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.

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.

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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

UrbanOmnibus has launched and they are looking for collaborators.  Urban Omnibus is a project of the Architectural League of New York.

I’m involved with a collaborative project, Breakout! Escape from the Office (scroll down for description), that has been funded by the Architectural League of New York as part of the Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City exhibition that will take place in September 2009.  Also, you can find a related publication, “Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy”, which was co-authored with Dharma Dailey.  I welcome thoughts and feedback on either of these projects and look forward to continuing the conversation on BSWW.

That’s the intriguing title of an article by Julian Kiverstein (who teaches philosophy at the University of Edinburgh) in MapMagazine:http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=40 where he discusses the Sciart initiatives (which started in 1999 as a consortium aiming to foster collaboration between artists and scientists). Sciart’s main goal is “to enhance public understanding of science and artist”. Sciart’s main goal was “to enhance public understanding of science. Artists are invited to employ their creative skills in making scientific ideas comprehensible to a wider audience”. Jackie Donachie, one of the contributor to this blog has been involved in this program and a lot of work has involved interactions with scientists. I am sure she will have many insights to share with us.

Yet Kiverstein questions Sciart’s goal, or more specifically the implicit relationship it presupposes between science and art where the artists are seen as in the service of science, as translators of the complex scientific discourse.

“What could artists teach to scientists? what scientists could learn from artists?”

“A lot” replies Kiverstein who highlights how scientific discoveries are not only rational processes but require true creativity. Scientists solve puzzles, often by means of leaps of imagination. He gives as an example James D Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA as one of the many scientific discoveries to have resulted from a creative leap of this kind. Kiverstein raises an important issue regarding the nature of collaboration. He argues that if one defines collaboration as the “sharing of the labour involved in a given task”, it seems that in many of the Sciart projects, one cannot talk of collaborative work. Artists are often only finding “ways of dressing the scientific ideas in visual clothing”.This question is key to our project with Aileen: is she involved in the project only as someone who can help me dress my ideas in a “visual clothing” or is the project an exchange between my data and analysis of them and her understanding of my work and her understanding of visual arts, which leads me to revisit and deepen my analysis and interpretations. Here is my take on it: I originally mentioned her my idea of developing this project because she had this expertise in visual arts. Yet, in the background there were also our frequent discussions about teaching and how to create learning environments (both in the classroom and through technology) where students could play with the concepts taught in class and reflect on them. Our conversation quickly becomes a dialogue where Aileen’s questions and suggestions led me to redefine my interpretations and revisit my assumptions.In fact, yesterday we met to work on this project and discussed what this collaborative work really meant and how it might leads to a redefinition of disciplines. I am very curious to have your views on this issue, including Aileen’s perception of our “collaboration”.:-) Thanks.Cheers, al

Hi,

I’m reading a book edited by Sherry Turkle, entitled “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With”. I found this book as I was exploring the literature on materiality (objects, artifacts) for a paper I’m working on with John Weeks. Yet I think that this book also highlights ideas that make sense to BSWW.

The book is a collection of essays by scientists, humanists, artists and designers about “evocative objects” - objects that matter to them, that had a role in their emotional and / or intellectual development. The point here is to remind us how embodied and situated we are, and the meaning and power of everyday objects. Turkle suggests to consider objects as “companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought” (Turkle, 2007, p. 5) and she adds “we think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with”.

Turkle’s assumption (very similar to Orlikowski’s claim that we need to think socio-material practices, or Suchman’s and Latour’s call for giving back some “agency” to objects) is that we “We live our lives in the middle of things” (p.6) and objects, things, stuff matter and influence our way of thinking. In fact, what might claim that abstract reasoning cannot be separated (except theoretically) from concrete reasoning. Science cannot be reduced to abstract hypotheses and theories but it is done in the “dirty”, “messy” lab where scientists “play” with materials and instruments. (see Latour and Woolgar, 1979 ; Barley and Bechky, 1994). Science can be described as “bricolage” (Levi-Strauss, 1966), i.e. a manipulation of a closed set of materials and instruments to develop new ideas.

