The Cross-Pollination Experiment

Jeff Lockwood

In 2014, 4 artists, 4 scientists and the project coordinator, all from the University of Wyoming, met at the prestigious Ucross Foundation ranch for a 2-week retreat. The results of that collaboration—called the Cross-Pollination Experiment--are astonishing and ongoing. The following is a record of correspondence about the project between me (Faerthen Felix), participant Michael Dillon, and organizer Jeff Lockwood.

Jeffrey A. Lockwood is Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities at the University of Wyoming. He began his career as an entomologist, then shifted to philosophy.

Michael Dillon

Michael E. Dillon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology & Program in Ecology at the University of Wyoming. Dillon also serves as Director of the University of Wyoming - National Park Service Research Station.

Brochure, explaining the project and some of its outcomes.

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FF: It looks like Ucross facilitated the Cross-Pollination Experiment. How did they find all of you? Was it an open call, or were you recruited? It sounds like there was an "organizer" and Ucross didn't just invite you all out to stay, then leave you alone. Who was that organizer, and how was the experiment structured? Were there structured exercises, specific goals and deliverables?

MD: Jeff [Lockwood] was the mastermind of the initial Cross-Pollination project (which led to all the other good stuff), did the fund raising (from many sources on and off campus), and was the leader. He planned all the activities, the approach, etc. Briefly, we were invited by Jeff and then all lived together for 2 weeks -- we had separate housing but spent most of our meals and lots of free time just hanging out. This was a critical element, in my opinion, because we had the chance to really get to know and trust each other. Jeff ran nightly post-dinner meetings in which we reflected on the day, discussed the positive, negative, difficult, exciting, etc.



Our first day was a "perspective" day, in which we all had the morning to prepare a presentation about the place (Ucross) through our eyes/experience/academic background. We spent the afternoon moving between our studios giving and attending these presentations (8 in all). Jeff then organized a "speed dating" for the next day in which each artist spent 1 hour with each scientist discussing ideas. The goal was to come out of each of those meetings with several concrete ideas for how you could collaborate in a meaningful way. That is, not just artists interpreting the science or scientists trying their hand at art, but rather collaborations that enhanced both disciplines. Jeff paired us up (not sure how he decided as there were so many interesting collaborations possible!) and then we went to work. We had less than a week to make progress on the collaboration as Jeff had already scheduled a "Saturday University" event for the end of the trip in which we would present our "products" to the broader public in the Ucross space. 

JL: Some backstory…I did a residency at Ucross as a writer.  And in the course of that time, I had some lovely chats with Sharon Dynak, the executive director.  She indicated that Ucross was increasingly interested in projects that would integrate natural sciences and arts, particularly as a means of gaining a deeper appreciation of the ranch and surrounding countryside.  I was putting together a pitch for a UW venture in this regard when Shannon Smith (executive director of Wyoming Humanities Council) met up with me and became super-excited about the possibilities.  So Ucross provided enormous in-kind support and WHC provided financial support (especially in terms of the public presentations as UW’s Saturday University program that summer).  I should also note that the UW Biodiversity Institute provided funding.  I’ve also attached one of the original proposals so you can see what approach was being advocated.


FF: I find that, almost universally, people who have engaged in art/sci collaborations find them useful and positive, but it is difficult to measure outcomes clinically, and there is little actual science available on the results. Do you have any publication references that somehow document the effectiveness of the collaboration?

MD: I know what you mean, but don't have references. Our own experiences and all the products that have emerged are the best evidence I can provide.

"This has been an incredibly productive, fruitful venture: 3 exhibitions, a documentary film, an online repository of microbe portraits and artist responses to them, an opera, and Xbox Kinect video game, 3 NSF grants to date totaling over $6 million in funding. The cross pollination website has links to videos and other information about the different projects. We continue to actively develop new projects and collaborations. This venture has been one of the most exciting, invigorating, rewarding, and fun things I've done for quite some time!" -- MD

JL: I’m there with Michael.  Our products speak for the productivity of this venture.  But one of the deliverables is also a sense of morale, excitement, playfulness and fulfillment for academic artists and scientists who may not see much “external” reward and, indeed, have good reason for demoralization.

FF: I found this statement by Jeff Lockwood really interesting: "These synergies have revealed elements of the natural world that would otherwise be overlooked by both artists and scientists." Can you elaborate and provide some examples? This is a big aspect of our push to get more art at field stations: that art is a discovery process that can enhance scientific creativity, and uncover raw material for science. But finding clear and obvious A-to-B examples is challenging.

MD: One example was my collaboration with Rachael Shaw, a dancer/choreographer. We used the notation of dance (Laban notation) to quantify the posture and movements of bees after exposure to sublethal doses of pesticides. A tool from choreography allowed us to better quantify something that was otherwise difficult to describe but visually obvious: bees move differently when exposed to minute quantities of pesticides. Unfortunately, we have not published this work. Rachael moved not long after the initial Ucross trip and we've found it difficult to find time to work together from a distance. Other examples are the microbestiary, and a collaboration between Jeff and Anne Guzzo (a composer): an opera about the disappearance of the Rocky Mountain Locust.

JL: Yup, LOCUST: THE OPERA is premiering this September (I’ve attached the proposal for that project so you can get a sense of the science/art collaboration)—and I should add that Ashley Carlisle, one of the Ucross participants, will be designing and producing our costumes, scenery, etc.


FF: It's great that UWYO faculty work with Ucross. I think field research stations would really benefit from identifying artist-residencies near them to collaborate with on art/sci linkages.

MD: Ucross was fantastic - very supportive of the whole endeavor. But, although some of our art faculty apply for and are awarded residencies at Ucross, I am not sure that the Art/Science residency is an ongoing element for them.

JL: I think that one of the key features that made our venture successful (in addition to my very carefully selecting participants—there was no open call for people) is that everyone came from one institution, which has allowed the venture to continue for years with all sorts of combinations and recombinations of people based on interests and opportunities.  And such ongoing collaborations would be very difficult to sustain across institutions (heck, they’re hard enough across departments and colleges in a single institution!).

FF: Is there any kind of exportable prescription that either guided the process, or emerged from it? Something like the HJ Andrews Ecological Reflections program that is kind of plug-and-play for any field station that wants to participate, or Best Practices, or anything like that I can direct field stations to? 

MD: I think that, in our case, the key was Jeff's vision -- the combination of prescribed reflection and conversation time, of a deadline for a product, and also of flexibility so the group could go where it wanted to (we often veered from Jeff's original plan - to his consternation and delight, I think). 


