Science, Art & Society 2

00:00:00 Oh as you know this is our last roundtable event now we are going to do a sort of group wide wrap up after this roundtable so don't feel like this is the last chance to ask a question or voice an opinion etc so the last panel is another science art in society panel our first panel on this topic we talked about how to overcome elitism in the Arts and Sciences and better connect with the people you know the people are who and you know look at art and engage

00:00:32 with science and it's important that we repair this kind of broken relationship between science and art science and society and art and society we also talked about literacy or lack thereof in for the arts and for the sciences and so you know there might be some panelists who want to continue that conversation because I don't think we quite finished it and we also talked about you know how to maintain the integrity of art and science while trying to connect with people who might have different ideas about what we should be studying or what

00:01:03 we should be making work about so anyways um I am I'm gonna plant a seed question as soon as I sit down but I will let Zack introduce our roundtable panelists if each panelist could raise their hand as I announce the name Suzanne anchor Suzanne is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences she works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and

00:01:34 installations to art to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the zkm kolleru Germany Walker Art Center the Smithsonian Institute the Phillips Collection ps1 Museum and the Jaypee Getty Museum to name a few Daniel Hill Daniel is an abstract painter and sound

00:02:06 artist whose work has been included in numerous exhibitions exploring the relationship between paintings in science collections that hold Hills paintings include United States embassies Microsoft Corporation and the Bank of America he is currently an adjunct associate professor of art at Pace University in Manhattan Emilia Amon Emilia is a solar designer with an aesthetic approach to integrating sustainable energy into the built

00:02:38 environment her design company develops products and installations including a solar awning with architects solar signage for wayfinding and dark sky compliant solar LED lights for solar one solutions and many many more interesting projects amelia is a member of the collective for community culture and the environment CCC II has served as chairman of the board of directors of the Northeast sustainable energy Association and is co-founder of the New

00:03:13 York Chapter of o2 international network for environmentally concerned designers [Music] Paul Brodie Paul is a psychiatrist and in an encounter couple centered couples guide and a storyteller he co-founded narrative Inc a company that transforms individuals teams and organizations through the universal art of storytelling he has led and participated in several projects with the Open Society Foundations teaching

00:03:46 storytelling as an advocacy tool to doctors and grantees from marginalized communities in Africa and Eastern Europe he has taught in the narrative medicine master's program at Columbia University for the past seven years Nancy Prince and thaw Nancy is a brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin her life and art received the 2016 pen America Award for biography a former senior editor of art in America she is also contributed to art forum the

00:04:20 Village Voice and New York the New York Times she has taught at the Center for curatorial studies Bard College Princeton University and Yale University and is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts Farzad mahute Ian Farzad is a clinical associate professor at NYU's College of Arts and Sciences Faculty of Liberal Studies his interdisciplinary work focuses on the interactions of metaphor myth and

00:04:52 science in the context of scientific theory practice in history recent publications include metaphor in chemistry Union Laboratory ethnographies and what white had an intuition implication for science and civilization with that I think Julie is gonna start us out with a question okay thank yous ACK um so over the last couple of days we've been talking about a lot of things and I I'm gonna mix some of our subject matters here so I want to start by

00:05:26 asking you all since I think it'll all have a kind of informed opinion about this from one aspect or another how can science art collaboration help repair the relationship the relationships that we're talking about between art science and society so feel free to approach this question as you will but with a focus on art and science working together to do this

00:05:59 as I woke up this morning cleaning how strange it was to be going to have a conversation fairly personal conversation because that's how it feels to me with people I didn't know and so for me I find myself in the last couple of days really not knowing whether I belong here like not sure why I'm here and whether I belong I don't know if I'm a scientist and I don't know if I'm really an artist I don't [Music]

00:06:30 I thought well maybe that's exactly why I belong because if we can if I can find a way of feeling that I belong then we've done our job and so for me it's really about how we listen to one another so most of the work that I'm involved in is is looking at the space that exists between people and what occupies that space and what shapes the space and how we can and clutter the

00:07:00 space so we look at art and science the question is what is the space is there a space between them and what can we do to take out whatever obstacles there are for them to coexist so I I realize people ask me what do you do what's what kind of psychiatrist are you what what's your specialty and I have a really hard time answering because I I grew up in South Africa

00:07:31 knowing that I wanted to be an actor and so I went to medical school and finished medical school and when a year out of medical school gave that up and went to drama school in England and became an actor and my life has been this endless back and forth between am I an artist am i a guest scientist because I am a psychiatrist nothing one of the the big struggles of psychiatry has been that it it once so badly to be a science and I don't believe that it is I mean

00:08:07 there are aspects to psychiatry which are science you know psychopharmacology but even that is not a science how you interact with the person so shapes whether the medications are going to work so I just I I start with that and I say that I would I would love is if this conversation rather than I was talking about how we could create generative conversations out there if we could create one right now right here that would be great that there are a number

00:08:45 of threads here we can pick up on about the antagonisms really between art and science scientists like to think that if they are sort of engaged in art practice it makes their science more humanistic and for artists if they are engaged in scientific ideas it makes their intuitive kind of gestures more palpable

00:09:20 to a general audience but I don't think we're going to solve this problem here this is an ongoing problem and it's a problem that may even go back to epistemological issues about knowledge and its production and its measurement and you know in science there's consensus there's consensus based mathematical kind of rules they may be bogus but there is a methodology there

00:09:56 is a scientific method there is no method in art okay every method is an individual method it's more or less a dialogue with our history and speaking to the dead so so I think the bigger arches here not that they can't overlap somewhat and they do but trying to put them one on top of another is not in our

00:10:30 interest I mean some people have talked about a third culture and I think that's another bad idea also three people on top of each other generally better than two sometimes Spencer they are generating conversation contradictions always a good place so as you contradicted Paul I'm going to contradict part of what you said I didn't read the scientific method thing

00:11:03 part of yesterday is a couple of the panels some of the scientists said their scientific method there is no such thing I think one of them said it's crap that was the olfactory scientist but anyway whether it's crap or it's not there or it's looser than it is and I think you could probably find a few scientists that means confusing artists with scientists a few artists who would say that there's a lot of method and and what they do even if they change that method when they get to the next piece having said all that I'm going to contradict myself on top of that and well that's okay I mean it's science you

00:11:38 aim towards repeatability in art if you repeat yourself if someone repeats yourself then they're either a plagiarist or an appropriation Asst the the consensus in art is not based on repeatability is there consensus in art yes of course I'm gonna have to jump in there and say yeah I had never seen it

00:12:10 like I I feel pretty strongly like an imposter in this crowd and what I was hearing my short bio read I thought so what you know what's the skin I have in the game here I've been writing about art for about 30 years a part that I usually don't put in my biography is that I've been married to neuroscience for those thirty years yeah I've been following very closely the relationship between the arts and the sciences and which has gotten a lot

00:12:41 better you know thirty years ago there was very open hostility so I think one question that hasn't really been addressed that I'd like to introduce at some point is why you know what historically culturally socially has led us to this point of greater intersection than we had thirty years ago when post modernists were saying scientists were the enemy they were searching for absolute truths only post modernists understood that no such thing was attainable at the same time so I'm gonna go with like the spirit of contradiction

00:13:14 including self-contradiction I really firmly believe that what is most fruitful about the sciences and the arts talking to each other is understanding how important the boundaries between them are this came up yesterday I think Stuart Feinstein brought it up boundaries are crucial I think in our current political climate and we really have reason to understand how ethically important this search for facts are for alternate facts I'm sorry for facts that

00:13:50 are not alternate that are not you know somebody's hope where somebody's you know political ambition and so I think on on that on that level where artists and scientists are aimed is fundamentally different I think artists are disruptors a couple of times over the course of this weekend artists have been enlisted in the role of clarifying you know of making science

00:14:22 understandable to everyone which brings us to the issue of populism which has also gotten a very complicated political unit and you know in the past year and I think that I guess the biggest difference between the or at least that's the way it seemed to me over the past few days between how science and art operate is that art is fundamentally communicative it's fundamentally about

00:14:56 reaching from inside out and scientists aren't that's not a first order of business scientists are you know interest in figuring things out and so this is I there this idea has arisen that artists can then be kind of brought in to you know take the figuring out and explain it but the most interesting art I know that reflects ideas from science uses them in a kind of poaching way you sort of you know kind of go into somebody

00:15:29 else's territory you take what you need you're not explaining it you know you're communicating something entirely else that can't be reduced to words so I'll stop in the spirit of contradiction I say that one thing I've picked up from this conference is the similarities between art and science that if they're both sort of an investigation of the world as we know it and so so little of what we do in school and then in society is really talk about the real world you

00:16:00 know the physical world we live in and and so both art and science are largely self-directed you know people choose their if not specialties and you know whatever draws them there's a big question that draws them and then explore it you know usually in an iterative way you know so even if an artist isn't doing the scientific method there they're working through things over and over to get to some something that they're trying to say whether it's in or out or so I you know I think from that point of view they're they're sort

00:16:36 of using different tools to get to some sort of reality or some sort of view of the world um that that is more in common than a lot of other things that yeah III think there's some basic epistemological differences and certainly as far as art being a pedagogical tool for science I think it's something it's necessary in the world I think somebody brought up yesterday 48% of the population in the

00:17:06 United States does not believe in evolution and there is there are people out there that believe the earth is flat so you know we need as much science and artists as possible a train of thought that came up with something I think Nancy said for me in in art school I found the conceptual underpinning that I wanted to have from my work did not fit in with a postmodern theory that was

00:17:39 what's going on at the time and I think this is a way that artists can refer to something that is an objective truth modernism you couldn't talk when I was in school I couldn't talk about something being beautiful and and conceptual at the 10 at the same time if it was beautiful it could not also be smart and have conceptual underpinning and the

00:18:09 conceptual art at the time I didn't find visually interesting I find science to be the ultimate conceptual adventure and so I kind of had to quietly secretly build a methodology for making work that science was the the underpinning to what was going on but it enables us now to talk about a truth that is true whether we believe it or not and whether we know it or not and I think that's really an

00:18:39 important thing so I have a question for you guys we're talking about the differences between them and then the similarities let's jump on the similarities a bit or at least the the points of convergence where where there's a functional meaningful relationship and and how do we address some of these some of these kind of societal things that we've been talking about whether it's you know maybe not as specific as how do we make people believe in evolution through an art science partnership but you know this is

00:19:11 this is the meat of what we're talking about here is how can art in science band together to to really do something to to bring us into the future that we envision for ourselves I think that is beyond the scope of essentially our thoughts here because as I said earlier this is an age-old kind of discussion the esteemed art historian Leo Steinberg wrote an article number of years ago

00:19:46 whether art and science should be linked together and he brings up Leonardo of course who is the master icon in this area said although Leonardo's scientific discoveries were very important at their time that even without him they would have been discovered but his works of art had to do with the work of the man itself and I thought that that was some

00:20:20 of the most intelligent conversation about this subject now what wasn't mentioned in my introduction is I'm chair of the fine arts department at the School of Visual Arts and in 2011 I built the first bio art laboratory in a fine arts department in America and we have been on the front page of The Wall Street Journal we've been on community TV etc and the idea here is to use the

00:20:50 tools of science to make art and that and and tools of art also include metaphor they include irony they include cultural critique etc and you're not going to do that in science so I think I think that the question of comfortability between disciplines is about territory and there

00:21:24 are many programs that that invite artists and particularly in Europe to work with scientists and sometimes they're accepted and sometimes they're not when we've reversed it we have now invited scientists to work with artists and it's the same kind of apprehension that these scientists feel about artists it's at what they come into a bio art laboratory they're stunned okay it doesn't look like anything that they're familiar with because it's a cross

