Search

On further review, the editors of Leonardo journal and the leadership of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology have rescinded acceptance of this article as it does not fit the editorial focus of our publication. We regret the error.

ArtScience is emerging as one approach for creating novel ways of seeing and new ways of knowing. The authors propose a role for ArtScience research and creative work in contributing to the necessary shifts to go beyond the current crisis of representation. DataRemix, a recombination and reappropriation practice intended to trigger novel subjective experiences and associations, is described.

In June 25 and 26 2012, in the framework of the European StudioLab project, Leonardo/Olats co-organized with IMéRA in Marseille, France, the workshop “Water is in the Air”.

A recent National Science Foundation–National Endowment for the Arts workshop sought to re-think the ways that the arts and sciences are being linked today and how the agencies might jointly promote emerging areas of research and cultural development. Participants included artists, scientists and research engineers, as well as university deans and directors of alternative art-science spaces. This first workshop focused on computer science and information technology; a forthcoming NSF-NEA workshop will look at the arts and the biological sciences. Next year the NSF is sponsoring an art-science workshop, “Art as a Way of Knowing,” at the San Francisco Exploratorium, which has coupled creative artists with scientists and engineers for more than 40 years. Why this new attention to the coupling of the arts and sciences? The topic has been hotly debated for at least several hundred years, ever since the Scientific Revolution. The 19th century saw prominent figures such as Goethe active in both the arts and sciences. Samuel Morse, inventor of Morse code, was a painter. In the 1920s and 1930s the Bauhaus movement recoupled the creative arts with science and industry. In the 1950s Snow’s “two cultures” debate rekindled initiatives to bridge the arts and sciences. In the 1960s, Experiments in Art and Technology joined artists such as Rauschenberg with engineers such as Billy Kluver. So what’s new? The first thing is that “born-digital”–generation artists find themselves at home in the landscape of information technologies. The NSF Creative IT program recognized this burgeoning area of research. The NEA’s Audience 2.0 highlighted the new paths—and growing audiences—for art created and distributed through the digital electronic media. It has become second nature for artists to use computers and to push the development of computers in new directions to address artistic needs. New “creative” and entertainment industries have resulted. By the end of the NSF-NEA workshop, creativity was almost a dirty word—overused and often not clearly defined. Creativity by whom and for what? What was clear was that there is a new, dynamic and rapidly evolving group of artists, scientists and engineers working together, a networked “community of practice” also coming together through a variety of “communities of interest.” Most of these creative individuals or teams work in informal settings, from nonprofit groups to the hacker, “maker” community, alternative arts centers and people’s science movements. An important issue is how to network and cross-feed these groups with more formal institutional programs. The “creativity for what?” leitmotif reflected a concern that technology-driven innovation needs to be contextualized by social and cultural issues, such as urban renewal, climate change and energy sustainability or the technological transformation of health issues. Our Town, the proposed NEA program for the arts and urban redevelopment, perhaps provides one example context that could motivate new art-science agendas. Many burning issues in our lives and communities give us no choice but to link the arts and sciences. Another thread was the need to innovate in creativity thinking itself when faced with the big data flood, distributed networked knowledge and the impact of digital culture on how the arts and sciences are embedded in society. The recent Macarthur report “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” and the National Research Council’s “Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity” provide good starting points. The “partitions and divisions” within funding institutions and universities seem mal-adapted to the rapidly changing locus of multi-, interand trans-disciplinary artistic practice, and more particularly the rapidly changing landscape of art-science collaboration. The phrase “Alt.Art-Sci” emerged a number of times during the discussions as a way of capturing the uneasy sense that “business-as-usual” approaches will miss the mark. We need to innovate in innovation to work in the emerging networked culture. We need to look at where the most exciting creativity is occurring, at the burning issues in our communities and at how harnessing new couplings of science, engineering and cultural approaches can be part of creating a sustainable society.

Re-reading Darwin’s Origin of Species on its 150th anniversary, one is struck by its lucidity and humility and the transformative power of its conclusions. Yet the theory of evolution is still not widely understood or accepted. Arrhenius first wrote about the impact of increasing CO2 on global climate in 1896, and yet among governments the issue was still argued until recently. The projects of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution are incomplete. Scientific knowedge is not culturally appropriated. In many ways science has become a cargo cult. Many people use the cell phone for daily survival but could not explain the difference between a photon and an electron. One reason may be that common science does not make common sense. The information I study as a scientist is nearly all mediated through scientific instruments. I can tell when my instrument is hallucinating. I develop new words to describe phenomena I encounter. I can manipulate concepts not grounded in my experience as a child. But this intimacy is not the daily experience of most people. In an interesting new development in the art world, a generation of artists are now collecting data about their world using technological instruments but for cultural purposes. Shared tool-using leads to overlapping epistemologies and ontologies. These artists both make powerful art and help make science intimate, sensual, intuitive. A second reason for the disconnection of modern science and public understanding is that scientists carry out their work mostly in guarded monasteries, unwilling to consider that a larger public could be involved and thereby change the direction and content of future science. This institutional isolation is a historical accident, largely due to the societal compact of science and government following World War II. There are, however, encouraging signs of new types of “micro science” made possible by the Internet and the new public access to scientific data and instruments. To coin a phrase, micro science is to the National Science Foundation what micro-credit is to the World Bank. I am not calling for a renewal of amateur science but for embedding mediated contact with the world in everyday life. Intimate science by artists and micro science at all levels of society are important components of the “hard humanities”---the arts and humanities disciplines essential to the cultural transformation necessary within the next two generations. Controlling climate change, abandoning dependency on fossil fuels and creating the conditions for sustainable development will require as deep a transformation as our ancestors accomplished over tens of thousands of years in moving from agrarian to urban societies. The work of the Leonardo community in promoting art-science and art-technology collaboration is part of the toolkit for survival. We know what a landscape artist is, and indeed landscape artists over several hundred years have helped shape the relationship between humans and nature. But what is a “climate artist”? Two hundred years from now we will identify the climate artists working today who made possible the transformations now beginning. Climate artists will use their senses, mediated by technological tools, to reshape our relationship to the world around us. The “hard humanities” also include social sciences, now suddenly required to be prescriptive. Anthropologists find themselves in industrial innovation workshops; historians are called upon to explain the ways that societies can transform themselves. Artists working with these scholars also engage in intimate and micro science that, as in the Renaissance, will help reshape our relationships to the societies we build. Over recent months a number of us have been developing the concept of “open observatories” that disseminate methods and knowledge for micro science, intimate science, people’s science and crowd sourcing. These open observatories would allow small communities to develop locally generated knowledge and to evolve rapidly to confront climate change, end oil dependency and create sustainable development. Open observatories would include artists collecting data for cultural and artistic purposes, as well as community leaders and researchers seeking ways to mediate personally meaningful access to scientific knowledge. They will help make new science indigenous and intimate.