A green cloud in the eye of the storm

Art-science conferences, like climates, change. When Arts Catalyst organised the first Eye of the Storm conference in 1998, it was a high profile event: opened by Culture Secretary Chris Smith, reviewed in national broadsheets, and debated on Newsnight. Forward to 2009, and Eye of the Storm II was a more low-key affair. But what did that quietness indicate about the subjects under discussion and their relation to both the broader culture and debates about the environment? Some mix of greater cultural consensus and apathetic complacency, or something else entirely?

There were other histories at play here, too. As Arts Catalyst director Nicola Triscott made clear in her conference opening remarks,  this year is the 50th anniversary of C.P.Snow’s Two Cultures lecture. I wondered what the two days would reveal about both cultures and their interrelation in 2009. Elementary questions still seemed pertinent:

• Is an art-science hybrid about the relation between them, or about using art, say, to relate to a general public?
• Is it a relationship best based on consensus or antagonism?
• Is a single art-science discipline possible?
• Is it something critical or celebratory?
• What is the correlation of increasing art-science collaborations and changing awareness of environmental issues?

DAY 1

Sheila Jasanoff’s introductory keynote sought to provide a basic framework about how meaning is made by the representations provided to us by science. Jasanoff highlighted how science reduces complexity in a manner counter to the actual workings of natural systems, citing examples such as the smooth rising curve of Keeling’s graph of carbon dioxide emissions from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii between 1955 and 2005. Whilst aware of the efficacy of such graphs - as both scientific tools and effective means of consciousness raising -  Jasanoff’s focus was on raising questions that prevented such constructions acquiring monolithic meaning: what is the scale? Is the steadily rising line signal or noise?

Jasanoff suggested a model of “interpretive flexibility”, characterised by diverse techniques of representation, multiple standpoints, prior framings throughout history, and the declaration of strategic interests - all of which she summarised as the shift from “text” to “context.” She applied such a shift to specific issues such as policy formation, the media, and the debate around bee extinction, hoping in each case for a more diverse array of approaches. She noted in passing how meaning making in the arts was not reductive in this way. It was a theme to be picked up by many other speakers throughout the two days.

Stephen Healy, for example, suggested art should not illustrate or illuminate scientific issues, but be part of the creation of new “forms of life” that conceived new responses to current realities rather than adapting old ones through a business-derived model of growth and development. UCL Artist in residence Martin John Callanan also offered a critique of scientists use of graphs, also posing the question of whether the artist’s contribution was best made via critique of scientific methodology. If it was more about the proposing of new visions then that, too, was not artists territory alone. Tommaso Venturini demonstrated this with a slick overview of Bruno Latour’s “controversy mapping” -  a method for visualising the relations between the different groups involved in a debate.

By this point there was some audience grumbling about the emphasis on cartography as “gods eye view” and the sense that the only possible working language was a rational empirical one. All of which were issues the artists Helen and Newton Mayer Harrison have been thinking through for forty years. Their own talk suggested a workable framework: an engagement with issues of governance, a close study of ecosystems on levels from the local to the continental, and certainly an abundance of maps. But it was always through an emphasis on conviviality and friendship, and how “each place tells a story of its becoming.” It was from their sense of being “storytellers” - and the particular relational possibilities of their positioning as artists - that the concrete proposals and actions of their work took shape.

Expanded methodologies as the prerogative of the artist were also themes in the subsequent presentations by artist Rod Dickinson and geographer Michael Bravo. Dickinson’s work included a gallery reconstruction of Milgram's famous psychology experiments - first performed in 1961 - where volunteers were asked by a scientist to give electric shocks to subjects who incorrectly answered a series of questions. Dickinson’s re-creation raised a series of arguments about the utility of artistic creation: a change of focus to get at unknown areas (why people did what they did); a chance to move from data and hearsay to embodied experience as a way of understanding; a chance to make the whole experiment fully visible for the first time, without the concealment and partiality that the original depended upon.

Dickinson also re-thought the nature of the original experiment: Milgram, he argued, should be thought of less as a highly problematic social psychologist and more as dramatist on a par with Beckett. If there was no such dramatic repositioning in Michael Bravo’s talk, based on several decades of field work in the arctic, Bravo also asked us to see experiments and research in a broader context, viewing experiments not as results obtained at a single moment but within the unfolding personal and professional lives of both subjects and experimenters, and the broader social attitudes within which they operated.
 
Such discussions soon shifted onto the genetic level. Eduardo Kac rooted his artistic work in a systems theory model of communication involving speaker, channel and receiver, but sought a “multi-modality” moving beyond real time and screen-based exchange of humans and machines to something more integrated. Kac’s early robots quickly lost their anthropomorphic elements, shifting, animal-like, closer to the ground. So, too, Kac tried to make work that was not principally for humans, such as Rara Avis where a bird and an electrode-connected plant in different locations were enabled to communicate or “come together in a sensuous realm” as Kac put it, “not [to] simulate but [to] stimulate new kinds of presence.”

Kac posed other questions: “If we could participate in the richness of the world, what would art be like?” His own answers included a genetic chip implanted in his leg, a genetically engineered rabbit called Alba that glowed green in the dark, and, most recently, the transplanting of his own cells into a Petunia called Edunia. The finer details of these projects revealed concerns with the nature of scientific production, its transmission in the media, memory, and new concepts of self. But I found the tone of such explorations hard to ascertain, noting at various times a political ambivalence, the artist's declared right to make use of any available technology, and an unsettling mix of utilitarianism and deliberately useless aestheticism.

