Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

This is a great discussion! CAE just wrote this:

> One of the reasons we stopped doing these projects was due to the fact 
> that our experience of the ArtSci world was that it was not progressive. 
> In fact, our experience was that most were unknowing agents for the 
> neoliberals. Aestheticizing the domination of nature, acting as lab 
> public relations agents, and worst of all making science look mysterious 
> and cultish.

I totally agree with this and for a long time my interest in the 
crossroads of Art and Science was basically limited to - CAE. When asked 
to admire the wonders of Symbiotica, or dozens of other such endeavors 
you might find at Ars Electronica, I looked and declined. The conflation 
of values like "research" and "invention" with simulacra like 
"innovation" and "excellence" was obvious. It was a tech boom, right? 
Science laid the golden eggs. Neoliberals handled all the lingo. Profit 
and power were the keywords. And what was art supposed to do?

Mystification is not for me. Concerning science, I did the 
historical-materialist critique of what Armin Medosch and I called 
"technopolitics."

Then this thing called Earth System Science came onto my horizon. It 
emerged right out of NASA, with some major help from geology and 
chemistry and statistical modeling. But the significance of it lies in 
ecology. The point was to understand biogeochemical cycles: the 
intricate dynamic union of organic and inorganic elements in the 
all-encompassing metabolic process that is the biosphere. This metabolic 
process extends about ten miles up into the atmosphere, and it goes all 
the way down into the earth's mantle, where petrified organic compounds 
from the crust are gasified in contact with molten material and vented 
back up into the soil and the atmosphere. The system of biogeochemical 
cycles is crucially affected by one extra-systemic input: solar energy, 
transformed by photosynthesis. And now, this remarkably stable 
homeostatic system is being decisively transformed by one 
*intra*systemic component: we humans, the Prometheans, who love to burn 
things. That's what we're literally doing, burning, releasing smoke, 
accelerating Earth's metabolism to totally unknown degreees.

For the first time I could see something beautiful and urgent in science.

I gotta confess, I've been immoderately influenced by the programming of 
Bernd Scherer and the rest of the Anthropocene Curriculum crew at HKW in 
Berlin. Recently the group Deep Time Chicago which I co-founded hosted 
some of them in Chicago. Bernd said something tremendously interesting 
which answered a question I had about the changing thematic focus of the 
institution, which in the mid-2000s had been closely associated with 
postcolonial critique. For Scherer, Earth System Science and the 
discourse of the Anthropocene represents an *internal critique* of 
Western hegemony - a way to pursue and drive home the postcolonial 
critique. That's an astonishing conclusion. I love TJ Demos, whose book 
Against the Anthropocene was cited here, and I urge him to think a 
little more about this idea.

Like Eric, and to Steve's bemusement, I'm influenced by Bruno Latour. 
The best way to say why is to recall a scene from an interview made 
perhaps two years ago for the French Ministry of the Environment, which 
pictures Latour sitting on an indoor chair outside his country home 
saying something like: "At least the war has finally begun. It was 
terrible, for so long, the Phony War (*la Drole de Guerre*). But now 
it's good. The war has started." So what in the hell does he mean by 
that one?

Earth System Science is the kind of truth that forces you to take sides. 
Or rather, its rejection forces you to take sides. If Earth System 
Science makes you see the current form of technoscientific development 
as a kind of planetary suicide - inevitably preceded by a cortege of 
horrors - then you must seek allies among those who oppose that suicide. 
This is a political truth, at least for the people who see it that way. 
Latour's belief is that scientists are slowly but increasingly 
recognizing that they have to choose sides in this war.

I am no scientist. I come from another people. In Chicago, which like 
everywhere in the US is anti-intellectual, they prefer to call me an 
artist. I did not wait for Earth System Science in order to develop a 
critique of capitalist technology, and indeed, there are many pathways 
leading to that critique (Marxism, decolonialism, certain varieties of 
religious belief, surely many other things). Yet science makes me 
realize how ineluctable the current process of eco-suicide really is. 
When you are faced with imminent murder, as in a war, you seek allies - 
the more powerful the better. Not phony, self-interested relations of 
commercial convenience like Steve has described, which is most of what 
you'd find on any random walk. But the rare thing, real allies, which 
are not born but made.

Eric, what a thought-provoking discussion. You want to locate the 
Art-Science relation, because you see it as crucial to the present. What 
I'm saying is you'll never find it in the mystique of creativity and 
fundamental research. You'll find it in the sequence 
perception-belief-action, or science-art-politics. You're totally right 
that it's hard to get across. But what if nothing else will do?

The most difficult question is how to change oneself in order to make 
allies.

Brian
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: