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Dear nettimers,

For a few years I’ve been teaching and coaching at the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague, a very
nice small scale experimental program located between the academy of visual arts and the school of
music, with some modest links to local universities, and since one and half years as part of their
faculty. It struck me in this time that there are many different understanding of what this emerging
field of ArtScience might be, tons of expectations but very little in terms of a more precise
articulation of what defines and demarcates the field. To stimulate debate on this matter internally I
wrote a short essay / position paper called “Locating ArtScience’. The second draft of that essay is
appended below as this could be of interest here I think, given previous discussions about the Earth
Sciences, why some of us did not want to ‘March for Science’ and more..

I understand that some of this is susceptible to various forms of criticism and contention (maybe all
of it?) - that’s fine and part of the debate. Aso, it is important to note that this is my personal take on
what I still see as a field ‘in becoming’ (despite having some extended lineages), and one that I see
mostly in danger of overheating as a result of which some particularly valuable potentialities might
be lost or obscured. Most of all I have become more aware of the great potential for methodological
innovation that could and sometimes already does emerge out of this hybrid set of practices, but it
needs to be shaped / refined / re-articulated - probably an endless process.

I appreciate any comments / criticism this might evoke - hope this is of interest to some of you.

all bests,
Eric

—————————

Locating ArtScience
Eric Kluitenberg, Second draft, December 2017

ArtScience as an emergent field of practice

We should start from the premise that ArtScience at the moment is a field of practice in becoming.
There is enormous interest in this renewed convergence of Art and Science around the globe, with
new institutions founded, public initiatives functioning increasingly professionally, a plethora of
projects, events, and a considerable number of publications. The picture is thus one not of crisis or
stagnation, but rather a booming field that if anything might be in danger of overheating.

At the same time there does not as yet seem to be anything of a consensus about what exactly
defines this field, what its specificity might be, and where its boundaries, its demarcations lie. This
is the first and most serious problem that ArtScience has run into, and one that needs to be urgently
addressed to avoid a melt-down of its inner core.

The problem can be summarised as follows: ArtScience as a field of emergent practice is

simultaneously oversignified and underdefined.

This rather curious condition invites a surplus of speculation and unfulfillable expectations, which
once these expectations have been revealed as unfulfillable might generate an equally exponential
loss of interest in the field. However, something truly valuable might be lost if such an implosion of
interest, and subsequent de-investment from the field (in people, institutions, activity, knowledge
production, financial flows) were to happen.

To pre-empt this scenario of overheating and subsequently deflating and collapsing the field, it is
useful to identify some of the most defining characteristics of this emerging field, and figure out
what might be important and valuable about them.

This short essay stops short of providing a comprehensive definition of the field, nor does it provide
a ‘complete’ mapping of a field that is currently and perhaps by definition in an emergent state.
Rather it tries to identify some key characteristics as well as some key-misunderstandings, to
question what might be the special significance of ArtScience, and what could be particularly
important and valuable about it.

ArtScience: not an ‘interdisciplinary’ but ‘intersectional field of practice

The first important distinction to make is that ArtScience is not an interdisciplinary, or cross-
disciplinary field of practice. The seemingly endless series of ‘collaborations of Art and Science’
type of events miss the most crucial point of this emerging field: We should understand ArtScience
as an intersectional field that intersects a range of different established disciplines and domains, but
ultimately establishes a new practice building on and moving beyond these established disciplines
and domains.

The problem with the notion ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘cross-disciplinary’ is that it leaves the existing
disciplines in tact. So, in this image, on one side we find the Arts, on the other side the Sciences,
both understood in the broadest sense. Then some project is defined where representatives from
both sides collaborate and produce joint results, which can be more, or less, fruitful. Regardless the
outcome though, both domains are left entirely unchanged, and with that their specific
methodological approaches. The tacit assumptions about each respective practice are left
unchallenged, after which the participants can safely return to their native professional domain.

ArtScience should instead be conceptualised more ambitiously as a new hybrid practice with its
own specific methodological concerns. Operating in a field that it considers its own and that is
distinctive from both that of the Arts and that of the Sciences, but nonetheless building on
experience gained in those domains. Consequently, ArtScience should not be subsumed to either of
these domains. In other words, ArtScience is neither Art nor Science in any conventional
understanding of these terms. It articulates a field of enquiry of its own - one that can be extremely
broad and diversified, yet will also be demarcated by clear boundaries that have so far not been
clearly defined.

Methodological distinctions / concerns

The Arts at Cern program [1], which promotes the dialogue between artists and particle physics,
offers a useful methodological starting point for articulating more precisely where ArtScience
should locate itself. The rationale for bringing art and fundamental research in particle physics
together in the frame of the largest and most costly scientific experiment in operation on the planet
today is that the initiators view art as a form of fundamental research. In that sense they understand
art and particle physics to share an affinity with the pursuit of knowledge and insight primarily for
its own sake, and without an a-priori conception about the application of the knowledge and
insights that result from the experiment.

One might rightfully question in how far a scientific experiment at the scale of the CERN programs
in particle physics can ever be entirely free from expectations and pressures for (long-term)
applicability of results from the experiments. Equally one might argue about the peculiar
mechanisms of contemporary art practice, its inherent reliance on reputation economy and the
institutional arrangements that facilitate this system. Still, in both cases the objective of the activity
is not to produce immediate outcomes that can be applied in the short-term for exterior and extrinsic
purposes. In this regard they do share an affinity with ‘fundamental research’.

In the broadest sense then we can understand scientific activity as the production of new forms of
knowledge (rather than providing solutions for specific problems, which is the typical concern of
design and engineering). The same might be said to hold true for the arts. However, here we would
add not just the production of new forms of knowledge, but also the generation of new forms of
experience that do not require ‘scientific validity’ to be accepted as valuable contributions to the
field. Here the arts can draw upon scientific insights and enquiry, while the sciences can provide
‘scientific’ validation of insights gained from artistic experiments. There is no principal
contradiction between these activities. Whether it makes sense to combine methods and insights
from both fields is a situational question, not a matter of principle.

When speaking about ‘the sciences’ in the context of ArtScience this should refer to all the different
scientific and academic disciplines, including the social sciences, philosophy, mathematics,
the humanities, the life-sciences and the earth-sciences. There is a strange tendency to understand
‘the sciences’ too narrowly as referring exclusively to the natural sciences. To assume such an a-
priori within the field of ArtScience would severely diminish its potential significance,
unnecessarily so. ArtScience inherits from the arts the freedom to appropriate any form, any
medium, any methodology, any insight, from any domain and any professional field. The specificity
of the ArtScience undertaking results from the specific enquiries its proponents wish to pursue and
the specific ArtScientific methodologies they develop in doing so.

Science, Art, and Design in the Anthropocene

Art and Science, and for that matter any other human activity, do not operate in a neutral context at
the moment. The collective efforts of all human activity combined have reached a level, because of
the explosive growth of the global population, where these activities now constitute a physical force
of geological dimensions in their own right. No longer is it ‘nature’ that bounds and qualifies
human activity, but it is human intervention that now bounds and qualifies natural processes and
bends them to our will. In short human activity has become a ‘natural force’ in its own right. This is
a dramatic reversal of roles.