JL: If there is anything approximating a set of guidelines/rules, it might be found in this very concise summary on YouTube. I’ve attached the text that I used for this Ignite presentation:

IGNITE
Science & Art: Instructions for Making a Chimera

1.
I have had the joy of orchestrating a three-year project bringing art and science into collaboration. We call ourselves the Ucross Pollinators to honor the institution hosting our gatherings—and to capture the underlying spirit.

2.
The Wyoming Humanities Council has been our principle supporter because they understand that if the arts are the flowers of civilization and the sciences are its stems, then the humanities are the roots.

3.
Our products include: National Science Foundation grants infused with art, a Microbestiary of unicellular life, a choreographic scoring method to encode insect movement, and operatic arias evoking the geology of Wyoming.

4.
I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned as an academic anthropologist, observing artists and scientists working and creating together—as well some thoughts about the institutional framework in which they are embedded.

5.
As for the people, here’s a simple but important consideration.  Scientists are not artists and vice-versa. Each pursues distinct ways of knowing themselves and the world.  To which I say, Viva la difference!

6.
The recipe for a tasty collaboration of artists and scientists is not to blend them into a homogenous smoothie, nor to make a loosely tossed salad.  Instead, simmer them together into a mouthwatering stew.

7.
For our venture, I chose “big dogs”—people at the top of their game, not those needing to yap to establish their dominance in the pack.  I’ve found that little dogs are much more likely to bite.

8.
The sense of wonder among the participants that catalyzed collaboration was akin to watching a spellbinding magician—and then being even more enchanted upon learning how the scientific or artistic trick was done.  

9.
The one quality that is critical to fruitful art-and-science ventures is playfulness—a vulnerable, childlike willingness to ask “why not?”, to wonder “what if?”, and to genuinely share one’s toys.

10.
Scientists and artists need more than a one-night stand to achieve satisfaction.  Fulfillment requires sustained interaction, and fertility is enhanced by proximity.  And so, being colleagues at the same institution is a tremendous asset.

11.
Collaboration does not mean artists making science pretty.  Rather, it requires mutual respect and that means genuine parity of power and prestige.  In this dance, each must be willing to lead—and to follow.

12.
Without constraints, the possibilities at the intersection of science and art are astronomical.  We need boundaries. Or as Robert Frost said of free verse poetry: It’s like playing tennis with the net down.

13.
An interdisciplinary team is often seen as having an ecologist and geologist.  Nobody ever adds a poet or dancer. We sought transdisciplinarity—engagement that was synergistic rather than additive.

14.
I’ve observed that pairs work extremely well.  Having one partner allows intimacy. Academic orgies don’t entail the commitment that sustains relationships.  Maybe science and art collaborations are like American marriage—serial monogamy.

15.
Turning to the institutional context, universities might tolerate, but rarely encourage, science-art collaborations—unless there’s money to be had. So, individuals must find working together to be internally rewarding.

16.
Trying to define science and art is an unhelpful starting point institutionally—much like attempting to define the humanities.  It’s like saying that before dating, one must define beauty, intelligence, and love.

17.
The university has islands of authentic collaboration—such as the Art Museum and the Biodiversity Institute—floating in a sea of institutional ambivalence.  For the most part, we have a College of Arts or Sciences.  

18.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) is a glutton.  Adding the Arts to create STEAM (I prefer MEATS) still leaves artists nibbling crumbs from the table.  But please sir, I want some more.

19.
Art-and-science collaborations subvert institutional norms.  The results don’t add up on a spreadsheet; they defy administrative classification.  These projects are viewed as the icing, not the cake, of a respectable academic career.

20.
In conclusion, art-and-science collaborations are acts of humanistic faith.  The Cross-Pollinators will continue to pursue beautiful, grotesque, and strangely enchanting works that take flight—or not.


Cross-Pollination Experiment documentary. Explains the program in detail as it unfolded.


Saturday University lecture. Explains some of the trouble communicating the project.

More videos.

“What would power look like if it were art?”

Jim Mason is a Burning Man and San Francisco Bay area artist. Asking that question led Mason down a path that led to All Power Labs (APL), a $5M a year energy start up sustained entirely by sales.

APL creates biomass gasifiers that produce heat, electricity and biochar from organic debris, creating negative carbon balance in the equation. The company actually aims to reverse the planetary damage done by burning fossil fuels over the past 150 years, moving atmospheric carbon into the soil in a stable form that enhances soil productivity over millennia. The technology is small scale for distributed production at the source of the feedstock, rather than requiring trucking of material to a large megawatt generator, as is our current cultural model...which is only better because some company can make billions that way.

Though APL's aims seem grandiose to the point of delusion, the artists are onto what may be the only solution out there, and the company is growing rapidly both domestically and world-wide.

APL's gasifiers are small, arriving on a pallet, and relatively affordable (if you have $50K and a handy source of biomass to feed it). But now, anyone can get in on the action, and improve their garden (or someone else's) at the same time: the company has borrowed the Community Supported Agriculture model and is offering biochar subscriptions through their new Local Carbon Network. You (or your designees) get periodic bags of this special charcoal shipped to your home (or farm), where you mix it with compost and till it into your soil. Your effort improves the soil productivity, reduces water needs, and banks carbon. It's worth the $25 Indie-Go-Go subscription just to support these visionaries!

Read article.



APL is not the only visionary, artist-led, Burning Man-inspired energy initiative underway.

"Black Rock Solar began its sun-capturing mission at Burning Man 2007, installing a 30-kilowatt solar power array on the playa in keeping with that year’s Green Man theme. After the event, the team donated and moved the installation to Gerlach’s Ernest Johnson Elementary School. The original array was later expanded to 90 kilowatts, providing the school with a third of its power and saving more than $15,000 per year, money that goes toward enrichment programs for the kids.  

Black Rock Solar’s financial model was innovative: use donations and grants to fund solar installations, receive significant solar rebates from Nevada’s electric utility, and use that money to fund more installations. Today, through Black Rock Solar’s efforts, more than 100 schools, non-profits and tribal community buildings, including the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribes schools and facilities along the Route 447 stretch between Fernley and Gerlach are now powered by the sun’s rays."

In 9 years, BRS installed 7.6 megawatts worth of solar systems to generate clean, cheap power in Washoe County, Nevada, and points beyond. So much power, in fact, that the State of Nevada proclaimed Hwy 447 as America's Solar Highway, with more watts of distributed solar per mile than anywhere in the USA (451kW along 75 miles of highway, 17 watts per mile).

With the drop in solar hardware costs and the end of Nevada's incentive programs, Black Rock Solar's financing model was no longer effective; the company recently transitioned into Black Rock Labs, an accelerator for "best-in-class clean-tech innovations particularly suited to the Burning Man culture and in alignment with Burning Man principles. It will select projects that may start by bettering life in Black Rock City, but which can be scaled to serve the whole world."

