Alt.Art-Sci: We Need New Ways of Linking Arts and Sciences

Abstract

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.