Thank you Florian for these further comments and your problematisation of the concept of ArtScience.
The extended lineages of ArtScience I’m overly familiar with and I deliberately tried to avoid them in this text so as to develop a slightly more ‘fresh’ perspective’ - I’ve been reading Leonardo since my student days (i.e. back in the 1980s), though less in recent years, and have always been amazed by the presence of really good and really terribly bad texts and works there - never managed to wrap my head around that entirely.
ArtScience as affirmative techno-spectacle is a real risk, or maybe even more than that an already existing condition as also Steve has pointed out here. So, there is an obvious need to get beyond that and Brian has made clear where the urgency lies in this.
However, critical making, as much as I appreciate the initiative, will not be able to deliver what Brian is rightfully calling for. What is needed is a broad synthetic perspective that can anchor itself in specific practices. This requires at the very least grounded research, critical theory, and sophisticated forms of ‘making’ if we follow that term (i.e. critical making?).
And when I write ‘research’ I mean all the different forms of research, in the arts as well as the sciences (and other domains, including non-professional ones - see in praise of amateurism), and when I write ‘arts’ I mean all the arts, and when I write sciences I mean all the sciences, i.e. the so-called hard sciences, humanities, but also social sciences). Nobody and no practice can contain such a scope - that’s clear, so how this becomes specific is through this idea of creating specific intersections. Every project / work coming out of this creates new and specific intersections between these different ‘fields’. What emerges is a hybrid practice that cuts through these existing fields, but every time in a highly specific / singular manner - you could call this a ‘mathesis singularis’, borrowing from Barthes (Camera Lucida), as opposed to the mathesis universalis of the so-called hard sciences.
Inevitably then subjectivity takes a central position in such a praxis, along with all its inherent problems - this is a ‘methodological stance’ we know from the arts, yet is inadmissible in the sciences. For this to become political it needs to be translated into a collective practice, and this is where what Brian is calling for (the triad of art / science / politics) clearly transcends the current frame of ArtScience. So the question is what this would translate into?
bests, Eric
Hello Eric, Brian,
Historically - as fas as I do overlook the subject matter -, ArtScience is rooted in the collaboration of artists and (hard) scientists in research labs as described in Douglas Kahn's and Hannah Higgins' book "Mainframe Experimentalism" and, from a very critical political perspective, in Lutz Dammbeck's feature documentary "The Net". In the 1970s, it often involved artists with backgrounds in 1960s experimental and intermedia arts (such as Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek), and was modeled after earlier collaborations between electronic music composers (such as Lejaren Hiller and Dick Raaijmakers) and scientists in university and corporate research labs. In most cases, ArtScience meant/means that contemporary artists chose to affiliate themselves with science and technology research instead of the humanities and cultural studies as the traditional academic counterparts of the arts. Perhaps the "Leonardo" journal, which has been published since the 1960s, is hitherto the best manifestation and documentation of the ArtScience discourse and field. (On top of that, "Leonardo's" name suggests a larger history of ArtScience that encompasses Renaissance neoplatonist and classical Pythagorean discourses that thought of mathematics, sciences, musical and visual aesthetics as one integrated whole.)
Just as 'contemporary art' (as a discourse and field with close affiliations to the humanities and cultural studies/critical theory) has tended to be late and/or superficial (such as in much of the trendier Post-Internet art) in grasping and engaging with the social and cultural impact of new technologies, ArtScience conversely runs the risk to end up as affirmative techno spectacle (or just some court jester experimentation in research labs without actual contributions to the core research).
While I do know and appreciate the ArtScience study program in The Hague - and even collaborate with some of its graduates -, I wonder whether the field of ArtScience as a whole can be extended towards the critical ecological discourse and engagement that you propose. Factually, that discourse does not only require the intersection of art and science (again, in the Anglo-American meaning of science vs. humanities), but one of art, science, humanities and politics. It would require to rid itself from those techno-positivists in the larger ArtScience community seen who literally advocate that art practice should become lab work and creative technology R&D in institutes of technology because the relevant stuff (such as robotics, artificial intelligence and sensor technology) is being developed there. (I could drop many names, also from the Netherlands, but leave them out for the sake of politeness.)
Along with colleagues, I've found the concept and discourse of Critical Making much clearer as an attempt of fusing the arts, design, technological hacking with critical humanities and social engagement. (On this topic, an interview with Garnet Hertz has just been published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD43kCvI1wY) One of the questions for us is to which extent Critical Making can be extended into a larger discourse including the contemporary art field. Other proposals are on the table, such as "environmental humanities" (whose name unfortunately doesn't include the arts) and "creative ecologies". Within the environmental humanities, T.J. Demos' book "Against the Anthropocene" conversely points out how the original notion of the anthropocene itself is contaminated with techno positivism. I would agree that the crises we're facing are insufficiently addressed by the mere combination of the two discourses of art and science, and that we need concepts that are both more specific and more inclusive.
Just my 10 cents.
Florian
|