Wonderful topic! A bit wide at first, which was a little confusing indeed,
but thanks very much for the clarifications.
First a little intro: As you might know, I first entered in to Yasmin actively in the Around Simulation discussion, which was closely related to my personal artistic research interests, where as this discussion is mostly related to how I go about doing my research attempting at successful collaborations...;). But it is also relevant to my other professional interests. For the last two years I am the main tutor of the Honours Program Art and Research in which I help guide 18 students (half are from different departments of the University of Amsterdam, and half from different departments of the Gerrit Rietveld art academy), in collaborative research projects. In these projects, collaboration itself is explored next to scientific methods and artistic methods in knowledge production. I am fascinated by art sci collaborations and am eager to learn and help think about how they best thrive and how for instance educational systems might aid in this.
Wonderful paper on ethics and curiosity Roger! Curiosity killed the cat...;)
Roger writes:
" It seems to me that many artists do not share all these values,..." [...] "I know that I am over-generalising here, but there is much discussion about the need for a "third culture' that somehow melds the scientific and the artistic ( or even E O Wilson's concept of conscilience). I often get very uncomfortable with these discussions, because it seems to me there are valuable differences between the goals, values and methods of
scientists and those of artists - and that often these implicit
cultural differences between artists and scientists are not made
explicit."
Yes, Roger you are generalizing artists a bit here... :) Scientists, as well as artists have these values as some scientists and artists do not, just like ordinary people ;).
In both science and art Awareness of what one is doing is key. A bit of
Common Sense, intuition. A good example of such an ethical moment is perhaps that of Joe Davis, who was recently
interviewed by Scientific American: http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_w03/davis_j_webarchive/davis_profile_sciam/jd.htm
"In the beginning scientists
were not comfortable talking to me," Davis recalls. "It took a while for
them to trust me with their secrets." That is probably a good thing, he
admits. "I still come up with ideas that are dangerous and don't realize
that they are dangerous. For example there is a 200-mer [a sequence of
200 amino acids] that folds into a highly geometric capsule. I had this
idea of creating Kepler's nested polyhedra [once thought to define the
planetary orbits] in these viral capsids." Fortunately, Davis ran the
idea
by one of his genetics mentors first. "He pointed out that I could
inadvertently
create a supervirus."
Successful collaboration depends
indeed on these geopolitical positions and the models and structures. What are the
visions, the aims and goals that are attempted, the knowledge that is sought out, be it
indeed Universal or Personal. And with art, I agree, it usually is personal, but that does not mean that there are no universal values in the personal (not that you are saying this). Actually, I'm not sure that the 'Universal' exists at all, other than in a sense of high probabilities. Where science often counters out the odd anomaly in a
graph of measurement results, as neglect-able, art is perhaps attracted
by the anomaly and what it might mean. It is the classic 'we see what we want to see, we find what we want to find'...An example of that might
be the story of Brandon Ballangee, if I remember it correctly, in which
he was invited to a pond that was studied by a biologist to seek out
frogs with mutations. The biologist was studying the pond for 10 years
and claimed he did not see any such mutations. Brandon brought in a
group of children, and together they spotted frogs with mutations within a short amount of time, like 30 mins...
Too often art science collaborations are based on concepts like: Oh, I generate pretty pictures, artists might like that, or the artist just wants to make use of a certain technology. Art is often brought in as a way to communicate to the public. But I do not think that these are the collaborations we are talking about. I think we are much more interested in knowledge production that comes from the combining of artistic and scientific methods in a methodology. Perhaps we may generalise that objectivity is the domain of science, and subjectivity the domain of the arts. It is when these two intertwine, that collaboration becomes interesting, perhaps even imperative. Think about consciousness studies and AI studies.
