September 21, 2010
Washington, DC
by Roger Malina
Digital DNA by Adriana Varella and Nilton Maltz. The seven-foot egg, which is quilted from circuit boards, was a commission by the Palo Alto Public Art Commission. Photo by Wonderlane via Flickr
A recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-National Endowment for the Arts workshop sought to re-think the ways that the arts and sciences are being linked today and how the agencies might jointly promote new emerging areas of research and cultural development. Participants included artists, scientists, and research engineers, but also university deans and directors of alternative art-science spaces.
This first workshop focused on computer science and information technology; a forthcoming NSF-NEA workshop will look at the arts and the biological sciences. Next year the NSF Informal Education Division is sponsoring an art-science workshop ?Art as a Way of Knowing? at the San Francisco Exploratorium, one of the pioneering institutions that has coupled creative artists with scientists and engineers for more than forty years.
So why this new attention to the coupling of the arts and sciences? The topic has been hotly debated for several hundred years at least, ever science the scientific revolution led to separate science institutions decoupled from the arts and humanities. The 19th century saw prominent figures such as Goethe active in both the arts and sciences. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was a painter. In the 1920s and 1930s the Bauhaus movement recoupled the creative arts with science and industry. In the 1950s C.P. Snow?s “two cultures” debate rekindled initiatives to bridge the arts and sciences. In the 1960s, Experiments in Art and Technology led to the coupling of artists such as Rauschenberg with engineers such as Billy Kluver. So what?s new?
At Home on the Range, the ?Digital? Range
The first thing is that the ?born digital? generation artists find themselves at home in the landscape of information technologies. The NSF Creative IT program recognized this burgeoning area of research. The NEA’s Audience 2.0 How Technology Influences Arts Participation highlighted the new ways, and growing audiences, for art that is being created and distributed through the digital electronic media. The born digital generation is innovating new ways of personal expression within the information technologies landscape; it has become second nature for artists of all types to use computers and to push the development of computers in new directions to address artistic needs. New “creative” and entertainment industries have resulted.
Art-Science Creativity by Whom?
Perhaps ironically, creativity was almost a dirty word by the end of the NSF-NEA workshop because it is overused and often not clearly defined. Creativity by whom and for what? What was clear was that there is a new dynamic and rapidly evolving group of artists, scientists, and engineers working together, a networked ?community of practice? that also comes together through a variety of “communities of interest.? Most of these creative individuals or teams work in informal settings from nonprofit groups to the hacker, ?make?, community and alternative arts centers, and citizens and peoples science movements. An important issue is how to network and cross feed these hacker, ?make,? and community groups with the more formal institutional programs in universities, and art and design schools.
Art-Science Creativity for What?
?Creativity for What? was another leitmotif reflecting a concern that technology-driven innovation needs to be contextualized first by social and cultural needs, with examples from community-based organizations faced with urban renewal, societal issues such as climate change and energy sustainability, or the technological transformation of health issues. Our Town,the proposed NEA program for the arts and urban redevelopment perhaps provides one example context that could motivate new art-science agendas. There are many burning issues in our lives and communities that give us no choice but to link the arts and sciences.
Art-Science Creativity: Innovation in Innovation
Another thread was the idea that we need to innovate in creativity thinking itself. We need to innovate in innovation when faced with the big data flood, distributed networked knowledge, and the impact of digital culture on how the arts and sciences are embedded in society. The recent Macarthur report on Learning Institutions in the Digital Age as well as the National Research Council’s Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity report provide good starting points. As we evolve toward networked culture and knowledge, the ?partitions and divisions? within funding institutions and universities seem mal-adapted to the rapidly changing locus of multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary artistic practice, and more particularly the rapidly changing landscape of art-science collaboration.
ALT.ART-SCI
The phrase ?Alt-Art-Sci? emerged a number of times during the discussions as a way of capturing the sense of unease that “business as usual” approaches will miss the mark. We need to “innovate in innovation” and find other approaches to work in the new emerging networked culture. We need to look at where the most exciting creativity is occurring, and we need to look at the burning issues in our communities and how harnessing new couplings of science, engineering, and cultural approaches can be part of creating a sustainable society.
Roger Malina is an astronomer and editor. For more than 25 years, he has been involved with the Leonardo Organization, whose mission is to promote and make visible work that explores the interaction of the arts and sciences and the arts and new technologies.
Stay tuned for more from conference participants…
Tags: "Digital DNA", Adriana Varella, Art Works, art-science, intersection of arts and sciences, National Endowment for the Arts, National Science Foundation, Nilton Maltz, Roger Malina
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Roger:
Not only is this exciting and confirming of the work that many of us have been doing in the nexus of art and science, I am delighted that you are taking the discussion public in this blog. I look forward to following the comments that follow.
JD
The nervousness that surrounds the word “creativity” is interesting. In one way it’s understandable since the word comes loaded with so much spiritual baggage. But I think the main problem comes from seeing things like creativity and hard research as polar opposites or at least spread out from each other on some sort of linear continuum. A better analogy would be to see them as only superficial differences in methodology used to approach a problem.
As a visual artist with a background in vision research people often ask me about how I adjust between the studio and the lab. Quite honestly I can’t see that there is that much difference. They feel a lot alike. If I am painting and I see something emerge that can’t be explained by anything in my arts training then I can proceed to investigate the phenomenon playing with different options—shooting in the dark but with an arsenal of artistic methodologies to back me up. In this case, as the viewer, I become the lone experimental subject. Of course this is what artists have always done and there has been a flurry of recent writings about artists as neuroscientists.
