MICHEL TOMBROFF

Zéro Dièse Existe.
Art, Mathématiques, Inesthétique

Saturday Feb 17 from 5pm
Book signing & Talk

Michel Tombroff publishes an essay entitled Zéro dièse existe / Art, mathématiques, inesthétique (Éditions Mimésis, Collection Philosophie). The book is in french.

Art and mathematics have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, as illustrated by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Béla Bartók, Bernar Venet, Roman Opalka, Manfred Mohr, Ryoji Ikeda, Hollis Frampton, Shigeru Onishi and many others. Since the 1960s, however, this relationship has begun to weaken, and a certain distance has appeared between these two spheres of creativity. Tombroff takes us on a journey to discover the reasons for this bifurcation between art and mathematics in the postmodern era and identifies a prime suspect: infinity. For this investigation, he draws on the work of philosopher Alain Badiou, in particular on the concept of inaesthetics, a novel approach that challenges the conventional notion of aesthetics that Badiou introduced to account for the specific yet universal nature of art’s truths.

Michel Tombroff (b. 1964) is a visual artist who lives and works in Brussels. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and in theoretical computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His artistic research explores the links between questions of formalization, subjectivity and aesthetics in art, mathematics and philosophy. Tombroff.com