One of their first efforts is the hexayurt: a simplified disaster relief shelter designed by artists and tested thoroughly on the harsh playa at Burning Man. The structures are simple, cheap, portable, and robust for use in disaster areas and other temporary communities.

More info.

Call for Open Peer Review: An Anthropocene Primer

Version 1.0 of An Anthropocene Primer is hosted by the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute as an open access book. In collaboration with Indiana University Press, we are inviting the public to participate in an open peer review of the volume between October 23, 2017 and February 1, 2018. We will revise the primer in response to the comments and intend to publish the text as an open access book as well as a hard copy volume in 2018.

An Anthropocene Primer is a great example of a project weaving humanities and science together seamlessly to explore a serious current socio-ecological issue. The online Hypothes.is software allows anyone to annotate and contribute to the project.

The primer website and blog also includes references to other interesting and successful art/sci collaborations, papers, and open peer review projects like the Rivers of the Anthropocene, and Environmental Humanities and Climate Change.

Here's how to get involved:

Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world

This 2011 article by Ariane Koek is an excellent discussion of the potential and pitfalls of art/science collaboration.

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Olafur Eliasson's "Your Split Second House",
shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010,
took physics as its jumping-off point.

It is one of the fashionable arts movements of the moment. It is also one of the most troubled because the aesthetic is unsubtle and still evolving. With the seemingly giddy rise of the wonders of science in our culture, epitomised by the boyish Brit physicist Brian Cox's blockbuster TV series, “Wonders of the Universe” on the BBC, arts/science (sometimes called “sciart”) is gaining ascendancy in the 21st century as a movement of influence and power.

Almost every week, across the world, exhibitions are opening that are billed as arts/science to cash in on this emerging trend, which is also driven by new funding possibilities from science in the current arts cash crisis.

But we are in the middle of a crisis of another kind—a reduction in the wonder of creativity itself, and the question of who controls it and how. Creativity, and where it comes from, is one of the last great human frontiers, and one over which we have little control, cash crisis or no cash crisis.

But there is a battle to do just that, and reduce creativity to a systematic formula in our function-obsessed, input-output, application-driven world. Artists are being driven to become scientific, from the moment they fill in a funding application predicting their final production.

Let me explain. I work in arts/science myself. So, you could argue, who I am to talk? After all, I have created an artists’ residency programme at Cern, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and home to the large hadron collider. But it has at its heart the wonder of the creative process. It is not a residency which is process-driven or defined by an outcome; nor does it demand communication about or homage to the science.

I have deliberately set it up to be a laboratory of the imagination, where freeplay can happen. The science and the place are springboards of the imagination for the artists, not the destination, reason, mission or simulacra of production. When they apply, prospective artists may be asked to imagine a project they would like to carry out, but we fully expect that to change completely once they come to Cern—and who knows what will happen then? That’s part of the process.

This goes against the trends that can be seen in the arts/science aesthetic which has emerged from the 20th century, which contains, in my view, three very dangerous strands.

First, art as a communicator of science, where the artist represents the science to the outside world. This is, essentially, art as a publicity and communications tool, and can happen consciously or unconsciously when the artist becomes subsumed in the science. This is becoming critical in the current cash crisis, when artists are seeking new ways of funding their work and science promises new purse-strings.

Second, science as a means of production, where scientific methods, experimentation and technologies become the channel through which art is processed and made, subjugating the imagination to reductive processes.

Third, science as art – for example, when a snapshot of a cell is admired as beautiful or a chemists' laboratory is found in an art gallery. Both instantly become art, “daringly” crossing the threshold of the arts/science boundary, but in reality saying nothing more than that. It is an intervention that leads nowhere.

But there is a fourth, more invisible, strand, where the arts and science are in fluid interchange—just as they were in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, when he moved easily between the two. Here, the disciplines are honoured for their similarities as well as their essential differences.

Let me explain this fourth and more subtle strand in full. Arts and science are similar in that they are expressions of what it is to be human in this world. Both are driven by curiosity, discovery, the aspiration for knowledge of the world or oneself, and perhaps, as the conceptual artist Goshka Macuga said on her recent visit to Cern, a desire for world domination. She was half joking.

But they express themselves in different ways: the arts through the body and mind, often driven by the exploration of the ego, contradictions and the sheer messiness of life; science through equations, directed, collaborative research and experimentation that works in a progressive, linear fashion.

As Dr Michael Doser, the experimental physicist on Cern's cultural board for the arts, says: “What I find wonderful about working with artists is that they are just as fascinated by side routes and diversions as they are by the direction in which they are going. This is what makes artistic work really different from scientific work.”

These oscillations between sameness and differences form what I call the fourth aesthetic—the Leonardo way. Honour the differences and then amazing work, true arts/science work, happens. One example is Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, which took physics as its jumping-off point.

This installation of twirling water-sprays momentarily separated the drops of water under strobe lights. It is a piece about perception, and was inspired by thinking about how long it takes an astronaut to get out of a black hole. The answer is about a day. But to people who are not in the hole, the astronaut takes forever.

Or take the work of Mariko Mori, which is driven by engaging with opposites and the oscillations between the two: reality and fantasy, seriousness and humour, human and machine, technology and nature, science and religion. This is shown very clearly by Wave UFO, which is simultaneously an architectural piece, a scientific experiment in which the visitor’s brain waves become the work of art in a space-age pod, and a temple to meditation.

The piece is fuelled as much by science and technology as it is by Buddhism and an investigation of religion. Critically, Eliasson and Mori are not so enthralled by the wonders of science that their work loses its wonder and integrity.

For nine months, I tracked a very confident young Swiss artist and astrophysicist working together on a residency. For four months, they were equally enthralled by each other. But then there was a turning point. The artist said to me: “The science is so amazing that I have to prove that I understand it and that I too have a brain.”

From that moment, I knew he was lost. The work he did at the end of the residency was at best a communications piece trying to explain what quantum fields were. Now, a year later, he has rediscovered his playfulness by regaining his distance from the all-intoxicating wonder of particle physics, and is starting to create great work again.

I will leave you with two quotes, one from an artist and one from a scientist, in order to practise what I preach: mutual respect, equal exchange and difference.

Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”

Keith Tyson: “If you attempt to marry and equate art with science, then you fail. If you allow what is not similar about art and science, and their different methods and processes, to co-exist and thrive, then a real art/science collaboration and aesthetic will emerge. But at the end of the day, art and science are united by one logic and one impulse—both are attempts to understand what it is to be human and the world around us.”

That’s why I call Collide@Cern, the programme I have created, Cern’s latest great experiment, colliding elements even more elusive than the Higgs boson: namely, human creativity and the imagination. It was founded to honour the creative process, and to keep science and the arts in an equal balance of wonder—and apart, too. Let’s just have spaces for this to happen, and let the magic and the mystery—those chance operations the great John Cage talked about—occur.

