Cooperation News: art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke

The art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke supports the OPEN DOORS Education Centre (ODEC) in Swakopmund, Namibia from January 2024.
– an article by Susanne Päch & Volkan Sazli

What does a wavelet transformation have to do with this cooperation? A lot!

Background

In December 2023 we will be finished with the construction. In January 2024 is the opening.

The new OPEN DOORS Education Centre (ODEC) is currently in the completion phase of a building which will offer a kindergarten, preschool, and state-approved classes for the 1st to 3rd grade with 25 children each, starting from January 2024. ODEC also includes an IT centre, a Library, and a homework tutoring. Hot, nutritious school meals will be served twice a day. The facility will be available to children and young people free of charge and a minimum of 250 children and young people are expected to attend daily. Thanks to the support of the Foundation, the teaching staff will get additional support by an IT- teacher. This will firmly anchor the computer science course in the students’ curriculum. In addition, there will also be computer science courses for young people and adults who are interested. The primary target group of all offers is the residential area DRC (Democratic Resettlement Community), an informal settlement with around 40,000 inhabitants living in the most basic housing conditions.

The support of the art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke was made possible by donations, which the foundation realized with the big Tribute project realized together with 80 invited, world-renowned crypto and computer artists and Anika Meier 2022 – in honor of the late metaverse visionary and pioneer of digital Art, Herbert W. Franke. Founder of art meets science, Susanne Paech: “We are very pleased, that, in addition to other schools in Namibia, the tribute donations will now be used to support the educational center of the association Tangeni Shilongo Namibia. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the artists who made it possible for us to make this contribution to education in Namibia together with the Ruetgers Foundation.” The founder of the Tangeni Shilongo Namibia Association, Volkan Sazli, adds: “It was a wonderful twist of fate that just at the time we were looking for a sponsor for the employment of a computer science teacher, we came into contact with the Herbert W. Franke Foundation. In the spirit of the foundation, these classes will make it possible to teach our youth important IT- knowledge to grapple tasks of the future in the country.”

A brief recap:

Herbert W. Frank visiting Namibia: Here talking to a tour guide in Sossusvlei.

Herbert W. Franke, a theoretical physicist with a doctorate who did research in the field of electron optics, is considered a pioneer in bridging the gap between science and art. As early as at the beginning of the 1950s, he began experimenting with electronic light art, which was created with the help of machines. While at that time he was still creating his work with cameras, X-ray machines and microscopes, as well as an analog computer he had developed himself, he already recognized in his book “Art and Construction,” published in 1957, that the computer would be used in the future as an universal art machine. He himself began to create art with digital programs already in the late 1960s. Franke is thus one of the world’s pioneers of computer art. In 1960, the visionary in his second life, that of a writer, also established the German post-war science fiction, a genre of literature to which he attributed a high degree of educational potential. He was convinced

An oscillogram is a diagram in which oscillations are reproduced.

that also the writer has an important educational role to play by imparting knowledge about possible scenarios of the future. Even at that time, Franke advocated the combination of art and science, at the center of which, for Franke, was the computer and the digitalization of our world.

For him, imparting IT-knowledge was at the heart of modern education – a matter close to his heart, which the art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke will continue to support in the future. As a scientist, Franke not only worked on the development of an art model based on perception theory and information theory. He has made a significant contribution as a speleologist who, as a participant of major expeditions, was involved in many first discoveries of cave spaces under the earth. In the fifties, he developed the theoretical basis for the age determination of stalactites and based on this he published several scientific works about geochronology with the paleoclimate.