00:21:58 between the nineteenth-century sciences such as live animals plants etcetera and the killer biology so it's been it's been a subject now that is brewing and many other educational systems University of Dundee University of Albany Windsor University in Canada etc so this is a kind of growing phenomenon and I think education is perhaps one of the key points of this conversions and I think it's important

00:22:36 to recognize that an essential element of the conversion is always going to be technology and you know it's it's about sharing tools every medium in art is a technology painting as a technology sculptures the technology you know books were a technology that we're cutting edge said that you know at the time that they were introduced and that it's at that level I think you know rather than there's been a lot of talk about transdisciplinarity which I think

00:23:07 Suzanne you and I both are suspicious of maybe whether or not there's this you know third way that actually is fruitful and and constitutes a path forward I think you know to brings the society piece into it Julia which maybe we're all a little bit suspicious of can we do that can we change the world at the same time points to something that I think is more prevalent now than perhaps once was which is all of these things have

00:23:43 ethical dimensions right so it's something that I think scientists are thinking more about I think artists are just assuming as part of the project in a way that maybe wasn't true 40 years ago or 50 years ago yeah especially when you consider we're experiencing exponential growth and technology whether or not we're going to have artificial intelligence in 50 or 100 years is and it's coming and the moral and

00:24:17 ethical implications for that are ambiguous and because of this advances in technology it's also we live in an age where I think the religion is losing its relevance and I think that arts the arts can step up and and be the moral conscience of our species I think it's a duty in fact critique we can build we can build a nuclear weapon we could build artificial

00:24:51 intelligence but should we and if we're gonna build artificial intelligence what what kind you know there's a lot of talk about this I think some people have talked about it that's gonna have a huge implication on society depending on what type of artificial intelligence we make it could be a time of human flowering of humanity or it could be something quite different and how hard is going to fit

00:25:22 into that I think art is in a bit of a state of crisis now and if that's the case now what will it be when a human level artificial intelligence can print out a an artwork that will fool a human being into thinking another human being made it and and beyond that and find it interesting and as well as if 3d printing is getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper we'll be able to

00:25:57 print out exact replicas of great master paintings or even living artists paintings have you huge implications on the gallery system perhaps galleries wouldn't be necessary in a situation like that you could just print out a version of the painting and live with it for a while and if you wanted to buy the real one you could it's sort of what happened with the music industry or a streaming of music art was always different because it

00:26:27 there was a reproducibility problem but this this would be a big change not enough thought is being given but there is there are people who are starting to work on it max tegmark has written a book on it is Nabokov the how to get ready for artificial intelligence when it actually becomes goes to a point where it can in fact function value than we can

00:27:00 which he says will happen very quickly which is why we need to have the conversation now I mean it's been possible to fake paintings and you know do reproductions of things for a long time take you back a moment could I ask if you are so interested in the boundary between art and science why build a bio lab why build a bio lab why paint with acrylics when you had oil x' because it expands the artists palette I think there's that there's so much going on

00:27:36 here I'm just I don't know where to start so I'll just start with okay with science the products of science don't last but those of art class that's a fantastic distinction that is true and good until we get to AI where you can't reproduce it that messes some things up and makes it brings chaos and in an interesting way but but yeah fundamentally the products of science shouldn't last and the irony could there be ironic science the way there is

00:28:11 ironic art that would be interesting to see I think in the long run historically it is ironic because it does contradict itself well there's also junk and there's junk science yeah yeah I mean there's a lot of stuff in a lot of journals is just yeah a way to pad things and that's junk and even if it's true but there are things that what's interesting about science is that the it's self-correcting nature is able to

00:28:42 cast out what it thought was true and beautiful and move on and that's great and and that's to its benefit and we don't have to throw out Leonardo's artwork ever and that's that's a real clear distinction I think it's important and absolutely true so what do we learn from that how do we what do we learn from that is part of the question of the boundary I think there's clear boundary on on that point so taking a scientific point of view on

00:29:16 this when you set up an experiment you have to really make sure the boundary conditions are tight so that you know that results you got hard because of this and if you did all the boundary conditions you get other results from the same sort of experimental setup and that kind of thing is basically improvisation and Andrew Pickering writes about this the mangle of practice it's basically you do have one experiment it's not coming out exactly the results are not exactly what you thought so you can diddle the boundary

00:29:47 conditions or you can diddle your theory but you keep basically messing around with both until you're not breaking the instrument totally but you're modifying and you're stretching it to its limit and you're not totally breaking the theory either you might you don't care you can do that - that sounds exactly like art methodically speaking you're willing to take risks do improvisation you don't exactly where you're going you're pleased with you know whatever might come out if it's useful to you if it's

00:30:17 fun and way there again a lot alike because of how they're playing with how they're playing with boundaries in both cases you have to know what the boundaries are very tightly in the case of science much much more tightly but in the case of art to you you created an effect you kind of want to know how you did that you don't have to go down to the micron but it's it's good to know there's a lot of similarity there in the spirit of the improv and so then that brings me to the social part and this is the part that's

00:30:49 really crazy because the current administration is playing fast and free with facts they are improving the out of the political context international context and how is that different from art and science they've taken the stuff that we teach in colleges about how well its interpretation and you can really alter the boundary conditions all the stuff I just said you can use that to create absolute so what is the difference between being rhetorical and improvisational with your facts and your

00:31:24 method of creating facts and what what seems to be happening now I'll suggest one thing I'm interested in hearing what do you think the difference is they're just doing it for maintaining power and money where it should be territory if you don't do that then you're in an other chair you're doing other stuff and I think that's where the sort of the sublime and transcendent nature with art and science goes to not just keeping more power and money but to

00:31:56 discovery other than that it seems a lot of like it seems well this is I think this is a huge area of concern and complication you know the legacy of prioritizing improvisation and prioritizing flexible thinking and the acceptance of contingency all that stuff you know I think one important or useful distinction is between cynicism and irony you know to know that you're being

00:32:28 deceptive and to go ahead with it anyway is very different than you know being open to a range of interpretations of a data set whether it's in the Art Center alright in the sciences also an aesthetic component what they're doing is so ugly you know I think both science and art are the truth and beauty thing you know that we're trying to look for something deeper and I mean is that is

