The Strong Case for Art-Science Interaction

By Roger Malina

Introduction

The human senses are incredibly efficient filters. They exclude from our perception almost all knowledge about the world beyond our skin and inside our bodies. Over the eons of human evolution, our senses have evolved to allow us to detect just enough information about the world so that we can survive and procreate.

             Our senses did not evolve in the context of a creature trying to understand the content and processes governing the evolution of the universe. It is perhaps surprising that we understand as much as we do.

            As a result of the inefficiency and bias of the senses, the history of science does not follow a logical path of increasing completeness. Instead the history of science is punctuated by the introduction into the scientific methods of ideas and methods from outside of science. The scientific method itself evolves. Facts,theories and methods which would not have been considered “scientific’ a hundred years ago, are now mainstream science. And scientific certainties are reframed in the new light of the new scientific method.

            In this essay I want to argue that one of the reasons for encouraging the interaction of art and science is to facilitate the migration of ideas and methods from outside of science into science. I call this the “strong case” for art-science interaction. The “weak case” is the reverse process, ie the introduction with ideas and technologies from the techno-sciences into the arts, or the use of art and design to do science more efficiently. (1)

            Pioneering telematic artist Roy Ascott has recently characterized the strong case with the aphorism: “Ask not what science can do for the arts, ask what the arts can do for the sciences”. (2)

            As with all reductions to binary oppositions, there is a danger of over-simplification with my proposed “strong” and “weak” cases. C.P. Snow fifty years ago was very conscious of this risk in his framing of the ‘two culture’ debate. Yet it can help sharpen the debate. With this caveat, let me elaborate some of the arguments

The Contingencies of Science

Often scientists give the impression that the development of knowledge is a steady process of understanding more and more of the world around us, and that one discovery follows on from another. Some scientists imply that there is a directionality to science; invest funding in one end of the process and steadily improving scientific knowledge and technological invention are the predictable products; many funding agencies develop long range strategic plans with road maps of intermediate achievements and discoveries. Science historians have described the development of science in two modes, the first evolutionary with normative science elaborating detail within a given framework, and revolutionary with the introduction of new paradigms which incorporate previous world views through sudden shifts.

            Yet the situation is more complex than this. We can probe this through a “gendanken experiment”; if we were able to enter into conversation with another intelligent species on a planet around another star, would they share the same scientific knowledge that we do?  If they were “further” along in their development would their scientific knowledge necessarily overlap, or contain, all of ours?

            I believe that the answer to this is very probably: no, their science could be different, they could know different things than we do and have different explanations for how the world functions. Even though we may share the knowledge of many ‘facts” of nature, they can be assembled into different explanatory systems that are testably reliable. And these differing understandings could still enable functional technologies. Even if they were older as a civilization  than we are, we might well have discovered things that they have not.

            The science of today is built on several very strong contingencies; what  we “want” to know about, what “can” we know about and “who” we are as physical beings.

The Cultural Contingency

The development of science depends on the desires of individuals and of the societies they live in, their ability to invest time and resources into investigating particular parts of the world and particular kinds of technologies. For instance, in the last ten years, wealthy societies commit large expenditures on information science, bio science and nano-sciences. These investments will determines to a large extent the direction of acquisition of new human knowledge. The decision by the US government to center the NASA space program on the goal of  human colonization of the Moon and then Mars will determine what fields of space science are developed over the next fifty years, if not longer. The decision of a Chinese emperor to “burn his fleet” so that he could concentrate on internal politics, changed the course of Chinese science.

            What we will know tomorrow depends on these kinds of cultural choices. A decision by funders not to fund research in stem cell research will slow down those areas of science for decades or even centuries to come. Which energy technologies are developed over the coming century is contingent on what “utopias’, what cultural dreams we have of how a healthy sustainable society organizes itself.

The Technological Contingency

The second aspect is that most things about the world around us cannot be studied or known until we invent the right technology, the right instrument to allow information to be collected. Our human senses are very badly designed to learn in general about the world around us.

            Which technologies are developed of course also depends on the cultural choices; painter Samuel Morse invented the Morse code as part of his desire to bring European culture to the United States. But the telegraph could not have been invented if the science of electromagnetism had not been developed in the previous hundred years. Thus there is both a cultural contingency and a prior science contingency in order to develop a particular kind of instrument. Certain parts of the world remain un-studiable by us because these two prior conditions don’t yet exist.

