For those interested in the intersection of art, science and social science intersections, Lucy Kimbell’s movie about her Rat Fair (see her post on December 23rd) is online

Seven Minutes in the Service of Rats from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This film documents the Rat Fair event organised by artist Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2005 attended by 40 rats and 450 people. Activities for rats and people included a rat beauty parlour, memory and agility tests, and roborat racing. The highlight was the world premier of the “Is Your Rat an Artist?” drawing competition for humans, rats and software, inspired by the Morris water maze used in animal experiments. The Rat Fair was the result of months of conversation with and observation of people and rats working together in the fancy rat and scientific communities.

Please see below. An interesting event on the collaboration between social scientists and artists in which, Lucy Kimbell, one of our blog members is involved. If you happen to be in London, make sure you attend and please post your thoughts afterwards.

—

Tactical Play
A one-day colloquium for social scientists and artists about playful enquiry as a tactic for research
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
1 July 2009, 09.30am–5pm
Room GO1, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London

Speakers include: Anne Douglas (Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen); Lynn Froggett (University of Central Lancashire); Pat Kane ( author of The Play Ethic); Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford); Justin McKeown (artist, Spartaction.com) and Christian Nold (artist, Softhook.com). Convened by Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight.

Informed by discourses of cross-pollination between art and social science, this colloquium will discuss the role of “play” as a tactic for social change within reflexive and performative social science methods and socially engaged art processes.

Positioning playful enquiry as both a method and meeting place between the disciplines, the event will seek to address the following questions through the presentation of case studies and open discussion:

- In what way do the essential characteristics of one discipline offer possibilities for “play” within the other?

- How is research through performance, fiction, collaboration and conversation employed by each discipline and what are the individual motivations for this?

- At what point does playful enquiry meet “hard edged” research, and what are the academic implications?

- In what way is “play” a politicised method, and how can members of each profession use it to antagonise the frameworks in which they operate?

To book a place go to: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/tacticalplay

Cost (includes vegetarian lunch): £35 standard, £15 students.

Numbers are strictly limited, please register early.

Two weeks ago I went to see the last production of Merce Cunningham at BAM, “Nearly Ninety”.

I liked the performance and I thought of two ways in which it relates to some of the discussions on this blog.

First of all, while the dancers were dancing videos of a rehearsal were projected … there were a few screens but many of the projected images “hang in the air” (as there were no screens) and it was as if the dancers were dancing with or better to say “in parallel” with these projected dancers. This created this dual space which reminded me of our attempt to create a hybrid space - virtual and physical.

Moreover, as I was reading about Merce Cunningham’s work (see for example, the NY Times article), I thought of John Weeks’ post and on the role of the “memory” of the blog. Here is a quote by Cunningham:

About Merce”: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.” (merce.org)

I was also very intrigued by his conception of collaboration and multi-disciplinarity. Indeed, he’s been working with composers - John Cage for many years - as well as with visual artists. Yet, while collaboration is often seen as a dialogue and we have indeed discussed this issue at length on the blog - how to build a shared understanding? - he seems to see it as different perspectives, that developed individually and are assembled only at the end. Hence, he  decided (since the 1950’s) to consider the dance as completely distinguished from the music. They are not coordinated. They just take place at the same time. The music, designs and choreography are made separately and they are assembled only on the first night.

He said in an interview to the BBC:

“(…) It’s at that time that we began to separate the music and the dance and that was so interesting to me.

Was that his suggestion? Cage’s suggestion?

Well his feeling was that not, one of the two elements should not support the other or be in charge, that they should be equal but separate. And I liked that idea.

Yes, the idea of going rumpety, tumpety tump and, and matching the music was awful.

Yes. Yes, well as he said it’s a form of slavery and so those first solos about three or four of them were made, were, we, given a kind of time structure between us as to how long, and certain divisions, we separated and he made the music to the structure and I made the dance. “

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.

The blog was started as a “companion” to the installation project we are working on with Aileen and that will be presented at NYU-Poly from March 5 to March 27 (BTW, thanks Yasmine for the nice post on Neo-Nomad). It is interesting to me that this blog has taken an existence of its own and several of you have mentioned to me that the conversation should be maintained after the installation.

To tell you the truth, I never thought of when to stop it. Now I got really into the discussion and I believe we should keep the discussion going, although we might want to reframe the terms of the discussion - how I don’t know; that requires some more thinking.