00:33:00 it a matter of motive so is it matter of what purposes it's being used for and is it is it art is it science you know the one when I hear that there is a distinction epistemologically they're different systems but when it becomes an identity that you start saying I am an artist he is a scientist what what concerns me is then we become we stop being able to really see the other

00:33:30 because we have so many assumptions about what it is to be an artist what it is to be a scientist there are limits our capacity to to be just to be and so you know I'm thinking as we're having this conversation I'm thinking is this conversation a scientific conversation or an artistic side conversation is it either is it neither because if it's an artistic conversation then anything is possible in the conversation that's the way I feel about it that's that occurs

00:34:03 to me it's a scientific conversation what happens for me is that I think there must be there are experts there are experts and I'm not one of them I should leave it to the experts to talk about and I think that's harmful I think that gets in the way of a generative conversation so for Mia contextualizing this as an artistic conversation gives freedom to just to belong to feel like whatever anybody is saying we'll add and build something so I'm interested to

00:34:36 know how you relate to this conversation for yourselves is it artist is it sighs III think I think in relation to that I think we need experts but then there are experts that connect the dots Gregory Bateson talks about the pattern that connects and finding similarities between these experts and connecting in a way that that's interesting we've divided things for so long and we found success with that but there there is value in in

00:35:09 connecting them I think it's interesting I come from a fact I come from two fields one is narrative therapy and the others marriage of medicine and both of them essentially believe that the person who's consulting the doctor or the therapist is the expert they're the expert in their own lives and that does not mean that the practitioner hasn't got a particular scientific or therapeutic expertise that is necessary but it really is a shift in the power

00:35:40 relationship there's um Brian Eno who's known as a musician he also has an interesting idea he's also a great collaborator he has this notion that he calls C Gnaeus where we live in a society that's obsessed with the individual achievements the genius the end we almost have a cult of ego and I think we need to move past that and he talks about you know we may obsess over

00:36:11 Picasso or something like that but we don't really look at the the scene that he came from it's an ecology of ideas conversation about ideas that forms the ground from which a person like that can can emerge and I think we've obsessed so much on the individuals that you know we need to think about the entire ecology I'm just thinking about that just today too that a lot of the examples of Tsai art successes are like these rock stars and

00:36:42 they're great and they just like they just BAM you know and then then there's everybody else and so with reference to society again how many of these geniuses can we spread around a similar conversation in history of science too we pick these heroes and then there's all this other stuff going on legions people doing but we only you know we have a very small handful of names so in reference to society how can we basically what we want to do I think

00:37:15 it sounds like it's we want science to be more widespread and we want art to be more widespread generally that would be good regardless of how although we don't want to turn art into a propaganda tool for science because science keeps changing it'll make monkeys out of artists and scientists to be really good at propaganda isn't today's science that's happened so many times already so instead what do we do if we could harness the power of many ordinary individuals which we are mostly through a generative process so this is the the

00:37:48 idea for a Tsai art project that doesn't involve too many geniuses but involves lots of non genius this could be a disaster chaos is generative too so it would be something like this you you have some large-scale literally I'm talking scale now large scale and space and time thing

00:38:20 that you want to what do you call it it's not an exhibit it's not gonna be in a museum but events or but you want it to last so maybe it's your mural that covers several square miles or something and then the bits of it are gonna be done by individual people and there's things like this before I'm just not I don't know the examples of it but it's through some kind of combinatorial analysis tool you can do this it's not just you gonna make it grid and you guys are gonna respond scible for these things so hold up the blue plaque it's more like The Improv element comes in it's more like okay there's a problem

00:38:54 you all have to solve it here's your boundary you solve your problem in here when I say go and so they're all gonna be solving it's like parallel processing that's what I'm trying to say instead of serial processing in the computer a lot of people solving the same problem at the same time in the same area they don't know exactly what they're going to get when they hook up but it's done by a bunch of small slow processors this is like when you hook up a bunch of little computers 256 of them in a big array you can do a lot of great things that a

00:39:26 supercomputer didn't do or eat a bunch of really low res lenses and you wire them together in an array like a dragonflies eye you get up very high res comparable to so this is getting a bunch of low res people non geniuses something that they understand in their locality and then the product is something that's great even though individually sort of that's happening I mean to go back to Pauls this is a very good question is that said I'm gonna be thinking about that for a while is this a science conversation or an art

00:39:59 conversation I think one of the things that has fostered a better relationship between the Arts and Sciences is the trend in the arts toward collaborative and participatory work I mean that's something that's been on the rise for decades now and I'm thinking in terms of you know this idea of lots of low res people and none of us are gonna identify ourselves you know there is work that's

00:40:29 sort of an axe that I'm thinking of Tino Segal although he's just one artist who's done that kind of participatory work where you you know he had a show at the I'm sure some people here are familiar with his work he he had to show the Guggenheim that was in it it was about having um his collaborators staged conversations with visitors to the museum they were scripted walking to the museum he did this also in galleries and other places around the world and the

00:41:00 conversations that took place were the art and they were scripted in the beginning but then after that it was you know is there in real time real life conversation so that is you know a kind of art work that sits on this boundary as do a lot of you know Moors or conventionally definable collaborations between artisans yeah I sort of like to pick up collaborations in the visual

00:41:38 arts and there are some and there are more now coming I agree with you but artists visual artists are not great collaborate they're not gonna sit there and take instruction about you know from geniuses or non geniuses doesn't happen that way and I I do want to bring this back to society because they don't that's the triangulation that we need to concentrate on rather than the dyadic structure art versus or art and science

00:42:12 etc in 2004 I wrote this book called the molecular gaze art in the genetic Age published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press which is an August scientific institution and it's the first time they produced an art book it's a collaboration with the late Dorothy Milken who was the sociologist of science and unfortunately she died before the book came out but when we

