Maitreya
Our idea of system, along with our broadest grasp of ourselves and the universe, is inseparable from our conception of a motor: something that contains its own power source, hot and cold poles, circulation and reservoirs. (1) Steam-engines, which poetically framed a coming world, taught from their onset that disorder grows alongside force; that every conversion is inefficient, spilling heat beyond itself to be cosmically hoarded until it turns the universe tepid and inert. (2) This heat-death – an apocalyptic theme of nineteenth century science – also whispered the irreversibility of time; of our inability to rewind the being of the universe because inescapable random heat would efface its structure as we retrieved it.
Let it not be said that this is an arcane technological matter: the entire symphonic genre from Beethoven to Bruckner explores nothing but temporary stabilities, fluid bridges and self-couplings across this newly sensed and deeply dissipative time. (3) Dvorak’s love of steam engines is more totemic than quaint and Xenakis would conclude that thermodynamics could have been deduced entirely from nineteenth century musical phenomena. (4)
Literature diligently responded to the cosmic rule of hot and cold. George Eliot and Zola dispersed the epic into life-cycles: plots became vortices swept upstream by new reservoirs and downstream by their own loss and turbulence. Proust, as surely as Bergson or Heidegger, showed that a temporary truce with ongoing extinction had replaced our confident ability to say ‘I’. (5)
Before Turing and Von Neumann (6) turned the great boilers into memory stores, the furnaces into cathodes and the valves into relays choked in noise instead of heat, it was Klee who showed the inevitability of this shift.
Paul Klee in his studio
His Bauhaus notebooks discover the concept of information; that a picture is structured entirely by the number of questions we may ask about it and that the best artists are the most enduring questioners. (7) Klee spoke of energies, signs, forces and meanings equally as befits somebody pragmatically meshing heat to noise and work to signal before science could begin to articulate this. The devil’s pact of the nineteenth century was to use local disorder to pre-empt total disorder – the thermostat was as much Cézanne’s and Van Gogh’s resource as Freud’s. Klee remoulded this technique of distortion into its radical premises, seeking the black box that would allow him to coax a temporary language out of the shimmering background of unknowns and noise.
Karel Nel is always at his most powerful when confronting the black box. (8) His precise personality thrives on noise, loss, dissipation and the archipelagos leave in their wake. His first exhibited work was the grainy frottage of an obliterated word on a British railway platform.
Karel Nel, Chitta (Mind the step)
He sunk coloured geometric constructions into hazy layers of crude paper made on his floor. He generalised such lessons in ambitious works whose sole stimulus was optic noise found behind shut eyelids and pressed eyeballs.
Karel Nel, Saw B State
He explored dark immediacy with the inventiveness of an addict. He maps invisibility, vibrations, rapports beyond number, instantaneous discharges and infinities – a harrowing disorientation of an eye in purely aural space, passing silently beyond the certainties of his peers.
It is obvious, if unremarked, that Nel became himself by exploring the great border between the consuming world of fire and its successor – the cold fire of intelligence. This manifest in evanescent forms borne on gusts of disorder and infinite mountains depolarised into lightning and sense. Nel translates Shannon, the founder of information theory (9), as precisely as Turner, translates Sadi-Carnot (10), the founder of thermodynamics.
Karel Nel, mural sketch, Phaedries, San du Plessis Theatre, Bloemfontein
It is not surprising that an artist this skilled in the drama of signal and noise should appeal to cognitive and perceptual scientists deciphering the shimmers of eidetic structure. Physicists – the virtuosos of knowledge captured at the extremes of cosmically hot or cold, unimaginably large or small – were also drawn to his fruitful journeys through the wall of noise.