The true threshold, we need to overcome for successful collaboration, is of our understanding of the perspective we take to look at things. Here we might bring in educational systems as a possible contributor to success factors in collaborations. How can educational systems contribute to an awareness of the position we are in. Even if we are a 'thinking out of the box' type of people, how to think out of our own box? Conclusions we made from our experience in our program is that artists
and scientists use the same questions to start, but indeed the paths we
take to find answers are very different. The differences form gaps that are hard to overcome, even by just two years of academic education. So much so, that they become
different languages. By the time we are professionals it becomes extremely difficult to understand how methods can be merged. As you might know, Art and Sciences in the Netherlands are separate educations. Art education does not take place at University. So I might be talking only about a national problem. Key to successful collaboration is understanding where the other is coming from, understanding each others language, taking into account an assessment of our position. Or we keep talking in circles. Wha I am trying to say is, that in order to do that, it is productive to come into close encounter with each others methodologies. In order to collaborate, one might need to embark on a collaboration training camp! To find common ground, to formulate definitions and methods of communication...
Apart from that, being able to function in group dynamics is a whole other skill...
The 'third culture' of which you speak of Roger, why not let us use the highly
debated term and field of Artistic Research here? For me this is a field in which paradigms of science as well as art shift. People who are
working in this field are often hybrids who have emerged themselves in
the languages of the arts as well as the sciences. Only recently are educational systems accommodating such endeavours. In the field of Artistic Research, there is a split in which some see making good and well informed art is the main goal. But personally I see knowledge production as the main goal. Depending on what knowledge production is aimed for, this determines how important artistic methods are within the whole research methodologies.
When seeking out collaboration with artists, we need to make assessment of such skills in both parties, and this does not mean just because you appreciate art, or are an art collector, that one can work with, or understand artists... :) otherwise, it may be indeed a bumpy ride!
Just some thoughts.
PS an nice example might be the NWO project CO-OP's in which artists were paired with scientists, in a sense a complete failure, but very valuable in understanding where art sci collaborations falter...see this website and the publication: http://www.co-ops.nl/ sadly it is mostly in Dutch, but the publication has both English and Dutch.
PSS there is an international community in the making. SAR and JAR Society of Artistic Research and Journal of Artistic Research, and of course we all know Leonardo...
Jennifer Kanary
________________________________
From: roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu>
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Sent: Mon, May 17, 2010 11:32:46 PM
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Doing and Studying International Collaboration in the Sciences, Arts and the Humanities
Yasminers
For our collaboration topic, here is a underlying question: do artists
and scientists share
the same cultures of inquiry ? Sundar Sarukkai in his article
on Science and the Ethics of Curiosity which I have quoted several
times on yasmin:
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/sep252009/756.pdf
Points out that scientific curiosity is often framed within
the following ethos:
Intellectual Honesty, Integrity, Epistemic Communism
Organized skepticism,Dis-interestedness
Impersonality, Universality
It seems to me that many artists do not share all these values,
and that when artists and scientists seek to collaborate
these cultural difference can create friction, sometimes productive
sometimes not.
in my talks i like to insist that artistic curiosity is often;
non universal : a work can be loaded with meaning in one
context and meaningless in another. There is a large discussion
against "universals" in art. In science there is no concept of locally
meaningful science.
Impersonal: whereas scientists seek to remove the personality
of the scientist from their work, artists often seem to ground the
work in their embodied specificity.
Disinterested: basic scientists like to have an intellectual distance between
their work and the sponsor of their work (how succesful they are is another
matter)
Many artists work on commissions where indeed the work is intended to be
situated within the framing of the institution or sponsor that funds the work.
eg the Bilbau museum is inseparable as a building from the ethos of the
Guggenheim Foundation. ( but of course scientists working on applications
are sponsor contextualised)
I know that I am over-generalising here, but there is much discussion
about the need for a "third culture' that somehow melds the scientific
and the artistic ( or even E O Wilson's concept of conscilience). I often
get very uncomfortable with these discussions, because it seems to me
there are valuable differences between the goals, values and methods
of scientists
and those of artists - and that often these implicit cultural
differences between
artists and scientists are not made explicit.
There is a large literature in the business world on what are called strategic
alliances= most collaborations between businesses fail, often because so
many implicit values are not made explicit before a collaboration is
entered into.
In the case of art science collaborations, many of them fail to be successful
from the point of view of one or both the art and science participants.
Roger
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