Sunday, May 28, 2017

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] art*science 2017 - The New and History

Dear Salvatore,

At this point, I think we are talking past each other.

You want to use both the language of art and the language of science — I'd add to this that your claim to making everything available open access is also a problem when you inundate people with so much information that there is no reasonable way to understand what happened without a research team. I am not prepared to put a full research team to work on some of the material I see in art-science just to find out if it really happened as the author says it did. It is the author's responsibility to write a reasonably complete yet parsimonious account that enables me to understand the material.

One of the shocking moments in the life of every young researcher comes when they learn that a research article does *not* communicate everything that went into the research between the start of the work and the conclusion. Part of the art of scientific practice — and this is also an art — is to decide what it relevant and what is not. If every scientist had to report every failed hypothesis, every guess along what way, every dead end, every false positive, every mistaken negative, no article would run to less than a book.

I once knew a researcher who spent three years grinding sheep brains in a blender, then refining them, and then doing further work to extract a couple of spoonfuls of the substance on which he did his PhD. He kept a lab workbook that tracked every little step. Anyone who might have want to review every step, data by day, could ask for the workbook. But he did not publish a diary of his long three years of work, and he did not spend pages explaining his motives, his feelings, and all the rest.

As I see it, there is both too much and too little in your posts. There is too much in the vast amount of needless information you provide about your feelings and motives, too much talk about transgressive traders and laughing elders in the bazaar, and so on. And there is too little concise, careful description that allows me to understand what you are actually writing about.

This thread began as something entirely different — we are no longer discussing "the new and history." We have moved over to the question of how we ought to write up art-science in an interesting, responsible way.

If someone wishes to make writing art-science the topic of a thread on Yasmin, I'll be happy to participate. For now, I don't feel that I will shed any further light on these issues by an endless cycle of replies.

So I will stop here.

Yours,

Ken


> On May 28, 2017, at 2:00 AM, xDxD.vs.xDxD <xdxd.vs.xdxd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Ken,
>
> If the highest value you can bring too any discussion is to describe what
>> you do, then I'm not sure why we are here on a list for art-science. Jeff
>> Koons describes what he does.
>>
>
> if you read the line below "describe what we do" it says: "... describe
> what we do, our motives and background research, how we formulate
> experiments, what are the results and impacts, what implications,
> difficulties, innovations,"
>
> so what we do is : describe what we do, describe our motives, describe the
> background research (which means previous studies/cases, or lack of
> previous studies/cases, or studies/cases which inspire us and how and/or
> how we try to reformulate them to try to go beyond them a little bit...),
> describe how we formulate experiments (which can be in the lab, but they
> can also happen in a performance, or in a city, or in another setting,
> according to a method, so that they can be performed again, etc, which
> includes the fact that we release all tools, software, technologies, data
> in input and output etc), describe the results, describe the impacts (what
> changed? what stayed the same? what was not "readable"? why? what next?),
> describe the difficulties, describe the innovations (what, if any, happened
> now that hadn't happened before? what have we done with it? what do we
> imagine that we can do with it? what do we try to do next with it?...)
>
>
>>
>> When you add to this such dimensions as formulating experiments,
>> describing results, considering difficulties, then description must rise to
>> the level of analysis. This, in turn, requires deeper description,
>> comparison, and if you also claim innovation, then you've got to
>> demonstrate what happened in the past. That is to say, when you make
>> scientific claims for your art or your approach to art, more is required
>> than a description of artistic practice.
>>
>
> so, with the previous paragraph I hope to have answered your doubt.
>
> I thought it was pretty clear even before, but evidently I was wrong.
>
> What I was really referring to by answering Ziva was the "self-promotion"
> thing. I have nothing wrong with it, and I figured, from what was being
> said, that even Ziva had nothing wrong with it. But, again, I think that it
> was important to communicate that describing an experiment, and its pre-
> and post- (see above), is more important than self-promotion.
>
>
>
>>
>> Without analysis, it is impossible to support other people's research.
>> Merely describing what one does assumes that what you do is innovative.
>> This may not be the case. That's why researchers work to identify the gaps
>> in the knowledge of the field prior to their contribution. Significant
>> innovation in uncommon. It is more likely to occur following serious
>> thinking and analysis.
>>
>
> of course we do that. as a matter of fact it is one of our priorities.
>
>
> all the best
> Salvatore
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Ken Friedman
>>
>> —snip—
>>
>>> We are practice-based.
>>>
>>> The highest value we can bring to any discussion is to describe what we
>> do,
>>> our motives and background research, how we formulate experiments, what
>>> are the results and impacts, what implications, difficulties,
>> innovations,
>>> etc appear when we perform such experiments, and hope that this is useful
>>> to give someone else new ideas, open up new possibilities, etc.
>>>
>>> In this, we also try to use art and practice as a platform, to support
>>> other people's research, innovations, critical stances, where they can
>> come
>>> together, inspire, be applied in the world, and also to engage people in
>>> ways which are effective, persistent, transformative.
>>>
>>> In a way, we "only" have our practice to bring into any discussion. Which
>>> is of course inspired and informed by other things.
>>
>> —snip—
>>
>>
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