Re: Locating ArtScience

[Brian Holmes]

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 

Locating ArtScience

[Kurtz, Steven]

Just a few random comments related to the discussion Eric has initiated.

Between 1997 and 2007, Critical Art Ensemble did quite a few 
art/science/politics projects. When speaking about those projects we would say, 
“it looks like science, but its not.” If someone wanted to engage us as 
scientists, we would, but that didn’t make it science. We were not using the 
scientific method to produce information to be reviewed and replicated by our 
scientific peers. Rather we were appropriating the vision engines of science 
that we needed to make a political point. We needed them to lead our viewers/ 
participants to places where they could see and understand their stake in how a 
scientific or a technological development would manifest itself in the world. 
To understand what kind of policies were being made around these developments, 
and to understand if they were in their interest. We were trying to create 
informed (amateur) interventionists regarding key issues that would impact 
society and/or the planet.

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. “Only a genius 
like myself can understand the mysteries of art and science.”  And people 
believed it. The contempt we had for that attitude is difficult to describe. 
The alienation that they would create was unforgivable. We would tell people 
that scientific work is not that difficult to understand in a general sense, 
and that lab work is little more than following a cake recipe. Not wanting to 
be affiliated with so much of the work that was being generated was why we 
stopped, and returned to doing art and politics without the sci. Perhaps it’s 
better 10 years later. Someone please show me that  my opinion is an artifact 
of the past.

And while I am on ethical bankruptcy, I do think it’s important to address 
educational institutions, because they are bureaucracies that endure even when 
there is regime change. Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) culture 
as it now exists in the US at tech universities is the worst, and it’s what 
many state universities now aspire to so they can promise jobs to the debt 
slaves formerly known as students. (The Ivy League schools will remain 
universities proper, so the wealthy may do as they will.) In STEM culture, 
students are absolved of all criticality. It’s all problem-solving education. 
Just solve the technical problem, it’s someone else’s job to make the policy. 
If something horrible happens in society or the environment, it’s not your 
problem—it’s the policy-makers problem. And just to make sure you won’t 
accidently stumble into a place where you might have a critical thought, the 
arts and humanities will be purged from the campus. Welcome to Cal Tech (often 
ranked as America’s top university).  We do need to do something on college 
campuses before art is reduced to drawing and art appreciation and English is 
reduced to technical writing courses. The purge is on.

“Amateur” is another term that needs to be called attention to again. In the US 
the term is in crisis. Right now it means that any know-nothing with an opinion 
(amateur) should be considered equal to or better than experts, specialists, 
and those who have reviewed a topic with interest and care so that they may 
participate in a knowledgeable way in debates on the issue (what an amateur 
should be). This is part of the reason the US currently has a political system 
packed with total incompetents. In a moment of total double-think, particularly 
among populists, ignorance equals intelligence and capability.

I am unsure whether ArtSci should be a discipline unto itself. I’m cautious. It 
makes me think back to the 80s when all the radical break-away English and 
Philosophy professors started semiotics departments. Don’t see many of those 
any more.
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Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Thanks so much Brian,

Very relevant critique. Without wanting to get stuck on a term, I was using the 
word ‘field’ partly because there is a field of practice that refers to itself 
as ArtScience (with a growing number of initiatives, organisations, museums 
even), towards which I wanted to take a position / open it up for scrutiny and 
discussion. Also, this text is written from within the program in The Hague to 
stimulate critical debate there, and is possibly a bit too much written from an 
‘internal’ perspective, which is why it is good to post it here and get 
responses from outside that inner-circle.

More important is your call for a triad of art, science, and politics. I fully 
agree that this would be much stronger and it would really be something to 
develop a strong research and practice context where these three come together 
- as you write so articulately: "Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes 
the visible meaningful. Politics makes the meaningful actionable.” That’s 
exceptionally well put.

The political is, of course, there throughout the text, though mostly implicit. 
Most overtly in the link up with Latour’s politics of nature and his more 
recent reflections on the Anthropocene (a by now somewhat over-used term, but 
still) - facing Gaia. There’s also an overabundance of ‘institutional critique’ 
implicit within the text (towards both the arts and the sciences). Still, it 
would make a lot of sense to be able to bring this out much more explicitly and 
indeed turn the political here into a fully fledged third constitutive element 
of a new intersectional practice.

The urgency of taking on such a ‘three-field formation’ is abundantly clear, 
and it would be a super challenging thing to do. Such an initiative should 
consist of both research (theory) and practice. The question would be where you 
would find support (institutional or otherwise) to develop a viable structure 
for that?

Not an institution, but rather a ‘program’ of sorts, more directly geared 
towards actionable interventions, combining research, theory, and artistic / 
design practices - nothing ephemeral, but something much more ‘grounded’. This 
is something I want to seriously think about - it was somehow already there 
when I was writing this text, but you pushed it just a step further - very 
inspiring!