Red Latent Light
It is possible that Nel’s varied scientific interlocutors glimpse in him the traditional virtues of geometry, calculus or group-theory – all grappling hooks for scaling the void. Nel’s work is a kind of scientific memento-moré, marking the only real drama in science: to wrench a confirmation of knowledge momentarily from the jaws of noise. Perhaps future sensibility will see Nel alongside Xenakis, Alexander and Wolfram – creators of a contemporary ethno-mathematics; of the rich bodily and perceptual heuristics from which fleeting experiences of order might emerge. (11)
Blueprint Table House
It seems remarkable that this young sculptor, entranced by folk art, Buddhism, Duchamp and Klee, should emerge as a poet and chronicler of several sciences. This harmony is incomprehensible only to those who deny that the twentieth century was the great coda of the nineteenth. The nineteenth century will one day seem the absolute consolidation of history and present, near and far, esoteric and banal – the replacement of the encyclopaedia with the vast heterogeneity of the museum, of Diderot with Ruskin and of Kant with Nietzsche. This unification of the diverse – whether metaphysical in Hegel or spectacularly personal in Mahler – was an exploration of an utterly general system, traced first in the dynamics of heat. (12)
The commitment to this shared system was the profound bond between the last two centuries as both parsed the broadest resonances across knowledge and experience in the same form. Only scale distinguishes the framework of the steam engine from that of the computer. In every other respect Carnot and Shannon, Gibbs and Renyi will be identical to posterity. (13)
Bowl of Isles
Living inside a model that began by speaking of the death of the cosmos and ended by talking of the birth of meaning, it is not surprising that Nel should have his Oceanic currencies and Tizio lamps where Turner once had his wooden ships and iron locomotives: Turner’s hot furnaces matching Nel’s cold metaphysical fires; Turner’s oceans anticipating Nel’s skies of dust. The great pivot of Gauguin stands between them, never sure of whether he was voyaging in space or in style.
Transitional Figure Dreaming
Nel’s recent work presents an intuition of order in formats too vast, unexpected or hidden to grasp. It is not surprising that this habitual traveller between islands should contemplate paths in vast spaces. His notebooks are filled with delicate, acutely observed scrolls of his journeys. Something of the concern with vast orientation is dramatised by disorientingly large, granular and directionless surfaces.
Places without names 2
His moves across such ensnaring terrains of dust, shards, shreds or stains by means of sequences of small, wholly intuitive connections. His place-making in a void is free of all reliance on precedent, apart from some greatly amplified details of his earlier images. It possesses a threatening archaism, characteristic of departures which lack obvious echoes in the canon. Here Nel recalls the protagonist of Antonioni’s Blow Up (14), wonderfully detached yet driven to see something existing in the photograph which eludes experience. Both are living out perplexity while improvising channels in the vortex of noise, grain and dust.
Circuit
In this decade, Nel is not dealing with blindness but with the forces that blind. His deeply interlocking axonometrics, potential images and interchange patterns give way to anisotropic surfaces, (15) phantoms resurrected from behind the picture plane and vast origamis of coal, salt or slurry. Nel has abandoned the Kandinskian playground of blindsight (16) for the overwhelming task of presenting the darkness itself.
He has acted out a conversation with space in which the surprisingly, impulsive mark of information seems to occur without destroying or muting earlier layers of gesture. These works from the Status of Dust onward are perhaps the purest expression yet of the idea that form or meaning – in this case they are the same – arise as detours around noise and interference. Yet nothing really prepares the spectator for these exact imprints of shaped noise – more intimate than any darkness – or for their proposition that the cosmic grain is the same – whether sparking in closed eyes, crackling in the ears or fluctuating in the spectra of glowing cosmic dust.
The 2 Square Degrees project possesses a pre-established harmony with Nel. Its battles with statistical circumscription, endless diffraction and loss, extreme faintness and inevitable grain seem like a fictional Thomas Pynchon reprise, dramatising all attempted by Nel since Status of Dust. (17) The astronomer and the artist find themselves strangely aligned in trying to stare down darkness, equipped only with the rudimentary manipulations of signal granted to both. The real mystery is how a single photon in the eye unfolds into a distant rim of the cosmos in one case, and a luminous wash of salt in the other.
the brilliance of darkness
Nel’s work within the exotic cartography of this project is not to re-render what computers, lenses and photodiodes alone can see. The numinousness of these visions of ultimate distance could not survive retelling in any art. It depends on the drama of actual photons and other radiations from often extinct stars, making a single actual journey to earth to intersect with their proxy observer namely a photovoltaic plate. The actual, causal transcription of these immense gossamers takes place in two darknesses: in the night – in the invisibility of x-ray or radio detectors – and in the impenetrable technical darkness of exchanges between photodiodes and software codes. Nel’s work with this project is not a vision of the sky but an internal map of the flows of information, conjecture and processing that make up the most artificial object of all: nature rendered loquacious in the laboratory.