            In my own field of astronomy, science was conditioned culturally by the use of astronomy in religion, agriculture and navigation. The first kinds of astronomies that were developed were in response to those cultural needs. The first kinds of instruments re developed were driven by metrology, chronometry and astrometry .

But another kind contingency came into play. The primacy of visible light as an investigation tool is an accident, because the human eye happens to have evolved to detect only this kind of light. But most of the light in the universe is not optical or visible light detectable, even in principle, by the human eye.

            Over the last hundred years, astronomers have invented all kinds of telescopes that collect other kind of light: infra red telescopes, radio telescopes, ultraviolet and x ray telescopes. Now we invent telescopes that do not detect electro magnetic radiation, light, but other forms of energy. These include Neutrino Observatories, Gravitational Wave observatories for instance.

            Each of these new kinds of telescopes has revealed not only more detail about the world we already knew something about. They also revealed parts of the universe that we did not know existed, until those kinds of telescopes were invented.

            Today modern astronomy and cosmology are in a new revolution and a new golden age. Using all the telescopes at their disposal, astronomers and physicists have discovered that most of the universe, some 97% at least, is in a form that is completely different than the kind of matter we are built from. This 97% is currently called, in total ignorance, “dark matter’ and “dark energy”. We are made of matter of a type that is a minor constituent of the universe.

            This means that all of science over all of human history has only allowed us to study a minor fraction of the universe, a fraction that happens to be of the same kind of matter as us. Yet our kind of matter is a very small constituent of the universe. We are the aliens in our own cosmos. This is a humbling realization. And as I have argued above, the state of astronomy would have been very different at a given time in a civilizations development depending on cultural and technological contingencies

The Contingency of Specificity

This reveals a third contingency (after culture and technology) that pre determines what the state of science is at a given time in history. The third contingency is an intrinsic myopia. Scientists are human and therefore they study things that are commensurate with humans and that exploit the limitations of the human senses.

             Optical astronomy came first only because the human eye detected visible light, not because most of the world emits visible light. As a result we have only been able to study the “flotsam and jetsam” of matter in a sea dominated by dark matter and dark energy

            We have tended to study things about the same size as us until very recently. Only 50 years ago we started studying in detail atoms and atomic sub particles. And in only the last twenty years have we started studying phenomena on the nano scale. We tend to study events that are not too rare or not too frequent compared to a human life span. If an event happens only once in a million years we are in general not very motivated to study it. And if some phenomenon happens very rapidly, on femto second scales, we have not until recently been interested in studying it.

            What we know today is largely preconditioned then by cultural desires, the state of technological invention and the accidents of human specificity.

            So if we go back to our Gandenken Experiment. What kind of science will have developed on a different planet by a different intelligence? The conclusion is inescapable, at least to me. A different science will develop that depends on their own cultural history, the particular history of technology in their societies, and the different specificities of their own material composition.

            I am confident that we will share some aspects of scientific knowledge, but most of our science and technology would be different.

           To re-inforce this line of argument we can think of a second “Gedanken experiment”; if we were able to meet today with Leonardo DaVinci, resuscitated, how easy would it be for us to discuss science together? I fear it would be very difficult as illustrated by a simple example; if we were to give him a common cellular telephone that is a basic part of our culture today, what would Leonardo Da Vinci be able to tell about it?

             Could he carry out experiments, during a fifty year working life, that would allow him to produce a good explanation of the operating principles and processes of a cellular telephone? I am convinced that if he dedicated fifty years of his life to this task, with all the resources available in his time, he would fail miserably.

The Strong Case for Art-Science Interaction

It is this line of thinking that leads me to articulate the “strong case’ for encouraging the interaction of the arts and sciences today. There is nothing inevitable about the direction that science and technology take over the next hundred years. The science we will have a hundred years from now, and the new technologies we will have developed, will depend on the cultural desires of our young people, and of our governments and corporations. The reason we want to encourage art-science interaction today, is to influence the direction that science and technology take over the next hundred years. If we are able to encourage a million Leonardo Da Vincis today we will have a different science and technology, closely coupled to today’s desires and dreams in a different way than is now the case.

The New Leonardos

What makes this argument exciting today is that there is indeed a new generation of artists, artists that are scientifically and technically literate, and can indeed drive these kinds of agendas.