But the thing is, I can take those same questions into the lab, set up some stimuli, run a couple dozen subjects, etc. They’re still the same questions. I can do background research by looking at other artists or by following the trail of scientific literature.
I think we do ourselves a disservice making big distinctions between the methodologies of art and science or promoting the idea that there are different kinds of minds and that some are creative and others logical. Better to learn to flex our mental muscle in all directions to investigate the problems that make us curious.
I appreciate your comments about “different kinds of minds.” As you know, we indeed have different areas of the mind that are used for various kinds of thinking. Creativitiy is the product of our right hemisphere where scientific thinking is the left. I think the “trick” is to become more consciously aware of how to tap each side regardless of the nature of our task. Then we can indeed flex our mental muscle in many directions. Thank you for your insight.
Fascinating discussion !
Kudos for the efforts, Roger. I have my doubts how this will benefit me, having been born prior to the Digital Age (Actually, the year Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the Transistor.) I have founded a HackerSpace in Urbana, Illinois. Does that qualify? It’s exciting that HackerSpaces are beginning to get traction, even in Congress (111-HR6003 : National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010) I have literally straddled the line between Art and Science/Technology for my entire career. My experience is that it is much nicer to be an Artist’s Technologist than it is to be a Scientist’s Artist. Scientists don’t want artists around until it is time to publish a picture on the cover of “Nature”. And that hardly ever happens.
Great to see the summary of this first workshop. I look forward to seeing more comments here–and learning more as the program progresses. It is exciting to see that the NSF and NEA plan to work together to promote new emerging areas of research and cultural development.
One additional thought: It is intriguing to see that your post uses the word creativity so much, despite the problems with the word that you mention in the summary above. Good luck.
As I understand, one of the ongoing questions asks how we identify innovative, and/or emerging practices being discovered at the intersection of art and science that are potentially transformative and/or deserving of governmental recognition and support. Here are four themes that I would add to the discussion:
1) *Emerging Practices*
This seems like the easiest proposition of the list – and maybe that’s why I’ve listed it first. Emerging practices are being discovered at the intersections of art and science– but they are also being evidenced elsewhere – in some not so expected places. It takes articulation and documentation of these practices for them to become relevant for other locations and endeavors – as catalysts for innovation. Here it seems that anthropology, psychology, and sociology have a great deal to offer. On one hand they can help describe 1) what counts in terms of innovation in context, 2) the relationships between people, practices, places, and things, and 3) they bring methods for conducting research designed to get at core innovative practices. By they also will need support and collaboration from artists, designers, and others.
2) *Interactions in Time*
If we shift attention to the networks of relationships around individuals, we may be able to understand how context affects innovation – in contrast to the individual identity focus that has developed beginning in the Middle Ages.
One way to understand this transition is through studies of social networks and the behaviors of individuals in them. Recent examples have shown that individual behavior can be understood in context by looking at the structure and dynamics of their social interactions (e.g. Gonzalez et al, 2008; Lee et al, 2010). Since different aspects of the social and infrastructural networks are strongly correlated, they can be used to articulate how and where different individuals leverage design practices and other expertise within society (Hildago, 2010).
A key outcome of this approach is the relevance of temporality for interaction, the use of space, and the shared proximity of meaning.
3) *In-between Spaces*
Research infrastructure is currently organized and built to support specific practices. As new and emerging proceses are described, they need to be supported in architecture, space planning, and landscape. There has been a great deal of success in recent years – arriving in the form of experimental or dedicated research spaces and through the creation of neutral, hybrid spaces for work, focus, and interaction. How can we learn from these formal efforts as well as those undertaken by individuals to carve out new niches?
4) *Disappearance*
Accept the possibility (not probability) that neither art nor science will survive in their present configurations and mixtures. This will be particularly difficult for the artists. The scientists will simply call it “not science”. But what new roles and guilds will different practices form?
Roger,
This important dialogue about the connecting of disciplines is so important. I just heard the Chilean economist Manfred MaxNeef speak about the necessity for economists to fashion a new concept of economics based on the priority of sustaining life forms on the planet. This requires new ways of understanding, assessing and creating dynamic relationships between disciplines and new ways of communicating those relationships. In the equation for developing new intersections, the art/science dialogue must include the social and physical landscape in which we live, the implications of emerging values of sustainability and how those ideas can be integrated into are/science explorations.
I am an American arts research doing a degree in telematic art in Canada, where the government here has endowed a one million research chair in telematic art, a two million dollar studio, and provided monies for Ph.D. student researchers. That is why Canada is now number one in the world for educating students, and the United States has dropped to number 12.
I’m an artist and about five years ago, I received a fellowship to participate in an archeology dig in Washington state. The project was through Earthwatch and a number of other artists participated. The premise was that artists would come up with interesting ways to communicate about this research.
I am one of several artists who found this experience profound and my work has never been the same since. The funding was later lost for this program and it was discontinued after just two years; It’s such a shame for such a successful effort.
My hope is that we’ll see more projects like this recognizing the unique abilities of art to communicate about science. It’s a wonderful partnership.
Roger:
I have just blogged about this topic here:
/about/disclaimer.php?outlink=http://representationz.com/?p=146
Cheers,
Paul