Geologists speak of a new geological time period, The Era of Man, where humans collectively
move more rocks and sediments than any other force in ‘nature’. This new geological era is named
the Anthropocene [2]. The term has become somewhat fashionable in public debates, but also
within the arts and the sciences. However, the prominent science philosopher Bruno Latour takes
the term very seriously. We are, according to Latour, now ‘facing Gaia’ [3], invoking the idea of
physicist James Lovelock that considers the planet as a self-regulating system tending towards
always new equilibria in response to any disturbance from within or from outside the planet. The
point that Lovelock has been making for some decades now is that the earth-system is reaching a
new point of disequilibrium that can trigger a planetary response tending towards a new equilibrium
in the future, but this might be one where the human species is incapable of surviving (because of
climatological changes, changes in air composition, heightened radiation levels, temperature
changes and other crucial ecological factors). Lovelock’s view is gaining more serious attention in
recent years in the earth-sciences, not least in response to the concerns over climate change.
Most important about the conception of the Anthropocene is that it makes the distinction between
‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ redundant. Instead it emphasises the tightly interconnected network of
associations between humans and what Latour has termed non-humans (animal and plant life,
minerals, gasses, water, air, and technological infrastructures). It is now clearer than ever that local
interventions, regardless of whether they originate from the sciences, the arts, design or
engineering, have global consequences. Every local intervention reconfigures the network of
associations between humans and non-humans and must be considered on both levels at the same
time.

The problem is of course the enormous abstraction of such planetary scale processes, the slowness
of their long-tail effects (that stand in stark contrast to the immediacy of the real-time economy),
and the non-linear nature of these processes that might develop ever so slowly but can suddenly
reach a tipping point, a singularity, where a radically new set of conditions emerges (global
warming being the most obvious example). While the statistics speak ever more clearly and
unambiguously about this problem, its communication to a wider audience and its translation into
effective policies falls short of this imminent threat. To a large extent this is the result of the gap
between abstract data and lived experience. Science alone cannot resolve this problem - it needs
more imaginative approaches that can only come from a supra-disciplinary perspective.

Reappraising subjectivity in the ArtScientific process

Subjectivity, the holy grail of the contemporary arts is inadmissible as scientific method. Perhaps
here we find the greatest rift between the two domains. The ‘operators’ of science will readily admit
that intuition and thus a subjective stance plays a key-role in scientific discovery. However, they
will immediately add to this that in order to turn a subjective hunch into a scientific view such
intuitions must be transformed into intersubjective methods and experiments with verifiable and
preferably repeatable results. In the Arts, conversely, intersubjectivity is merely an option, and one
often looked upon with some suspicion (as in the case of collective or community-based art
practices). There seems to be little opportunity for bridging this divide.

Still, scientific and technological history is full of singular personalities who shifted directions in
both scientific enquiry as well as technological development. Needless to say from artists we have
come to expect nothing less than a ‘singular personality’. When talking in 2011 in video conference
to Siegfried Zielinski during the Techno-Ecologies symposium at RIXC in Riga [4], who spoke
directly from the Vilém Flusser archive in Berlin, I pressed him on this particular point. The
question was what role, if any, subjectivity, the kind of subjectivity that we associate with the arts,
plays in the ‘deep time relations of the Arts, Sciences and Technologies’ that Zielinski’s wonderful
and monumental Variantology project is investigating? [5] Visibly delighted by this question
Zielinski explained that subjectivity was exactly at the very heart and origin of his project. One of
the aims of the Variantology project is to make clear the vital role subjectivity plays equally in
artistic, scientific, and technological exploration and discovery, and how it informs the desire for a
diversity of praxis that Zielinski, and with him many others including myself, is looking for in the
Variantology project.

In praise of amateurism

ArtScience celebrates amateurism and the cultural figure of the amateur. When artists venture into
the domain of the sciences they inevitably become amateurs, and vice versa the same holds true
for scientists venturing into the domain of the arts. This is a good thing. The word ‘amateur’ derives
from the Latin word ‘amator’, lover and the verb ‘amare’, which means ‘to love’. The amateur is
someone who is primarily motivated by love, in this case for the arts and sciences, yet is not tied to
professional conventions.

This characterisation of the cultural figure of the amateur was recognised as particularly productive
by the American arts collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) for a critical public engagement
with scientific research and method. CAE mount many of their artworks as public education
projects in which advanced ideas about genetic engineering and the politics of the life-sciences are
explored hands on with the audience. Through this activity CAE stimulates a broad participation of
non-specialist citizens in a vital area of scientific and (bio-)technological research and
development

In their 2001 book Digital Resistance CAE celebrate the figure of the amateur:

“Amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements
of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations.
Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalised systems of knowledge
production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of
their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige-capital”
[6]

Conversely, the amateur artist has the ability to see through the peculiar particularities of the art
system (the art market and the global reputation machinery of museums, public galleries, and
dedicated publications). The ArtScientist / ScienceArtist is simply looking for a truly expanded
field beyond the limitations of disciplinary codifications.

Aesthetics of ArtScience: (New-) Materialist rather than Idealist

Art as an Idea is not enough. ArtScience is a materialist practice, but a progressive one. It shares
affinities with new materialism, which combines a materialist perspective with attention for issues
of gender, race, the position and rights of non-humans, and a special care for diversity (cultural,
biological, ethnical). The network of associations between humans and non-humans, what Bruno
Latour has named ‘the collective’, is the expanded field that ArtScience operates in.

The aesthetics of ArtScience reflect this materialist perspective - they position im/material
phenomena in a wider axiomatic context. That is to say that ArtScience invites a reflection on the
different values at play in these phenomena. This questioning of the value-system governing
ArtScience experiments aims to transcend the performativity of Science as well as overly ideational
preoccupations of Art.

This is not a regressive move back inside / behind the medium. Alike post-conceptual art,
ArtScience can utilise any medium, appropriate any material, any process. The materialist
perspective rather means a foregrounding of the sensible in the process of ideation. It aims to
‘demonstrate’ (through experiment), even if that which it aims to demonstrate, qua definition,
cannot be demonstrated. As such it can produce both positive signs (signs that show something), as
well as negative signs (signs that show that something cannot be demonstrated / presented /
represented).

From this we can see that ArtScience builds on the great expansion of aesthetics that the 20th
century Avantgarde movements in the arts battled for. ArtScience thus continues in the footsteps of
that heroic long march through all the registers of human experience that the Avantgardes of the
previous millennium had begun, and expands it with all the registers of non-human experience.
Beyond Good and Evil in Science and Art

ArtScience can never occupy an elevated moral ground. It can never be innocent, nor naive. As a
matter of principle ArtScience needs to shed the moral a-priori of art, but also reject the non-lieu
of science. The assumption that the perspective of the artist / the arts on scientific and technological
processes invokes an ethical point of view in and of itself is simply an embarrassing display
of arrogance. It first of all completely denies an ethical position to the ‘operators’ of science and
engineering. It seems to assume that scientists, researchers, engineers are either unable or unwilling
to articulate an ethical position. Unfortunately we see this implicit (sometimes even explicit)
assumption in numerous art projects entering the domains of the sciences.

More importantly, such a position completely ignores the fact that there is a lot of great art that is
corrupt, amoral, or even immoral, anti-social, incorrect, outrageous, potentially criminal, or deeply
abject. If one truly believes in the freedom of the arts to appropriate any material, topic, or process
then this includes the freedom to violate any social norm, to be abject and incorrect, to be morally
corrupted, or ambiguously morally suspect. As an artist, if one follows this rule, one then has to be
ready to face the consequences (rejection, exclusion, imprisonment).

