model for their work. After an artist has drawn humans over and over and then quits using real people or references all the people they illustrate start to look the same. The artist has learned how to draw a nose a certain way and is comfortable with it and now that is how all their noses begin to look. The human subjects they draw start to look strangely related or cartoonish. The best way to keep capturing the unique personality and essence of different people is to draw people who exist and are different. Keep informing your opinion on anatomy with reality.

If you have the opportunity to use a live model for life drawing practice that is also ideal.

Perspective New artists commonly fall into the trap of their drawing presenting subjects in a flat and immediate way instead of adding perspective to their work. If you are having trouble with a drawing feeling “stagnant” or uninteresting, perspective can open your piece, giving it depth and interest. It is also helpful with lining up subjects in your piece.

We covered two different types of perspective in class, one point and two point perspective.

STUDENTS’ SKETCHES TO PRACTICE HUMAN FORMS AND FIGURES.

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STUDENTS’ SKETCHES OF PERSPECTIVE AND SHADING.

The Grid Method If you are drawing a subject and you find that it is complex or difficult, the grid method is helpful. By making a grid on an image that matches the grid on your paper you can draw it square by square. This method of drawing is sometimes considered slow and labor intensive.

When using this method remember to keep the ratios of squares on the image you are referring to the same as those on your page or you will stretch or distort the images.

There are pros and cons to using the grid method.

Pros: It can take a very difficult subject matter and make it easier and less overwhelming to approach. Many new artists feel that their skill level and what they are able to draw improves drastically when they start to use this method. Some artists even find it less stressful to approach a piece of work box by box.

Cons: Many photo realistic artists use the grid method and sometimes their artwork lacks creativity and seems more like drawn photograph. The focus of the grid method is to tackle the art piece square by square which can limit or reduce the line work or personality of the artist because their focus is one square at a time. This is not necessarily a promised outcome of using the grid method. If an artist is making their own photo compositions elements can be juxtaposed so that an artist is doing more than just regurgitating an image. Some artists use the grid method for their sketching process and abandon it, working free hand on their final product once the basic idea is laid out.

Always have reference material to inform your opinion. Even if your piece is at a different angle it is amazing the details that are lost or forgotten as an artist goes through the effort of creating their work. If you are drawing a bird, study images of wings and feathers and learn the structure and the way the bones function.

Remember that any photo can be used as reference material but if your work is too derivative of someone else’s and you are selling or promoting it you could be viewed as someone stealing or plagiarizing the efforts of another. Attempt to do more than recreate a photograph that always exists. If working from a photograph directly does bring you joy, make your best effort to use copyright free images. All artists put in work for what they do and the best way to be part of the art community is to respect the other creators.

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STUDENT DRAWING USING THE GRID METHOD

Other Techniques At times there can be difficulty in tackling certain subject matters. There are other ways to approach the drawing process for this.

There is the use of negative space, where you draw in the area that is not your subject matter to help define it. This can be especially helpful with complicated objects like bundles of branches, hair or cords.

There is also the technique of using several methods of cross hatching and pointillism to create certain textures.

Coming up with Original Ideas Much of class was spent building the skills needed to be able to execute a drawing. Those skills will need continuous practice, especially when you find a subect to be difficult. If there is some item or body part you find yourself avoiding the best action to take is to focus on that area and improve until you get a new comfort level with it. As your skill set improves then original ideas and compositions should become your focus. Areas like hands and feetare commonly avoided because of their difficulty.

Where do ideas for paintings come from? I am asked this question often and the truth is that every artist will be inspired and motivated by different factors. In class I covered the three general reasons people create art: 1. Beauty. The aesthetics of the piece is the focus.

2. Statement. The meaning of the piece, the expression of an idea or concept is the purpose of the work.

3. Therapy. The final product in this case doesn’t matter as much as the act of making the art.

These are, of course, not mutually exclusive. I can paint a v ase of flowers as emotional stress relief while also wanting to create something beautiful that is also, somehow, a statement against pesticides.

Ideally, your fate as an artist will not simply be to find a cool photo and replicate it. I ask this question of many artists‌ why bother recreating a photo that already exists?

STUDENT DRAWINGS

What could give you ideas for pieces of art?

