March 12, 2006
[Spectre] Art and Science:
Why Duality is Good, Why (New Media) Theory is Poor
"Dear friends:
After reading a lot of different positions on this never-ending discussion on the relation between Art and Science, I want to give an opinion on why the dichotomy of science and art are quite useful and probably why they are also irreconcilable in a 'unity' perspective, and also, expand it towards our own criticism, within the new media community, of a lack of critical theoretical analysis in some areas.
Whenever science becomes rationalist or mechanistic, there should be criticism. Anna Munster mentioned that inside science there is some criticism, but usually the most deep and open criticisms come from the outside of a discipline, from "the other", that is excluded from the dialog but also has the right for participation to give an opinion. Artists in that sense had been part of this enriching external opinion, although, to some extend, quite ignored or taken seriously, hence, undervalued.
In fact, the organizing visions in art are different than the ones in science. Even inside communities (these happens even more in science, where there are specialized groups, which means they are defactum isolated from other groups or general topics inside science itself). Nevertheless when we are exposed to hibridity, lets say to an artistic approach of a formal discipline, initially the people of the former community will be doubtful: the analyses will not satisfy the formalization of thought that is internalized in a particular group. This will lead towards seeing art as a "nice thing" but nothing more. The formal discourse will usually not include into its formulation the discussion brought from the arts. Even more seriously, since art has a natural tendency to be seen to have an esthetical function, it will be left aside, once more, as seen as a "nice thing".
In that sense public opinion is underestimated, and this is why the museum should convert itself into a social science laboratory, should be seen as the experimentation towards the understanding of issues that arise within today's society. Yes, if we talk about this, we immediately will think about many interactive art pieces that had tried to develop public awareness towards certain subjects. Hence, duality in art and science could be seen in a positive way: whenever a science is neutral or conservative (dogmatist) towards a certain issue, art could bring up those issues in a critical way.
However, I want to address here a second critical point: art is usually not taking into consideration the theoretical basis of the critical issues around science from a deep perspective. In that sense perhaps it is important once more to mention the work in areas such as the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) that had build a corpus of theoretical discussion that enriched not only the relation between Science, Technology and Society (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Mulkay and Knorr-Cetina 1983; Latour 1987; Law 1991 among many others) in these sense, Science takes seriously or at least discuss and criticize many of the works done around SSK. However this does not happen in Science with the discourse that comes from the Arts. Even more, some of SSK's theories, specially the ones related to social constructivism (Law 1999) take into consideration not only the inner core, but also the outer core, in that sense, the diaspora of emergent situations that are out of the centre, what we had been calling "the other" or the "marginal". This marginality sensitivity is fundamental for assimilating new pattern and invigorating a theoretical discourse that has been quite Western-oriented since its formal academic establishment.
This, as I mentioned before, could be also interpreted as a criticism towards the current state of new media theory and its deepening with other concurrent discussions. We cannot deny that there has been quite an important theoretical development in new media art, especially from an historiographic and genealogic point of view. However the deep discussion about the future is something that though is addressed by artists (in this respect, as Dreyfus (2001) mentions "Artists see far ahead of their time") it is not worked in a much more detailed and deep manner. This is perhaps not only the work of the artists but of many of new media theoreticians, to start fostering and enrich a discussion in our former community and expanding it to address several critical issues that have a much more deeper and wide implications in society and are multi-disciplinary (or sometimes pertain to specific disciplines).
Moreover, if the take a view that does not only covers our little theoretical world of new media and open it up, we will perhaps start to incorporate diverse practices from other areas of the world, those "others" that in the case of new media art are neglected by the majority (if not all) of encyclopedic approaches in what I consider today a rude exception to a much more broad reality. We cannot just think that media art has a history in the West (in my opinion this tries just to link it again with the past, a Western-envisioned-past). Media art has its own history all over the world and we need to broaden our closed mental boundaries not only to see those structures but also to understand them." -- Jose-Carlos Mariategui
Refs:
Dreyfus, H. L. (2001). On the internet. London ; New York, Routledge.
Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981). The Manufacture of Knowledge: An essay on the Constructivism and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford, Pergamon.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action : how to follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Law, J. (1991). A Sociology of monsters : essays on power, technology and domination. London, Routledge.
Law, J. (1999). After ANT: complexity, naming and topology. Actor Network Theory and After. J. Law and J. Hassard. Oxford, Blackwell's for Sociological Review: 256p.
Mulkay, M. and K. D. Knorr-Cetina (1983). Science observed : perspectives on the social study of science. London, Sage.
Annick Bureaud responds:
Jose-Carlos wrote :
> usually the most deep and open criticisms come from the outside of a
> discipline, from "the other", that is excluded from the dialog
so ... if this is true for science (I would rather use the plural "sciences"), this should be true for art too. Let's people "outside the art" or "arts" (plural again) look at what art is doing ;-) no more theoreticians, art philosophy, etc. ... huh ! May be it is what is already happening and what we (the critics, theoreticians, philosophers, artists, curators, media activists, etc.) are fighting against.
Sorry, I could not help !
Sometimes, in this discussion, I wonder about "which" science we are talking about : an imagined one, a fantasized one, the one that is used by politicians (and business alike) to justify everything and anything, the one that scientists do (and some scientists are very much backing up some politicians and business while others are not) ?
We still don't have answered Andreas's original question. I had planed to, at least give some info, but, well ... only 24h a day.
Forgive me for the above (half) joke. Jose-Carlos, I agree with you. It was not intended against you. Just I am in a "light" mood today.
Louise Desrenards responds:
> Jose-Carlos wrote :
>
>> usually the most deep and open criticisms come from the outside of a
>> discipline, from "the other", that is excluded from the dialog
>
> so ... if this is true for science (I would rather use the plural
> "sciences"), this should be true for art too. Let's people "outside the
> art" or "arts" (plural again) look at what art is doing ;-)
> no more theoreticians, art philosophy, etc.
> ... huh ! May be it is what is already happening and what we (the critics,
> theoreticians, philosophers, artists, curators, media activists, etc.) are
> fighting against.
Sorry of my very special Anglophone language:
Can be there are too much numerous experts speaking of Art (Arts) by a way that drives (it) them to the orders, as we know how money comes through the discourse of Art and through the conceptual criticism of Art(s) waited by certain institutions or foundations. In the former times there was too orders coming from institutions. But institutions did not conditioned (but only the subject) the free interpretative answer by the artist. That is exactly not more the actual situation.
Money does not come directly to Art but to curators or to any happy few as artists being able to make the academic discourse of their artistic actions. What does not give the best sign that Art (even they would be several) would be so representative of its traditional symbolic tribute. Artistic acts of artists have not to speak of themselves but only by themselves...
More having to be explained or extended by the discourse of their artist. Arts do not reveal of the force of their acts but all the contrary.
During the modernity and the post-modernity several artists were too writers or poets, any of them philosophers too, other were criticizes, or writers and mathematicians were same time poets or artists -I shall give few between a lot of examples as different as are Raymond Queneau, or Topor, or Jodorowski, or Lewis Carroll, Wittgenstein, even nowadays by a part of the different works of Peter Sloterdijk, but that was/is always in a register of feeling or trans-intellectual as a gift (even a published work under private signature) toward their respective field to other artists or to people. That was not of marketing nor of lobbying but of change, can be sold but not exactly as commodity.
In fact I think that the problem of the relationship of Sciences with Arts it is not the problem of what is an Art, but the problem that Sciences are not Arts by the fact that Sciences work always with a methodology to experiences can being reproduced or not approved as result -even these ones or human sciences regarding stochastic to relative reality "decidability" as they say. While Arts are the expression of the free feeling or interpretation to a work as event, not as the truth of a proof, but as real event.