00:42:43 teamed up together and I said to her for every sociological aspect of science you can come up with I will come up with a visual constituent image so there is a certain kind of possibility here of not essentially patronizing scientific companies or whatever but really looking at the data bank in art history of how

00:43:14 people were thinking about some of the things that are prevalent in society now such as genetic engineering now this is very similar to the concept of collage or cut and paste techniques this goes back to 3000 BC so it's it's not a question that this is all new it's not new it has this kind of creeping build up that includes innovation includes accident includes recognition last time

00:43:46 I was here and I was on a panel with you velocity was here and barber Stafford and several others who quite a high res group I must say colossi is the scientist who discovered mirror neurons by accident okay so that is one of the things I think a part of discovery that may join these two forces but it's about

00:44:17 recognition of the accident and being able to extrapolate it I went to the reason I went into design originally was that I was interested in art and interested in science and it seemed to me that design was the combination of the two so therefore the perfect thing but then you have designed sort of somewhat and subservience to commerce you know that you're you're making a living you're you're doing propaganda in some ways and that's why you know when

00:44:50 sort of started thinking about the environment and we have to change our whole energy system what's a new energy system going to look like or how is it you know how is it gonna be better than the hodgepodge we have now so I guess I think there are ways that art and science can impact the future you know whether it's having something to say about AI or our energy systems or yeah where we're going yeah I think that actually looking forward in the future I think design and architecture I really have high possibility of blurring the

00:45:29 line between fine art and science I was we were on a symposium last month called strange attractors and I spoke to some scientists there that felt that neuroscience or neuro aesthetics is there's nothing to it that you know it doesn't have real science behind it yet but with three decades plus of making art under my belt and subjective experience about I think

00:46:05 personally I can say absolutely my thinking and my creative problem-solving skills have been enhanced by both the product that that I have made and the process of making it and when we think about the architecture that we have around us being dictated by profit margins and costs where if we could study further neural aesthetics and find the pattern I think it was in the newest

00:46:39 book by Max tegmark he says you know it's not matter that matters it's the pattern it's the structure that's that gives intelligence and if we can extrapolate from that structure that we can surround ourselves in in our civic design and architecture you know we could build a city and urban design an even interior design that could potentially have a small part in making

00:47:12 us better thinkers and promise own building has been often a joint venture all along yeah yeah if you want to go back to Plato with that - if I just designed the ideal Republic when the citizens will naturally be good that's that's the idea right and if we add science to that and get some really good artists not push the poet's out but bring them back in to work with the scientists then we could make this ideal Republic that not only is designed well

00:47:47 but also produces the only thing that and he was being kind of ironic and metaphorical all that and we should we should take him as that when he pushed the poet's out but I think it points up once really good thing I think Plato does Express very well collaboration is not enough if we get really good at science art collaboration we could still do some really heinous things that look beautiful I mean intelligence by itself is not enough we

00:48:17 can do some horrific things with better intelligence and make it palatable with art so it leaves the moral component that many people brought up the other day about how what are the social values can where social justice how do we how does that work into this picture and there we don't want of all places to be elitist in the sense that well we'll design the design that the size of the room and door and window for you but and will also decide for you what are the

00:48:47 best moral values for you and you because you're all so much alike and all that so that can't be so how do we do it instead it goes back to the ground layer of working listening to each community and letting those values come from them in other words trusting it's chaotic again but trusting in the sub low-res whatever community which already has pride of place as the person who mentioned Appalachian the other day yesterday people have pride of their

00:49:18 they know their place they know their land and they know that community many generations they're in the best position to express something beautiful about it artistically as as well as other values as well as knowing what the problems there are so applying just raw intelligence to what we think are the main problems of some part of West Virginia not the best way to go but the participatory research stuff you mentioned that's that's the way to go

00:49:48 when you do that you can add to that participatory art as well as participatory science as well as participatory social value and social justice so you're listening more and letting it come up and really all you're doing is creating the context is this an art adventure is this a science adventure is this a government eventual no we're just going to set up a context not sure what they call it but then it'll be something the community can define as it goes and redefine and redefine and redefine as it

00:50:18 goes and from that will emerge something better than a top-down design that's done by intelligent people which failed utterly well you do it yourself bio labs internationally in New York it's gen space and biohackers Without Borders that and this sort of theme is an expansion of what computer hacking was

00:50:49 in the in the 90s to now engage in hacking biology and the general public is invited in to take very short courses and whether it's genetic engineering or cloning or painting with bacteria etc and there's a very interesting construct because if you look at the do-it-yourself bio community you will

00:51:21 see it's almost in every country in the world I don't know what the repercussions are going to be with this Allen Jorgensen is one of the founders of gen space and comes in as an invited scientists to do my lab is also friends with the FBI okay that's so many times the well they were very taken by her and she has never received any you know

00:51:57 intrusive kinds of arrests that she knows she's a PhD in molecular biology as a member of Ted and and this is sort of her her forte is to bring science to the community from children to adults to even scientists who do not have an institutional affiliation try doing science at home I mean you need a lot of equipment so so I think we need to fold that into this conversation as the fact

00:52:33 that science has built out of the laboratory into our everyday lives in many ways and to articulate some of those things from the clothes we wear to the food we eat to the medicine we take etc etc that this is a revolution in the transformation of materials human materials animal materials the sale of materials blah blah blah and this has been going on you know since the late

00:53:07 80s so I think those are some of the areas that people could be engaged with when they go to the supermarket and their food is not labeled as a GMO and that's another thing we do in our lab is we do GMO testing so we can see what's what and so for example when you're on Delta Airlines don't eat the cookies

00:53:39 and you know other things like that that are GMOs whatever that means I mean that's a whole conversation for the social order that people are are hidden I mean that people are hidden but products are hidden in terms of what they consist of interesting to me that you say people the last several years

00:54:18 has been working with people who are marginalized for some reason and who are trying to a part of movements trying to change the narrative around them around who they are and they resort to subdued a scientific language trying to explain to people for example an example would be people in Croatia with intellectual disabilities are often institutionalized from birth for a whole lot of