1. Write down emotions you are feeling and the source of some of those emotions. Ask yourself how that could be visualized, how you could tell a viewer what you are experiencing by using only images.

2. Is someone important to you? Try to draw or paint that person.

3. Consider other hobbies you are passionate about and share that in a piece of art. Do you like fishing? What is it you like about fishing? Did you do it as a child? What about your hobby makes you enjoy it, and can you visually share that with the audience so that they will understand and connect with your emotion?

4. Music! Artists have done artwork based on songs that inspired them or hit a cord with them. Imagine that a band has asked you to illustrate their album. Imagine someone has asked you to do a painting based on a song their loved one liked. How would you represent it?

5. Poems/books/movies. So long as you make it your own, you can absolutely do a painting on how Darth Vader should have looked. Or what characters from Game of Thrones should have looked like. Be careful not to just copy the idea as it exists but show your own interpretation.

DRAWING BY FRANCESCO FEDELE

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6. Dreams. Did you have a dream about something and it was strange or frightening? Put the imagery down. It might be odd but you could have fun making something surreal or a little scary. Chances are if it frightened you that it might provoke your audience.

7. Make a commentary on another artist’s work. As the Boulevard of Broken Dreams was done as a commentary using Nighthawks, you could have fun doing the same. If you liked MC Escher’s Relativity piece, then consider doing it but with dinosaurs or only locked doors. Remember, there is a difference between making a commentary piece and stealing an idea and claiming it as your own.

STUDENT’S SKETCH OF THE “LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON” BY PICASSO

Final Thoughts Don’t forget that 99% of those consuming art are everyday people with no training or formal background in art. Your opinion on art is valid. The biggest difference between those that study art and those that do not is the ability to easily know why they like or dislike a certain painting. As untrained artists, people can generally tell if something is “wrong” or “off” in a piece of art though they may not understand or be able to explain why.

Here is the mental list I go through when I inspect a piece of my work for flaws: 1. Is the subject matter or intent of my work clear?

2. Did I execute my light/shadow correctly?

3. Is my perspective (if any) correct?

4. Is there something wrong with my anatomy (if applicable)?

5. Would this be better if I started over and redrew it?

Sometimes a checklist of what to look for is all you need to identify where your piece of work is struggling. As you mature as an artist you will have a better idea of what your weaknesses are and what aspects of your work you should double check to ensure you aren’t repeating what you feel are mistakes.

Again, and always, study the world around you. The paper will tell you nothing.

- Emily Vickers, Atlanta, December 2018 7

DRAWING BY FRANCESCO FEDELE

ART AND Exhibition features student art GEOMETRY

inspired by Einstein and Picasso

There aren’t many engineering courses that include, as the final class activity, exhibiting artwork at a local gallery.

Francesco Fedele’s students did just that Dec. 11, showing the drawings they created during his course this fall connecting advanced geometry with art through the lenses of Einstein and Picasso.

“They are icons of contemporary art and science,” and they were linked in time and ideas, Fedele said.

“Einstein was an artist; Picasso was influenced by ideas about the fourth dimension, space and time.”

The course included students from computer science and across the College of Engineering and introduced what Fedele called exotic and complex concepts that don’t typical show up in the engineering curriculum — differential geometry, covariant derivatives and the like. Fedele showed how Einstein used the concepts as he was developing his theories of general and special relativity.

“My main goal was to expose the students to this difficult mathematical concept of differential geometry, and also, I want them to realize that special relativity and general relativity, they are not far away from us,” Fedele said, noting it has only been a century since Einstein’s paper on general relativity published in 1915.

“We need to appreciate it and understand it. The GPS navigation system we use every day on our phones would not work without Einstein’s relativistic corrections. It is not difficult to understand Einstein’s great physical insights on relativity of space and time; it is just that we think that everything is absolute in the world around us.”

That’s where art and Picasso come in. With a grant from Georgia Tech’s Ferst Center for the Arts, Fedele brought in Atlanta artist Emily Vickers to teach studio sessions and help students “unlock” their minds. The resulting artwork hung for an evening at the Kai Lin Gallery on Atlanta’s Westside at a public exhibition.