What I wanted to do today was reflect about the process, talk about the installation project as an intellectual scaffolding process. It started with this idea of presenting some of my research ideas, and in fact combining two streams of my research - hence it was more than mere presentation, it was already combination. This could be understood (and I originally  conceived it as…) as a translation exercise: an attempt to use a different medium, a different language game - art rather than peer review publishing.

This relationship, the nature of the collaboration has evolved into a dialogue. As I started working with Aileen, and as I have to explain her what I was trying to present (and Aileen can be tough sometime! thanks though for all these hard questions which pushed my thinking forward), my ideas evolved and the relationship between them too.

Aileen also made suggestions for the installation per se that led me to start thinking of what it meant at a conceptual level. Hence, I started thinking by drawing, sketching, taping on the floor, climbing on ladders and moving projectors. This is perfect for someone with an interest in materiality (which started with my interest with the materiality of the paper flight strips used by the air traffic controllers)! I cannot help thinking of the prototyping workshops with the computer scientists, engineers and air traffic controllers during the Cameleon project and this is a wonderful experience.

The ideas are still evolving and I am not sure how I will write the paper that will correspond to the installation. Yet, the installation has forced me to specify the concepts; it also has led me to uncover the different layers of meaning involved in this work. The blog and the discussions have also helped a lot. It is for me another interesting element to add to my thinking about the role of writing for knowledge sharing and development (that’s another project I have with Anca Metiu looking at the power of writing through a historical analysis of correspondences - Einstein, Descartes, Virginia Woolf, Mme du Chatelet, Kafka, Hudson Bay Company and East India Company… That’s another story… More on that topic another time).

Thanks to all.

Cheers,

al

As I was re-reading the introduction to the Design and the Elastic Mind catalogue (adapted in Seed)  by Paola Antonelli who curated the exhibition at MOMA last year (Feb-May 2008), a few passages seem relevant to the discussion on this blog. Let me share them with you.

- On the collaborative process and the interdisciplinary dialogue:

“Much of this is being done by bona fide designers, but scientists and artists have also turned to design to give method to their productive tinkering, what John Seely Brown has called “thinkering.” They all belong to a new culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement in the world and by open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists.”

“The figure of the designer is changing from formgiver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality; one increasingly informed by science and mediated by technology.”

- On the importance of understanding and taking into account social practices:

“The most contemporary design theory is devoted to the quest for an environment, whether virtual or physical, built in human proportion.”

- On virtual space

“Without designers, instead of a virtual city of home pages with windows, doors, buttons, and links, the internet would still be a series of obscure strings of code, and appliances would be reduced to standardized skeletons of functions.  ”

It reminded me Milena’s post distinguishing between architectural and interpersonal cues (December 14). I guess I will add that the affordances of the technology are intertwined with the social and discursive practices of the people interacting in this virtual city.

Ciao,

al

 Lucy Kimbell on her Design Leadership blog (January 18) wrote the following post:

“Building Space with Words is a project by social scientist Anne-Laure Fayard (assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NYU-Poly) and artist Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Along with several others, I have been invited to join their blog conversation where they/we discuss matters such as disciplines, practices, materiality, art v science, social science v science and so on. Indeed the subjects being discussed, and the range of backgrounds of the contributors are such that I was worried that I couldn’t keep up with all the posts and all the threads. But then I realised it is rather like being at a party of people, some of whom know each other, or know of each other, or faintly recognise each other, with two hosts who keep offering drinks or things to eat, and introduce you to each other. But where are the gatecrashers?”

I think it’s an excellent description. Aileen and I are glad to be perceived as good hosts but we have to say that you are all great guests in this potluck dinner party.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Let’s keep drinking and eating.

And indeed where are the gatecrashers?

al

“The words between the Spaces: Buildings and Language” is the title of a book by Thomas Markus and Deborah Cameron, an architect and a linguist, where they argue that language shapes our understanding of the built environment.

In their first chapter, they argue that while architecture is usually seen as a visual rather than verbal activity, in fact architects’ work is both visual and verbal. “Making a building is a collaborative process which involves continual dialogue - wit clients, with colleagues, with other professionals like engineers and landscapers, with building contractors. Cuff aptly describes what goes on in these interactions as “constructing a word-and-sketch building” (1992:97). She also makes clear how much written language is produced in any architectural project” (Markus and Cameron, p.1).

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…)

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