Last comment, more from my personal perspective: In the 12 years I was 
developing projects at De Balie in Amsterdam, our main purpose was to link 
culture and politics - at least that is what I always saw as the main raison 
d’être of the place. At the time the evolving practices of new media culture, 
network culture, digital culture, whatever you call it, provided a vibrant 
context to make such linkages (thinking of tactical media, the new 
internet-driven transnational arts and culture networks, the (still) on-going 
info-politics debates, net.criticism and so on). Currently, at the ArtScience 
Interfaculty, the program is exploring intersections of art and science as 
emergent supra-disciplinary practices.

Now, what if we can fuse these two approaches? - an forever emergent set of 
intersectional practices that cut through the arts, the sciences, and politics, 
where these practices constitute themselves anew every time they create a 
specific intersection between these ‘fields’. That’s what I mean with ‘forever 
in becoming’ - such an intersectional (transversal?) practice can never fix 
itself in static definitions or rigid structures, but it does require a viable 
structure, a strong basis from which to act, to avoid complete marginalisation 
- how to do this?

Now there’s something to think about!

All my bests for now,
Eric

> On 8 Dec 2017, at 18:57, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but with due 
> respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic 
> twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society could 
> believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's winter fires, 
> it seems that much greater things than an academic field could "overheat" and 
> "melt down."
> 
> And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively rich. 
> The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian floods of 
> 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically new: harbingers of 
> the present.
> 
> Why can't deal with what's all around us?
> 
> Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. 
> Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is 
> separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present 
> circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the other. 
> Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.
> 
> Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications and 
> consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe 

Re: Net neutrality and the rest of the internet?

[Molly Hankwitz]

Dear Johnathan,

Thank you. I tend to agree that it may well be a lost cause but, one still
worth commenting on and rejecting until its lost, no? I’d rather go down
fighting. Maybe some can claim a completely autonomous net.space already
and, therefore, this seems as much a part of hype as “multimedia” once
did...but, I for one can’t claim a space that autonomous.

“Net neutrality” is a bit of a buzzword. True.

M



On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 2:15 PM Johnatan Petterson <
internet.petter...@gmail.com> wrote:

> hello Molly,
>
> i like the neutrality of net.
> you should want to call this with an other hype name than 'neutrality'
> which does not sound attractive.
> i was not in touch, just googled 'neutrality'; 'net' ;and got to a
> wikkypedya webpage. >>>
> >>it seems the kind of lost cause, a bit like the one of the
> 'Dine'/'Navajo' : .
> , in my opinion, one day, people will realize there 'used' to be loads of
> lost causes such as the 'Navajo' and 'net/neutral' cause.
> and which day will be a happy day, for there are always (in the Future)
> other tools than you thought to defend and strive
> for a cause that is loosing ground quite quick. too quick.
>
> any info welcome.
> Johnatan
>
> 2017-12-08 17:16 GMT+01:00 Molly Hankwitz :
>
>> Dear nettime,
>>
>> Please post good sources of thought about the curtailing of “net
>> neutrality” here in US and what effects that could or will have elsewhere?
>>
>> Feeling myopic in my understanding
>>
>> Much obliged for any, all comments
>>
>> Also - an easy action to take is this one...open to international
>> communication as well...tick the box!
>>
>> > Oliver's instructions (which crashed the FCC website the last time this
>> issue came up), and tell the agency we want equal access, and equal speed
>> for everyone. Otherwise, telecomms and government will decide what we get
>> to see, and what we don't.
>>
>> Contact and comment to the FCC.
>>
>> ⚡️Thanks to John Oliver there's a SUPER easy way to voice your comment⚡️
>>
>>
>> 1. Go to gofccyourself.com
>> (the shortcut John Oliver made to the hard-to-find FCC comment page)
>>
>> 2. Next to the 17-108 link (Restoring Internet Freedom), click on
>> "express"
>>
>> 3. Be sure to hit "ENTER" after you put in your name & info so it
>> registers.
>>
>> 4. In the comment section write, "I strongly support net neutrality
>> backed by Title 2 oversight of ISPs."
>>
>> 5. Click to submit, done. - Make sure you hit submit at the end!
>>
>> **share this** Thanks Michael Mandiberg, Kimi Takesue
>>
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>
>
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Re: Locating ArtScience

[Brian Holmes]

Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but 
with due respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic 
twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society 
could believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's 
winter fires, it seems that much greater things than an academic field 
could "overheat" and "melt down."


And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively 
rich. The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian 
floods of 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically 
new: harbingers of the present.


Why can't deal with what's all around us?

Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. 
Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is 
separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present 
circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the 
other. Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.


Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications 
and consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe 
fundamental research into the constitution of twenty-first century 
authoritarian racist capitalism is now going on in the US White House 
and in the vast actor-network of which it is a part. This is highly 
consequential research into the denial of the present.


The three-field formation of Science-Art-Politics would be much stronger 
than authoritarianism: more robust, more dynamic, able to integrate 
vital energies for transformative work in the present. Why not make a 
vast social movement for urgent times, instead of another specialized 
niche for all eternity?


thanks for your reflections,

Brian

PS - As the below shows, you yourself are arguing, not for a fusion, but 
for two "complementary" disciplines. Why not add the third essential 
one? Because the window of opprtunity is short: in ten years, if nothing 
changes, "politics" will be replaced by "the military" as the necessary 
partner in any transformative process.