“It’s very difficult to unlock your mind, but that’s what you have to do to understand Einstein. You need to give up on the idea that space and time are absolute,” Fedele said. “Artists can do that. They are free-thinking; they are unlocked.”

It was the first time Fedele taught the course and likely just as difficult for him as for his students, he said. But he saw how exploring Picasso and Einstein’s insights on relativity and cubism, art and science opened students’ eyes.

“Emily and I saw the evolution in their thinking and drawing skills over the semester. Some of them started very locked in their mind and even very rigid in the way they were holding the pencil,” Fedele said. “In three months, they basically freed their style, and they started to appreciate these concepts. We can see it.”

Fedele and Vickers ended the class with an exhibition simply because, Fedele said, they wanted their students to be proud of what they accomplished over the semester. Fedele also wanted to connect with Atlanta’s art community so that he can find more ways to link local artists with Tech, perhaps even through an artist-in-residence program.

At a minimum, he’s planning to teach his Visual Arts and Geometry course again next year to engage a new group of students “To me, the future of education has to be art and science.

There is not much difference; artists are like scientists, they are thinkers,” Fedele said.

“Each of us, we are all artists. If you put forth the dedication to learn the skills, it will come. We are born to create. The caveman didn’t even talk, and he was creating graffiti.”

- Joshua Stewart, Atlanta, December 2018

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THE STUDENT ART EXHIBIT AT THE

KAI LIN ART GALLERY

The “Visual Arts & Geometry” Special Topics Course taught in Fall ’18 included, as the final class activity, exhibiting the student artwork at the Kai Lin Art Gallery of Atlanta. We ended the class with an exhibition simply because we wanted our students to be proud of what they accomplished over the semester. Hereafter some photos of the exhibit followed by a description of the student arwork.

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ARTWORK BY (LEFT TO RIGHT) ASHISH GUPTA, BAHAR ASGARI AND DENNIS FRANK

ARTWORK BY (LEFT TO RIGHT) OMAR ALRAWI, RANJITA KASTURI AND FRANCESCO FEDELE

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ARTWORK BY BAHAR ASGARI

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ARTWORK BY JOONHO KIM

ARTWORK BY OMAR ALRAWI

ARTWORK BY BAHAR ASGARI

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ARTWORK BY EMILY VICKERS

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ARTWORK BY FRANCESCO FEDELE

STUDENT

ARTWORK

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OMAR ALRAWI

Omar is a PhD student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in his third year of study. His research focuses on system and network security for smart-home devices.

FREE MINDS This work takes the famous quote of “free your mind� and depicts it as a tree. A tree is chosen to illustrate the minds connectivity, branching, and fluidness, while the face is drawn using straight lines with more rigidness. An old tree also represents wisdom and experience because these qualities are gained by age. The tree bark is drawn to illustrate the age of the tree. The branches are drawn using negative space to illustrate the brain’s deep grooves, which in theory they are associated with intelligence.

The work is drawn in pencil (2H and 4B) and uses rolled paper for shadow affect. The negative space is chosen to illustrate the freeing of the mind by not concentrating on details, while the bottom half of the drawing is drawn with details illustrating the experience gained in life. An individual is institutionalized into a rigorous curriculum of learning and gaining knowledge, which adheres to rules and customs. Hence the bark of the tree is drawn with details. As a free thinker, the mind must let go of such details and focus on the big picture, hence freeing the mind and the lack of details. Overall this piece attempts to capture the rigorous learning techniques that societies have become accustomed to by molding individuals into a specific way of thinking. The tree fully matures and its branches freely flow and every direction to signify breaking of customs and institutional thinking captivity.

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ESCAPING THE MANIFOLD (PASTEL ON PAPER) Inspired by the geometric interpretation of manifolds and historical context, this work attempts to capture a hybrid perspective between an intrinsic and extrinsic point of view. The frame is distorted to give the feel of an extrinsic view from above, while the landscape ahead curves into the horizon placing the viewer into the manifold of the landscape. The title reflects the perspective of the onlooker being elevated from a point on the sphere and lifted from the two-dimensional view to the three-dimensional view, hence escaping the manifold.

