An interesting article was posted by Jesse Shapins and Brian House (who collaborate on the Yellow Arrow) on the Urban Omnibus entitled Designers and citizens as critical media artists. They discuss their views on maps, cities, technologies and the role of art as a research practice.

Here are few themes and quotes that I found really interesting. I let you read the whole article and I’d be curious to read your thoughts.

On the method (which is a theme that emerged from our discussion on this blog - collaboration between artists and scientists, social scientists), they have several interesting points and a great quote:

“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

Jesse and Brian note: “We wanted to stimulate another mode of urban practice that was based fundamentally in the physical, social spaces of the city. In other words, we wanted to get students out of the classroom and onto the streets. We were inspired by Shklosvky’s concepts of estrangement and “Art as Technique”, we then aimed to use media arts critically as a mode of research to gain new perspectives.”

On language and ” a mutually transformative relationship between language and the city”:

An interesting project they mentioned: ” One of the projects I’ve always found fascinating is ABCDF: A Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City. The general principal of this book is to re-define the city through a new form of dictionary. Thousands of words are defined by images from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the home photographs of ordinary citizens, to historical newsprints, to the work of famous contemporary artists. These images are complimented by short texts in a glossary at the back. What emerges is a highly detailed mosaic of the city that brings to life the everyday life of the metropolis.”

… and a project they develop for their students: “Furthering the language theme, we built on De Certeau’s understanding of walking through the city as an act of reading and writing. After each student defined around 35 words for their territory, the final assignment aimed to synthesize this material and create a series of design interventions in physical and virtual space. Writing in this new language, the core component of the students’ final project was to write a “poem” that linked together multiple words they had defined in their territory. In addition to the longer and visual media, students had to also now define their words in 140 characters as text messages. The poem would be read, then, as an SMS-based walking tour of their territory that poetically connects the words in physical space using the new vocabulary they have defined. We created the interface and the messaging infrastructure, which they could then script for their particular walks. The walks provided an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that students identified through their research throughout the summer.”

Go and check Periplurban their research platform

al

Really happy to have made it to the centre of the maze to experience BSWW. The space that has been built is a beautiful and comfortable space. With a wonderful soundtrack too. Al and Aileen, it’s fantastic milena

Yesterday I was in the space and two visitors asked me “what’s next”.The first one coming from “the art world” (sorry for the simplification) asked: “what will happen to the installation? where will you present it next?”  The second one coming from “the business world” (once again, sorry for the simplification) asked: “what are the outputs of this project?”… I also heard although it was not explicit “Can you implement them?”These questions are in themselves interesting as they highlight the multitude of interpretations and understandings, but there is nothing new here. What is more interesting is that it made me realized that the installation had become something in itself. The second visitor saw it as a presentation of research ideas, innovative, different, but still with some potential outputs. One of my academic friends also asked me what papers will come out of this installation: once again the question of the outputs. These questions made me realized that the nature of the project has changed and if originally there was this idea to present my research ideas in a different way, this has slowly vanished in front of the “project itself” - which still draws on research ideas but which has become something of its own.This does not mean that there are no potential outputs (we are working on two papers) but these are not essential to the project, and there are more related to our reflection on the process than to the content of the project.  Back to the point raised by Aileen and Ben Rubin on the relationship between the form and the content, I am realizing how the heaviness of the content has vanished in the work with the material to reach a form, hopefully to get some kind of balance between both. al   

Hi Anne Laure,I wanted to (as always) continue talking about this. It is so interesting to me. I think we might be back around somewhere near the Sci/Art discussion we had recently right here on the blog. Both you and Milena (in her comments in response to you), talk about thinking imaginatively or thinking of new ways to present ideas. I am a firm supporter of this, of course, for many reasons, not least because of our shared interest in broadening the audience for research/academic work and we have often said this in any discussion of BSWW-as our reference by Foucault has suggested. But I think what is emerging here in these recent posts is distinct. What is coming up here are both questions of collaboration (and who is doing the collaborating) but also questions around the visual- to put simply when is something visual an illustration and when is it art? Whether interactive or not. And I think what is also important to consider, what does this mean when one collaborates with artists? Museum display, as in the case of the one Milena cited, has a visual, interactive and illustrative aspect-and may well be innovative in all those respects. I think those kinds of responses or thinking (and I am sure Milena would agree) are quite different from say what Rubin and Hansen do with their collaboration.Perhaps the key piece that is missing here is that in any collaboration with an artist, the project must move beyond the mere presenting of ideas. The project must in and of itself become a new idea. The question of the relationship of a form to it’s content (and the role of the viewer) is a long one in aesthetics. To impose the content on a form, the form dies (as Baldachinno, who is a blog member, said in a lecture). This, for example, has always been the difficulty of political art and I venture, collaborations with artists. This too was my fear of calling Building Space with Words, art. I felt that the obligation was, of our project and of our collaboration, to prove itself in the process of it’s making so to speak as to whether it was indeed becoming a ‘new idea’ or merely an illustration of an existing one.Given the kinds of response we have had and the richness of our discussions Anne Laure, I am excited.