The writer is a Clore Fellow and is head of international arts development and the arts programme at Cern. She created Cern's arts policy and its main strategy, the Collide@Cern Artists' Residency programme.

Article from Conservation Biology, and book from Oxford Press

Here's an interesting 2007 article by Jacobson, McDuff and Monroe from the journal Conservation Biology, titled Promoting Conservation through the Arts: Outreach for Hearts and Minds:

Emotions play a central role in the decisions we make. For example, we often make poor investment choices because we are driven by our emotions rather than rational judgment (Tversky & Kahneman 1991). On the positive side, when emotional input is added to learning experiences, it makes them more memorable and exciting. The brain deems the information more important and enhances memory of the event. Presenting facts alone is less likely to result in long-term changes in feelings and behaviors (Sylwester 1994; Weiss 2000; Cable & Ernst 2003). 

The arts offer a way to make an emotional connection to people, and the visual and performing arts can help conservation practitioners reach new audiences. Art can provoke reactions that typical education and outreach methods do not. Art has the potential to inform audiences or participants in a new way about conservation topics, and it can stimulate new dialogues and actions...

---

The essay was based in part on the planning, implementation, and evaluation guidelines for using the arts in conservation, published as a meaty and thought-provoking chapter in Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques, Susan K. Jacobson, Mallory D. McDuff, and Martha C. Monroe.

Mechanisms of discovery

Discovery is the creation of new knowledge. Both art and science are ways of combining previously unrelated elements to create this new knowledge.

"In designing this project, I have been looking for the right proportions and contrasts that set associations in motion, that invite the sort of very human experience of engaging through curiosity and being rewarded with discoveries...I think it’s an important skill to be able to read things in multiple and often contradictory ways." -- Todd Gilens

But what are the mechanisms involved in this discovery process? The philosopher David Hume argued convincingly that the human mind does not invent: it combines previously unrelated elements to create something new:

"What never was seen, nor heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction...But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted." 

"If all we had to go on were impressions and ideas, we could not do much more than have perceptions and notice past experiences. Hume, however, develops a powerful account of the mind by identifying the ways in which ideas may be related to one another. We can mentally link ideas together in three ways:

1. Resemblance: A and B share similar features;
2. Contiguity: A and B occur together in space and/or time;
3. Cause and Effect: A brings B about.

...Hume argues that all human beliefs [and mental processes] result from applications of these simple associations. From our simple ideas and associations we build very complex systems of thought and belief. Yet, no matter how complex an idea or belief system, it is always possible in principle to analyze it into its simpler component parts: ideas and relations between them.

This theory of mind and method of analysis provided the tools that Hume used to arrive at remarkable conclusions about knowledge, understanding, metaphysics, the self, morality, justice, religious belief, and a host of other key philosophical topics." Much of Hume's work has been confirmed by later science. Read more here.

* * *

So, how does someone actually effect this productive recombination? Artists and inventors have a particular need for novelty; here are a few of the tools they have used to explore new hybrid ideas:

Surrealism is an art movement creating artworks that feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. The result was achieved by by combining conscious and unconscious awareness, with the goal of effecting social change.

• Inventor Thomas Edison also famously accessed the power of his unconscious mind by power-napping at his desk with a handful of ball bearings. When he drifted off to sleep his hand would relax, dropping the heavy metal balls to the floor. The noise woke him to record his unconscious answer to whatever question his conscious mind had been pondering.
• Artist Salvador Dali used the same technique with a spoon and metal plate. Dali was intrigued with the images which "occur at the boundary between sleeping and waking that occur when people are falling asleep, or when they are starting to wake up. These images tend to be extremely vivid, colorful and bizarre".
• Though it slightly predated the Surrealists, Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious, mirrored and inspired their goals. Despite significant errors, Freudian analysis led to a revolution in psychology, ultimately transforming it from essentially voodoo into a more scientific discipline.

Humor uses startling juxtaposition of apparently unrelated elements to convey new concepts, and to build new coping mechanisms and emotional connection to the ideas and the people expressing them:

"Humor also bestows social, psychological, and physical benefits. It attracts attention and admiration, softens criticism, delineates social boundaries, and alleviates conflict between people with different worldviews (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Keltner, Capps, Kring, Young, & Heerey, 2001; Martin, 2007). Humor even helps people cope with anxiety, embarrassment, grief, and physical pain." (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Keltner & Bonanno, 1997; Martin, 2007)

"...comedy goes far beyond the business of making us laugh: it has long been a powerful tool for social change and a means of undermining authority. What we find funny can also be cruel, establishing symbolic boundaries that divide people, setting those with power against those without and vice-versa." -- Artdaily.com

"Stand-up comedy is among the most popular forms of entertainment in America today. It is also one of the few places in mainstream society where people speak candidly about the topics of race and racism. This is no coincidence." -- Colleen Frances Manwell

Perhaps because of its transformative power, humor itself has often been seen as subversive: in Confucian China, in the medieval Islamic world (where comedy was dissociated from Greek drama and re-associated with Arabic poetic forms), and in more modern culture, where jokes can unite, or at the expense of national, religious or social identities can work to enforce tribalism, misogyny and racism.

However, for its transformative capacity humor is often seen as the enemy of fanaticism. In fact, "the topic of whether Christ ever laughed was hotly debated by theologians over many centuries. So, if Christ never laughed, and priests should be models of Christ, then humor and laughter were counter to true religion" (which is conservative and rejects re-interpretation).

The roots of humor include:

• Being reflective of, or imitative of reality 
• Surprise/misdirection
• Contradiction/paradox
• Ambiguity

The comedian Rowan Atkinson goes so far as to state that a person or object can become funny in one of only three ways: by being in an unusual place, by behaving in an unusual way, or by being the wrong size (Laughing Matters, 1992).

Atkinson also notes the strangely close relationship between comedy, fear, surrealism, and magic, as well as the surprising recurrence of classic themes in all of these. The physical comedian, like the ground-breaking artist, "breaks all the rules of decorum and convention".

Magic upends expectation, exploiting object behavior that obviously must be following the laws of physics, yet appears to break them. Artist and inventor John Edmark says,

"Clearly the works are sculptures of sorts, but in a sense that's just a coincidence; they're just the medium that I'm using to ask and answer questions that I'm interested in...I think my work is most successful when it evokes a sense of wonder, when it sort of seems to be magical."

