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    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana Runs Through the Land of Tao
    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana Runs Through the Land of Tao
    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana Runs Through the Land of Tao
    Ebook65 pages47 minutes

    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana Runs Through the Land of Tao

    By Jan Krikke

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    About this ebook

    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana runs through the land of Tao offers a new perspective on art and science in East and West. Starting in the 19th century, Western science and technology helped to modernize the East. Not widely known is that Far Eastern aesthetics played a crucial role in modernizing Western art and architecture. Traditional East Asia had many qualities we consider modern today. While East Asia failed to develop a natural science, it developed what we may call a natural aesthetic. The merger of Western science and Far Eastern aesthetics is a key driver of our emerging planetary culture. Digital Dragon shows why:

    • Culture plays a far greater role in historical development than we usually assume
    • East Asia rather than India replaces the West as the world's most influential region
    • Gottfried Leibniz claimed the Chinese first used the binary code in the I Ching
    • Chinese projection system "axonometry" is the key to understanding the Modernist Revolution
    • Developing robots with AI is the art and science of reconciling spirit and matter

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherProglen
    Release dateNov 28, 2017
    ISBN9786167817972
    Digital Dragon: The Road to Nirvana Runs Through the Land of Tao

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      Book preview

      Digital Dragon - Jan Krikke

      Introduction

      The National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is held every five years in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The stage is always dominated by the classic symbol of communism: the hammer and sickle. When Chinese leaders host foreign dignitaries for state visits or international gatherings, the backdrop is completely different. Rather than the hammer and sickle, we see a monumental view of a mountainous landscape partly shrouded by mist. In the middle of the landscape is a waterfall pouring water from the mountains into the river below.

      Like the hammer and sickle, the landscape is symbolic. In classic Chinese art, this image is known as a water-mountain picture. Water-mountain represents the Chinese view of Creation. Water is yin, mountain is yang. The ancient Chinese said: When the yin and the yang, initially united, separated forever, the mountains poured forth water. The mysterious something that governed the separation of yin and yang is symbolized by the dragon, that most Chinese of all Chinese symbols. Today, China combines a Western ideology and the rediscovery of its own ancient and unique world view to create a modern state.

      Growing up in the West, we have a basic knowledge of the broad contours of global history. Europe began its colonial march in the 16th century, launched the scientific revolution in the 17th century, and was the world’s political, scientific and cultural center of gravity for more than 400 years. The first tentative challenge to European leadership came in the second half of the 19th century, when Japan became the first independent country in the world to copy the Western approach to science, governance, law and education. Much of the rest of the world remained in the grip of colonialism and had to wait until the end of World War II to follow Japan’s example. What history usually doesn’t tell us is the other side of this story: while European science and technology helped Japan to modernize, Japanese art - based on the Chinese prototype - helped Europe to modernize its art and architecture and offered a potential model for the development of a machine aesthetic.

      In the 1850s, Japan began exporting to the West the quaint products of its traditional culture. It included delicate porcelain protected by unusual wrapping paper; colorful woodblock prints depicting daily life in 17th and 18th century Japan. The Japanese considered them as mere posters, rather than high art, which explains their use as wrapping paper. But in France, artists Manet, Monet and Renoir looking for an alternative for the traditional, optical style of European painting, became captivated by the Japanese prints. These prints could not be more different from Europe's photo-realistic style of painting developed during the Renaissance and perfected by classic masters like Da Vinci and Rembrandt.

      Traditional European optical was based on two pictorial techniques: clair-obscur, or chiaroscuro (the effect of light and shadow) and linear perspective. Under the influence of the Japanese print, the early modernists eliminated all traces of clair-obscur from their paintings. Their work, later referred to as Impressionism, became a tapestry of pure color. However, the early modernists did not recognize that the Japanese print artists used a Chinese alternative for linear perspective. It came to be known in the West as axonometry. In the history of art, only two cultures developed a pictorial projection system to depict a coherent pictorial space on the two-dimensional picture plane - Europe and China.

      In Part II we will see how European artists struggle to recognize the Chinese system. Understanding axonometry is understanding the birth of modern architecture.

      Another and most curious encounter between the East and the West sheds more light on how our modern world developed. In the 17th century, the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz invented the numerical binary code that came to be used in modern, digital computers. A few years after announcing his invention, Leibniz wrote another paper on the subject and wrote that the

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