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.

Re-reading the introduction of Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists by Anselm Strauss (1987) for my Ph.D seminar on Qualitative Methods, I noted this quote by Dewey (who did not conceive artistic and scientific activities as radically different):An “expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not first possess” (Dewey, 1334, p.65)and Strauss adds: “In short, the researcher, if more than merely competent, will be “in the work” - emotionally as well as intellectually - and often will be profoundly affected by experiences engendered by the research process itself.” (p. 10).An interesting analogy between the work of the researcher and the worker of the artist, or maybe of their relationship to their work, their engagement with their practice. Moreover, this is one of these quotes that just say in “better words” the way you feel about a specific experience, in this case my work.   al

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

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