Finally, Sylvia Nagl talked of recent tentative findings in epigenetics, replacing the central dogma of the genome - with its one way flow from DNA to RNA to protein - with the metaphor of the city and its multi-direction information flows. The artist Trish Adams then concluded the day by talking about machina carnis, an interactive installation developed after Adams changed adult stem cells from her own blood sample into beating cardiac cells, declaring herself to be her very own “human guinea pig.”

Despite its surface similarities Zac and Adams work seemed very different. Adams was more interested in a sublime awe of the gene and had a sense of collaboration that was more about discussion than Zac’s use of genetic labs as contract workers. Adams talked of the artists contribution as “other ways to work with materials for different purposes” whilst Zac seemed to absorb both art and science into a new seemingly self-contained hybrid practice. Where did identity, criticality or celebration fit into either of these practices? I wasn’t sure. But it was that zone of uncertainty that was emerging as the conference's most provocative contribution.

DAY 2

Saturday began by exploring the balance between social construction and the reality of the physical universe. Via the example of dark matter, astrophysicist Roger Malina explored curiosity - how scientists decide what to research. His joint role as director of L’Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille and editor of the arts-science and technology journal Leonardo gave him some ideas on how artists and scientists differ: artists are getting interested, he observed, at the point where scientists stop. “Modern science” he noted “doesn’t make common sense” - being often on a scale outside human perception. Art, in contrast, offers a model of knowledge that is embodied, visible, enacted, social, and collective.

Malina was paired with sociologist Harry Collins, who talked of his long term research project on scientists researching gravitational waves. Collins studied the different personality types of the scientists involved and how individuals and relationships changed when small scale, fringe research became huge, million dollar research projects. He also focussed on the experimental method itself, and the ways in which “scientific truth is an agreement to agree” due to “experimenters regress”, where proving or disproving an experiment unavoidably uses that original experiment as measure. In a Q&A Collins’ arguments infuriated Malina, who punched the table to show his hand would not go through, asserting his faith in a positivist world view beyond all pervasive social constructionism!

The non-human also had something to contribute. Meredith Tromble wondered how the boundaries between human and animal could be re-drawn, shifting the later from “model” to “agent.” Revital Cohen used “design as a tool to get people into the story - to relate to the subject.” She outlined a proposal whereby humans became harnessed to animals who provided services such as kidney dialysis and oxygen. Moving into the transgenic, Oron Catts outlined a series of art-experiments, including growing a steak out of pre-natal sheep cells, whilst Adam Zaretsky’s theatre pieces proposed that genetic engineering should be modeled along more aesthetic lines. What, he wrote to an FSA enquiry, would a surrealist cow look like, or a futurist one? In an aesthetic realm posed somewhere between Hermann Nitsch and John Waters, Zaretsky highlighted the flesh, blood, gore and camp of the transgenic reality.

In Cohen and Zartestky’s contrasting projects I found an ecological approach. Both worked an interzone of fiction and reality within an awareness of limits and the interconnectedness of ideas and actions. So, was the future of art-science-ecology a sort of fleshy neo-conceptualism? No sooner had I thought this than Bronwyn Parry and Ania Dabrowska suggested otherwise. Their research with elderly men and women donating their organs for alzheimers research was stylistically rooted more firmly in classic documentary photography. It provocatively evoked the Harrison’s “conviviality” as it worked through the ethical and personal issues involved in working with subjects whose final portraits were likely to be of preserved brain tissue after their death.

Such thoughtfulness was present, too, in Kira O’Reilly’s presentation which stressed the art-science collaboration as the place for new kinds of thinking - she offered the example of trying to read Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter directly in the science lab. But other relationships were foregrounded by Norman Cherry’s angiogenetic body adornment, which emphasised the possibilities for growing new body parts as a form of jewelry.

This utilitarian and commercial stance was taken to another extreme by Alana Jelinek’s performance piece in which she adopted the persona of a supposed scout for the global corporation BLACCXN, eager, she said, to exploit the commercial possibilities of “unscientific ideas that sound scientific.” Where Jelinek satirised, her fellow panelists provided case studies of the realities that informed her wit. Neuroscientist Steven Rose offered a cautionary warning of the possible uses of developments in neuroscience by the military and government, fearing a mind-controlling future that evoked the SOMA of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whilst Paul Dorfman discussed the difficulties of legislating for nuclear risk in the face of massive scientific uncertainty.

The conference concluded with Helen Evans of the artist partnership HeHe, whose piece Nuage Vert (Green Cloud) used a cloud of power plant emissions as a screen for the projection of a green laser. Installed first in Iceland and later in France, both the final projection and the negotiations through which the projects were realised, were sites of conflicting, multiple interpretations. If the cloud, as Evans observed, was an “open projection space” it seemed neither to celebrate the power station or function as a green critique. It balanced the risks and pleasures of pure spectacle, with the potential to offer a new way of thinking about the power stations and the communities in which they were located. 

It was an ambiguity that applied to the conference as a whole, and its articulation of the current states of art-science and art-ecology relations. No more high profile discussions on Newsnight, the two days suggested, this debate has lost its claims to such media-noteworthy topicality. In its place, I concluded, was a diverse array of projects and infrastructures, in which roles and identities were more uncertain, and where familiar notions of art, science, experiment, risk, the sublime and the critical, declared themselves as constituents of some emergent and as yet unarticulated condition. 

Photo: Nuage Vert by Hehe, St Ouen, March 2009

http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/global/eyeofthestorm.html