Equally, though, ArtScience cannot accept the non-lieu of the sciences contained in the basic
statement; “We are only figuring out how this works, how it will be applied is not up to us.”, or
worse: “We only measure things.” The ethical dimension of the arts and the sciences is part and
parcel of ArtScience practice.

This indicates that the ethics of each situation, each project, each experiment must be carefully
considered on a case by case basis. There is no space to assume comfortable a-priori positions.
Instead ArtScience asks for a constant articulation of one’s ethical position, even if that position is
incurably anti-social and immoral.
Significance / contribution of ArtScience

Based on the set of characteristics laid out here the question is what could be the (specific)
contribution of ArtScience to our collective enterprise?

It is possible to make a few preliminary suggestions, though it is wise to proceed diligently here:

1) ArtScience as a ‘transversal’ practice can establish new methodological bridges

The practice of ArtScience is transversal ‘by nature’. ArtScientists are transversalists - they operate
across and between the different registers of the sciences and the arts. In this nomadic
movement ArtScience can help to establish new methodological bridges between different
disciplines within and across the domains of the arts and sciences. It is hard to overestimate the
importance of this role of ArtScience as a go-between.

Consequently ArtScience practices hold an exceptional potential for methodological innovation.

This might very well be their most important contribution to both the fields of the arts and the
sciences.

2) ArtScience can enable new modes of knowledge production

Through its nomadic movement across and between the different registers of the sciences and the
arts ArtScience can enable new modes of knowledge production. Particularly in the reconciliation
of scientific method and artistic subjectivity ArtScience can open up new domains of knowledge
production. It is also here that ArtScience can find its own ‘genius’ - that what sets it apart from
other worthwhile human endeavours.

3) ArtScience can enable expanded aesthetic experiences

By insisting on the sensible in the ideational, and through the incorporation of the most advanced
and sophisticated scientific methods and findings, ArtScience can enable expanded
aesthetic experiences that build on the legacies of the Avantgardes, while remaining firmly locked
in a contemporary sensibility that anchors itself in (new-) materialist approaches.

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.

5) ArtScience can foster a heightened sensitivity for the emergent

Like the field of ArtScience itself the universe is best understood as ‘emergent’. ArtScience is not
interested in creating grand statements of artistic genius. Instead it is driven by a curiosity for
phenomena, processes and sensations in becoming. ArtScience locates itself deliberately outside of
the domain of the arts and even largely outside of the confines of human society. ArtScience studies
and composes the processual, the becoming, the ‘pressing crowd of incipiences’ (Massumi). In
short, ArtScience is a study of the emergent.

6) ArtScience can and must produce a deeper engagement in the ‘progressive composition of the
good common world’

Given the pressures of intense demographic growth and planetary resource exhaustion ArtScience
cannot but take responsibility for finding alternative pathways into the future. It therefore needs
to engage in what Bruno Latour has described so beautifully as the ‘progressive composition of the
good common world’ [8] of humans and non humans. We may dream about the limitlessness of
the universe, but we are bound to Earth. We cannot escape facing Gaia.

Eric Kluitenberg, May 19 / December 8, 2017.

References:

1: http://arts.cern/
2: http://www.anthropocene.info/
3: A thorough introduction to Latour’s recent thinking on the subject can be found in the
documentation of the Gifford lectures he delivered in Edinburgh, February 2013 under te title
“Facing Gaia”.
see: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/487
4: Archived event pages can be found at: http://rixc.lv/11/en/festival.info.html
5: See for an overview: http://variantology.com/?lang=en
6: Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, New York: Autonomedia, 2001, pp. 8-9.
7: ‘Incommensurable’: by virtue of the absence of a shared scale of measurement / qualification
incomparable.
8: Bruno Latour (2004): The Politics of Nature - How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA).

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.

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

Hello Eric, Brian,

Historically - as fas as I do overlook the subject matter -, ArtScience is rooted in the collaboration
of artists and (hard) scientists in research labs as described in Douglas Kahn's and Hannah Higgins'
book "Mainframe Experimentalism" and, from a very critical political perspective, in Lutz
Dammbeck's feature documentary "The Net". In the 1970s, it often involved artists with
backgrounds in 1960s experimental and intermedia arts (such as Fluxus artist Alison Knowles and
filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek), and was modeled after earlier collaborations between electronic
music composers (such as Lejaren Hiller and Dick Raaijmakers) and scientists in university and
corporate research labs. In most cases, ArtScience meant/means that contemporary artists chose to
affiliate themselves with science and technology research instead of the humanities and cultural
studies as the traditional academic counterparts of the arts. Perhaps the "Leonardo" journal, which
has been published since the 1960s, is hitherto the best manifestation and documentation of the
ArtScience discourse and field. (On top of that, "Leonardo's" name suggests a larger history of
ArtScience that encompasses Renaissance neoplatonist and classical Pythagorean discourses that
thought of mathematics, sciences, musical and visual aesthetics as one integrated whole.)

Just as 'contemporary art' (as a discourse and field with close affiliations to the humanities and
cultural studies/critical theory) has tended to be late and/or superficial (such as in much of the
trendier Post-Internet art) in grasping and engaging with the social and cultural impact of new
technologies, ArtScience conversely runs the risk to end up as affirmative techno spectacle (or just
some court jester experimentation in research labs without actual contributions to the core
research).

While I do know and appreciate the ArtScience study program in The Hague - and even collaborate
with some of its graduates -, I wonder whether the field of ArtScience as a whole can be extended
towards the critical ecological discourse and engagement that you propose. Factually, that discourse
does not only require the intersection of art and science (again, in the Anglo-American meaning of
science vs. humanities), but one of art, science, humanities and politics. It would require to rid itself
from those techno-positivists in the larger ArtScience community seen who literally advocate that
art practice should become lab work and creative technology R&D in institutes of technology
because the relevant stuff (such as robotics, artificial intelligence and sensor technology) is being
developed there. (I could drop many names, also from the Netherlands, but leave them out for the
sake of politeness.)

Along with colleagues, I've found the concept and discourse of Critical Making much clearer as an
attempt of fusing the arts, design, technological hacking with critical humanities and social
engagement. (On this topic, an interview with Garnet Hertz has just been
published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD43kCvI1wY) One of the questions for us is to
which extent Critical Making can be extended into a larger discourse including the contemporary
art field. Other proposals are on the table, such as "environmental humanities" (whose name
unfortunately doesn't include the arts) and "creative ecologies". Within the environmental
humanities, T.J. Demos' book "Against the Anthropocene" conversely points out how the original
notion of the anthropocene itself is contaminated with techno positivism. I would agree that the
crises we're facing are insufficiently addressed by the mere combination of the two discourses of art
and science, and that we need concepts that are both more specific and more inclusive.

Just my 10 cents.

Florian

Thank you Florian for these further comments and your problematisation of the concept of
ArtScience.

The extended lineages of ArtScience I’m overly familiar with and I deliberately tried to avoid them
in this text so as to develop a slightly more ‘fresh’ perspective’ - I’ve been reading Leonardo since
my student days (i.e. back in the 1980s), though less in recent years, and have always been amazed
by the presence of really good and really terribly bad texts and works there - never managed to
wrap my head around that entirely.

ArtScience as affirmative techno-spectacle is a real risk, or maybe even more than that an already
existing condition as also Steve has pointed out here. So, there is an obvious need to get beyond that
and Brian has made clear where the urgency lies in this.

