Multidisciplinary encounters on Complexity in Arts and Sciences: an interesting event at IRCAM in Paris (co-organized with Centre George Pompidou) IRCAM, June 10-12, 2009 (for more information, see description below.

In case you’re in Paris at that time, it sounds like a very interesting event and completely in line with some of our discussions on the collaboration between artists and scientists.  

The event comprises of a three-days scientific symposium and twoart-science encounters in the evening.The whole event takes place inside the Ircam Agora Festival<http://www.ircam.fr/85.html>, june 8-19 2009, a major milestone in the French cultural landscape. It is also coupled with a Lars von Trierretrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou.

While the symposium will focus on conferences by prestigious scientists or art theorists, the evening presentations will give the opportunity toleading artistic personalities to confront their practices and ideology on the ground of complexity.Physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, epistemology, architecture, music, painting, litterature, cinema, theatre … a greatvariety of topics will be explored in an interactive fashion.Participants will take advantage of a selection of concerts during the Agora Festival program that have a unique connection to the idea of complexity.

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

For those based in New York and in line with our discussion about collaboration between science and art: an interesting public program will take place next week at BRICS Rotunda Gallery.

Applications of Medical Imaging Technology in Contemporary Artistic Practice

Tuesday, February 17 at 7 pm

Artists Robert de Saint Phalle and B.J. Vogt in discussion with curator Nina Horisaki-Christens.

Artists are pushing the limits of medical imaging technology through a range of practices that transcend the rigidity of current thinking, including: translating MRI reports into sculpture, applying form and color to standard procedural output, and manipulating data to create imagery. Robert de Saint Phalle and B.J. Vogt discuss the artistic applications of medical imaging technology in contemporary practice and in their own work with curator Nina Horisaki-Christens.
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……So it is with more than a little sense of mission that she talks about bringing together the different strands of activity in the building. “I’ve always had this interest in meeting places and social spaces. This place is an interesting interface between patients and doctors and scientists. When I worked on the subject of genetics I was fascinated by the scientists – often they work in a bubble and, of course, there’s no reason why they should be directly involved in patient care. But everyone has so much to learn from each other.”

In the building this is reflected in many ways. There are shared entrances and social spaces. There is just one café, with furniture designed by Donachie using timber and craftsmanship sourced just a matter of miles away. At the centre of the building’s courtyard, Donachie has helped create a garden and built The Disc, a huge concrete circle which acts as a focal point, seating area and picnic spot. It has the capacity to warm up, using the waste heat from the centre’s labs and refrigeration units.”

and here’s the link: http://living.scotsman.com/visual-arts/Arts-Review-Artists-doing-the.4861951.jp

On December 1, Lucy posted an interesting post on her blog http://www.designleadership.blogspot.com/
very relevant to our discussion about socio-material practices:

“Designers wary of social theories - imagining that intuition, or something like it, will produce good design - would benefit from being attentive to the work of sociologist Steve Woolgar. In his recent lecture on the occasion of winning the J. D. Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Steve produced a thoughtful demonstration of how it’s hard to talk about “the social” without talking about objects and how they are involved in constituting it. Many designers, of course, have the opposite problem - they find it hard to talk about anything but objects and aren’t interested in what “the social” might be.

Outside of social science, Steve is perhaps less well known than his close collaborator Bruno Latour, but he is an important figure. Their Laboratory Life (1979), is one of the most influential books in social studies of science published in the past 30 years. Steve enjoys telling people that his job title when hired at Saïd was professor of marketing. More recently - having along the way run whole events on the perplexing question of what Science and Technology Studies (STS) is doing in a business school - he has worked with Dan Neyland (now at Lancaster) on studying what they call mundane governance: looking in ethnographic detail at the now day-to-day, possibly boring objects that are involved in governance and accountability. Their examples include things like speed cameras, recycling boxes, and bottles of water. The latter, for example, are turned into weapons of terror once you pass from one zone into another in an airport. Key questions for Woolgar are who, which and what, is accountable to what, which and whom? Once governance is not just about the governance of people, but also about the governance of things, then the categories (and practices) that constitute mundane, ordinary life, should be considered.”

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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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.

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

http://www.zakros.com/projects/eat/index.html