Art and Science

ArtSci - ISSN 2515-8767 - © ISTE Ltd

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In Fleming’s works, is James Bond an office-and-casino superhero, or an islander whose horizons extend beyond the British isles? He moves from domesticated settings to favourable coastal areas, encountering dangerous gardens, within a narrative space with an archipelagic character where naturalisation is a recurring theme. He finds himself travelling on several occasions to Jamaica, his creator’s favourite destination, just as he visits various fictional yet plausible islands, populating using lists of tropical species. He himself is regularly compared to a predatory animal, and his relationship with nature, which evolves in line with the narrative twists, is characterised by both usefulness and respect. His antagonists, who are frequently depicted as animals and who often dominate the natural world only to meet their end there, stand in contrast to his female allies, almost all of whom are associated with species of flowers. But nature also serves to bring the story’s world to life for the reader, as well as providing narrative devices or alternative weapons, and if this nature is outdated or carefully chosen, the stories give the impression of carrying an environmentalist subtext.

Cephalopods in general, and large specimens in particular, have held a prominent place in the human imagination since ancient times; there are countless sailors’ tales describing terrifying monsters capable of sinking a ship. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in these often fantastical accounts, especially as the animals in question generally live at great depths and, for very long periods, only specimens that washed ashore, often in poor condition, were studied. It is therefore not surprising that literature and cinema have seized upon these spectacular creatures. Even today, these deep-sea animals remain relatively little known.

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in its strongest sense. While they exhibit genuine capability in the domain of combinatorial creativity, they are significantly bounded in exploratory creativity, and fundamentally incapable of transformational creativity. The paper further argues that the most important limitation of current AI systems is not the absence of novelty per se, but the absence of any mechanism for serendipity, accident, or the unexpected — all of which play a central role in the phenomenology of creativity — and the absence of any subject position from which to recognize and welcome such chance events. The paper concludes by proposing a model of human-AI creative collaboration that is both realistic and generative, illustrated by several concrete experiments. The paper is itself a demonstration of the thesis it advances: it was composed through a deliberate human-AI collaborative process, which is described in the methodological note that opens it.

The French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 – 1905) used real European butterfly models with vivid eyespots to depict the wings of mythological figures such as Zephyr, Flora, Eros, and Psyche in his paintings. Here we analyze these works of art, identify the butterfly species depicted, and discuss the potential symbolic meanings behind these paintings.

The mirror’s history, spanning thousands of years, has led people to view it as an aesthetic object, an optical instrument, a source of knowledge or illusion, and even a metaphor for the soul. The first part of this article explores the various manifestations of mirror consciousness, as it appears in certain animals and in the foundational myth of Narcissus. The following section discusses the technical evolution of mirrors, the diversity of their uses, and the ways in which artists have begun to appropriate them. Next, the article addresses the spiritual dimension of the mirror, followed by its persistent presence in contemporary art, where it reflects the uncertainties and fragmentations associated with postmodernity. Stepping through the mirror (in the wake of literary adventures such as Alice’s) thus proves to be an endeavor as desirable as it is perilous. And while nowadays, the deep universe reveals itself more and more to giant telescopes, the question of infinity raised by the mirror continues to resurface, in contemporary art as well as in philosophy and literature.