However, critical making, as much as I appreciate the initiative, will not be able to deliver what
Brian is rightfully calling for. What is needed is a broad synthetic perspective that can anchor itself
in specific practices. This requires at the very least grounded research, critical theory, and
sophisticated forms of ‘making’ if we follow that term (i.e. critical making?).

And when I write ‘research’ I mean all the different forms of research, in the arts as well as the
sciences (and other domains, including non-professional ones - see in praise of amateurism), and
when I write ‘arts’ I mean all the arts, and when I write sciences I mean all the sciences, i.e. the so-
called hard sciences, humanities, but also social sciences). Nobody and no practice can contain such
a scope - that’s clear, so how this becomes specific is through this idea of creating specific
intersections. Every project / work coming out of this creates new and specific intersections
between these different ‘fields’. What emerges is a hybrid practice that cuts through these existing
fields, but every time in a highly specific / singular manner - you could call this a ‘mathesis
singularis’, borrowing from Barthes (Camera Lucida), as opposed to the mathesis universalis of the
so-called hard sciences.

Inevitably then subjectivity takes a central position in such a praxis, along with all its inherent
problems - this is a ‘methodological stance’ we know from the arts, yet is inadmissible in the
sciences. For this to become political it needs to be translated into a collective practice, and this is
where what Brian is calling for (the triad of art / science / politics) clearly transcends the current
frame of ArtScience. So the question is what this would translate into?

bests,
Eric

Dear Eric,

Thanks for the stimulating and thought-provoking text. I’m enjoying the discussion it’s generated.
Would you mind if I asked some questions?

The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its undermining of the human’s
‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work
in Prince of Networks. Here Latour is portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented
philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human subject’ in his thought. We
cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject and
object. Every entity is something in its own right…. This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus,
blue whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of
objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from
Latour’s The Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in
the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry you were
not there... Things in themselves lack nothing.’

Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with humanism, the
consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. After all, the zebras don’t care
whether Latour writes about them or not. In themselves they lack nothing - including books by
Bruno Latour presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, containing as
they do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are attributed to him as unique, individual,
named, human author or personality, to the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman actors, and
published (in the case of Facing Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all rights reserved’ basis with
a for-profit press?

Similarly, you write, on the one hand, that what is 'most important about the conception of the
Anthropocene is that it makes the distinction between "Man" and "Nature" redundant.' Yet on the
other, is there a risk of the differentiation between the human and nature being reemployed in your
position paper? I’m thinking of the emphasis you place on: 1) the kind of human subjectivity we
associate with the arts and with intuition, as well the importance that is placed on a subjective
stance. Of course an emphasis on subjectivity doesn’t necessarily have to mean a reinforcement of
the human/nature distinction. So I was wondering, could you perhaps say something about how the
particular form of subjectivity you have in mind differs from the traditional humanist subjective
stance that is associated with the liberal arts and sciences (and which endeavours to keep those
boundaries very much intact)? How does the form of subjectivity you are referring to take account
of and assume the redundancy of the human’s boundaries with the nonhuman?

(Perhaps related to this is the desire for ArtScience to ‘find its own “genius” - that what sets it apart
from other worthwhile human endeavours’. The way this is phrased seems to suggest it is definitely
a human, and not a collective HumanNonhuman, endeavour - albeit the humans in question should
be amateurs rather than institutionalized, bureaucratic professionals.) 2) the singular human - and
to my mind all too frequently male and ontology-building - personality such as Bruno Latour or
Siegfried Zielinski. As far as your notion of the ‘singular personality’ is concerned, is it the concept
of the ‘singular’ that is doing most of the heavy lifting here, in that singularities can be understood
as being different from (sovereign, unified, self-identical) individuals? 3) the nonhuman ‘(animal
and plant life, minerals, gasses, water, air, and technological infrastructures)' as being precisely
different from the human - rather than, say, ‘Nature’ being irreducibly interconnected and
intertwined with ‘Man’ in a manner that places both sides of this relation in question. If we want to
be consistent with the idea that the human/nature distinction is redundant, do we not need to make
an argument that develops more along the lines of, say, each being born out of its relation to the
other: of nature and the ‘nonhuman’ (including most obviously minerals, gasses, water and air)
already being IN the human? Wouldn’t this bring us closer to being beyond human and nonhuman
in science and art, in the sense of your reference to Nietzsche’s beyond good and evil? Moreover,
if we wanted to be generous, couldn't we say that it is just such a reworking of the distinction
between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ that Symbiotica are engaged in?

Cheers, Gary

Dear Gary,
Thank you for your highly articulate and critical questions, which deserve a far more thorough
answer than I can provide here with limited time available. Still I want to respond in brief to some
of the issues / problems you raised.

On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall <mail@garyhall.info> wrote:

The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its undermining of the human’s
‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work
in Prince of Networks. Here Latour is portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented
philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human subject’ in his thought. We
cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject and
object. Every entity is something in its own right…. This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus,
blue whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total democracy of
objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from
Latour’s The Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in
the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry you were
not there... Things in themselves lack nothing.’

Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with humanism, the
consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. After all, the zebras don’t care
whether Latour writes about them or not. In themselves they lack nothing - including books by
Bruno Latour presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, containing as
they do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are attributed to him as unique,
individual, named, human author or personality, to the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman
actors, and published (in the case of Facing Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all rights
reserved’ basis with a for-profit press?

Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s publishing politics, quite obviously
part of the global reputation machine. Nor do I have to or feel the need to defend him on this point,
and for that matter also have my own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside from
the issue of collusion with copyright / for profit publishing - in the past I have attempted to reach a
subtle, balanced, reasonable public position on copyright by uttering the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck
it!”).

I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not (yet) overly familiar with your work, and
I think on your website the last part of the biography does a good job at summarising what is
obviously a thoroughly developed position. I’m thinking here particularly of the section
Reinventing the Humanities and Posthumanities” Let me quote you from there:

"To decenter the human according to an understanding of subjectivity that perceives the latter as
produced by complex meshworks of other humans, nonhumans, non-objects and non-
anthropomorphic elements and energies (some of which may be beyond our knowledge), requires
us to act differently as theorists from the way in which the majority of those associated with the
posthuman, the nonhuman and the Anthropocene, act. We need to displace the humanist concepts
that underpin our ideas of the author, the book and copyright, together with their
accompanying practices of reading, writing, analysis and critique.”
http://www.garyhall.info (biography - bottom of the page)

So, in this view then we cannot continue copyrighted publishing practices exactly because they
reinstate a human subjectivity that is detached from the material and immaterial networks that we
are all immersed in and composed of. And this in turn implies that if we want to reach a non-
anthorpocentric understanding of ‘ecology’ (and work with that practically) then we need to
renounce such confining and detaching practices and instead really embrace the notion of 'the
collective’ (in Latours' terms the collective of humans and nonhumans), which collapses not so
much the boundaries between man and nature as between ‘society’ and nature.

By and large I think I agree with you on that. However, I still find this idea of Latour to start
thinking in terms of ‘the collective’ a very useful one to get rid of the redundant dichotomy of
society and nature, and start thinking about larger interconnected networks that produce what we
used to call ‘the social’. This is a set of ideas introduced in his Politics of Nature, back in 2004, as a
response to the stagnation of ecological (‘green’) politics.

