Re: <nettime> Vienna Declaration thoughts

Hi Martin,

You bring up some excellent context here!

I am part of a research group investigating the interconnections between meditation and the arts, and many funding sources for such work have a similar orientation to what the Vienna Declaration outlines. It seems that there is a wish to align public sector funding with private sector activity, i.e., one is encouraged to seek out both simultaneously. This makes sense given the dependence of higher education on the broader economic base, and reflects the "two-way street" between universities and the market. I suppose there are both insidious and benign implications of this.

As to politics in the Declaration, I would imagine there are players across the spectrum involved. What seems like the center in Europe might be considered far left here in the US! The Declaration could well be a kind of rulebook for competition and not necessarily a final decision in favor of one party over another. I also agree that art and artists are very resilient and persistent, and can never completely lose their agency no matter what the academy or the economy decide. If the big systems get out of sync with what people are experiencing and thinking, people usually find a way to point that out.

It is interesting to hear about Denzin. I did not know his work but have been interested in qualitative research for a couple of years. I think its importance is greater than often is recognized, and this may be in part due to the fundamental role of the imagination -- visual, verbal, musical, spatial, etc. -- in even the most ordinary human activities. If one seeks to exclude that as "subjective" or "biased" one risks throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater!

Leonardo wrote that “Sound rules are the issue of sound experience — the common mother of all the sciences and arts." He defined experience (or Esperienza, which he both capitalized and personified) to mean both experimental method in science and expressive action in art. This kind of thinking even goes back to Dante, who wrote "From this instance [of confusion] if you will do your part / you may escape by experiment, that being / the spring that feeds the rivers of man's art" (Paradiso II.94-96). Leonardo was of course proposing a more modernized set of concepts but Dante's ideas about the imaginative process, as illustrated in part by his characterization of Beatrice (Inferno X.130-132) as well as Fortune (Inferno VII.67-96), were arguably a major influence on Leonardo (though current scholarship is divided on this point).

I have formulated a new and rather unlikely hypothesis that the bridge in the Mona Lisa is a key metaphor in understanding Leonardo's thought, representing the historical flow of the arts, sciences, and engineering and how they connect humans with the natural world in a cyclical process through time. The bridge "flows" into the Mona Lisa's garment, which symbolizes the present state of art/science/technology which is both "worn" and "woven" by Esperienza. This interpretation thus views the portrait to be part allegory, and has implications for the bridge in one of Leonardo's last drawings: Woman Standing in a Landscape (especially in comparison to Botticelli's illustration of Purgatorio XXVIII which depicts the crossing of the river Lethe). Leonardo's fluency in myriad artforms, from stage design, costumery, and singing to military earthworks and architecture affirm the possibility of such a pan-disciplinary image.

Clearly this is a case of qualitative research in the extreme, and must be taken with a mine of salt! 🙂

My knowledge of indigenous culture is not extensive, but as part of my research group's work I have been studying the tradition of the medicine wheel, which seems to have similarities with the Denzin book (which I have ordered). In a great show of indigenous art at the local museum here, there was a video piece in which the speaker said that in her language there are no separate terms for "art" and "science;" they are referred to by a word that means something like "doing." This to me has great relevance to Leonardo's concept of Esperienza, but the non-qualitative mode of research would likely say the two cannot have any connection.

A random side note: while finishing my book about this bridge hypothesis I listened to Bach's A Musical Offering each day while writing. This was in part due to the complex layers of meaning ascribed to that piece by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and a connection that I imagined existed between GEB and Calvino's fascinating commentary on Leonardo in the "Exactitude" section of Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but the simple reality of the sound was also very conducive for some reason.

All best regards,

Max

https://www.rct.uk/collection/912581/a-woman-in-a-landscape

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sandro_Botticelli%27s_illustrations_to_the_Divine_Comedy#/media/File:Botticelli,_Purgatorio_28.jpg

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Martin Donner <mail@martindonner.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 11:01 AM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> Vienna Declaration thoughts

Hello Florian (& nettime),

thanks for the post of your Vienna Declaration critique that gave me something to think! As I made my own living as a media artist/el.composer for some years I´m now in a PhD aspirant in a research project within a funding guideline from a German ministry researching on digitization processes in art practices (in the widest sense, a field labeled with the term „Kulturelle Bildung“). From time to time I had some very similar thoughts and impressions like you without knowing about the Vienna Declaration.

However, I was able to change the research design in a way I would have liked it as an artist (not being the scientifically observed white rabbit in a laboratory). As I hoped we saw unpredictable things happen, uses and developments that no usability study of the music technology lent to our participants would have ever revealed. And many of the (not so rich) participants were very happy to have the opportunity to be part of the study and get stuff for several thousend euro for their use for 2 years. For some of them the project really changed their prospects on what they want to do, how they want to work artistically and so on.

