Science and Art in the Digital Age: A Synergy Problem

Abstract

Today artistic perception of the world and scientific and technical understanding of reality remain the main forms of creative self-realization. For many centuries, starting in Antiquity, art and science went hand in hand in cultural history. However, during the heyday of technogenic civilization, there occurred a split, and since the second half of the 20th century these two parts of a previously common culture became poorly compatible. According to the authors, the era of digitalization is going to completely replace the algorithmic and instructive professions in technology and service personnel with robots and artificial intelligence, and a person will have to develop the spheres of right-brain practices, which undoubtedly include scientific and technical creativity and art. Like all previous information revolutions, the modern digital revolution is creating new network structures of fast communication and ultra-long-distance, global order. Distance does not matter any more. In this situation, the cognitive maps of a person change radically, new types of self-organization and socialization appear, and there occurs a deformation of value spaces and worldview guidelines. Life in the uncertainty of this new world can only become effective in interaction of man and artificial intelligence, and the only aspect of activity that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence is creativity and aesthetic experiences as well as culture. Thus, the authors conclude that a new synthesis in culture is needed, the ways of which are discussed in detail in the article. Among them are promotion of new concepts of Science-Art, application of post-Turing methodology, and use of quantum-synergetic anthropology, which develops new ideas about theatrical and engineering creativity, – and these will remain unattainable to artificial intelligence in foreseeable future.