My feeling is that Latour takes a very pragmatic position when it comes to his engagement with
politics (one might argue overly pragmatic - he would call it ‘realist'), in that he tacitly accepts that
politics is still seen as made by humans, and mostly in the interest of humans. Rather than dreaming
about replacing the whole system of human (-centric) politics, he is considering ways in which the
nonhuman can be brought into politics - where one suggestion for instance is that humans should
become spokespersons for nonhumans who cannot speak for themselves in the arena of human
politics. His aim here is to start engaging democratic politics in the ‘progressive composition of the
good common world’ (of humans and nonhumans) - and his ultimate aim is to 'preserve the
plurality of external relations'.

I could see this as a potentially fruitful strategy for opening up the current frame of human-centric
politics, so this is where his thinking for me seems productive.

Similarly, you write, on the one hand, that what is 'most important about the conception of the
Anthropocene is that it makes the distinction between "Man" and "Nature" redundant.' Yet on the
other, is there a risk of the differentiation between the human and nature being reemployed in your
position paper? I’m thinking of the emphasis you place on:

1) the kind of human subjectivity we associate with the arts and with intuition, as well the
importance that is placed on a subjective stance. Of course an emphasis on subjectivity doesn’t
necessarily have to mean a reinforcement of the human/nature distinction. So I was wondering,
could you perhaps say something about how the particular form of subjectivity you have in mind
differs from the traditional humanist subjective stance that is associated with the liberal arts and
sciences (and which endeavours to keep those boundaries very much intact)? How does the form of
subjectivity you are referring to take account of and assume the redundancy of the human’s
boundaries with the nonhuman?

This question I have already answered a few years ago in the conclusion of the Legacies of Tactical
Media network notebook (published in 2011/12 under anti-copyright) - page 52:

"In the era of online commodification of the social and the willing participation of a mass of
affective-labour-slaves the question is justified how to undo these organised forms of innocence?

Simply leaving the network behind hardly seems an attractive or sensible approach. (…)

A more effective strategy might be to abandon innocence itself. Embrace your shattered self.
Indulge in a lovers’ impurity. Enjoy your co-option, relish your commodification. Play the game of
simultaneous singularisation and heterogenesis. Infect the network. Submit knowingly to your
perverse subjectivity in order to escape the perversion of subjectivity."

So I am arguing for a perverse subjectivity, one that is entirely cognisant of its own constructed /
decentred / fragmented composition, consisting in part of utterly incommensurable flows and
processes - to be fully aware of all this and still relish the cult of the subjective to create a locus
from where to act rather than not to act at all.

In my understanding such a perverse subjectivity would already assume that the boundaries
between the human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily, or that they are largely meaningless, etc..
But still cherishing it as a priced possession.

(Perhaps related to this is the desire for ArtScience to ‘find its own “genius” - that what sets it apart
from other worthwhile human endeavours’. The way this is phrased seems to suggest it is definitely
a human, and not a collective HumanNonhuman, endeavour - albeit the humans in question should
be amateurs rather than institutionalized, bureaucratic professionals.)

My point was more that this insistence on the subjective can help to bridge a certain experiential
gap where (collectively) we know what is going wrong on a planetary scale and yet cannot translate
that into something that is meaningful on a personal level and can spur us into action. The practices
formerly know as art can still be helpful here in finding ways to bridge this experiential gap but
they need some form of subjectivity as a base from which to act, albeit a dramatically transformed
(perverted) one compared to the classical notions of subjectivity you are drumming up here.

2) the singular human - and to my mind all too frequently male and ontology-building - personality
such as Bruno Latour or Siegfried Zielinski. As far as your notion of the ‘singular personality’ is
concerned, is it the concept of the ‘singular’ that is doing most of the heavy lifting here, in
that singularities can be understood as being different from (sovereign, unified, self-
identical) individuals?

My hopelessly basic answer to this question would be that you can have a very large number of
individuals that have no discernible singularity when it comes to their thinking and behaviour
patterns - I don’t want to be arrogant, it’s fine to be quotidian, unremarkable, unspectacular and so
on. Yet there are these moment of singularity when something remarkable and altering comes into
being, though these are usually the result of a conjunction of a wide range of processes and flows
that are much larger than the individual they might be attributed to later on - so the singular
personality is a marker, a sign post if you will of such moments of coming into being and
transformation (in science, art, engineering, technology, culture) - just to be clear such moments
also occur in physical non-human systems of course, but the sentence you referenced was in the
context of a discussion of technological transformation.

3) the nonhuman ‘(animal and plant life, minerals, gasses, water, air, and technological
infrastructures)' as being precisely different from the human - rather than, say, ‘Nature’ being
irreducibly interconnected and intertwined with ‘Man’ in a manner that places both sides of this
relation in question. If we want to be consistent with the idea that the human/nature distinction is
redundant, do we not need to make an argument that develops more along the lines of, say, each
being born out of its relation to the other: of nature and the ‘nonhuman’ (including most obviously
minerals, gasses, water and air) already being IN the human? Wouldn’t this bring us closer to
being beyond human and nonhuman in science and art, in the sense of your reference to Nietzsche’s
beyond good and evil?

Yes, I think that I agree with this - that is also very much in line with what you have been arguing
on your biography page discussed earlier.

Moreover, if we wanted to be generous, couldn't we say that it is just such a reworking of the
distinction between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ that Symbiotica are engaged in?

Yes, if the objective is to reach a deeper understanding of how each (‘human' / ‘nature’) is being
born out of its relation to the other ( ’nature’ / ‘human’) then this would be a possibility. However,
the explicit aim within this is to turn this insight into a personally meaningful experience, so within
that a different type of aesthetic sensibility must also be mobilised (the primary function of art in
this constellation), and then from this personal appreciation this experience must be made
actionable on a collective level - and with that we are again in the realm of politics.

Hence we need three different modalities of operating to get anywhere in view of the disastrous
ecological situation we are facing. This is not a ‘merely academic’ matter, much more a ‘matter of
real concern’.

———

Thanks again for these tough questions that I have haphazardly tried to provide an answer to here...
:)

all bests,
Eric

Dear Eric and all,

Thanks for a really enjoyable discussion so far. Not long ago, I would
skip over most ArtScience related material, because as Florian Cramer
already pointed out, this seems to belong to another era and a
particular lab-oriented approach that isn't up to scratch to the
challenges of today. But in the past year or so, I had been wondering
why Art & Science seems to be making a comeback and Eric's article is a
timely response to this. The reason why I am under the impression that
this "field" is surging back is simple - I surprisingly found that this
year, all my transmediale related invitations to participate in a panel
or give a talk were under an ArtScience umbrella. This is rather unusual
for a festival that isn't overtly concerned with Art & Science and its
relation to the legacy of Leonardo and artists that work within the
natural or so called hard sciences. What I ended up doing at these talks
was arguing for transversal approaches, across and beyond disciplines
(much like Eric is advocating), the recognition of the value of the arts
beyond advancing knowledge in linear ways (art does not have to be good,
innovative) while still interacting with all sectors of society and the
importance of including humanities based approaches into ArtScience. The
latter point was made by Eric too and reiterated in the discussion with
Gary Hall - and I can't stress how important this is as there seems to
be a tremendous lack of critical theoretical discussions in many of
these artscience gatherings. At the same time though, there is a doer's
mentality in ArtScience which is refreshing in our current times, not to
say that it is reactionary but rather that there is a positive outlook
on hybridity and the possibility of making ArtScience out of that. This
became evident to me at a meeting in Grenoble under the title "Future
Collaborations between Art & Sciences and their Role for Europe" which
seemed untypical as the participants were a mix of "softer" cultural
institutions like transmediale and Schloss Solitude, EU politicians,
science labs and big corporations. It was uneasy for sure, but there was
a feeling of uncertainty of how to move this field further that could be
productive. At least, it is important to intervene in this field as Eric
suggests, since a lot of policy making and financial resources are being
invested in it, an aspect which has not so much been brought up here
yet. Just take the Horizon 2020 programmes which has set a new agenda
for collaboration between art, technology and science on a European
level and which dictates a very technology-centred view with clear
quantifiable results. A few interesting projects have been able to slip
through and we need to see much more tactical action and long-term
strategies to influence this growing field. As Eric's post was initially
coming from an institutional context, maybe there are other voices on
the list who can share experiences from working "within" projects in
this field and reflect on how it might be transforming?

best,
Kristoffer

Dear Eric,

Thanks for this.