This post is a follow up to my post on thinking with fabrics, ladders and projectors (February 5th). It emerges from my reading of a text on ideational drawing (by Terry Rosenberg in an edited volume on Writing on Drawing).Rosenberg defines ideational drawing as a specific type of drawing, “a process and always in-process; thinking-in-action and action-as-thinking” (p. 109). Ideational drawing seems to me very close to what I describe as scaffolding and to the thinking space that building_space_with_words (blog and installation) is for me.”Ideational drawing  (as process and as artefact) is a thinking space - not a space in which thought is re-presented but rather a space where thinking is presenced.” (p. 109-110).Ideational drawing is a drafting process and it includes not only the output - the drawing - but also the act of drafting.  The description of ideational drawing for someone like me who does not draw is still meaningful because it evokes my notes taken in notebooks and small pieces of paper. It also reminds me the correspondences of intellectuals during the Republic of Letters which exchange ideas, challenge each other in their letters and thus develop their ideas and explore new ones. This is thinking with words, thinking with your hand holding the pen - taking notes, writing letters (or even typing on the keyboard).Yet, the current process with the installation makes this whole idea even more meaningful.More meaningful also became this quote from Heidegger:”Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet” ( Heidegger, 1999, What calls for thinking, quoted in Rosenberg, p. 110).Another version of it is the notion of distributed cognition (see Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild): cognition does not only take place in the skull, but it is distributed across people and artifacts. I became very interested with this theory while studying air traffic controllers at work. It also provides a very relevant framework to describe our work with Aileen: drawing, prototyping and building an installation as a way of thinking out loud, sharing ideas… and for me at the end of the day, that’s what thinking is about - this ongoing process of drafting, scaffolding.al

Sometime ago, I started investigating a visualization of the three types of mobilities that I had identified: mental, physical and digital mobilities.  At that time my explanation was that “when place changes, the social network multiplies, shrinks, evolves, so is the feeling of belonging. Sometimes belonging stays strongly linked to the place of departure (grows even, if we “long in belonging”)… It also explains the notion of displacement, physical and mental, and how digital networks participate to it.” The thinking has matured since… Lately, as I was presenting my neo-nomad research at the CIID, the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design, I showed a similar version of the sketch. I explained it a little more clearly:
1. Mobilities, mental physical are intertwined.
2. Mobilities that align (vertical or oblique) represent a balanced state (the feeling of being grounded or belonging)
3. Mobilities that do not align (when the physical displacement is disproportionate) represent an unbalanced state (the feeling of NOT being grounded or NOT belonging).
For example refugees are forced to leave their home—travel physically—while mentally longing for the place left behind.  Some use tools and technologies (photographs, video tapes, emails, social networking…) to connect to their homeland, share information about the two spaces connected digitally. Technology helps in balancing the stretched relationship between forced physical mobility and mental mobility.
As another example, when absorbed by the screen and virtual environment (Thinking of Sherry Turkle), other subjects of preoccupation such as physical health problems may arise, and other strategies are taken into consideration to reach a balanced state.
4. It is the RELATIONSHIP between mobilities, and not the mobilities individually that become a topic of investigation (It is because there is a stretch, that there is matter to discuss). The stretch corresponds to a theoretical field of investigation.
5. You can draw a diagram for different kinds of nomads.

Lucy was mentioning in her post on rat art / art rat (December 23) that she took “a practice from psychology labs, where such activities are routine, and combined it with an acknowledgement of the human participation to make an art event”.

Aileen commented on this point: “Your description of what took place in the gallery really highlighted the practices and procedures of the laboratory. It raised the question for me too of the ‘performative’ aspect of behaviour in different social spaces.”