This piece is composed of smudged pastels on a 70-pound paper. Three colors of pastels with three different shades were used in addition to black and white pastels for touchups. The frame uses three shades of brown and the landscape ahead uses three shades of green and a mix of black color to illustrate the feeling of closeness. The sky uses three shades of blue and it is offset by black in the edges to depict space. The white stars in the horizon use a vanishing point to illustrate stardust in space.

Overall the idea of this drawing is to give a wide perspective of the world we live in. Perspective is subjective and this drawing attempts to capture the view from an intrinsic and extrinsic point of view. An intrinsic viewer, someone on earth, sees a plane with a vanishing perspective, while an extrinsic viewer, an astronaut, sees a sphere.

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ERIK ANDERSON

Erik is a 4th year PhD student in the school of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in the NanoEngineered Systems and Transport Lab of Prof. Baratunde Cola.

JELLYFISH (PENCIL ON PAPER, 8 × 12”)

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PORTRAIT NO. 1 (CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 11 × 14”)

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KUNG FU IN MOTION: 6TH DAN STRAIGHT-SWORD SEQUENCE (PENCIL ON PAPER, 24 × 18”) “Kung Fu in Motion: 6th Dan Straight-Sword Sequence” is inspired by the beauty and fluidity of motion present in Kung Fu. The work captures one of the many elegant movements from a more advanced wushu sequence incorporating the jiàn (straight-sword). The jiàn’s weapon style is characterized by light and quick techniques, complemented by the graceful taper of the blade. The stream lines of the jiàn are inspired by the sinuous flow of water. Techniques in this form emphasize wholistic movement of the body to drive the sword, typically in continuous and majestic sweeps.

This piece is influenced by my decades of training in Long Fist Kung Fu. Long Fist is a dynamic style full of large, extended, and often circular movements. This is conveyed by my use of organic lines and soft shading in pencil. The sword is the highlight of the drawing, moving in and out focus as the eye is drawn from left to right.

The drawing expresses philosophical elements of Yin and Yang: a duality of opposites that must be learned to master a martial art, evident here through the rhythmic translation between distinct postures of the body and the graceful arcing of the rigid and linear jiàn. I want to convey the duality in all things: dark and light, soft and hard, fluid and rigid, organic and geometric.

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BAHAR ASGARI

Bahar Asgari is a PhD student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the computer architecture and system lab (CASL). As a graduate research assistant under the supervision of Prof. Yalamanchili, she is involved in high-performance computing projects. Her research interests include but are not limited to designing near-data-processing (NDP)-based accelerators for sparse problems and deep neural networks (DNN). Besides doing research in the field of computer architecture, she loves drawing and painting. While she is interested in realistic drawing of portraits and people in details using pencil, charcoal, and watercolor, her main imagery includes abstract painting. She integrates geometrical shapes with both sharp and soft edges, to create objects, which are distinguishable by their borders. In her paintings, Bahar tries to combine space and time to exhibit emotions and tell stories.

MIRRORS (CHARCOAL, 12X18�)

This drawing is an integration of pieces of five portraits of men and women, drawn by charcoal. Mirrors is inspired by Picasso’s Cubism.

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CURIOSITY (CHARCOAL, 12X18”)

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GRAVITY (PENCIL ON PAPER, 11 × 14�)

This drawing is inspired by a photograph, taken by Rachel Neville, of two dancers of Atlanta Ballet, Jessica Assef and Moises Martin. The view point from a top-level balcony in Paris gives sense of romance to the drawing. The technique of two-vanishing-point perspective is used.

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TIME VERTIGO (ACRYLIC ON GESSO BOARD, 16X20”) Time Vertigo visualizes space-time simultaneously by mixing colors and geometric shapes. This painting is a deep envision of the “Gravity” drawing. Simplifying the minor details of a scene, happing in a known time and location (i.e., Paris), and bringing the other scenes happing simultaneously to the same location are the key insights of the painting. The six characters in the painting are basically representatives of the two main dancers, in three captures of time, past, present, and future, but all happening concurrently.

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DREAM (CHARCOAL, 12X18”)

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THE UNION HARMONY (OIL ON CANVAS 36X36�)

The Union Harmony shows the beauty of world, made up of elements such as a goldfish, a symbol of life, Eyes, the gateways into the soul, Lotus, the symbol of purity of the body and mind. All of them are connected through Music, a shared language of human regardless their races.

