Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>]

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 <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> 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 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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