Explanation of the strobe effect seen in Edmark's dynamic sculptures:



Source: Removable Thumb Magic Trick by ViralHog on Rumble

EDWARD TUFTE  ALL POSSIBLE PHOTONS
THE CONCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE ART OF FEYNMAN DIAGRAMS

"Dan Goods, JPL's science seer"

Dan Goods, "Out There" at JPL.

This article from the LA Times archive profiles Dan Goods: Jet Propulsion Labs' (JPL) resident "Visual Strategist". Some quotes from Dan:

"I love the theme of seeing the unseen." 

"Everyone should have the opportunity to have a moment of awe about the universe. If I can create that, then I feel I've been successful."

"I've always had a good reaction [from scientists]. Sometimes their inner geek comes out: 'How did you do that?' These are huge problems these people are working on, really difficult and technical, and sometimes they forget about the big picture. So when I show them something, they're like, 'Yeah, that's why I'm doing this.' Now people come to me when they want something from a different perspective. They say, 'Oh, we should just go talk to Dan.'"

See more of Dan's work at his website:
http://www.directedplay.com/

And on his Vimeo channel:
https://vimeo.com/dangoods

The link between math and poetry

How learning German taught me the link between maths and poetry | Harry Baker | TEDxVienna

Social Sculpture and Climate Change

Like politics, science supports a position. They both have an opinion, though arising out of very different sources.

Politics is a reflection and harnessing of public opinion: the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by a population for whatever reason. Scientific opinion, on the other hand, "harnesses the opinions of many different scientific organizations and entities and individual scientists in the relevant field, and is ultimately based on observation": that is, what is empirically demonstrable. The thing to note here, is that--unlike political consensus--once scientific consensus is reached and knowledge has been created from data, that doesn't mean there has actually been any connection made to public opinion, nor to the mechanisms of social change. Art can fill this disconnect, and has frequently been used by politicians as a tool to effect change in the working of the world.

As an example,  Soviet communist party leaders "depicted the United States as a cultural black hole and cited their own significant culture as evidence that they were the inheritors of the European Enlightenment". The Congress for Cultural Freedoms was organized, operated and funded by the CIA to promote American Abstract Expressionism to Europeans in the 1950's as a superior counterpoint to Soviet agitprop art. This covert operation was enthusiastically supported by New York's MOMA and the Ford Foundation. The CIA, acting secretly due to public and Congressional hostility to modern art, funded numerous traveling European exhibitions, symphonies, and many magazines that provided a platform for favorable art criticism. The aftermath of WWII was a not just a military Cold War, but also a cultural one, fought for the hearts and minds of the European intelligentsia. The fascinating and unsettling full story of the CIA and modern art is told in at least two books and a documentary, Hidden Hands (watch Episode 2 here), by Frances Stonor Saunders. Read Chapter 1 of The Cultural Cold War here.

In fact, the CIA still maintains a collection of important modern art used for agent training.

"We’ll have some of our guys and gals come down here and do a critical analysis of the paintings. Say you’ve got to analyze this big, heavy duty ISIL problem over here — maybe if you come look at the painting, it’ll help you think about how to solve the ISIL problem creatively."

* * *

With climate change emerging as the primary global social problem of the Anthropocene geological era, and a massive obsession of the scientific world, it is startling and alarming that politics is not bending art to address this unprecedented challenge. As Bill McKibbon said, "...though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Science can't offer this.

In the absence of political support (and funding), artists often seek to make cultural change on their own.

"There are experts in little things, but there are no experts in big things. All of us, no matter what we do, have the right to make moral decisions about the world....Everyone must be involved. -- Rachel Schragis 

The historian says [of war], "It's not my business." The lawyer says, "It's not my business." The businessman says, "It's not my business." And the artist says, "It's not my business." Then whose business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave the business of the most important issues in the world to the people who run the country? How stupid can we be? Haven't we had enough experience historically with leaving the important decisions to the people in the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, and those who dominate the economy?...It is the job of the artist to...think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say. " -- Howard Zinn

“Art was supposed to change things … after studying art history, you realize that’s not always the case, but I love that spirit about what art is supposed to be. Art is part of our larger world so it’s not just by itself trying to do that … yeah, so art does change things.” -- Kellie Jones, Curator and Art Historian

Operating, as we do, on the front-lines of climate change, field stations and marine labs do well to engage with and support artists who are interested in the same things we are.

Should art respond to science?

There's an interesting discussion happening at YASMIN. Below is the original post and some of the more compelling comments:

=========================== 

Yasminers

Here is a very very negative review of Ryoji's Ikeda's art installation resulting from his cern residency

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/23/art-respond-science-cern-ryoji-ikeda-supersymmetry

Should art respond to science? On this evidence, the answer is simple: no way
Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda's installation Supersymmetry is inspired by his residency at Cern - but signifies little more than that physics is weird. Isn't it time we stopped expecting artists to understand the complexities of science?

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/apr/23/art-respond-science-cern-ryoji-ikeda-supersymmetry

this is very much along the lines of my colleague Jean Marc Levy-Lebond's book 'Science is not art' where he attacks much of the mystification of art science practice

the review ends with:

Art <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/art> and science, we feel, should have something to say to each other. But perhaps they speak different languages after all. I don't speak the language of science too well, either, but I do know one thing: it is concerned with the wonder of nature. There is a depressing lack of wonder in this technically sophisticated but intellectually and emotionally empty art.

would be interested in Yasminer reactions: has anyone seen the work ?

roger malina

_______________________________________________
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Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin

=========================

Dear Roger & Fellow Yasminers,

One of the crucial differences between art and science is that art represents and expresses the views of the artist. Art also involves a viewer or receiver. As Duchamp used to say, the viewer completes the work of art. But this isn’t merely Duchamp’s opinion: this is a fundamental proposition of symbolic interactionism as a method in the social sciences, and this is the core understanding of hermeneutics. For a deeper discussion of these issues, I have posted Herbert Blumer’s concise, elegant discussion of the methodological perspective of symbolic interaction in the teaching documents section of my Academia page at URL:

https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

The clarity and precision of the natural sciences arises from the fact that the equations and propositions of natural science reflect and represent a world that should be the same to all viewers. While there are often differences of opinion about the truth, correctness, or value of what any one scientist or research team may represent about the physical world, there are also reasonably common standards that permit us to reach a common view over time.

One of Albert Einstein’s great papers of 1905 was his paper on Brownian motion. He published this at a time when no one was yet able to physically see an atom. Many scientists doubted the physical reality of atomic theory — and this included a great many scientists who accepted the hypothetical use of atomic theory for heuristic or didactic purposes while doubting the physical reality of atomism.

