Review of “The Art+Science+Policy Nexus External Study” by E.U. Joint Research Center
Author: Austen, K. Caterina Benicasa ed. Publications of the Office of The European Union, Luxembourg, 2023. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/641713
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/57a4a020-8f31-11ee-8aa6-01aa75ed71a1/
By Roger F Malina, Executive Editor Emeritus, Leonardo /International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.
Even though this is “just” a study report, it lays the groundwork for a problem of emerging importance. There is now considerable ‘innovation anxiety”, according to journalist David Brancaccio (http://www.brancaccio.com/ ). The end of the 2Oth century saw the explosive growth of technological innovation but wars, poverty, climate change and prejudice are still everywhere. The JRC Report “The Art+Science+Policy Nexus” details over ten years of efforts to connect European Union “policy makers” with the art-science movement in the hope of mutually useful interactions.
Policy, Policy Makers, Administrators, Government Officials have rarely been active ‘inside’ the art science community. An exception is Joan Shikegawa who at the Rockefeller Foundation and the US Government National Endowment for the Arts who was able to ‘get inside the hood’ of what in the USA became the STEM to STEAM movement. This report is an important next step, in particular by targeting an audience of policy and policy makers.
The pandemic highlighted the fact that the internet did not solve many problems that could have been predicted. Poor children with no laptops couldnt go to school on line. Telehealth was workable, for some, but to get blood drawn or injections still required interminable in person waits.
This has led to the concept of “Smart Villages” approach where social innovation is as important as technological innovation. In May of this year 2024, a group is organising a Smart Village workshop, to convert theory to practice, at the Festival del Imagen in Colombia. In a previous workshop, we presented a ‘manifesto’ to the Mayor of Manizales, Colombia: https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-abstract/52/2/108/46542/Manifiesto-Manizales-Una-Experiencia?redirectedFrom=fulltext . These interactions between policy and creatives is infrequent and usually uni-directional.
The E.U. Smart Village Program ( https://ec.europa.eu/enrd/smart-and-competitive-rural-areas/smart-villages_en.html ) focuses largely on rural communities, India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Village_India#:~:text=Smart%20Village%20is%20a%20concept,and%20Swaraj%20(Self%20Reliance) on locally relevant contexts. The vision of an Indian SAGY is an integrated village development plan, encompassing Personal, Human, Social, and Economic dimensions. This J.R.C study is a good stepping stone towards these goals which ironically embody technological innovation anxiety.
The JRC report argues that art science collaboration could help develop useful policies on all scales from small to the whole planet.
Smart Cities were sometimes a good ideas, now on to Smart Villages.
I particularly like the Indian “ Parliamentarian’s Model Village Scheme “, it’s main goal is for each Member of Parliament and Minister to adopt a rural village and develop it into a model by 2019 under the SAGY guidelines” Kaushik, Preetam (25 November 2014). (“Smart Villages: Lending A Rural Flavour To Modi’s Growth Agenda”. No. 25 November 2014. Business Insider India. )
Government policy makers have to “practice what they preach”. The JRC Art-Science+Policy Nexus is a crucial stepping stone.
A key conclusion of the J.R.C report is that although policy makers have been the intended recipients of knowledge coming from art-science projects, there are few examples of active involvement of policy makers in art-science projects. We need collaboration in all directions, as was developed in the National Institute of Health methodology ‘The Science of Team Science” https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/the-science-of-team-science. This JRC report argues that we also need the artscience of policy studies and their applications.
These arguments re-inforces a key conclusion of Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council. Science desperately needs to become socially embedded and robust.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250198724_Democratising_Expertise_and_Socially_Robust_Knowledge .
Science and Engineering are still largely done in universities and other gated enclaves. Every day people can visit and understand a pharmacy but not an electron accelerator microchip lab. A.I. is a product not a hobby. Museums are not like laboratories. Most people have never met a scientist or engineer at home or a party.
The report follows a classic narrative: Motivation of why art and science need to intersect with policy, Sharing Knowledge Outputs, Active engagement of policy makers, Collaboration with policy makers. There is a large section, 19 pilot projects and numerous case studies, of organisations and events and a final section of recommendations.
On a personal note I would like to mention the current collaboration of our artscilab at UTDallas with Police Captain Patrick McCully. He is now engaged in collaboration with our lab and gave a talk on “Creative Policing”. His concerns are multiple, and overlap with those of Policy Makers. The police are ‘behind the times’ on using and understanding the technology they use to arrest and convict people. Much of their time is spent in contexts of domestic violence, and they dont have the necessary Behavioural Science training. Perhaps we can look forward to a Art+Science+Policing Nexus. We have documented some of this work with sitting Texas Judge John Marshall in a recent article “Barbarians at the Gate”; we argue that social and technological innovation in the legal system lags disastrously.
An interesting point is made in the introduction of the JRC report is that “ One key barrier is a problem of knowing, where knowing on different levels affects decision making- both in individual choices and at a community and policy level”. Not every level needs to know everything. Emergence is often auto-poetic.
The recommendations include “ undertaking studies tracing the flow of ideas, including the iterative cycle between cultural trends and funding trends’. This will require application of the science of complex systems which have demonstrated their utility in the arts. In 2013 Laszlo Barabasi and collaborators https://www.barabasilab.com/art/work/art-network mapped the interconnections between individual artists, galleries, museums and collectors which resulted in accelerated connections between artists and collectors; the network from artscience to policy makers can make use of similar methods. The NFT art movement explicitly uses the science of complex networks.
The Art Network, by A.-L. Barabási, S.P. Fraiberger, A. Grishchenko, M. Nauro, M. Resch, C. Riedl, and R. Sinatra, created for “Quantifying Reputation and Success in Art,” Science (November 16, 2018)
In conclusion as a member of the community cross connecting the arts and sciences , this report validates/justifies social innovation approaches that may be relevant to tomorrow’s pandemics. This can encourage policymakers to continue funding the nexus of the arts and sciences.
Back in 2013, ten years before the ERC report, I was part of a group trying to convince US policy makers that the STEM to STEAM movement was worth funding with tax payers money. https://leonardo.info/NSF-SEAD E-ISBN: 978-0-262-75863-5 ©2015 ISAST, Published by MIT Press under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). Our title was “Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation: Enabling New Forms of Collaboration among Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design”. Ten years later this JRC report refocuses us desirably on how the arts-science nexus must connect with various policy levels of our societies. Policy is a way to convert great ideas into succesful applications. Mihai Nadin and his ‘anticipation studies’ provide a framework.