I like the idea of singular nonhuman personalities and systems producing moments of when
something transformative comes into being. And that of using a perverse subjectivity to escape the
perversion of subjectivity.

The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity would not assume that the
boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely
meaningless. Rather, the drawing of such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.

One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal Mouffe's definition of the
political as a decision taken precisely in an arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the
concept of the 'cut' to those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in the work
of Karen Barad.
Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities and Posthumanities etc.
Actually, a nicely packaged version of that material (with pictures and everything) has just been
published in the Techne: Art+Research series as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play. If
you're interested, you can download it for free here:
http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf

Best, Gary

10

Dear Gary,

On 14 Dec 2017, at 17:06, Gary Hall <mail@garyhall.info> wrote:

The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity would not assume that the
boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely
meaningless. Rather, the drawing of such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.
That is a good / important point. So, while these boundaries might in themselves be rather arbitrary,
the act of drawing them and the choice how and where to draw is deeply political.
One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal Mouffe's definition of the
political as a decision taken precisely in an arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the
concept of the 'cut' to those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in the work
of Karen Barad.
Ah, interesting to link back to Mouffe’s work, will re-read some of her work with this in mind!

And yes, the ‘cut’ belongs to this exploration, as well as other figures, such as ‘rupture’, ‘negation’,
‘erasure’ - for someone who comes from the field of the arts such figures feel familiar - the only
thing to be careful about is not to think exclusively in ‘negative’ categories since we are also
looking for more ‘generative’ approaches.

Many thanks for your feedback!

bests,
Eric

11

Dear nettimers,

I'm new to this list, and although I've read this whole thread and although
I know the work of some of those involved in this discussion, please pardon
my ignorance of any previous "background story" that may have happened.

First, due thanks to Eric and everyone involved in what is a greatly

interesting discussion. As an artist and scholar working in an eerie area
folding performing art, sound art, body theory, computation and physiology
into each other, I have been pondering on issues similar to those raised by
Eric for some time.

I use the term "eerie" on purpose, in the sense that Mark Fisher elaborates
so well in his The Weird and the Eerie: Something where there should be
nothing. This is, in my view, a precise definition of the particular form
of art-science inter- cross- trans-disciplinarity - where science, as Eric
cleverly pointed out, is not only natural sciences, but humanities,
philosophy, etc..
At the core of art-science lies its intrinsic impossibility to exist as a
whole, unified and pure practice on its own. Art-science, at its best, is a
bastard set of methodology, which seldom respects conventions and
traditions. It creates something in a phantasmal zone that "should not" be
there in the first place. This is its biggest potential, especially when
coupled with cultural criticism (I prefer cultural criticism to the rather
abused and somewhat now-emptied notion of "politics" in use today).

Crucial art-science works "haunt" us, rather than entertain or dictate us.

Now, contextualising art-science within the Anthropocene is problematic.

First, the effort to situate art-science in what is a markedly
Western-white-male theory about how other Western-white-male people has
brought down hell on Earth risks to, at once, reinforce the grave issues of
that theory and disappear in its muddy puddles of Western guilt. We don't
want that.

Rather, as Florian indicated, it seems more useful to let art-science

overcome a particular geo-cultural-political context so as to acknowledge
its development - what Eric calls "becoming" - throughout human time. From
Pytaghora and Leonardo through feminist and cyberfeminist art, and from
CERN today through what the future will bring us. We need to acknowledge
art-science for what it is, a practice of invention, creation and challenge
that has not developed in a void, but it has actively contributed to shape
human culture, and consequently even the way we talk about it right now.

Why is this important? First, this opens our eyes onto the crucial and
still painfully overlooked role that feminist art and feminist scholar
literature has played in tearing down the separation of human and Nature,
of subject and object, of my body and your body. It struck me how, with the
exception of the reply by Annie (thank you Annie for bringing up the
topic), this thread is populated only by males - and yes, me being another
one of them.

Why is that?

Equally concerning is the almost exclusively White male literature being

referenced so far (again, with the exception of Annie's reply). How can we
talk about closing the distance between human and nature, or discuss
subjectivity and its role in art-science without working through the
feminist literature that contributed so largely to this kind of discourse
exactly because of its own marginalisation at hand of White male scholars?

We can be more humble and ambitious, I believe. In this sense, while I

support the idea of reinvigorating the figure of the "amateur" in the sense
that Eric has fleshed out, I wouldn't want us to reject or elide the
importance of thorough expertise and skills. Especially here, where we
discuss how art-science should be politically inflected.

My point is that if one lacks an in depth knowledge of a scientific or

technological method or phenomenon, it is much harder to develop a strong
criticality towards it. While the "amateur" has the advantage of operating
as an outsider, she or he can only produce and convey a limited critique,
if not a superficial one. And, unfortunately, this is what happens too
often in current art-science projects, as others have noted in this thread.
On the other hand, in depth expertise in a scientific field does not,
obviously, ensure critical skills. If the chief aim is to develop a
critical practice, one needs to gain granular knowledge of all fields one
chooses to engage with.

Superficial critique is anti-critique. It denies itself.

Finally, following the cue by Kristoffer, I wanted to very briefly mention

that here in Berlin - where I am based - together with local independent
art organizations and individual artists, we have formed a formal working
group to lobby our local government towards an official recognition of what
we call "hybrid arts", artistic practices that create zone of contagions
across disciplines, DIY, bioart, digital rights, cultural criticism, body
and technology, sound art, noise, etc...

Although the history of the group dates many years back, the current group
is working since a year, and we are now in conversation with politicians
and other similar working groups. Among our goals, there is also the idea
to reunite our community and attempt - perhaps for the first time - to
define our own identity as a movement, a movement which has existed in
Berlin since long time and which is continually developing new forms of
cultural practices that make the city what it is.

wishing you all very well,

--
Marco Donnarumma, Ph.D.

12

just wanted to mention two recent works, which can function as a

comment regarding the disciplinarity, relevance and reach of the
works deriving from the exploitation of the intersections of art and
science.

