Hello Roger and All,
I would like to express my opinion on this interesting topic which I've been following most of the time
I'm sorry to disagree, but on the contrary, I don't see any more good reasons to keep disciplines as they are. I think humanity will feel as if a big heavy load has been taken away from its shoulders once disciplines, as we know them, are vanished and we are confronted back again with the basics. New ways of dealing with the world will appear as well of new ways of questioning and learning. The question for me is not if what the arts is doing is beneficial in any way to science or viceversa. The question should be broader, do we really need to keep emphasizing these separations?
Borrowing from Roger's example, I don't see either how the history of film would help to build a space elevator, but at the same time I don't see why we would need one in the first place. I have to add that I do share a passion and love for thinking about outer space.
Anyway, my point is that I believe we are missing the point. Science and Art are not opposed practices or ways of thinking. What determines them, and have been shaping them so far, are political and cultural agendas. But Art and Science are in their essence free from them. We just need to reclaim them (this is where I find an echo with Brian's claim to include the other A). Artists and scientists are partners and friends in Humanity's journey on Earth, not adversaries.
Love,
Alejandro
...
www.thepopshop.org
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On Sat, 8/24/13, roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] How does art science practice contribute to successful scientific practice
To: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Received: Saturday, August 24, 2013, 10:50 AM
danny bronac and colleagues
I agree that the way that I have phrased the yasmin
discussion as "how
does art science practice contribute to scientific research;
sets
up the very dichotomy I am arguing against
but I also have a deep problem as does with Danny with the
'third
space' discourse- brockman etl al's third culture , E O
wilson's
consilience-
i am just not convinced this approach is interestingly
generative- i
am less concerned about its positivist heritage but that I
think it
contextualises our activities in a world that doesnt exist
any more
I personally think there are very good reasons to have
disciplines and
that we train discplinary experts - i would be hard pressed
to explain
to a nano technologist working on how to build space
elevators how the
history of film would really help find the new approaches
needed-
except in some very vague theory of creativity- its a lot of
work
bringing different disciplines together and you have to be
really
convinced
its worth the effort
on the other hand there are some hard problems ( science of
consciousness ?) where connections between the sciences and
the
humanities
are generative. I am just reading Randall Collins' book "
The
sociology of philosophies; a global theory of intellectual
change"
which concretely
shows how communities of practice bring together disparate
approaches
to tackle hard problems- and the cognitive sciences today
are
rightfully
engaging the art science community ( the new european
network on
Cognitive Innovation- COGNOVO www.cognovo.edu has just
been
launched).
When we were working on the SEAD white papers final report
(
http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/draft-overview-of-a-report-on-the-sead-white-papers/
)
we very very naturally found ourselves tying our thinking to
prior
movements in systems theory, cybernetics, complexity and
emergence and
we titled
our report very deliberately:
Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation:
Enabling new forms of collaboration among sciences,
engineering, arts,
and design
in hommage to bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind but also
drawing
ongoldberg and davidsen's future of learning institutions in
the
digital age
we had somewhat of a gestalt switch when we moved from
thinking of a
Tree of Knowledge ( one of whose branches in STEM)
to a Network of Knowledge- you make connections beween
branches in a
tree in a different way that between nodes in a network,
tree structures grow topologically in different ways than
networks,
and information flows through trees in different ways than
through
networks,
to cut down a tree you do it in a different way than to
destroy a network
in a dynamic evolving network of knowledge the separation
between
nodes evolves as hard problems bring researchers from
different communities together- in our community the art
and
technology movement brought into proximity researchers that
20 years before would barely have met at cocktail
parties-and we now
have industries based on computer arts= but bringing
together the art and technology communities around the steam
engine
would not have been very generative and to my knowledge
theromodynamic art never happened
today the art and biology community of practice is thriving
around
deep issues of the nature of life etc- and we now see hybrid
practices
in a way that would have made little sense in the age of
Pasteur
in some cases forrmerly separate disciplines merge ( in my
case
astronomy became so joined with physics that astrophysics
resulted)
anyway- i dont like the Third Culture discourse any more
than the Two
Cultures Discourse- and feel we need to develop networked
knowledge
metaphors and language and think in terms of disciplines
within an
evolving dynamic network
this line of reason is one of the reasons that perhaps the
concept of
"STEM' is one that is no longer useful because it is so
firmly
perched in a tree of knowledge metaphor
and why the way I phrased this yasmin discussion perhaps
sets us on
the wrong track
roger
Hi all
It is indeed old ground but always fruitful precisely
because so
intractable. The limitations of the third space discourse
from my
point of view are mostly that it carries the positivist
legacy that it
is possible or desirable to define new spaces for practice,
rather
than pursuing better descriptions of the incommensurability
of
practices and discourses. Critical art practices of the
avant-garde
have traditionally worked in a more negative direction of
departure,
so many artists would find the question of how their
collaborative
practices contribute to scientific research pointless or
even
offensive (it is also true that many would find it similarly
unhappy
to be asked how their practice contributes to art history).
With the insertion of artistic research into the
techno-scientific
university there are indeed new modes of practical
collaboration and
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices being
institutionalised, for myself the most interesting
collaborations have
had a kind of indisciplined quality where both artist and
scientist
are in a state of departure from their very different modes
of
socialisation.
Of course some people are better working across the two
cultures (or
more than two) than others but it's hard to believe we are
really at
any state of departure from that paradigm when the question
can still
be asked "How Can History of Science Matter to Scientists?"
Maienschein et al, Isis, 2008, 99:341-349. My preferred
conversation
is "how can art-science collaboration contribute to
discourses of
artistic autonomy and interrogation of form"? Yes there have
been a
few interesting interventions made there but the hyphen in
art-science
is far from disappearing and there's nothing wrong with that
IMO.
Cheers,
Danny
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