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DENNIS FRANK

Dennis is a senior undergraduate student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is primarily a musician who writes and records his own music.

THERE'S NO TIME (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER, 18X24�)

What is time? What is its nature? Where does it come from and where does it go? This piece explores several thematic concepts of the enigma of time. The main feature of the piece is the floating staff of a musical motif; music itself represents the art form that decorates time, and the motif itself is a from a song written by the artist that echos the refrain "there's no time". The direction of this staff also implies the curious existence of the "arrow of time", though the compositional balance of the rest of the piece challenges this idea. This balance is represented mainly by three elements that juxtapose the "before" and "after" concept of time: a body vs. skeleton, a fresh vs. rotting apple, and the light vs. dark compositional halves. Finally, a clock with no hands sits boldly in the center confronting the viewer to question what man-made time really even is.

Techniques: Body and skeleton drawings, shading, ribbons, composition

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JIAXIN LI

Jiaxin graduated in fall 2018 from Georgia Tech completing a M.S. in Environmental Engineering.

SHARON (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER, 18X24”) The girl in the painting named Sharon, and she is my best friend. I draw this painting from a photograph.

We went for a trip to Green Mountain together this semester. She was having a hard time and did not know what to do with her future, that’s why I draw her into negative space, to show the uncertain and unclear future. I want to tell that it is okay to have down days and tough times and I hope she could open herself to the future soon.

Technique:

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Negative space: I use negative space to show her outline. With the absence of her image, people could picture her in their mind. People could have different stories to tell when they look at this painting.

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Vanishing point: One-point perspective could help draw the bridge upon a flat paper. This makes the drawing look three-dimensional and realistic.

XIAOYU LI

Xiaoyu graduated in fall 2018 from Georgia Tech completing a M.S. in Environmental Engineering.

INNER MONGOLIA (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER, 18X24”) The drawing is inspired by the photo I took in Mongolia. I was in a desert with my friends. At that moment, I felt the greatness of the nature and I was so small and lonely. I used the “one point perspective” to construct this drawing. And I did a lot of shading in this work.

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ASHISH GUPTA

Ashish is a PhD student in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on procedural modeling of large and complex microstructures of 3D-printing objects.

THE GREAT FILTER (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER) The “Great Filter” is a hypothesized catastrophic event that stops the evolution of simple life forms into advance space travelling species. What if our “great filter” is our mind? The sketch depicts, a human mind acting like a black hole, curving the space-time around it, and not letting the information escape. And we like Pinocchio, have only lies to tell, without ever knowing the reality.

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LIVING ROOM (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER)

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RANJITA PAI KASTURI

Ranjita is currently a 2nd year PhD student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on cyber security, in particular binary analysis and cloud/website level attack investigation.

IT'S RAINING BOOKS (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER) This work takes inspiration from magic shows and my love for reading. Back in the 90s, when I had restricted TV time, books were my only best friends. During the restricted TV hours, I especially enjoyed watching magic shows was mesmerized by the levitating person act. The levitating girl represents the wonderland a good book can take you to. The flying books illustrate that there is so much to learn, and there’s only so much you can do in a lifetime. Grab a flying book and learn as much as you can, because books are an outcome of someone’s best work.

The work is drawn in pencil (HB, 2B and 4B) and uses rolled paper for shadow effect. The white space is chosen to illustrate infinite possibilities of setting one’s mind free. In particular, immersing myself in a book enables me to think beyond the constraints of my brain. This work is an outcome of going through the rigors of complex math while associating the same effort to art, and understanding how mastry comes with patience and time.

Overall this piece attempts to illustrate the wonders of deep work. Deeply engaging in any Activity such as math, art, or reading, not only brings depth of knowledge, but also frees the brain from its internal constraints, and brings joy similar to that experienced by a child watching a magic act.

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TIANHUI ZHAO

Tianhui is a Master's student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She will graduate in spring of 2019.

THE LOVE OF MOUNTAIN HUA Inspiration and Story: This drawing shows the moment when my parents climbed to the very top of Mountain Hua, which has been named one of the most dangerous hikes in the world. The put their hands into "OK" gesture just under the sunset and took this beautiful photo for me. I am very proud of their courage to challenge themselves since both of them are almost 50 years old, and very happy to share the beautiful love between them to other people.