1) the cigar shaped asteroid which took a strange trajectory recently.

based of radioscopic data illustrated by the graphic artist Martin
Kornmesser, employed by the educational reach out program of the
ESA in munich. similar to the recent discovery of exoplanets, hard
science relies on artist's imagination to promote their findings and
"visualize" data. of course these artists are not at all having any
rating in the world of fine arts or media arts, and rather range as
organic intellectuals or applied artisans, with nevertheless far
reaching impact on public imagination.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42329244

2) on the disappearence of the bees. outside of the professionalism

of art, science and activism, Martin Sorg, a part time biologist,
linux freak and eco-hippie samples data about the number of insects
in a little town in germany from 1989 to 2013 and comes up with
a break through study on rapid ecological decline triggering
an avalanche of debate. "Ermittlung der Biomassen flugaktiver
Insekten im Naturschutzgebiet Orbroicher Bruch mit Malaise Fallen..
http://80.153.81.79/~publ/mitt-evk-2013-1.pdf

both fields of science, insects and space, can and have been
exploited by artists, setting up pointers into this areas of
research practise, reframing it with a re-enactments, baroque and/or
shiny visualisations, romantic overinterpretations, or imaginary
politics, making them prone to various kinds of narcissistic
self-identifications, enhancing the narrative material with elaborate
quotes by the theoreticians of choice with temporarily high rankings
in the art charts, transfered into the ethnographic collections
of the ruling discourse networks, imported, exotified, mystified,
valorized, and exploited by a financialized logic of signification
but nevertheless presented as autonomous, original and critical,
biting the hand that it feeds. while these two mentioned works, mostly
distribute themselves in unattributed "viral" ways, they nevertheless
can be regarded as some kind of art, while they dont have to be named
as such to still function well enough, still proving a far reaching
impact on public discourse and future inscription into history,
including a needed "change of consciousness".

but remember, these areas of field research are not unoccupied

by "creative" labour, people without a name in the art world, do
their work there having their type of creative output. they do
not necessarily wait for artists discovering their treasures and
reporting to a general audience, they do might not want to be treated
as unintelligible material for studies, reconfigurable by the
interpretations of social constructivists.

science institutions as well as companies have already employed

graphic designers, marketing experts, and even anthropologists, to
mediate their work to various audiences. some of them reach out to
media arts and fine arts to enhance their portofolios of public
relation, recognizing a responsibility and philanthropic angle to
their put products into a different light.

we could be much more aware of the porous lines of the institutional

outside, opening up to rich fields of cultural production outside of
the inner circles, appreciate and respect the countless works of the
anonymous art collectives outside and below our little circles, and be
aware of their potential historic relevance compared to inscriptions
of a highly fetishized but probably mostly irrelevant production of
the cultural establishments, as lessons in modesty.

rogue science, hackery, mad science, amateur tinkering, militant

and non-militant activism, might be performed by artists under the
strict rule that nobody gets hurt, that everything is just a test,
a simulacra, an offer for communicating opinions, a mere symbolic
act or signification, while the area of hard science of "measured
facts" gets symbolically subjugated in a imaginary hegemony of
cultural/intellectual supremacy, ultimately serving the system it
claims to question. finding methods and loopholes to resist and escape
this logic can be a the a science in itself, hard to teach and learn,
and difficult to find, but nevertheless truly possible.

13

Just a few random comments related to the discussion Eric has initiated.

Between 1997 and 2007, Critical Art Ensemble did quite a few art/science/politics projects. When
speaking about those projects we would say, “it looks like science, but its not.” If someone wanted
to engage us as scientists, we would, but that didn’t make it science. We were not using the
scientific method to produce information to be reviewed and replicated by our scientific peers.
Rather we were appropriating the vision engines of science that we needed to make a political point.
We needed them to lead our viewers/ participants to places where they could see and understand
their stake in how a scientific or a technological development would manifest itself in the world. To
understand what kind of policies were being made around these developments, and to understand if
they were in their interest. We were trying to create informed (amateur) interventionists regarding
key issues that would impact society and/or the planet.

One of the reasons we stopped doing these projects was due to the fact that our experience of the
ArtSci world was that it was not progressive. In fact, our experience was that most were unknowing
agents for the neoliberals. Aestheticizing the domination of nature, acting as lab public relations
agents, and worst of all making science look mysterious and cultish. “Only a genius like myself can
understand the mysteries of art and science.” And people believed it. The contempt we had for that
attitude is difficult to describe. The alienation that they would create was unforgivable. We would
tell people that scientific work is not that difficult to understand in a general sense, and that lab
work is little more than following a cake recipe. Not wanting to be affiliated with so much of the
work that was being generated was why we stopped, and returned to doing art and politics without
the sci. Perhaps it’s better 10 years later. Someone please show me that my opinion is an artifact of
the past.

And while I am on ethical bankruptcy, I do think it’s important to address educational institutions,
because they are bureaucracies that endure even when there is regime change. Science, Technology,
Engineering, Math (STEM) culture as it now exists in the US at tech universities is the worst, and
it’s what many state universities now aspire to so they can promise jobs to the debt slaves formerly
known as students. (The Ivy League schools will remain universities proper, so the wealthy may do
as they will.) In STEM culture, students are absolved of all criticality. It’s all problem-solving
education. Just solve the technical problem, it’s someone else’s job to make the policy. If something
horrible happens in society or the environment, it’s not your problem—it’s the policy-makers
problem. And just to make sure you won’t accidently stumble into a place where you might have a
critical thought, the arts and humanities will be purged from the campus. Welcome to Cal Tech
(often ranked as America’s top university). We do need to do something on college campuses
before art is reduced to drawing and art appreciation and English is reduced to technical writing
courses. The purge is on.

“Amateur” is another term that needs to be called attention to again. In the US the term is in crisis.
Right now it means that any know-nothing with an opinion (amateur) should be considered equal to
or better than experts, specialists, and those who have reviewed a topic with interest and care so that
they may participate in a knowledgeable way in debates on the issue (what an amateur should be).
This is part of the reason the US currently has a political system packed with total incompetents. In
a moment of total double-think, particularly among populists, ignorance equals intelligence and
capability.

I am unsure whether ArtSci should be a discipline unto itself. I’m cautious. It makes me think back
to the 80s when all the radical break-away English and Philosophy professors started semiotics
departments. Don’t see many of those any more.

14

This is a great discussion! CAE just wrote this:

One of the reasons we stopped doing these projects was due to the fact that our experience of the
ArtSci world was that it was not progressive. In fact, our experience was that most were unknowing
agents for the neoliberals. Aestheticizing the domination of nature, acting as lab public relations
agents, and worst of all making science look mysterious and cultish.

I totally agree with this and for a long time my interest in the crossroads of Art and Science was
basically limited to - CAE. When asked to admire the wonders of Symbiotica, or dozens of other
such endeavors you might find at Ars Electronica, I looked and declined. The conflation of values
like "research" and "invention" with simulacra like "innovation" and "excellence" was obvious. It
was a tech boom, right? Science laid the golden eggs. Neoliberals handled all the lingo. Profit and
power were the keywords. And what was art supposed to do?

Mystification is not for me. Concerning science, I did the historical-materialist critique of what
Armin Medosch and I called "technopolitics."

Then this thing called Earth System Science came onto my horizon. It emerged right out of NASA,
with some major help from geology and chemistry and statistical modeling. But the significance of
it lies in ecology. The point was to understand biogeochemical cycles: the intricate dynamic union
of organic and inorganic elements in the all-encompassing metabolic process that is the biosphere.
This metabolic process extends about ten miles up into the atmosphere, and it goes all the way
down into the earth's mantle, where petrified organic compounds from the crust are gasified in
contact with molten material and vented back up into the soil and the atmosphere. The system of
biogeochemical cycles is crucially affected by one extra-systemic input: solar energy, transformed
by photosynthesis. And now, this remarkably stable homeostatic system is being decisively
transformed by one *intra*systemic component: we humans, the Prometheans, who love to burn
things. That's what we're literally doing, burning, releasing smoke, accelerating Earth's metabolism
to totally unknown degreees.