4) Closing the experiential gap between rigorous scientific enquiry and 
subjective appraisal


Through the reconciliation of scientific method and subjective 
experience ArtScience can contribute to efforts to close the 
experiential gap between the abstractions of scientific enquiry and the 
experience of everyday life. ArtScience can do for science what art does 
so well for itself: turn abstract ideas into lived experiences. Here we 
see the unique intersection at work of two methodological 
universes considered to be ‘incommensurable’ [7], where in fact they are 
complementary and mutually reinforcing modes of understanding and 
experience.

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Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear nettimers,

For a few years I’ve been teaching and coaching at the ArtScience Interfaculty 
in The Hague, a very nice small scale experimental program located between the 
academy of visual arts and the school of music, with some modest links to local 
universities, and since one and half years as part of their faculty. It struck 
me in this time that there are many different understanding of what this 
emerging field of ArtScience might be, tons of expectations but very little in 
terms of a more precise articulation of what defines and demarcates the field. 
To stimulate debate on this matter internally I wrote a short essay / position 
paper called “Locating ArtScience’. The second draft of that essay is appended 
below as this could be of interest here I think, given previous discussions 
about the Earth Sciences, why some of us did not want to ‘March for Science’ 
and more..

I understand that some of this is susceptible to various forms of criticism and 
contention (maybe all of it?) - that’s fine and part of the debate. Aso, it is 
important to note that this is my personal take on what I still see as a field 
‘in becoming’ (despite having some extended lineages), and one that I see 
mostly in danger of overheating as a result of which some particularly valuable 
potentialities might be lost or obscured. Most of all I have become more aware 
of the great potential for methodological innovation that could and sometimes 
already does emerge out of this hybrid set of practices, but it needs to be 
shaped / refined / re-articulated - probably an endless process.

I appreciate any comments / criticism this might evoke - hope this is of 
interest to some of you.

all bests,
Eric

— 

Locating ArtScience
Eric Kluitenberg, Second draft, December 2017

ArtScience as an emergent field of practice

We should start from the premise that ArtScience at the moment is a field of 
practice in becoming. There is enormous interest in this renewed convergence of 
Art and Science around the globe, with new institutions founded, public 
initiatives functioning increasingly professionally, a plethora of projects, 
events, and a considerable number of publications. The picture is thus one not 
of crisis or stagnation, but rather a booming field that if anything might be 
in danger of overheating.

At the same time there does not as yet seem to be anything of a consensus about 
what exactly defines this field, what its specificity might be, and where its 
boundaries, its demarcations lie. This is the first and most serious problem 
that ArtScience has run into, and one that needs to be urgently addressed to 
avoid a melt-down of its inner core.

The problem can be summarised as follows: ArtScience as a field of emergent 
practice is simultaneously oversignified and underdefined.

This rather curious condition invites a surplus of speculation and 
unfulfillable expectations, which once these expectations have been revealed as 
unfulfillable might generate an equally exponential loss of interest in the 
field. However, something truly valuable might be lost if such an implosion of 
interest, and subsequent de-investment from the field (in people, institutions, 
activity, knowledge production, financial flows) were to happen.

To pre-empt this scenario of overheating and subsequently deflating and 
collapsing the field, it is useful to identify some of the most defining 
characteristics of this emerging field, and figure out what might be important 
and valuable about them.

This short essay stops short of providing a comprehensive definition of the 
field, nor does it provide a ‘complete’ mapping of a field that is currently 
and perhaps by definition in an emergent state. Rather it tries to identify 
some key characteristics as well as some key-misunderstandings, to question 
what might be the special significance of ArtScience, and what could be 
particularly important and valuable about it.

ArtScience: not an ‘interdisciplinary’ but ‘intersectional field of practice

The first important distinction to make is that ArtScience is not an 
interdisciplinary, or cross-disciplinary field of practice. The seemingly 
endless series of ‘collaborations of Art and Science’ type of events miss the 
most crucial point of this emerging field: We should understand ArtScience as 
an intersectional field that intersects a range of different established 
disciplines and domains, but ultimately establishes a new practice building on 
and moving beyond these established disciplines and domains.

The problem with the notion ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘cross-disciplinary’ is that 
it leaves the existing disciplines in tact. So, in this image, on one side we 
find the Arts, on the other side the Sciences, both understood in the broadest 
sense. Then some project is defined where representatives from both sides 
collaborate and produce joint results, which can be more, or less, fruitful. 
Regardless the outcome though, both domains are 

Net neutrality and the rest of the internet?

[Molly Hankwitz]

Dear nettime,

Please post good sources of thought about the curtailing of “net
neutrality” here in US and what effects that could or will have elsewhere?

Feeling myopic in my understanding

Much obliged for any, all comments

Also - an easy action to take is this one...open to international
communication as well...tick the box!

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