Einstein’s paper, “On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat”
examined several well-known physical and chemical facts, drawing together well established evidence to demonstrate the physical reality of atoms. As a result, many scientists who had been skeptical about the reality of atoms became convinced that atoms were, in fact, real. You can read the paper (in Satchel 1998: 71-98) for yourself on my Academia page at URL:

https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

The key issue between these two kinds of discussions is the difference between the ways in which we can understand human beings, how they think, how they behave, and what their behaviour means — including those forms of human behaviour that include speech acts, and the artefacts of behaviour in the form of written texts and works of art.

Not only do human actions change over time, but the meanings of human actions change over time. What’s more, the understanding of human actions, human artefacts, and their meaning undergo translation by everyone who hears, sees, or participates in any action.

An atom of carbon will be the same as any other atom of carbon in the universe. Gravitation is the same force wherever we can look and wherever we can measure it. Certain predictable factors account for measurable differences — different isotopes of any element, differences in the strength of gravity on the surface of a large planet as against the force of gravity in space outside the pantry atmosphere.

In contrast, my idea of a good beer may differ to the ideas of those five people at the table next to me. I’ll order a bottle of India Pale Ale from the case and not the refrigerator while the next table has five frosty glasses of house lager on tap. Someone may enjoy Aaron Copland’s film scores while someone else might prefer Danny Elfman’s work, and yet another person might enjoy them equally. One viewer may love Ryoji Ikeda’s work and another may not. I am puzzled about the multimillion dollar sums that Jeff Koons’s work take at auction when someone can buy a beautiful print by Dieter Roth or a painting by Dick Higgins for a 5-figure sum.

It is for this reason that I read Jonathan Jones’s review of Ryoji Ikeda’s Supersymmetry installation without too much feeling either way. The artist responded to scientific ideas, but Ikeda’s installation is art and not science. It is very much the same thing as a musician composing works to reflect a sense of what early astronomers called “the music of the spheres.” Jones’s review tells me what Jones thinks — it doesn’t tell me what I think.

I haven’t seen the installation for myself, so I have no idea about it from first-hand experience. I did read the review, but the review doesn’t seem any more harsh than other kinds of reviews. If you want to read some truly withering criticism, take a look at Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time. I suppose that a similar collection may exist for visual art, but I haven’t seen it. There are two interesting books of rejection letter from publishers and others, however. One is Bill Shapiro’s Other People's Rejection Letters: Relationship Enders, Career Killers, and 150 Other Letters You'll Be Glad You Didn't Receive. The other is Rotten Rejections: The Letters That Publishers Wish They'd Never Sent by Andre Bernard.

Duchamp used to say “posterity will be the judge.” We’ll eventually find out whether Ikeda’s work or Jones’s opinion prevails.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

==========================

Dear Roger,

A very interesting set of questions to arise at this point in time of intense mutual admiration between art and science and lack of responsible criticism in the arts and as science falls prey to conservative doubting, at least in States, and what I would argue is an over determination from technology sectors in education.

Perhaps it's not so much that artists should "understand" or take a deeply creative interest in mimicking science in their practices, but that both can learn different sets of questions and directions for research from each other and that deep critique both positive and negative is needed in both fields. We have enough problems to solve on this planet!

I had a chat with Erik Davis after a presentation he did about psychedelia in which he screened early CIA scientific experiments with LSD - controlled in a white office, with clock, with men in ties. If this is "objectivity" about the type of mystical experience possible on psilocybin then scientists have missed something crucial about aesthetics and sensual pleasure in affecting mind-alteration. He also talked about a recent study done at Johns Hopkins where it was determined that there was some kind of universally-had mystical experience. Presumably this more recent study used control environments more conducive to tripping than the CIA did in the sixties.

My point being that Science could gain important insights into how it is posing questions and proving its ideas from artists and artists would do well not to treat their own practices as if Art were for producing results that need to be proved--what has seemed a creeping concern in both criticism and practice and a peculiar (funding driven?) demand on artists in the last decade.

Molly Hankwitz, PhD
Independent scholar, curator, editor
Bivoulab "scientist"

==========================

Gaston Bachelard makes the point that "bad science can produce good art."
His books reveal how what was once taken to be scientific fact can become a
poetics that retains a psychological truth even when it can no longer claim
any scientific legitimacy. Ordinary language still carries along the
imagery of how we used to imagine the word--and ideas we no longer accept
as scientific may still condition our experience of the world.

I have only seen Ikeda's work in online videos, so it is particularly
difficult to know how to react to it. I do use other works of his in class
as examples both of simplicity of means and large scale immersive
environments. I read the review some time ago, and found it irritating--the
sort of "let's be sure you know my opinion" writing that for me is the
opposite of what I imagine good art criticism should be. Rather that
offering readers analysis that would allow the reader to form her own
understanding Ikeda's work, the critic decides what is good and what is
bad. But that's the pattern of most newspaper criticism for you.

On the other hand, I think that there is a point to be made about artists
learning the language of science in ways that go beyond the facile.
Complexity and chaos theory have been particularly misconstrued--consider
the innumerable times "the butterfly effect" is dropped into conversation.
There is a tendency of artists to skim the surface, pluck a few metaphors,
and consider that their work is done.

best,

-- Paul
http://paulhertz.net/

=========================

Dear Ken and Fellow Yasminers

Of course the letters that publishers wish they had never sent is a good way to view Jones' review.

I've been reading Susan Sontag's essay on Camp and that's the sort of writing that we are looking for - sensitive and evocative responses to the sorts of work that we are interested in and involved with. Writing that draws out the sensibilities of the work and provides us with a frame of reference for understanding.

But remember that Jones' review might have prompted more people to visit the installation, more people to have arguments about the relationship between art and science and more people to appreciate Ikeda's art. Sometimes you have to slag something off to get people to pay attention to it.

But the world is not only the Turner Prize, any news is good news, no such things as bad publicity.

We actually need good critical writing to explore what the work means to the audience (bearing in mind that as Ken so rightly highlights there is no direct connection between the artist's intention and the audiences' reception of the work). The critic is the audiences' voice, the way the artist hears back. I'm not meaning to simplify the critic or to remove the power relations, the connection between critic and collector, etc. But we know we need high quality criticism and we know that we need it more than ever now.

For what its worth my cues for writing good criticism are Helen Molesworth, Susan Sontag and Grant Kester.

Chris--

Chris Fremantle
Independent Producer and Researcher

chris@fremantle.org
+44 (0)7714203016

http://chris.fremantle.org
http://ecoartscotland.net
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/chrisfremantle/
https://independent.academia.edu/ChrisFremantle

==========================

For those interested in some further discussion of this article by
Jones, you can see a conversation in e-flux from April here:
http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/whats-art-got-to-do-with-science/1489

David Harris
UCSC Digital Arts and New Media

Architecture of Life exhibit

UC Berkeley has a current show that includes anatomical drawings by Ramón y Cajal that are still used in medical textbooks today. From a review by NPR:

Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Microglia in the grey
matter of the cerebral cortex, 1920.

