Last modified: 2014-04-08
Abstract
The concepts of art engineering or engineer artists are apt concepts in that science and art nurture one another and that they act in parallel in some situations. The artist also benefits from several scientific disciplines in the process of art creation. Examples for art engineering include the works of Jan van Eyck and subsequent masters, who benefited from chemical engineering by using different mixtures of pigments and various oils in the creation of oil painting dating back to more than six hundreds years ago and Leonardo Da Vinci, who benefited from different fields of engineering such as mathematics and mechanics, which characterized the Renaissance. In parallel, the development of industry and technology brought about a variation in the materials and techniques that can be employed and put into use by artists. As different engineering branches emerged, new concepts were also included in the literature. The word Kinetics (Kinesis) which was originally used to define only movement-related phenomena in the branches of physics and chemistry came to be used in the field of arts and it was established in the art jargon when a Kinetic Art chronology was published in the year 1960. Kinetic Art is the branch of art that probably has the highest concentration of works demonstrating the concept of 'art engineering'. This paper will purport to analyze the way in which practitioners of Kinetic Art benefited from various engineering fields in the light of findings that this movement-based art was nurtured by several fields of engineering including mechanics, mathematics, electronics and even chemistry.