Cosmology is driven by the most pressing agenda of physics. It reconciles relativity-derived theories of the macro scale with the quantum conceptions of the unimaginably small or brief from which the universe escaped or arose. The poles of this unified theory – which cosmology either refutes of confirms with each of its chapters – are without common measure in everyday experience. The evidence which astronomers collect is shaped by the best current restatement of many theories. Their tools are not human sensory prostheses as much as theories materialized in geometry, chemistry or programming codes. It is quite likely that the object of astronomy can no longer be understood on the model of experience. Instead it is an exotic derivative of the concepts and apparatus used to glean stochastic pattern from a tornado of noise.
Karel Nel at Subaru Observatory
Nel closes the cycle between Faraday’s, Maxwell’s and Turner’s fiery cosmos and its reincarnation (18) as the most delicate of signals in a channel endlessly retrieved from noise. Nel shows us a cosmos which is not an underlying order but a slim agenda in the passages travelled between disparate spaces, orders of being and times. It is a universe, not of the observer, but of the traveller, the bridge-maker or the translator.
There is really no difference between Nel’s voyaging to islands as a scholar and curator and the frames he builds around the illegible answers murmured by the stars. Both require radical translation, immense tact, the ability to hold patterns in abeyance and an unyielding suspension of judgement. Perhaps all knowledge is undergoing a change from a world that can be captured to one which can only be questioned in passing and intermittently listened to. The encyclopaedia gives way to the travel diary. In turn, knowledge becomes less interrogation than request, closer to prayer or gambling than to annexure.
Nel’s responses to the 2 Square Degrees project are different sections sliced into its socio-technical machine. He has given us an image, not of experience beyond construction, but of a knowledge unthinkable except as a construction. The result is less of a cosmic image than a blueprint of the deft transformations and artifice needed to make reliable knowledge in a noisy, dissipative universe drawn on the arrow of time. The great lesson of 2 Square Degrees is that the world in which we live is not the same as the world in which we enquire. Nel’s great lesson is that there is no difference between artefacts of knowledge and their counterparts in galleries and museums. Each are tools of world-making, probing along paths for which there is no easy measure. These worlds are available to feeling or to knowing by simple changes in form – not content. Nel’s profound skill is to make forms and gestures in which the emotions begin to function cognitively, making intimate paths through fact by simply altering the tools of science or culture; making the black box work, for a moment, in reverse.
lost light
Nel has throughout his work acknowledged the vast ocean of unknown things surrounding all of us. He has given us the tools of orientation without which no experience, no self and no identity can exist in an uncircumscribable world. Today, these are not maps, diagrammes, talismans, mental spaces, ideologies, worldviews, beliefs or certitudes as they appeared from afar in past human experience. Today, orientation is a way of talking to the void and listening to noise; of taking up a skilled and corrigible stance in order to put questions to the unknown of which we never get answers but only the unexpected liberty to ask again.
In past ages, Nel would have been a seer like Blake – a questioner in excess of society’s answers. Perhaps Nel is today our most profound listener. He overhears us drifting in the common grain of the universe, identical with animals, plants and crystals. He portrays us as unsolicited islands that are formed by the grace of circumstance, endlessly converting chance into necessity only to lose it all again in death. Nel reminds us we are blind swimmers, creatures of an endless night, listening with our eyes.
Dr. Jean-Pierre de la Porte
House of Pleasure
FOOTNOTES
(1) Three notions of system succeeded each other in western thought. The first, formulated by Plato, is geometric and marginalises contingency as a source of disorder. Its second notion is physical, associated with the planetary systems of Galileo and Newton, and includes time as a basic condition of its operation but nevertheless a reversible time as the system may imaginably run backwards. The third, developed in 1824 by Nicolas Sadi-Carnot in Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, presents the cycle of energy in steam engines. This last model proves that part of all converted energy is lost in an irrecoverable way as heat. The still prevalent notion of a thermodynamic system shows that any order achieved over time – the structured universe, living organisms, language and artefacts – is ultimately always at the cost of a greater and ever growing disorder in its host energy system.