There is something shamanist in Arts and in Poetry that never would be abolished, even the artists as members of the demiurgic part of societies would have left to be representative, their would stay any ones not being called artists but following creative objects, even virtual, from their own predictable feelings of their time of their imagination of other times.
The question is that more Arts leave their traditional reprentativity (that comes more from the trans-modern environment and social connections after the times of the connective production) more they leave their social interest and more they are unsupported, more Sciences appear as an alternative providential supporting truth to renew Arts -that makes a consequent -between the numerous- entropy of Arts. Because unfortunately there is not at all -or by misunderstanding- connection between the symbolic events and the scientific proofs without which there are no sciences.
But they may have game between themselves, they may play together: can be very interesting as dialectical installation of the mind ; but without critical relationship it is a very dangerous game to the actual player whose name is Art. And both time it is a very dangerous game in matter of freedom - free event as butterfly of which poetry is a field useful towards any price to humanity.
Can be more an extending scientific field to call for money from the side of the " absolute commodity " at the cost of Art.
But overall we cannot be reductionist of Arts, by this way we can only say: if entropy is so much advanced can be Arts as collectively representative are really dead (as Baudrillard could told of since a moment event he was not understood, in the historical sense of the lost symbolic connections to the trans-modern societies and power regarding the artistic acts themselves). Fortunately Artist and Poets are still alive, I guess.. and Sciences are in revolution of their Aristotelian paradigm (by elements), in stochastic paradigm of environment to living elements in plasticity.
L. [via Spectre]
Jeremy Hight responds:
I have to jump in on this discussion.
I am an artist,writer,musician,theorist,curator,almost scientist (will explain) and a bit of an early math whiz.
I played with pattern variations in long number strings as I saw symmetry flux and pattern emergence while waiting in the dark and cold for the bus as a boy in elementary school. I began giving weather forecasts and correcting the men on tv (one actually corrected his error after our phone call) around 8 or 9. I also collected an amazing fact corner in the sunday comics that has fueled a lot of my later work. It was etymology (word origins) and fascinated me. I collected hundreds of them over my young years. I also began writing at that age, although not taking it seriously.
I was one of those highly gifted kids so the teachers basically just accelerated everything and didn't look for individual interests. I am not bragging by any means, in fact I spent several years failing out of school as a teen partially because everone bragged endlessly about iq and how little they studied and also I just felt lost. My point is that I saw mystery, answers, searches, curiosity and patterns (in math,weather,language and writing)
There long has been a perception here in america that art and science are polar opposites. But it depends on what perspective of the field you are talking about. I was planning to be a field researcher in experimental meteorology looking at uncertainties, patterns, new forms and how to model them graphically.
Now I am a locative and new media artist and have published poems, stories, criticism, critical theory and have had my music in some experimental music shows. I still am obsessed with wether and devour info on nanotechnology, genetics, string theory etc......
It is important to see how a hypothesis....a question of combination or comparison........steps of exploration.......smaller and larger questions.........and a conclusion............can be biology or how many poems are constructed..........
I teach writing, design theory, semiotics, art theory and english composition and often have been stuck on a point and found a science example that filled it in clearly.
One example is when I was teaching how to write personal essay and trying to explain how a certain essay was both about a broadening discussion of racism in america and simultaneously a tighter and tighter journey into understanding the writer (James Baldwin) and his father's blank dead look in his eyes. I tried to explain the two movements, then drew diagrams of the spirals and key points in time (personal essay is often not linear in time and instead a resonant accumulation/"jumping around") and being saturday morning the students went "mmm pancakes!"
I had to scramble..............so...........thinking oh no this is wacky........I explained the simulatenous tightening of eye wall/low pressure and fanning upper level exhaust system/high in intensifying hurricanes.....and how it was the same thing in a way...........the students listened then nodded......
I was on a panel in a conference at M.I.T last year and it was great to speak to creative scientists and researchers and to artists in one place.
There is great similarity, we are simply taught not to see it.
Posted by jo at March 12, 2006 09:19 PM