Technique: I used the "1 point perspective" technique to construct the frame of the whole drawing as "the sun" being the exact "vanishing point." Also, I used the "contour hatching" technique to define the entire drawing's shadowing. To do the two hands, I followed the contours of their gestures. To draw the mountains and sky, the hatch lines go along the curves of the nature.

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JOONHO KIM

Joonho graduated in fall 2018 from Georgia Tech completing a M.S. in Computer Sciences with specialization in Computer Graphics.

DANCER I am a graduate student in computer science with little practical art background yet a growing interest in displaying my childhood imagination. I have always been fascinated by human form, the interlacing between technology and nature, and the adolescent imagination of the romantic world.

These materialize in my (day-)dreams and surface a suppressed desire to explore expression and fantasy amidst the droning of reality.

The works I am presenting are a product of practice, study, and exploration of the basics of art throughout this Fall semester. One displays form. This was a study of detail and shadow using the grid method. I chose this dancer because of their expertise in expressing emotion through challenging (yet elegant) poses. The other displays imagination. This is a version of Ikuno Station in Japan. I’ve always been fascinated by these rural train stations because it preserves the primitives of nature with the integration of technology. More so, it embodies the idea of secluded tradition and knowledge of a small village and the gateway to the knowledge of the futuristic world.

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IKUNO STATION

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KELSEY KURZEJA Kelsey is a PhD student advised by Jarek Rossignac in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on computer sciences with a specialization in graphics and geometry.

SHAPE OF A UNIVERSE I (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER) I was inspired to draw this to make sense of the universe described in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” The narrator in Borges’s story describes their universe as a seemingly infinite stretch of hexagonal rooms, forming a library that contains all possible permutations of books with 410 pages, each with 40 lines composed from 25 characters. Each room has four walls of bookshelves and two walls with a door to a neighboring room. The library is described as having a symmetry such that any room seems to be the center of the universe. The number of books must be finite if there are no repetitions, but the library cannot have an edge without breaking its symmetry, so, it is believed that the library must be periodic.

Such a periodic universe is often depicted as existing on the surface of a torus (or hypertorus). I adopted the torus model. However, the library is so large that a view this torus would appear as either a flat plane or a cylinder stretching infinitely. I chose to solve this problem by warping the cylindrical view to appear more like a torus by distorting “the point at infinity” to lie closer to the viewer and by shrinking the geometry of the universe as it approaches the new point at infinity.

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SHAPE OF A UNIVERSE II (DIGITAL ART)

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INSTRUCTORS FRANCESCO FEDELE EMILY VICKERS

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FRANCESCO FEDELE, PH.D.

Dr. Francesco Fedele is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. He joined the faculty in 2007.

His scholarly research spans Nonlinear Wave Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Probability and Random Fields, Computer Vision, Geotechnical and Structural Engineering. Dr. Fedele contributed significantly on the physical understanding and prediction of rogue waves. His research appeared in prestigious journals: Scientific Reports-Nature, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Fluid Mechanics among others. Fedele’s research had an impact in ocean and naval engineering. NOAA has implemented his stochastic model for spacetime extremes in their operational forecast wave model. Fedele has also supported the National Transportation Safety Board into the investigation of the 2015 sinking of the El Faro cargo ship. He received the OMAE 2011 Best Paper Award and the Class of 1934 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award.

In 2017, he has been invited as a speaker at the G7 High-Level Meeting on Maritime Security. Dr. Fedele has started drawing and painting in Fall 2016 inspired by the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso.

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LINDSEY

2016

(16×20″ ACRYLIC ON CANVAS) PRIVATE COLLECTION

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LOVERS

2017

(18×24″ ACRYLIC AND INK ON PAPER) Artwork selected for the 1st Faculty & Staff art exhibit at Georgia Tech in Fall 2017.

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CONFUSED

2017

(16×20″ ACRYLIC ON CANVAS) Artwork selected for the 2nd Faculty & Staff art exhibit at Georgia Tech in Fall 2018.