            Steven Wilson in his book “Information Arts’ (3) has described how over the last fifty years artists have appropriated almost all areas of science and technology, from the mathematics of chaos theory to evolutionary biology to space exploration. These artists work in a number of different contexts to appropriate scientific and technical knowledge for cultural purposes.

            In some cases ideas and concepts migrate from one field to another through intellectual contact and dialogue. Thus the ideas of networks and cybernetics became the subject of artistic inquiry in the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Roy Ascott. In other cases engineers have collaborated with artists to realize projects; one example is the way that Bell Labs engineers worked with artists in the E.A.T. program. In other cases artists have worked in residencies within scientific and R and D settings; pioneers such as Sonya Sheridan and Lilian Schwartz are examples. More recently some corporations such as Xerox PARC (4), Interval and ICC in Japan have brought in artists as researchers to help on development of new technologies; there are many good examples such as Donna Cox at the National Supercomputing Center or Christa Sommerer at ICC. In a few cases such as at ZKM and the Exploratorium, scientists are in residence in cultural organizations.

            More recently some funding agencies such as the Welcome Trust, the UK Arts Council, the Swiss science funding agency (5) or the Basque Government have funded various kinds of art-science or art-technology projects both in R and D setting and in industry. I would imagine that to date some 3000 artists have been deeply involved in such art-science and art-technology research collaborations.

            In a few cases early work by artists, or artist-researchers, led to major developments that were commercially viable. Thus the special effects industry in film can be traced back to early experimentation by artists with computers. A number or pioneers, on the boundaries of computer science and artistic expression, such as Charles Csuri, or James Blinn or Loren Carpenter can be cited. Similarly the early work of computer musicians is now visible every where in the digital music culture. The home computer and pervasive computing revolutions have been particularly fertile grounds for art-science-technology interaction, but such efforts have been primarily through individual initiatives and a few pioneering organizations. It is only recently that universities have begun to establish more systematic approaches to created teaching and research environments that promote the conditions for ‘the strong case”. Examples are the University of California initiatives, the School for New Media in Cologne or the PUC-RIO programs in Brazil. Recently UNESCO through its DIGIARTS program has brought visibility to these areas within more traditional cultural programming

The Sense of Urgency

As I have argued above the direction and content of science is contingent on a number of external factors. What do we want to know about, what can we know about at a given point in technological development. And the the human being is now evolving through various prosthetic extensions to the senses. As a working scientist I have the sense that we are in very early days of the scientific understanding of our world, and that all our hypotheses are theories are built upon the contingencies of  particular history of own species.

            At the time that C.P. Snow framed the two cultures debate, the western world had emerged from a series of world wars of escalating magnitude and atrocity. There was a sense that The Enlightenment project needed to be completed, and that for this science and technical literacy needed to become universal. Snow felt this was particularly in government and management circles where policy and implementation decisions had to be made for a world where science and engineering drove many of the issues. Obscurantism would recede and the scientific method would overwhelm the various fundamentalist appeals to on un-challengeable authorities.

            As we face today’s societal problems we are faced with a strange paradox. Although science provides the most successful method for understanding the world around us, the societies we have built are unsustainable and driving instabilities in the ecology within which we survive. It does not appear that fundamentalism and obscurantism are receding.

             And if we look at the history of science, we become aware that many of the conceptual breakthroughs occur through sudden shifts in theory that rely on ideas and concepts from outside of science. The underlying concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity theory did not arise through a step wise progression, but rather through the re framing of concepts that were developed within the cultural imaginary of the scientists in their time. Today cosmology no doubt faces such a period of reframing. The science of consciousness also. And as nanoscientists work to develop new intuitions about how matter behaves on scales with which we have no daily experience we can expect surprises.

            It is this context that there is a certain urgency about promoting art-science-technology interaction. If we are able to invest in this arena, a different science and a different technology will be developed more closely coupled to todays cultural imaginary. I believe that the survival of our civilization depends on close coupling of the arts, sciences and engineering.

References and Notes

References and Notes

See for instance the recent Leonardo Book “Aesthetic  Computing”, MIT Press, 2006. This collection  of essays explores the ways that the arts can influence computing and that computing has affected the arts.Roy Ascott on YASMINStephen Wilson, “Information Arts” ( Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press, 200X)Craig Harris, ” Xeroc PARC title ?”, MIT Press: Cambridge 200?Jill Scott