 "We forget that it is hard to see. To paraphrase Kant (loosely), seeing without understanding is blind, even if understanding without seeing is empty. A good drawing — for example of the working parts of an engine — is often much easier to interpret than an actual perceptual encounter with the engine itself. The engine, after all, is very complicated. What is important? What deserves notice? It's hard to know. But the drawing, when it is successful, is more than a mere representation; it is, really, the exhibition of what something is, of how it works, of what it is for. A good drawing is an image that has been imbued with thought."

Architecture of Life runs through March 29, 2016 at BAMPFA, the new visual arts center of UC Berkeley.

How The Arts Enhance Learning

Mariale Hardiman, Vice Dean, Academic Affairs, Professor of Clinical Education, and Co-founder and Director of the School of Education's Neuro-Education Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Read the referenced paper, The Effects of Arts Integration on Long-Term Retention of Academic Content. Hardiman, et al. 2014.

Stanford's Environmental Humanities Project

Here's a great project by Stanford grad students:

The Environmental Humanities Project provides a forum for an interdisciplinary approach to environmental issues. It foregrounds recent work of humanities scholars in disciplines such as cultural studies, history, literary studies, philosophy and anthropology that has engaged with environmental problems, and explores how this research contributes to current discussions about ecological crisis.

Partnership for Community Engagement Pilot

This WESTAF program seems like a great, ready-made model for some types of FSML art (Partnership for Community Engagement Pilot).

* * *

WESTAF--the Western States Arts Federation--is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the creative advancement and preservation of the arts. To accomplish this, WESTAF works in cultural policy, research, and technology.

WESTAF provides other services that may be useful to FSML art programs:

• "Since its launch in 2005, CallforEntry.org (CaFÉ) has grown to become the nation’s leading online call-for-entry application and jury management system. Thanks to a series of significant improvements and an expanding team, CaFÉ now has over 150,000 registered artists and is the only system with an active marketplace of artists who regularly search for and apply to calls through the site. The CaFÉ site consistently hosts more than 120 active calls, with over 60 new calls added each month. Each call receives an average of 220 submissions for juried exhibitions, art competitions, and public art commissions."
• "The Public Art Archive (PAA) database is quickly approaching 10,000 records from almost 1,000 collections around the nation and abroad. As the database grows, the PAA team continues to work on ways to help more of the public discover and learn about public art collections. One big step towards this goal is the Collection Showcase Page feature, which allows administrators with collections in the PAA to develop their own home page as an access point to their collection. Using the showcase page in this way is far less expensive than designing a stand-alone public art site. In addition, because the PAA is heavily used, the public is better able to search for a collection in a locality rather than seeking one out that is often buried in state and local government sites."
• "WESTAF has underwritten Barry’s Blog for 10 years now. The blog was initiated by Barry Hessenius, who, at the time of the blog’s founding, was the recent past executive director of the California Arts Council. WESTAF...invites our Update Notes subscribers to read Barry’s thoughts on 10 years of blogging about the arts by visiting: http://bit.ly/barry10."
• See more services on the WESTAF website.

Community Innovation Labs

"Community Innovation Labs offer the opportunity for the cultural sector to play a vital role in community change, using artistic practices to build a shared vision, explore new possibilities, and advance adaptive solutions...

Our Labs create the space and conditions for organizations to test innovative new ways to take on their most complex, intractable challenges. We do this by helping them bring together teams of 'unusual suspects,' unfreeze the status quo, and test their most promising ideas by putting them into action...

We believe that innovation is primarily a process, not a product, fueled by discipline, focus, and a strong will for change. It requires letting go of what is no longer useful and experimenting your way forward. This is difficult and vulnerable work. We also believe that artistic experiences help us learn to productively navigate the tension between thinking and feeling, both of which are required to respond to complex challenges."

The project asks several questions to find fruitful areas for collaboration:

• What problematic situation(s) in your community would be a good fit to explore in a pilot Lab? 
• In what ways might a pilot Lab build on existing momentum, networks, and efforts? 
• What group of community stakeholders from a range of sectors and backgrounds might be champions of this effort? Who is already committed?

The Community Innovation Labs model is clearly applicable to FSMLs aiming to foment creative abrasion between arts and field science in pursuit of fundamental discovery and solutions to wicked environmental problems.

The project website has links to a recent Webinar and an incredibly insightful and valuable Information Packet.

Art as Cultural Diplomacy

This expired Call For Papers by Cassandra Sciortino, University of California - Santa Barbara is a fascinating example of seeking problem solution through art.

This idea is a strong theme in FSML art programs that seek to enhance fundamental discovery and push scientific knowledge through to social policy and action.

The CFP was for a panel of the recent Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (The Fourth Edition) conference in Kraków, Poland. Presented topics included some information that is philosophically interesting and highly pertinent to ambitious FSML art programs, including:

• The Artist-in-Residence as Cultural Mediator: "...As well as being sources for inspiration, this global web of residencies can have a wide-ranging ethical and mediating effect through contact between visiting artists and their host cultures." Download paper.
• David Loewenstein: Art Intervention as Social Practice: "...It is a basic tenet of Loewenstein’s approach that for a community art project to have integral value, the needs it addresses must emerge from, and be articulated by, the members of the community themselves."
• Non-Aligned Modernism: Yugoslavian Modernist Art and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: "...the 1956 MoMa exhibition of Abstract Expressionism...legitimized modernist ethos as an accepted political, social, and cultural form during Yugoslavia’s transition from a hard-line Soviet-style state, to a more open, humanist-socialist one."
• More here.

=======================

CFP: Art as Cultural Diplomacy (Krakow, 24-26 Apr 2015)

Krakow, April 24 - 26, 2015
Deadline: Mar 23, 2015

Call for Papers for the Panel: Art as Cultural Diplomacy: (Re)Constructing Notions of Eastern and Western Europe

(As part of the Fourth Euroacademia International Conference ‘Re-Inventing Eastern Europe’, to be held in Krakow, Poland in 24th - 26th of April 2015, including a visit to Auschwitz – Birkenau on 26th of April 2015)

Deadline: 23rd of March 2015

Art as Cultural Diplomacy: (Re)Constructing Notions of Eastern and Western Europe Panel Proposed by: Cassandra Sciortino, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panel Description

The panel “Art as cultural diplomacy” seeks papers that explore the function of art (in its broadest definition) as an instrument of cultural diplomacy by the state and, especially, by nongovernmental actors. The main theme of the session is the question of art and diplomacy in Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Papers are welcome which explore issues related to the role of art, diplomacy and the politicization of the European Union and its candidate countries, as are those which consider how the arts have pursued or resisted East-West dichotomies and other narratives of alterity in Europe and worldwide. The panel seeks to combine a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how art—its various practices, history, and theory—are an important area of inquiry in the expanding field of cultural diplomacy.

