To Roger's gracious promotion of my work on "visioneers" and radical ideas
for the technological future, I would just add the value that images have
had as a means of stimulating the imagination and, I would argue, also
stimulating policy (and perhaps even some collaborative efforts).
Images of space travel, of course, were a powerful inducement for making
space exploration "appear real" as numerous scholars have pointed out while
I think it is fair to say that representations of "nano space" have had the
same effect more recently. As Roger notes, Leonardo itself appeared at the
apogee of human space flight, at least in the US, and I imagine it reflected
an optimistic idea about the 3rd culture that might emerge from the closer
union between artists and technologists.
I'm not sure this represents a true collaboration but this visual
representations have I'm sure, inspired some engineers/scientists and have
also certainly provided a useful venue for historians to explore. They are
also a valuable evidentiary source as we try to understand how people in the
past imagined the future.
Patrick
On 5/24/10 2:06 PM, "roger malina" <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> jean baptiste
>
> thanks for your many thoughtful responses on our collaboration discussion
>
> you state:
>
>
> The engineering context of many historical art/sciences conferences
> and projects can be a political terrain and thus inform a specific
> discourse or mode of production. I am thinking here for instance of
> militaro-artistic collusion in the 50s and 60s in conferences, events
> and places such as Macy (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences ), 69th Regiment Armory
> (E.A.T. http://www.9evenings.org/ ), Rand + Lacma (
> http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=706 ), JPL (
> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) and CAVS ( http://cavs.mit.edu/ ).
>
>
> i want to pick up on your connected comment about including the
> humanities in this
> discussion about collaboration- as you mention IMERA is hosting residencies
> of artists and scholars in the humanities= patrick mccray
>
> http://www.history.ucsb.edu/people/person.php?account_id=14
>
> who is organising the imera workshop on collaboration is a historian of
> science, but he is particularly interested at the moment in how popular
> culture
> cross couples to the techno sciences:
>
> he says
>
> Currently, my work focuses on the the creation of a national research
> infrastructure (with Cyrus Mody and Hyungsub Choi) and the activities
> of various pro-technology futurist movements. This work, which is
> sponsored by the NSF, will be part of my next book project which
> explores the intersection of technology, culture, and political
> thought in American culture at the end of the 20th century.
>
> his comment above about pro-technology futurist movements connects to your
> comment about how EAT, CAVS, and indeed leonardo were created in a period
> of techno futurism/optimism= a period that dissipated very much in the
> 1970s partially as a cultural push back during the vietnam war when
> the military scientific industrial
> complex was seen as being allied to to the destructive forces at work=
> this period
> was of course also
>
> the art-science discussion sometimes doesnt bring in the humanities=
> which is a booming
> area with what are called now the digital humanities, and scholars in
> the humanities
> are key to understanding collaboration cultures and methodologies
>
> http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/about/
>
> and see for instance the
> high throughput humanities conference
>
> http://hth.eccs2010.eu/
>
> collaboration cultures/methodologies vary within the areas of science,
> engineering,
> arts and humanities= and when collaborations occur between these areas the
> issues of underlying values -in in particular techno-philia vs techno-phonic
> outlooks need to be made explicit
>
> and there are very different regional differences ( cf the differing
> attitudes to
> genetically engineered foods in different countries, or the differing
> attitudes
> of different green movements to technological solutions )
>
> roger
>
>
> an other issue is the time allocated= most residencies are so short that they
> are barely enough for the collaborators to begin to explore the shared
> interests
>
>
> That's a crucial issue, usually related to the impossibility to build
> a "deliverable" that can be "monetized" and hence sustain a sabbatical
> for bot the artists and the scientists involved. In addition, and in
> relation with the topic of "Doing and Studying International
> Collaboration in the Sciences, Arts and the Humanities ", usually
> Humanists are missing from this equation and it is very agreable to
> see that IMERA for instance is hosting historians and philosophers :)
>
> Jean-Baptiste
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jean-Baptiste LABRUNE <labrune@media.mit.edu>
> Date: Thu, May 20, 2010 at 3:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] : International Collaboration in the
> Sciences and Humanities
>
>
>
> Jean-Baptiste
>
> --
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanbaptisteparis/
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