This makes me wonder what defines a practice as “scientific” or “artistic”: from the comment above, maybe not the activities, the procedures, but the social context - a laboratory and experimenters who are “performing” an experiment or artists who are “performing” an artistic event. The example here is art and science, but it could be art and social science, art and design, or science and design.

(more…)

We’d like to welcome two new contributors who accepted our invitation to join our conversation:

• Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at MOMA. Paola’s experience in architecture and design, and her reflections on design as art (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paola_antonelli_treats_design_as_art.html), on space and technology makes her a perfect contributor to our conversation. The exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind she curated at MOMA last year dealt with many of the themes discussed on this blog. We are also looking forward to her insights on multidisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, social scientists, designers and architects.
• Maciej Fiszer, visual artist, stage designer and scenographer. We are curious to hear more about his work on space and our interpretation / perception of space. Moreover, we are very interested in hearing about his collaboration with choreographers, theater directors and anthropologists. He also provided us very useful feedback when we started exploring different materials and ideas for the maze. 

Check the Who’s who page for more information.Cheers,   Aileen and al 

Hi,

I’m coming in a bit late to all of this. There is quite a diverse dialogue already – Rats, space, science, Town Squares – all strangely connected.

In response to the question of the Sciart scheme, launched and supported by the Welcome Trust, I’d say my experience was really great, but perhaps not illustrative of how it always works out. Throughout the selection process for both the initial research awards and later Production Awards, it was always emphasised how important it was that the collaboration was two way. Art – Science but also Science – Art.

This was my interest from the start, and it was always crucial to me that as an artist I was not just looking at or interpreting the work that the genetics department where I was based was doing. A certain element of this is inevitable, and not at all bad, and as has been proved many times- artists are extremely good observers. But a lot of the work that artists do in relation to science is observational – Oooh, look at that cool colour/ check out those machines etc. I very much wanted to be part of a dialogue, which was of course coloured by my personal relationship to the inherited genetic illness that the scientists were studying; my father, sister, brother, niece and nephew are all affected. This freaked the scientist out a wee bit, to be honest. If I met somebody in a lift and they asked what I did, they were fascinated that I was an artist, but genuinely troubled that I had family members who were sick. I think it is that inability to directly cure the disease, then and there, that maybe threw them. They know the prognosis for my family isn’t good, but what they don’t get to see is that in the midst of the long term bad stuff – wheelchairs and tube feeding on the horizon – there is a huge amount of short term good stuff, like a toddler learning to walk when we were told she wouldn’t, or my nephew singing Karaoke like he really is John Travolta.

It’s this cross dialogue that I would like to do more of. So one of the main outcomes of my collaboration with the scientists was that patient’s group conferences are now often held at the same time as the scientific meetings, so that people actually see each other. You see, it’s all about the meeting places! And there we are, full circle.

Apologies again for delayed responses, more coming…

Jackie

In my first contribution to this blog I though I’d write about one of my art projects (in other modes, I may write about design or social science), directly following on from earlier posts about humans and non-humans in art, and Natalie’s current work. One Night With Rats in the Service of Art is a performance lecture I first did in 2005, which tells and shows of my encounter with rats and some of their humans, mostly in the context of ‘fancy rat’ shows. As a result of hanging around, cluelessly, at these rat shows for a few years, I decided to make a similar event, which would offer something to that community, but also to arts audiences. My Rat Fair event held at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2005, attracting about 40 rats and about 450 people. In this space/event, I invited a number of different people to take part: a vet and rat lover offering a beauty parlour for rats; design students with some fashion and accessories for animals; a social psychologist offering a t-maze as used in labs to test intelligence; and - a world first - the “Is Your Rat an Artist?” drawing device. The pictures shows drawings created by the human and non-human combination of rats, software and humans. The photo shows how the set up was arranged. There was a pen with comfy sawdust on the floor in which a rat could move freely. Above this was positioned a video camera which tracked a rat’s movement. This was hooked up to some software which turned that motion into a drawing. What was important is that this took a practice from psychology labs, where such activities are routine, and combined it with an acknowledgement of the human participation to make an art event. Despite being in an art venue in London, rather than a village hall where many rat shows are held, and not having the typical judging events at those events, the Rat Fair succeeded in attracting quite a number of rats and their humans from the fancy rat community, as well as other kinds of audience. If I could work out how to use wordpress better, I’d add more images but may have to do this later.