Reading Turkle’s introduction and conclusion, and some of the essays in this volume, I reflected on the nature of the exercise of building_space_with_words: the installation (not only the physical one that will take place in March, but more broadly the project including the blog) becomes a thing with which I try to think and to combine and recombine my ideas (through the combination of objects - wires, fabrics, blog, etc.) about space and interactions. And in this case, I want to make this object public and share it hoping that it will allow others to reflect on the “object” (the installation) and make them develop their own thoughts and associations.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. I guess this is a particularly relevant question to artists and to the issue of art as a research method.

Cheers,

al

Hi, 

I’d like to share with you a question that arose from our early discussions with Aileen. We wanted to project on the walls of the maze the content of the blog, but Aileen was worried that it will “feel dead”. She was worried that most of the time people would not be posting and thus there won’t be a lot of activity on the blog and as a consequence, not much “happening’ on the maze. Although I understood her concern from an aesthetic perspective, my first reply was “well, that’s reality” and I added “In fact, most of the time in many of these online forums and blogs there are not that much posts”. I gave her the example of my study with Gerry DeSanctis on online forums and how very few forums were very active and were really “communities” in that sense. And this example is just one illustration of what the research on online forums shows.

Moreover, I thought it was important to have at least one of the projectors showing the “blog live” even if “live” meant “dead” for Aileen… Yet Aileen insisted on creating an impression of activity on the maze. Of course, Aileen had a good point and this highlighted the interesting nature of this project - based on some data from two studies - but which was aiming to use art as a language to present and explore ideas. Discussing with Aileen, I remembered my literature classes where studying Balzac, perfect example of “realism” in French literature, you would learn to decipher and entangle all the craft, all the work, involved in creating this feeling of realism. Closer to us and more obvious, think of movies that show seemingly realistic dialogues and compare them to videos made during family or friends reunions. If you watch both, usually you will get very quickly bored with the latter. This “real” dialogue will need  a lot of editing before it can create this “realistic” feeling that the first ones (the movies’ dialogues) will create. That’s what our discussion with Aileen was about: she wanted to edit, to craft the discourse of the blog to create a sense of realism while I originally thought in terms of “data”. While I was collecting video data for my project on informal interactions in copier rooms,  I remember a discussion with Austin Henderson with whom I was working on video analysis: I was very frustrated as I had several hours of videotapes with “nothing” - no one used the copier, no one came in the copier room. I even thought of erasing the tapes! Fortunately Austin reminded me that these tapes with an empty copier room were “data”. It was telling me that during these 5 hours I recorded on that day, no one came in that room. That became even more meaningful when compared with other tapes in other settings where there were people going in and out, chatting, and using the copier. 

The question then became for me: what is the nature of this project? Is it another version of an academic article using another medium or is it another “animal”, another practice following different rules and mores?Was the discourse on the maze “data” or “art” (for lack of a better word)?

I think we are getting closer to “art”. This approach made even more sense to me when I though of my teaching practice. Indeed, when I teach, more than passing by knowledge to the students, I aim to create an environment which allow them to reflect and explore the concepts of the course. Similarly  Building_Space_With_Words  aims to create an environment where people who will come will start reflecting of  of what a virtual space means and what interacting online means.

Yet, this is still an open question, a very interesting one indeed as it opens discussions about the nature of the work and the nature of the object of the work of the artist, the sociologist and the scientist - of the architect and the  designer as well. These discussions become even more complex and interesting in multidisciplinary contexts.

Many of you have been involved in these collaborations - from one perspective or the other, and I’d like to know what are your thoughts on how to manage the boundaries and the definition of the objects of practice. Thanks.al  

In our discussion on Continuous City, Aileen and I discussed the role of technology in the play - how technology was “given” agency. I wanted to follow up on this idea of agency which was highlighted by Bruno Latour (1992, 1996, 2005) . Latour questioned the second-order role given to technology which is seen as passive, a tool used by human beings who are agents. He argues that agency is not a property or a capacity that belongs only to human beings, but that it emerges from the interactions between humans and non-humans, and in that sense, is relational. In a similar vein, Lucy Suchman invites us to redefine our notion of agency based “on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things” (Suchman, 2007).

