Art Science Technology: The weak case vs. the strong case
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 4, 2004 11:47 AM
The Timeshift conference at Ars had two panels on Thursday, Progress and Disruption. Guest curated by Michael Naimark, all of the panels had an interesting setup. A "younger person" was asked to go through the Ars archives and give a 20 minute talk about the past 25 years. The "older persons" were asked to prognosticate about the next 25 years. The thought and effort that Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Aleena Williams, and Nadja Maurer put into their presentations was remarkable, and hopefully they will be available in the archives soon. The thought and effort that the older crew put in was variable.
On the Progress panel, Esther Dyson suggested that progress is the dimunition of entropy and told us stories about having lunch with former Intel vice presidents in Budapest the previous day and how her experience at ICANN proved that online was not a forum for making decisions. She is still a very busy person and had to check her email while the other speakers presented.
Roger Malina gave an inspiring fire and brimstone speech about how little we know - only 3% of the composition of the universe is stuff we can say we understand what it is. The rest we call "dark matter" (25%) and "dark energy" (70% ), and we might just as well say Hic sunt dracone: "Here be dragons."
[Imagine each of these as admonitions belted out in a passionately rising voice and multiple hand gestures, if not podium thumping for emphasis.]
Our knowledge of the universe is of the irrelevant "flotsam and jetsam."
Most of the universe our bodily senses are not equipped to even sense. It is as if insects with only the sense of touch discovered there were things beyond their reach like light, but they could only reason with the physics of touch and did not even have any language about light, not even an alphabet.
Rather than study the world, we study databases about the world. And what is in the databases, someone has decided to put in the databases.
This leads to an "epistemological inversion" (Boorstin), where our scientific process is retrodictive, not predictive.
In the 19th century we were meaning rich and data poor. Now we are data rich and meaning poor.
The direction of scientific research is culturally contingent. For example, it is George Bush who decided to explore Mars and not stem cells.
The intersection of Art / Science / Technology (AST) is one approach for explicitly recognising the cultural contingencies and embedded-ness of science and technology.
There are two cases for AST. The weak case:
interaction of artss and scientes lead to "better" science.
introduction into sci or tech into the arts, leads to art that is "appropriate", "resonant" with our times. E.g. computer art.
The strong case:
"new leonardos"
what is art when 97% of universse unknown
AST interaction will lead to different cases of science + tech
different science, different technology, new methods within science -> re-imagine what art and science might means as the connected planet develops "collective" behaviors leading to a mind at large
I'm not sure I can follow you all the way to the "mind at large," but thank you Roger, for such a clarion call, and I think the argument that we have been making the "weak case" for AST, and we need to develop a "strong case" is right on target.