(2) Thermodynamics rapidly became the common foundation of nineteenth century physics, chemistry, biology, astrophysics and cosmology. It made the concept of time both central to all processes as well corrosive – an irreversible succession of small orderings attained at the cost of larger dis-orderings. The statistical nature of all changes in energy under thermodynamics meant that the refined grain of the Newtonian calculus was abandoned and in its place arose systems with probable states, with increasing entropy as their long-term outcome. The universe leaps from a Newtonian clock to an inscrutable casino in which the house-odds inevitably stockpile noise, preparing a deluge of useless energy that will submerge everything in eternal disorder. The Newtonian fantasy of a time-machine dissolves in Sadi-Carnot’s universe, in which reversed time would corrode the very reality which it tried to recreate. Hence, time becomes a devouring entropic ribbon, forever blighting order in its wake and corroding twice as fast if folded back along its own path.
(3) Of all the nineteenth century arts, music responds most readily to the emerging thermodynamic conception of form and process. Eighteenth century music, in the classical style of Haydn, has symmetrical phrase and tonal structures, which would be identical if experienced forward in time or backward. It therefore belongs in the Newtonian universe of systems which remain identical under reversed time descriptions. The modal music preceding Galileo is similarly tied to the initial Platonic, geometrical system of interval structures which were established outside time and remain impervious to dynamic relations such as of modulation.
(4) The romantic symphonic tradition becomes either a literal laboratory to discover and test forms that are unstable but legible under dynamic conditions. This is established in the conservative tradition from Schubert to Brahms. Alternatively is becomes a figurative trek through the dramatic post-Sadi-Carnot world of forms dissipated by time, exemplified from Beethoven to Bruckner. Music is the first communicative structure to raise and solve the problem of growing disorder, or entropy, within a process. Modulation and local symmetry become the strategies to overcome loss of meaning in its growing density. In this manner, nineteenth century music anticipates the later concept of redundancy exemplified in the theory of codes developed by information theorist Claude Shannon.
(5) Henri Bergson was the first philosopher to confront the consequences of the irreversibility of time spelled out by thermodynamics. Marcel Proust would explore the same hypothesis as Bergson by dramatising the plight of personal continuity in a world in which time accumulates formlessly, even within memory itself. Martin Heidegger would dramatise this enquiry by making humans’ access to themselves a consequence of the corrosions of time, like death and anxiety of uncertainty.
(6) Alan Turing and John von Neumann were, after Charles Babbage, the greatest exponents of thinking-machines, which had to process information in a post-Sadi-Carnot universe in which all form, including that of information, is eroded and undermined by the very processes of its genesis. The concept of information would become the practical core of many disciplines but would remain slow to receive a complete scientific formulation. When it did, Claude Shannon, amongst others, modelled it on the analogy of thermodynamics, which by the late nineteenth century had become a statistical model in the hands the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Computation – as an error-free relation between input and output – required a warrant against error in the form of transcription. Logic would provide such a warrant and would only later be recognised as effective because over-coded by the redundancies of the truth-table. Logic would therefore become a universal description of any conceivable mechanism, although probabilistically rather than casually. In this way logic becomes a model of perfect-transfer of meaning – the opposite of the imperfect transfers of energy that gave rise to the insights of nineteenth century thermodynamics. Logic would therefore become the opposite of entropy, or of energy leakage from a system entitled negentropy. Information would thus be modelled on entropy but with its sign reversed. Both systems were statistical by the time their formulation as mirror-images occurred in the twentieth century. Information would be buffered against noise if redundancy, or the ability to anticipate a signal-state, increased. Perfect information would require absolute redundancy, or an entire universe coding a universe, or a map as big as the territory it maps. In every respect, the information-machine becomes a version of the steam-engine since both realise a theory of identical form, albeit an opposite tendency. Reversed, the steam-engine would condense information just as the computer reversed would become an engineered motor with heat-loss. Freud recognised intuitively this overlap his Project Document of the 1890s but his inadequate physics prevented an adequate formulation. However, the memory-motive structure captures the essential relation, stating that the movement of energy in one direction yields consciousness and ordered action. In the other direction, the same energy yields dreams, hallucinations and noise. In both cases an identical system of inscriptions (memory) and energies (motives) arbitrate the direction of flow. As an unconscious, the steam-engine yields the computer as a mind.