Some examples of topics include:

• How can art serve as a neutral platform for exchange to promote dialogue and understanding between foreign states?
• How can art, including organized festivals (i.e. film, art, music.), cultivate transnational identities that undermine dichotomies of East and West, and other narratives of alterity in Europe and beyond it?
• The implications for art as an instrument of diplomacy in a postmodern age where geopolitics and power are increasingly mobilized by image based structures of persuasion
• How has/can art facilitate cohesion between European Union member states and candidate states that effectively responds to the EU’s efforts to create “unity in diversity.”
• The politics of mapping Europe: mental and cartographic
• Community based art as a social practice to engage issues of European identity
• The difference between art as cultural diplomacy and propaganda
• The digital revolution and the emergence of social media as platforms for art to communicate across social, cultural, and national boundaries?
• Diplomacy in the history of art in Europe and Eastern Europe
• Artists as diplomats
• Art history as diplomacy—exhibitions, post-colonial criticism, global art history, and other revisions to the conventional boundaries of Europe and its history of art
• The international activity of cultural institutes

Please apply on-line or submit abstracts of less than 300 words together with the details of affiliation until 23rd of March 2015 to application@euroacademia.eu

For full details of the conference, please see before applying the conference website: http://euroacademia.eu/conference/re-inventing-eastern-europe-the-fourth-edition/

Reference:
CFP: Art as Cultural Diplomacy (Krakow, 24-26 Apr 2015). In: H-ArtHist, Mar 4, 2015 (accessed Sep 25, 2015).

Thanks to ArtHist for the original post. 

Innovative public outreach at Sanibel Captiva

Hi, Thought this might be of interest for the blog on a collaboration with the Rauschenberg foundation.

=============

Xavier Cortada

Caloosahatchee CLEER (create, learn, exchange, entertain and restore) is a multi modal event to open conversations with the public about the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation's science and policy initiatives while creating community art pieces and listening to three professional singer/songwriters. 

The event includes the opportunity to paint wooden message fish to be delivered to Tallahassee, make personal pledges to help clean the water, and enjoy the creation of four iconic art pieces commissioned for the project by Xavier Cortada, an environmental restoration artist. 

It has been demonstrated by similar past events, discussing science and policy with residents and visitors in more informal one-on-one festive setting, people delve deeper into the subject of water quality around Sanibel and Captiva. It has also gives SCCF an opportunity to gauge the knowledge people already have and where educational needs may exist.

Musicians for the two November events are J Robert Houghtaling of Marco, Austin Church of Cocoa Beach and Brent Moyer of Nashville TN and Jackson WY.

We have done 3 events like this in the past and people have been great. It is the first time I am putting all the components together after a Communicating Science workshop. 

Eric

-- 

Eric C. Milbrandt, Ph.D.

Director

Marine Laboratory

Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation

900A Tarpon Bay Rd.

Sanibel, FL 33957

(ph): (239) 395-4617

(fax): (239 395-4616

Check out the ML website:

http://marinelab.sccf.org

RECON Observing Network

http://recon.sccf.org/

Follow me on Twitter:

@SCCF_Marine_Lab

Recommendation from an Eco-art legend

http://www.centerforforcemajeure.org/

For those of you who don't know me my name is Newton Harrison.

I consider myself an artist first but also an academic and an educator. I come out of a number of traditions and the Bauhausian attitude toward problem solving is a background sound in much of our work. The artist educators I identify with and know or knew, are people like Alan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, and Hans Haacke who are or were my contemporaries in my early thirties. I found myself comfortable in many of the sciences. Moreover, I have helped form art departments, chaired them, was the first policy panel chairman for the NEA and have done a body of administrative work. I took early retirement from UC San Diego after reaching the top of the professorial ranks in order to do art full time. The career of Helen Harrison, my lifetime collaborator, has the same general outline as my own. I bring up this history to make clear that I have direct and extensive experience in the three principle domains that comprise this discussion. If I am correct, they are about the melding of art, science, administration and support structures of various kinds.

I would like to suggest that missing from this discourse is what one one might call content. I would also like to suggest that there is a common meeting point between formations in art and formations in science. One might better say, a common beginning point. It is about seeing, in the sense of envisioning that evokes a question of originality about something not previously spoken. Let me begin with Cezanne the father of modern art, the question he asked was: why was the art making in the academies of his time dominated by straight lines that created various perspectives visually when in nature the same kind of seeing happened but in the absence of straight lines? A key question that he spent a good part of his life answering. The answers turned out to be how non-linear perspectives, 6 or 7 in number, actually worked. This was demonstrated most powerfully in his Mount St. Victoire works. From these discoveries emerged a body of art movements, such as expressionism, impressionism, even fauvism among others, changing the nature of the field and significantly expanding the conceptual domain and visual domains that people though of as art. His discoveries, and their proof exhibited in his paintings were endlessly useful field.

Let me now offer a parallel example, perhaps of even greater importance in the sciences. In 1969 I was doing an artificial borealis for Expo 70 and then the Art& Technology exhibition in LACMA. The work was based in plasma physics which I had to learn something about. Richard Feynman the physicist was my guide. The work was done, successfully, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. One time walking in the woods with Feynman, he explained the problem he had that forced him to make so many equations, always with something missing, finally discovering that what was missing was something. Also a lovely question that he asked which was something like this: is it true that the faster something moves, the more impossible it is to find its location in a trajectory of movement? I think he discovered you could come close by "averaging a sum of its histories" (a good physicist might express this more clearly). These discoveries seem to offer new insight into indeterminacy and wave particle physics.

The point I am making here is that powerful content emerges from asking, then setting out to answer, a question that turns out to be of great consequence. This is true of both the arts and the sciences. The outcomes in physical terms between the arts and sciences are sometimes parallel and sometimes very different but the original question, the original search and high excitement in original discovery, are common. It is my opinion that a concerted effort needs to be made to locate artists who are comfortable in the sciences and who are asking questions and seeking answers that are of great importance. For instance a dominate question in our own work, looks something like this: if flood and drought, the outcome from global warming, reduces dramatically the ability of the peninsula of Europe to feed its own people, is a mediating force on the horizon, can it be enacted, and can civil breakdown be countered? We think yes.

The artists that I have mentioned previously in the response to Janet Brown's blog, do in fact ask and seek answers to questions of importance and are useful models. Therefore I suggest that our rather complex group take on itself the extremely exciting task of locating and supporting, that relatively small group of artists globally, that go about doing what I have been talking about.

More later.

Newton