In organization studies, scholars like Orlikowski (2007) also revisit the notion of practice and suggest that while most organizational scholars focus on social issues, they tend to forget materiality - either disregarding it, downplaying it or taking it for granted. Orlikowski claims that organization studies need to take materiality seriously into account as every aspect of organizing involves some “stuff” - whether visible like bodies, offices, desks, phones, computers, books, papers or invisible like data and voice network, electricity water and sewage infrastructures. She argues that “materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it” (Orlikowski, 2007: 1436). Our work with John Weeks on space and informal interactions belongs to a similar approach as we claimed that most organizational scholars ignored space (one aspect of materiality) while it played a key role in understanding interactions in organizations.

I personally became interested in this materiality issue while sitting in Francisco Varela’s class during my MA in Cognitive Science and then two years later when I read Being There: Putting Brain, Body and the World Together Again (Clark, 1996) and Cognition in the Wild by Hutching. Clark (a philosopher) develops a theory of cognition as the interactions between the brain, the body and the world. Cognition is not only the results of the computation of internal representations, but it is shaped by “the social and ecological settings in which we must act” (Clark, 1996: 221). Similarly, Hutchins (a cognitive anthropologist) who argues that in order to understand cognition, one needs to go out of the lab and study it “in the wild”, highlights the importance of social and material context. In Cognition in the Wild he studies cognition in the Navy and shows that navigation is an activity distributed between different individuals and different artifacts. His work greatly influenced me when I started doing an ethnography of air traffic controllers in the Control center for Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports with Wendy Mackay. Our observations showed how air traffic control was a distributed activity involving not only the internal representation of one controller, but the internal representations of different controllers in the team as well as the paper flight strips, the annotations on them, their arrangement on the board, and the Radar. 

The agency of technology has become even more relevant with the development of ubiquitous computing and the increasing role of online communication in human relationships. Turkle’s work which shows how people use computers not merely as tools to do things but how they interact through them - not only to communicate with others, but also exploring different identities - and to a certain extent with them. More than just prostheses, extensions of the self, technology - computers, cell phones, Ipods - have become our companions and they have changed our way of interacting.

I think it is fair to argue that artists also reflect upon the nature of technology and its agency. For example, in plays like Weems’ Continuous City, technology becomes central - not only as a material to support the actors’ interactions but also in some ways it becomes the main actor on the stage (see our discussion on the post of November 23rd). Re-reading Orlikowski’s point about the invisible “stuff” in organizations such as data’s networks I thought of Natalie Jereminjenko’s  Dangling String (see November 3rd).In a similar way, Terrain’s by John Klima is “the culmination of Klima’s explorations into ‘the real world as it exists in data’” (http://www.cityarts.com/terrain/index.html). It is digital interactive display that represents virtual data into physical forms and allows the “human” to interact real time and thus transforms the physical presentation.Hansen and Rubin’s Listening post (see November 3^rd) also explore how technology shapes our interactions and how online communication which can be seen as connecting us, allowing us to build communities, can also become a cacophony where voices talk in the void.Hence, technology becomes the matter with which artists work and play, but also the matter they question and reflect upon. By developing interactive installations like Klima’s Terrain or Train, (http://www.cityarts.com/train/index.html) or Utterback’s (see all the installations at the Act / react exhibition http://www.mam.org/act/index.htm or Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMa curated by Paula Antonelli http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/) they also in some ways revisit the idea of agency and create networks of human and non-humans from whose interactions’ agency emerges. What Aileen and I want to explore in our current work are the interactions between materiality (technology, space) and social interactions: what are the socio-material practices that we develop in online forums, blogs?In the installation, our aim is to “embody” online interactions by representing them through the structure of the maze and the discourse projected on it. The structure of the maze will represent different potential interactions and people will walk through a maze of words (discourse projected on semi-transparent panels). The public (in the maze or anywhere else) can create the projected discourse by posting on the blog. 

As I am finishing writing this post, I am struck by how the questions we are exploring in BSWW are questions that I have been exploring from different perspectives at different moments of my life. I also find fascinating to note the similarities between the work of people working in so many different disciplines and fields - sociology, philosophy, organizational studies, anthropology, neuroscience and art. This is why I believe taking a multidisciplinary approach is so rich as it allows you to turn around the object of exploration and see if from different perspectives, through different lenses and deepen your understanding. I know this is again a long post but I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on these issues. The great thing about this blog is that contributors all belong to different fields allowing us to share our various perspectives on issues related to interactions, space, virtual communication, and technology. 

Looking forward to your thoughts, al