(7) An influential, intuitive measure of information is to count the number of questions needed to identify or describe any given reality, similar to a cosmic game of twenty questions. This would eventually become an algorithmic information and complexity measure as the number of lines of programming-code needed to produce a given output. Paul Klee’s teaching at the influential Bauhaus revolved around an inventive series of graded questions which informed practical exercises as well as his own picture production. Working in the era between the sophisticated thermodynamics of Boltzmann and it redeployment as information-theory by Shannon, Klee dramatises the brief moment when thermally-eroded form and fully encoded meaning inhabit a common microcosm. See Kittler, F. Gramophone/Film/Typewriter, also Klee, The Thinking Eye.
(8) The Black Box describes a situation in scientific enquiry in which only the inputs and the outputs of a system are accessible, however with the intervening mechanisms remaining inscrutable, lost or unknown. The twentieth century would increasingly see its assumptions becoming Black Boxes as complexity-theory showed the intervening variables of physical systems to be too complex to calculate. Eventually, mathematics would become a Black Box with the experimental proofs of Gregory Chaitin and Steven Wolfram. Impenetrable realities, such as sub-atomic structure, would by the mid-twentieth century be confidently treated as Black Boxes in which symmetry, acting as a code, would yield inferences about deep-particle structure.
(9) Shannon, the founder of the mathematical theory of communication (also known as information-theory) states the conditions under which information may be preserved and retrieved by means of appropriate coding in a hostile universe that is permeated with distortion and noise.
(10) See footnote 1.
(11) Traditionally, ethno-mathematics studies the everyday customs and behaviour from which mathematical operations derive. Iannis Xenakis established the rapports between music traditions and basic logical operations. Christopher Alexander demonstrated that set-theory is embedded in architecture and decorative art whereas Wolfram proved that the continuity between cellular automata as computers and the repertory of ornament.
(12) On the surprising rapport between problems of nineteenth century philosophical logic and its contemporary symphonic tradition, see Theodore Adornos studies of Hegel and Beethoven, whose sociological context masks its role as a founding document of the history of information-theory.
(13) Sadi-Carnot and Shannon were the founders of thermodynamics and information-theory, whereas Joaiah Gibbs and Alfred Renyi were the codifiers of each of these disciplines.
(14) Michaelangelo Antonios’ film Blow Up famously concerns a photographer who unwittingly records a murder and is unable to establish a consensus around what he never personally saw but knew had happened.
(15) Between 1980 and 1990 Nel reproduces most of the diagrammatic tools of contemporary architecture, namely the axonometric (an artificial convention of superimposing plan and elevation to produce an apparent volume) the potential image (an illusion exploited by figure-ground ambiguity) and the interchange (an effect of viewing a line drawing of a solid on a 45 degree vertex). A treatise on modern architectural representation from le Corbusier to Hejduk lurks in these early works. These would give way to images which defy diagrammatic description like anisotropic planes in which an axis of symmetry can neither be located nor defined. These surfaces of the late 90s exchange place-making devices of modern architecture for the uncanny place-lessness of Nel’s images of dust and stars.
(16) Wassily Kandinsky explored the colour spectrum of after-images, as well as an entoptic generation of form – a fact downplayed during his subsequent absorption into post-war abstraction. Nel began working on entoptic imagery endogenous to the nervous system in the late 1970s, at the same time that the clinical phenomenon of blindsight – or the ability to practically see objects without being conscious of them – was explored by Nicholas Humphrey and others.
(17) Thomas Pynchon characteristically writes about people engaged in private Sisyphean tasks which correspond by chance to public activities such as V2 Rocket launches.
(18) The British physicists Michael Faraday and James Maxwell and the painter Joseph Turner elaborated a world in which cosmic heat was the motive power, culminating decades later in the theory of information. The isomorphic theory of information becomes dramatised and exemplified in Nel’s work, accounting for much of his intuitive appeal to scientists and his relative opacity in the art world.
Summary
Karel Nel is artist to the COSMOS 2 Square Degree Survey. It is the latest of his many collaborations with scientists. It is also the occasion to locate Nel in a tradition of mutual rapports between arts and sciences, made possible by thermodynamics and its offshoot, information theory.
Résumé
Karel Nel est l’artiste au COSMOS Enquête de 2Degré Carrée. C’est le dernier de beaucoup de ses collaborations avec les scientifiques. C’est aussi l’occasion pour trouver Nel dans une tradition de rapports réciproques entre les arts et les sciences, faites possible par la thermodynamique et son rejeton, la théorie d’information.