For the first time I could see something beautiful and urgent in science.
I gotta confess, I've been immoderately influenced by the programming of Bernd Scherer and the
rest of the Anthropocene Curriculum crew at HKW in Berlin. Recently the group Deep Time
Chicago which I co-founded hosted some of them in Chicago. Bernd said something tremendously
interesting which answered a question I had about the changing thematic focus of the institution,
which in the mid-2000s had been closely associated with postcolonial critique. For Scherer, Earth
System Science and the discourse of the Anthropocene represents an *internal critique* of Western
hegemony - a way to pursue and drive home the postcolonial critique. That's an astonishing
conclusion. I love TJ Demos, whose book Against the Anthropocene was cited here, and I urge him
to think a little more about this idea.

Like Eric, and to Steve's bemusement, I'm influenced by Bruno Latour. The best way to say why is
to recall a scene from an interview made perhaps two years ago for the French Ministry of the
Environment, which pictures Latour sitting on an indoor chair outside his country home saying
something like: "At least the war has finally begun. It was terrible, for so long, the Phony War (*la
Drole de Guerre*). But now it's good. The war has started." So what in the hell does he mean by
that one?

Earth System Science is the kind of truth that forces you to take sides. Or rather, its rejection forces
you to take sides. If Earth System Science makes you see the current form of technoscientific
development as a kind of planetary suicide - inevitably preceded by a cortege of horrors - then you
must seek allies among those who oppose that suicide. This is a political truth, at least for the
people who see it that way. Latour's belief is that scientists are slowly but increasingly recognizing
that they have to choose sides in this war.

I am no scientist. I come from another people. In Chicago, which like everywhere in the US is anti-
intellectual, they prefer to call me an artist. I did not wait for Earth System Science in order to
develop a critique of capitalist technology, and indeed, there are many pathways leading to that
critique (Marxism, decolonialism, certain varieties of religious belief, surely many other things).
Yet science makes me realize how ineluctable the current process of eco-suicide really is. When
you are faced with imminent murder, as in a war, you seek allies - the more powerful the better. Not
phony, self-interested relations of commercial convenience like Steve has described, which is most
of what you'd find on any random walk. But the rare thing, real allies, which are not born but made.

Eric, what a thought-provoking discussion. You want to locate the Art-Science relation, because
you see it as crucial to the present. What I'm saying is you'll never find it in the mystique of
creativity and fundamental research. You'll find it in the sequence perception-belief-action, or
science-art-politics. You're totally right that it's hard to get across. But what if nothing else will do?

The most difficult question is how to change oneself in order to make allies.

15

Brian wrote
>
> Like Eric, and to Steve's bemusement, I'm influenced by Bruno Latour. The best way to say why
is to recall a scene from an interview made perhaps two years ago for the French Ministry of the
Environment, which pictures Latour sitting on an indoor chair outside his country home saying
something like: "At least the war has finally begun. It was terrible, for so long, the Phony War (*la
Drole de Guerre*). But now it's good. The war has started." So what in the hell does he mean by
that one?
>
>

I have found Latour’s suggestion in "Pandora’s Hope” very helpful of substituting the
concept of science with research . He argues that this would have the effect of
rendering practices we call science less cold, less aloof and distant; less likely to
act as if it were disconnected from the collective.

This shift he asserts would result in something more uncertain and open ended;
an alternative to the "purifying practices of modernity”. Something similar was introduced into
art by Feminists artists of the 70s who were among the earliest to critique the purifying practices
of modernity in art (sometimes called formalism). This turn generated new hybridities that have
been
further productively complicated by the emergence of the category of the artist/researcher.

Perhapse the dynamic nature of these hybridities (reflecting Eric’s important distinction between
intersectionality and interdsicciplinarity).

While we are on the subject of Latour..

here is a terrific review of, Facing Gaia: 8 Lectures on the new climate regime..

http://www.publicbooks.org/we-have-never-known-mother-earth/

16

Thanks Brian for introducing Earth Systems ideas, they go a long way towards an understanding of
the connectedness across the wide scale of the entire planet from an approach that is understandable
to a literate Westerner. There is a lot of new, creative, and very pertinent science happening within
that sphere, related to stories of deep-time pasts and futures, in which we are scaled more to the
global glitch that we are, despite our propagation of globe-girdling effects. James G. Miller's work
dove-tails with this and may be of interest to you. As well, for example, Franesco Gonella's piece
"Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change" http://prosperouswaydown.com/gonella-
systems-climate/ might be of interest. (I append a short selected bibliography of some other
sources)

Latour suggests that 'things' be related by negotiation. I believe that his presumptive objectification
of nature ('that-which-we-perceive') as a set of 'things' continues the travesty of Cartesian
disconnect that brought us to where we are in the moment.

The essence of the 'connectivity' between *everything* is not a language-based negotiation. It

pertains more to the energized relation and an awareness (almost a dis-awareness!) of those flows.
Definitely pre-verbal to our English descriptive system.

Any 'solutions' that are based in the model of 'relations of things' (species, environments,
ecosystems, regimes) and so imagined by/through their thing-ness (which includes most scientific
processes) are bound to fail, as we so-far witness. Not only that, but the solutions are too often
framed even by eco-conscious folks as a catastrophe to *us-things*. Perhaps if science proceeded
on the assumption that all is connected, then created hypotheses to disprove that assumption...

Unfortunately our language restricts the essence of the discussion to thing-ness -- it permeates all
discourse (including the John Tresch article about Latour). Using terms like 'assembled body',
'assemblage', 'agent', even, 'apocalyptic', keeps us mired in the self-limiting and impotent thing-ness
of our realities, our histories, and our futures. Even Latour's ANT which suggested the possibility of
fluid connection between the actors, remained mired in the defined material-ness of those objects,
and did not, imho, delve into the (energized) flow that both makes them up and permeates, *is* the
interstitial dynamic.

Where is change? It is deeply internal. If it is not rooted there, it will not propagate to wider
systems. I agree, Brian, *that* is the most diffucult issue.

The suggestion in the article of a return to an understanding by "granting epistemic weight to the
natures of indigenous collectives" need be driven by adopting their language for circumscribing
reality. Other models of reality may be adopted or at least studied, as they may provide mental tools
and the mental re-wiring necessary to let go of the materiality that makes capitalism and our
'indigenous' world-view such a (stupidly) compelling model -- one that most people take for reality
itself. Of course this poses the crucial question of how people approach reality -- most, it seems,
simply adopt what the dominant social order provides ('it's always been that way'). What is first
necessary is the development of a creative milieu that points out explicitly that the social order is
constructed on models, and the models are *not* the phenomena of reality itself. Fluid and pre/non-
disciplinary creative learning situations are what need to undergird any art/acience/politics question.
One's own awareness of reality may then possibly be developed in such a way that the
connectedness is forgrounded. If your program in NL is doing that, Eric, good on ya'!

anyway.

JH

17

A suggestion : Start thinking in a completely different ways. Use diffractive reading, writing and
researching to find new approaches.
We need it.

Some sources :
Three Minute Theory: What is Intra-Action? An introduction to Karen Barad's concept of "intra-
action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0SnstJoEec
Iris van der Tuin, Reading Diffractive Reading: Where and When Does Diffraction Happen?
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0019.205?view=text;rgn=main
A "concreet example" Down the methodological rabbit hole : thinking diffractively with resistant
data. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3184&context=sspapers

Best
Annie Abrahams