Beryl wrote:
>Perhaps the process and the 'research' is ultimately more useful than the
>end product in these projects? >Scientists may be more familiar with this
>approach than artists, who are often expected to 'produce a nice object'
>>at the end of any residency.
-----
Different residencies have different outcomes and objectives. Some are
about making something, but others can be concerned with outreach,
education or research. It is however generally true that people seem to
expect artists to be, even define them according to, making things.
Nevertheless, I would expect that most artists are less interested in
fetishising "things" and see the core of their practice as being concerned
with practice, especially since the 1960's.
I'm currently involved in a residency at Cambridge University and the only
objective I have set myself during this first phase (there is no guarantee
of later phases) is to research the environment this offers and to meet
with as many research active people there as possible. It is very much a
reconnaisance mission where my research is into what goes on within the
University itself. My hoped for outcome is that I will have identified one
or more attractive research directions and potential collaborators and to
have outlined a brief for future work. This seems fine with everybody else
involved. From the earliest stages of the process we were all agreed on
this approach. So, I am not sure if artists are always expected to produce
something final as an outcome. In this situation definitely not, but then
perhaps this is quite a well thought through residency program. I even have
an anthropologist who tags along with me all the time carefully documenting
everything for analysis. Being the subject of research is in itself
interesting and in some ways this person is my initial and perhaps most
significant collaborator. Their presence also deeply effects the dynamics
of all the meetings involved in the process, which in itself then becomes
another research topic for analysis. The whole thing could become endlessly
recursive and self-sustaining, in a Heisenbergian way.
During a recent visit to MIT I was struck by how the place has changed over
the past decade or so and how much of its current research is now tied
directly to either commercial or military objectives and how clearly
expected outcomes are defined early on. That is, the research there is
outcome defined. This is in marked contrast to the general ambience at
Cambridge where research seems less well defined in its objectives and thus
more concerned with fundamental science (rather than technology) and a lot
more playful (and therefore fun). Not surprisingly though MIT receives more
money with its approach. So, in the same way as it can be argued that
artists are not always expected to make things the inverse argument can be
posited in respect of the idea that scientists are not expected to make
things. At MIT (and I suspect at Stanford and other leading technology
institutions) they are.
>Art Science projects often seem doomed to live in 'Turing-Land' rather
>than in the land of art museums - would >List members agree with this?
-----
So long as artists focus on the technology or science then of course they
will end up within that world. The question in all of this is how to occupy
both worlds whilst still focusing on the art. Too much art that is involved
in the art-science field (I hate this terminology) defines itself not in
relation to art but as to science. This practice will tend to be seen as
speaking to and about a specific world-view.
Science, like art, is not an ethics free affair. Science depends on money
and patronage to exist, just as art. As the MIT example above exemplifies,
money talks (perhaps artists are in the "walking" business?). Much of the
research undertaken there is characterised by the needs of those paying for
it. Much of that research is also questionable. To a lesser degree this
also true of Cambridge and other centres of research. "Pure" science has
probably never existed.
The same can be said of art of course. The art that is successful in the
market place determines the general discursive dynamics of the artworld,
whether as fashion or as a reaction against it. What exists in the art
museum is a direct function of this. As in science there is no purity in
artistic creation and much corruption in the process of how certain things
become paradigmatic and thus come to occupy prime position within the
institution. Ethically there is no difference between a science dominated
by a military-industrial agenda and an art at the service of a
corporate-fashionista. The distinction between 'Turing-Land' and 'art
museums' is thus possibly a false one. When you stand outside both worlds
they look very similar.
best
Simon
Simon Biggs
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http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
http://www.greatwall.org.uk/
http://www.babel.uk.net/
Research Professor
Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
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http://www.shu.ac.uk/
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