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ROGUE WAVES NO. 1, WHEN THE OCEAN PLAYS DICE WITH THE BLINDFOLDED GODDESS FORTUNA 2018 (GRAPHITE PENCIL ON PAPER) Dr. Fedele’s research focuses on understanding the dynamics of rogue waves, waves that can develop seemingly out of nowhere at the open ocean to sink ships and overwhelm oil platforms with walls of water as much as 25 meters high. Rogue waves have been observed in oceans around the world as the famous Draupner, Andrea and Killard waves. They typically last only 20 seconds or so before disappearing. The formation of a rogue wave is simply chance: the rare combination of waves in what turns out to be a bad place and time for ships or oil platforms: “It is just the ocean that plays dice with the blindfolded Goddess Fortuna". At the open ocean waves from many directions can arrive. In rare conditions, those waves arrive in an organized way or almost in phase, leading to an unusual case of constructive interference that can double the height of the resulting wave. Larger heights are attained by accounting for the effects due to the nonlinear nature of the waves, which are not sinusoidal – but instead have rounded troughs, along with sharp peaks that result from the water being pushed upward against the pull of gravity.

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LINES, FORMS AND EMOTIONS

2017

(18×24″ CHARCOAL ON PAPER) Artwork selected for the 2nd Faculty & Staff art exhibit at Georgia Tech in Fall 2018.

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LADY WITH RED HAT

2019

(ACRYLIC ON CANVAS)

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OCEAN WAVES

2019

(16×20″ ACRYLIC ON CANVAS)

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A VASE OF RED ROSES 2019 (16×20″ OIL PASTELS)

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EMILY VICKERS

Emily Vickers is a professional artist located in Roswell, Georgia. She was born in Georgia in 1984 and first began her interest in art in 1996. Since then she has studied art in Bayeaux, France and has fallen in love with mixed media. She is inspired by stories, color, motion and exploring new materials.

CREATEDBYEMILY.COM

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LUMINEERS

2017

(4Ă—6' ACRYLIC ON CANVAS) This is a substantial painting of the send-off of paper lanterns (lumineers) into the night. For many people and cultures, the paper lantern send-off can be celebratory or akin to expressing sorrow. I often find it interesting how important ceremony can be to people, how collectively performing an act can give us a sense of community and connection. I once heard a quote that, when I was younger, seemed silly, but now I begin to feel is more and more true: funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living. As intelligent and sophisticated as we have become, ceremony remains important in terms of being able to grasp life events.

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AUTUMN RAIN

2015

(40×30″ ACRYLIC AND WASH ON CANVAS) This painting captures the coming and going of autumn. The leaves change color, it rains, and it seems as though all those changes sink into our bones.

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THE SWINGING GIRL

2013

(24×28″ NEWSPAPER, PEN AND INK) I made this piece on my sleepless night. I’m not calling it a self-portrait, but it is me as a little girl. The tree isn’t a perfect replicate of the one I grew up with– that tree was huge.

I just remember the wind, the enormous oak tree our swings hung from and kicking up my toes to the sky. In many ways this piece is a distorted memory. It was fun to be a little girl again when I painted this.

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THE MUSE

2018

(24×30″ MIXED MEDIA)

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SEEKING SOLITUDE

2018

(36X36″ MIXED MEDIA)

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References Albert Einstein (1905) "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) ", Annalen der Physik 17: 891; Einstein, Albert (1915), "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation", (The Fields Equations of Gravitations) Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: 844–847 Arthur J. Miller 2001 Einstein, Picasso, Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. Perseus Books Group Poincare’, Henri (1902) La Science et l'Hypothèse, Paris, Ernest Flammarion Edituer Kai Lin Art Gallery | kailinart.com Francesco Fedele, associate professor | ce.gatech.edu/francesco-fedele Office of Arts at Georgia Tech | arts.gatech.edu Artist Emily Vickers | createdbyemily.com

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Acknowledgments FF acknowledges the support of the Office of Arts at Georgia Tech, the owner and director Yu-Kai Lin of the Kai Lin Art Gallery and the director of events Robie Duchateau. FF and EV also acknowledge the professional support of Joshua Stewart in assembling the manuscript.

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

– Albert Einstein

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“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”

– Albert Einstein

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist” – Pablo Picasso