00:54:50 psychosocial reasons there aren't enough resources so people are put in these draconian institutions and never see the light of day or very poorly treated so there is a movement to the institution as people and reintegrate them into the community and so there was a whole body of knowledge trying to teach people that people with intellectual disabilities deserve to live in the world they don't need to be locked away but it's with opinion what you get is opinion so when

00:55:25 you say when you try and bring facts to people and say these people don't belong in institutions people say but they do it becomes an argument so we were hired to come in and work with an organization of people with intellectual disabilities training them to tell their personal stories and there are not stories about living in institutions they're all stories about living in the world and just what so in order to be accepted into this organization I needed to speak

00:56:00 about my credentials so I had been told before I went to Croatia that I should talk theory I should speak about my credentials as a doctor as a psychiatrist and I should definitely not mention my own personal story which is you google me you would find out that most of my work has been around my own personal journey about being a gay man living with HIV and that age my storytelling was a way of before there was the science of surviving really a

00:56:35 finding a way of making sense of my experience as a person with HIV I was told do not mention this in Croatia cos no one will listen to you so I arrived at the organisation and they said welcome we will not introduce you to the people you're gonna work with yet they're a vulnerable group till we feel safe with you who are you the psychiatrists were the people that

00:57:10 perpetrated terrible harm on the on the people in the institution's they said can you tell us something personal about yourself and I said I like to hide as the day progressed it got more and more difficult to serve with my performance partners and it's another whole story of a 20-year collaboration with someone which is not easy I can tell you really collaborating but he

00:57:42 said to me listen if we don't speak the truth we're not gonna get to work with these people so I told my story and the social workers who were the interface with the organization ended up in tears and saying well that's why you're here come on in and so what we did was teach people who really some didn't have language some would tear up beyond terrified to sit in front of a group we eventually taught them to to sing and to tell stories about very simple stories

00:58:14 one woman told the story of her niece and she showed a picture of how much she loves that little girl plays with her in the park she's a woman with Down syndrome and they then used these stories as part of a campaign that that is you can find as part of their organization and it was the art it was the art of storytelling it was the one of the women couldn't speak at all she just danced it was the art that communicated what this I would say the

00:58:44 science couldn't have and honoring those people as experts so I think what you're saying is allowing it to come from the people what it what it is that's needed is a particular kind of consciousness that we can bring as artists and scientists I think that it's a really good point to pause at and invite the audience up for questions I'm gonna emphasize again people who come out for questions please ask questions for this panel because we're gonna do an open

00:59:17 group session where it's gonna be more like pass around the mic talk about you know your reflections for for a minute or two and what you want to see next and that sort of thing so more commentary things we can save for a little bit later but let's get some questions going can I just say to your point that we throw out science and keep art I mean Newtonian physics works really well for most of the world you know that Darwinian evolution you know there are some things that yeah we go down right but I was I was gonna say

00:59:49 something very similar let me expand on that a little bit on this notion that science is always discarding itself whereas you know we keep Leonardo but we don't keep old scientific ideas that's not not quite true it's true that science is in an important sense self-correcting but it's not disposable in the sense that whatever version of the truth we have at any one moment is path dependent and knowing that path is very important it's we need to know we

01:00:24 need to understand Aristotle's cosmology and what was wrong with it and what we learned about the universe that made us realize that that was limited and we like you just said we need to understand Newton's laws in fact we can't teach science without teaching Newton's laws and then we teach why they don't quite apply fully because of what we've learned since then it would but it wouldn't make sense to to teach science and to know science without knowing that history of of ideas that are you know when I say wrong I mean in a certain

01:00:57 certain sense limited and so maybe keeping Newton and keeping our Styles not that different from keeping Leonardo I mean you don't teach artists I mean artists have to learn about Leonardo but you don't teach a professional artist now go out and make art exactly like Leonardo any more than we teach go out and do Aristotle's cosmology as I understand are which is not fully there are also movements and things that you know ways

01:01:28 that things are done and you don't go out and do our the way it was done 20 years ago so there is that sort of revision - it's not quite the same sort of sort of linearity but maybe there's a little more commonality there than then was represented the other quick point I wanted to make was about this notion of not having everything just done by geniuses I thought it was very interesting part the conversation and there is this question who owns art and who owns science who's it for is art just for professional artists in art departments or is it for everybody

01:02:01 and we can ask the very parallel thing about science and and so this notion of having having projects that everyone can do and you were kind of crowdsourcing and all that you were kind of feeling it there's a really good model in science now for citizen science where there are these projects where it's not just because it's cool as I outreach think to involve people in fact the science is better there are certain kinds of science we're having lots of people out there recording and sensing and contributing makes gives us an ability to do those kinds of science that we couldn't do when it's just the genius

01:02:32 and so the idea and you mentioned a project at a museum that maybe kind of hinted at this too but the idea of sort of citizen side art where we use some of these same platforms to really be collaborative in some way that it's not about the genius vision of the great ego but the contribution of the masses and maybe maybe there's a way that the the citizen science model can be further applied to 2sy art and and also I mean in that language the maker movement which is something that's going on we're yeah and

01:03:05 you mentioned these bio labs like that word were you really are bringing in lots of people and it's not just about the lone genius vision but like getting people involved so I think I think that's a very useful direction we can think of in this conversation well as far as Leonardo I'm reading the new biography by Isaacson yeah and it's maybe you know the thought that I had was not that we should paint like him but we should think like him he was an integrator and and and brought disparate things together and I think

01:03:39 that's where his real inspiration is the following question hey some of my artwork out there [Music] I noticed the ongoing difficulty we have been with correlating art and science etc I was fortunate enough to Venice flashed paint and mixed paint with other

01:04:14 paints etc etc to discover the formation process of the vertebrae etc etc details are out there and I would like you to give me some feedback as to if you can agree to that I mean I just think I discovered the formation process / and other important like horseshoe crab splashes exactly they established the fact that the physics of liquid formation to correlate to biological information processes and yeah give me some feedback if you would please I'll