But there are of course questions, beginning with the demand to get and safe as much data from the field as possible to store it if possible forever while on the other hand the privacy law (DSGVO) forbids it in our case (so we won´t…). I do not have the feeling to affirm directly a neoliberal agenda within the project. Luckily no need for that in this funding guideline. I´d say I try to develop the trojan horse approach you mentioned – at least as good as I can and with backing on this. Sometimes I even ask myself if the kind of Vienna Declaration language might be a camouflage for well-meaning attempts as you write. It may be just the institutions game that usually is pressurized to follow the dominant political narratives. But on the other hand one can´t deny that such a language infiltrates the self-understandings within the field by superordinating economic and innovations goals and terminology. Indeed the whole situation reminds me a bit on the ambivalence of Batesons second order learning cybernetics and its sympathy for emergent art practices while at the same time it remained a theory of control. In a way it seems to be a similar situation these days.

It`s a fine line: we were also involved in a conference where artists, tech designers and musical educators were brought together which was quite fascinating because it was (as intended) a clash of worlds. However there it is, the relation to enterprise Research and Development you wrote about. Of course we do not sell or give our project data to techdesign industries. The idea of the conference was more to establish a dialogue between those different spheres which worked astonishing well despite of all differences. Indeed the field of institutional music education is already very formalised but mostly with a strong emphasis on classical „high“ arts practices and a certain refusal of new technologies (especially in Germany with its music traditions). Or at least with a favour for „high arts“ electronics as e.g. at IRCAM. I would say one political agenda behind the guideline is to research how to change that refusal – which could also be described as a kind of colonization of a widely non-digitized field if you want so. It depends on your perspective…

While reading your article I asked myself what you might think about Denzins New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: The Arts (2020). The book´s approach is clearly meant to be a liberating and activist one. Chapter 6 contains some Arts-based Research definitions and I think it was in chapter 7 where a division (similar to yours) is made between art which can serve for PhD projects and art which cannot serve for it (because it´s „unethical“ for instance). As a former artist i was able to understand some of the examples mentioned there but I didn´t see it as narrowly as the author. However, my point (or question) is: while you seem to argue for a complete freedom of the arts (which could be surely doubted in consideration of the art market and art [learning] institutions) the author argues for new and more ethical forms of art which are culturally more embedded and which give up the famous and deeply historical (!) concept of the autonomy of art with its special role for modern societies and artist subjectivation. But I´d say this insight came from theory not from art practice. So in this argument there is a kind of good and responsible art and its opposite (which then is not usable in PhD projects). With real interest: Does that already sound like a normalization or formalization approach to you?

My personal thoughts at the moment are that art as practice was always quite resilient against absorption. But I concur that it is easily possible that „two forms of arts“ may establish within that Vienna development like you presumed. However I already had that impression before the Vienna Declaration. As I didn´t study art (but media science) I wasn´t able to contend for institutional art stipends and stuff like that which so many studied artist do and have to do to make their living until they´re maybe a bit more famous and able to live from their art. Almost no chance to ‚become an artist‘ without studying some art form, even the composers association asked for it. I just did it all my life without any official higher education in this field and it was more or less a coincidence that I had the possibility to live from it. So to me that old status quo of institutionalised arts education seemed already like a two-forms-of-art approach in a way.

Historically the spheres of art and technology were mostly institutionally separated (which has to do with the modern condition) and each field had its own funding strategies and opportunities. If you don´t fit in from your education biography you fall through the cracks, either way from which side you are. And it may be no coincidence that the boundaries between institutional research and art practice get blurred discursively on a governance level just when the ideology of modernity and its social forms get under pressure in an unmistakable way. A bit like Max wrote: like at the beginning of that strict separation, in times of the Renaissance man, but I´d say now under a posthuman omen. Just a thought…

The promise (and problem as well) might be that arts education in general seems to serve divergent desires depending from which perspective and with which interest one is looking. The field itself often isn´t so clear about its own standpoint, too. On the one side critique in art is a common courtesy. On the other side people are happy about fundings, individual success and so on within a field where so much casualization is going on. I saw things like that: officially critical and „left wing artists“ were kinda corrupted over night when they got the prospect of a secure and well paid arts field managing job in the widest sense. This is not unusual and it doesn´t only happen in PhD programmes adressing individuals.

The political promises which seem to be needed for official fundings are insofar divergent as on the one hand art is associated with dealing with the social, with self-understanding of societies, with inclusion, with giving the marginalized a voice, with being a laboratory for alternative forms of living, thinking and so on. In the eyes of social policy makers this is deeply needed in our times. On the other side art promises innovation of all kinds, e.g. the focus on practice may help in HCI contexts to develop better interfaces which then sell better (from the standpoint of enterprises) and which help to bring forth digitization processes between those who do not have much knowledge about them but have to change their behavior within the upcoming posthuman conditions (from the standpoint of political agendas, to be an optimised self) and so on. Sometimes it feels to me like the field is taking every argument that is out there to escape marginalisation. It´s really a tricky melange.

Best regards,

Martin