Select Bibliography
Michel Serres Origine du Langage in Hermes IV La Distribution Paris Minuit 1977
Michel Serres Turner traduit Carnot in Herrmes 111 La Traduction Paris Minuit 1974
Paul Klee Das Bildnerische Denken Basel Schwabe 1956
Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik. Fragmente und Texte, edited by Rolf Thielemann Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1993
Friedrich Kittler Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin Brinkmann & Bose1986
Steven Wolframs A New Kind of Science is available online at http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
The COSMOS 2 Degree project is online at
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S138764730500103X
Nels Brilliance of Darkness catalogue is online at
https://particle.phys.uvic.ca/~jalbert/KarelNelcatalogue08.pdf
Writings by Karel Nel
(2007) ‘Shangaan: in search of a genealogy’ in
Dungamanzi: stirring waters – Tsonga and Shangaan
art from Southern Africa, WUP and JAG: Johannesburg
pp. 148-167
(2007) ‘Vittorino Meneghelli: bold collector of the
unexpected’, in Meneghelli (V.) et. al. LA MIA VITA,
LA MIA COLLEZIONE/MY LIFE, MY COLLECTION,
memorie e pezzi selezionati dlla collezione di Vittorio
Meneghelli/ memoir and selected pieces from the
collection of Vittorio Meneghelli, Johannesburg.
pp. 268-275
with Von Maltitz, A. ‘Edoardo Villa: a life considered’
in Nel, Burroughs, Von Maltitz (eds) (2005) Villa at 90,
Jonathan Ball with Shelf: Johannesburg, pp. 25-120
‘Edoardo Villa: creating an African Presence’ in Nel,
Burroughs, Von Maltitz (eds) (2005) Villa at 90, Jonathan
Ball with Shelf: Johannesburg pp. 121-148
with Sack, M. ‘Villa, Johannesburg and the modernist
context’ in Nel, Burroughs, Von Maltitz Editions, (2002)
‘Southern Artifacts in the Horstmann Collection,’ in
The Power of Form. Milan: Skira, 2002, pp. 212-243
‘Towards a Southern African Aesthetic,’ in Ubuntu
catalogue. Paris: Musee de l’Homme and Museum
of African and Oceanic Art, 2002
‘Headrests and Hair Ornaments: Signifying More
Than Status,’ in Hair in African Art and Culture,
edited by Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman. New York:
Museum for African Art, 2000, pp. 151-159
with Nessa Liebhammer. ‘Swazi Umntfwana’ and
‘The Puzzle of the Pendant Figures’ in Evocations
of the Child: Fertility Figures of the Southern African
Region, edited by Elizabeth Dell. Cape Town:
Human and Rousseau/Johannesburg Art Gallery,
1998, pp. 161-171
Catalogue entries for southern African tobacco
pipes and snuff containers in Africa: The Art of a
Continent, edited by Tom Phillips. Munich: Prestel,
1995, pp. 211-215
Selected bibliography in Karel Nel
Nel, K. , J-P de la Porte , Jessica Dubow (et al) (2007) Lost light: fugitive images from
deep space, Standard Bank Gallery: Johannesburg
(exhibition catalogue)
Wullschlager, J. ‘Karel Nel at Art First,’ FT Magazine,
London 3 September 2005
McKenzie, J. (2004) ‘The Status of Dust’ in studio
international visual arts, Design and Architecture
Yearbook special issue, Vol. 203 no. 1026, The Studio
Trust: New York
Bunn, David. ‘Breath Alphabet: Karel Nel and
the History of Division,’ in Status of Dust. Art First,
New York 2002
Dubow, Jessica. ‘Status of Dust: A Profane Spirituality,
A Radical Materiality,’ in Status of Dust. Art First,
New York 2002
Cooper Stracey, Clare, and Karel Nel. Volcanic Texts.
Art First, London 2000
Martin, Marilyn. View of the Inner House. Art First,
London 1996
Doepel, Rory. Karel Nel: Transforming Symbols.
Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand
Resume Dr Jean-Pierre de la Porte teaches at the University of Pretoria Faculty of Boukunde. He opened Karel Nels 2007 Lost Light exhibition at the Standard Bank gallery and contributed to the catalogue
He has delivered several papers on aspects of Nels work and he is currently engaged in a book length study of the artist . His
Other interests include musical composition, heuristics in design and the history of mathematics and experimental science.