01:04:46 be here thank you thank you I just want to say one you had a lot there I didn't want to gloss over the value of art which you know probably have a whole conference on that question alone but I think something I've been thinking about a lot is that we emphasize the product that is art the noun of art but I think there we should emphasize and put as much value perhaps an education on the verb of art the process of art the thinking that is art but again that's

01:05:22 that's a loaded conversation wonderful thoughts today and on other days I had I guess - two questions related to authorship which I think came up a lot and the first question one is kind of the model of authorship in sciences versus arts I think in science publications there's a long history of many authors being on the communication and less so with humanities and artists

01:05:54 although we have fields within the arts that know how to credit many people you know theatrical performances the film industry animations there are hundreds of people listed as producers in a larger work and I'm wondering whether these kind of considerations of authorship might also affect how we think about science art production and collaboration and whether changing our models for authorship when we have a participatory piece

01:06:25 we're actually crediting the the low-res people in that piece and not just saying oh this is a Nick Cave sound piece that happened to be sewn by a hundred people found on Craigslist or whatever so one is this question of authorship your thoughts about changing models of authorship within the fields of art science and art science and CyArk whatever the other is a question about in particular participatory art and you kind of put forward this model of the

01:07:00 grand mural with small components fabricated or designed by other people and we have this idea of seeing this which as opposed to genius which I thought was very interesting and I think there's another interesting strand that I would be curious for the group to comment on which is sort of trends and evolutionary art where the participants is part of the aesthetic where I think one of the kind of standard examples we have electric sheep where people are

01:07:36 voting on the aesthetic direction of a digital artwork and there's genetic algorithms involved in its production another interesting example is kamar and melamine who kind of cite you know this has some problems to it when we ask everybody to participate and vote you get something that's pretty a landscape and it has George Washington in the corner and it's kind of like a deer on the side everybody's happy but the end result is something that is all

01:08:11 that satisfaction the second question is in this question of authorship intersecting with the people or the public or the low-res people whatever you want to call it how do you also preserve this aspect of novelty search that is so important in art making and finding outliers you know artistic visions that do not come about through a democratic process that is such an

01:08:42 important question I mean two questions three questions many questions and I'm glad you've brought Komar and Melman into the discussion I'm sure most people in this room know about this series of town hall meetings they had where they would ask but you know the attendees to vote on elements that should be in the best picture and you know they varied according to region of course but there's always a lot of blue because blue is everyone's favorite like landscape so there's hot so you know and you know I think it's really important

01:09:16 that people who are involved in the creation of artwork be credited and this is resulted in a lot of wives being acknowledged as co-authors of work then used to be attributed only to their husbands you know we're looking at Keith Olsen and Christo and Klaus Oldenburg and I'm missing a lot of people but so these are you know these are good things happening there are artists who acknowledge their assistance very explicitly they're artists who don't on

01:09:49 the other hand and I think this is really important and I'm not going to be proposing a hard and fast rule here there is tremendous danger in I think the the initiative for producing the work to the public and I think it's suspect because it's so you know it's a way that institutions have boosted their audience you know this sort of drive toward everyone's a winner everyone's an

01:10:23 artist everyone's introducing and your you know your expertise is as valuable as mine and it's particularly prevalent in the arts because really everyone does feel in their hearts of heart hearts that they're artists why not what do you need to be an artist not much just an opinion right you know I think being clear about negotiating those two you know it kind of irresolvable

01:10:54 perspectives is really important I'm not sure who was might have been Thomas Jefferson that said democracy only works without educated public and saying that's true with art the status of art education in this country we can't expect people to know I mean there are certain basic teaching that needs to happen and as far as authorship I think if there's a matter of private and prioritization if we have a priority more on the product and what what the

01:11:28 product and the product is a thing and a product that's the thinking what it is doing for us there'll be less of a need to want to have authorship even though it I think it's important but I think the focus should be on what it is and what it's doing yeah I have two comments one distance on the wall under his name but let's take this expression everyone's an art critic I don't know much about art but I know what I like what if I go into a scientific

01:11:59 laboratory I say I don't know much about science but I know what I like I know what facts I like a safe way for my question yes so I wanted to ask a question based on far that's parallel processing question and and whenever I come to some of these conferences as a guest or whatever on this side of this side I alway always

01:12:30 wonder how can we harness the power of the people in the room and so you're talking about science art science and society this is a micro society and we often and these are great conversations to listen to and be part of but I wonder how can we also use our experimental processes that we're going through finding out how to collaborate and how to collaborate in these new ways that are not genius center that are that are about looking at other people and

01:13:05 listening to them and have taking time and doing things in parallel and then coming back together and so I'm curious just in terms of having you as a smaller group iterate about the next panel in terms of like where or not panel the collective discussion is where do we go as a as a community are we a community and do we have processes that we can start to put into place so that we always make sure that even if we don't harness the power of the room today we

01:13:38 leave the room knowing that the power of the room is going to be that there are processes in place whether they be online offline about meeting at the next cafe next week or whatever I'm just curious to have you play with that I think that's a great suggestion for the final panel just for the structure of the final panel to do that and can you figure that out between Ellen it reminds me of in family therapy there used to be a well Estelle is in some

01:14:10 context a one-way mirror in which the experts at on the one side and watched the family working with the therapist there was a phone and that experts would call in and the therapist would pick up the phone with the family sitting there and go okay the unknown invisible experts there was I think his name was

01:14:46 called Tom in 1987 decided to do away with the one-way mirror and he took down the mirror so that now that people could see the experts and it changed everything because behind those one rumors people would say things to each other about family that the family would never hear suddenly anything that God said was heard and that became known as a reflecting team and what it did was it broke down the power relationship so I think the questions really important I

01:15:16 think that what can happen here is even when you having questions that directed at us we become some heart that we are the experts in the room and everybody else is a is an outsider witness group really if we now turn if we all shut up and listened to reflections from the room that in the unneccessarily have anything to do with directly with what we've spoken we would get a whole nother body of knowledge that would arise and then it would end with us reflecting on

01:15:51 what we'd heard and that's a standard practice in narrative therapy using communities and then outside of witness groups and then reflection I think that's a wonderful way to go well clearly I should have just asked you to introduce the last you know exactly the idea there's not gonna when we when we meet again in 20 minutes or whatever there aren't going to be people sitting in the middle it's just going to be kind of you know as we are and the thoughts that we can squeeze and you know in the time that we have which will continue and there are a lot of ideas

01:16:24 floating around which we'll discuss a little bit later about how to continue this online offline in person over there over here sort of take yours so I want to give a little contribution to this therapy session I actually I'm a long-term collaborator with Tala Volk I'm a scientist I'm retired but I'm still active and I always crash at his apartment and makes it very convenient so he invited me here I came Friday

01:16:58 night my name is David Schwartzman by the way and I want to start with a quotation which meant I don't know if it's been used yet because I wasn't here yesterday art is not a mirror of reality but a hammer with which to shape it and subtract it to Berto Brack but there's some controversy whether it's mayakovsky or whatever but what it brings up is odd as a technology and I think that the

01:17:31 technology part has been alluded to but it's the intersection of our technology and science I think it's really critical so yes autism oh there's a motor production technology to make art but art itself is a technology like Amelia's design so design and obviously architecture and so on so it's technology but it's also and let me make a quick point about the

01:18:05 conflation of Science and Technology you're critical of GMO then you're anti science you've heard that if you're critical a technology which appropriates molecular biology then you are immediately by those in that let's say business your attack is being anti science and I would I was very influenced by newest alphas philosophy

01:18:40 works in particular brought as a mode of aesthetic production which I think some of his followers all already also wrote about and and not only it brings in the mode of production of making art but how on interfaces with social movements the swastika is an obvious example of a fascist aesthetic which had a powerful I

01:19:12 think it had a real powerful influence in empowering the fascist movement that symbol which of course was appropriated from India or Navajos or whatever but I would share with you to a more positive example as a scientist I went to the science March and of course ice I'm a climate justice activist and all the

01:19:43 rest but they were sorry saying science has brought us to cell phone and a cures for I don't penicillin or whatever no one held up besides saying science brought us nuclear weapons so the what I poke this is a question when I'm posing is the great potential of art being a part of progressive social movements to

01:20:16 change the world going back to Bret's quotation I sort of make a comment to that well art is a way to engage in the cultural imaginary and if we go back to Aristotle he talks about the poetic epistemology X words etc to essentially get towards that that it's the idea that is expressed through

01:20:52 this materialization and you know the influence of art as an icon within social practice is a thesis in itself we can take it on both sides you know another another image that the neighbor young girl running naked with burnt body from Vietnam or the Abu Ghraib images or Michael Jackson these are icons that

01:21:27 then carry with them huge social dimensions and that's in many ways what an icon does whether we go back to Russian Orthodox religion etc that it encapsulates all of the social surround and it has not changed yeah an art also could be a simulation for the full spectrum of the human experience

01:21:57 science is mostly objective but there's this huge subjective part of us motions and and art can be a stage in which we can put these things together and run a simulation I think that's a another valuable way to think of it my name is Cynthia Panucci and so i founded art and science collaborations here in new york 30 years ago and i've watched the field slowly develop over these years you know

01:22:33 after being an art student and coming to New York to start my art career in the early 70s I worked in the top print Gallery in New York the triple a gallery doesn't exist anymore but um you know I saw the elitism of the art world and and then I see my family members who mostly they're not artists but and people that I know galleries are incredibly off-putting to the common person the common man so science yesterday I said we have to sort of sneak in science and

01:23:08 and surprise people with it because you mentioned the word and people turn off their eyes glaze over so I think that the people in this room we represent a really privileged rarefied environment and I just went to Thanksgiving with my family and relatives and you know I cannot talk about my work because there's no talking about they feel they're not experts and they feel because I've been in this field for X amount of years maybe I'm somewhat of an

01:23:41 expert anyway I like the ideas of crowdsourcing information and citizen science because it's sort of a natural way to bring people in to the issues that we're all really concerned with I think in this world we want to make the world a better place to live one that's environmentally sustainable for future generations and we want we have the privilege of thinking about the implications of AI or genetic engineering most of the people in my

01:24:16 family and the people on this the common man you know they come home this is how my brother explained it years ago we come home we have three children we do dinner dishes we make their sandwiches we do you know their homework with them we read stories to them we're exhausted we go to bed we we have hybrid minds I think we have a responsibility to our society to put our energies together and

01:24:50 to work on some of the very what are they call the complex problems of our time that the stubborn issues what is edible [Music] anyway it's sort of for the next rooms panel but it sort of addresses the crowdsourcing information the lead ISM the the thinking that the the local person like in Appalachia or whatever or my brother lives in Michigan and there

01:25:22 are our invasive species going into Lake Michigan and that's why the water is crystal clear you can drink it practically it's beautiful it cannot sustain life and the fishing where tourists like to come and fish it's seated by the forestry to biology department and University Michigan they put the fish in there every year I mean what type of environment do we want to live in a totally artificial environment but we are the kind of hybrid mines that

01:25:54 can be the visionaries the leaders and I'm not meaning to be elitist I think we have to listen to the problems but the people in Michigan or Wisconsin the whole border Chicago area they're not thinking about this in the future and what its gonna mean for the tourist industry and for just enjoying the lake anyway I think that is a great place to end and it's kind of giving us the

01:26:24 impetus to not let this fizz out as things so often do after conferences okay so we're gonna have our last artistic interlude of the weekend we're gonna hear from dr. Shirley Muller who is a neuroscientist but we're going to hear how neuroscience can interact with museum exhibition which is a kind of new trend I see happening around especially at places like Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts so we're gonna watch a short video we'll take a break

01:26:55 reconvene for the wrap-up okay Thank You panelists for a wonderful panelists warning I would still like if we could get the lights turn down a little bit on this nice perfect

01:27:26 yeah