Off to Sci Foo this weekend!

I'm excited to head to the Googleplex this coming weekend for Science Foo Camp! Usually referred to as Sci Foo, the eight-year-old invitation-only "unconference" is organized by Google, the science journal, Nature, Digital Science, and O'Reilly Media. Sci Foo brings together "between 200 and 300 leading scientists, technologists, writers, and other thought-leaders at the Googleplex for a weekend of unbridled discussion, demonstration, and debate." (You can learn more about SciFoo here.)

Selene and I were invited because of the BAASICS mission, and I'm pleased to see that one of the proposed SciFoo sessions is titled "Building Better Art-Science Partnerships." Naturally, we're looking forward to engaging in lively, informative conversations with other participants about the art-science interface and to explaining what it is we aim to do with BAASICS and why we feel it's so important. That said, while BAASICS got me invited, I'm super jazzed about attending (and perhaps participating in) many of the other sessions that have been proposed. A few of my favorites:

- Using Emerging Technologies to Advance Conservation
- Science Advocacy
- Rethinking National Security
- Defragging Government (How Can Scientists and Engineers Help?)
- Science and Popular Skepticism

To my way of thinking, Sci Foo's interdisciplinary angle and relaxed format are outgrowths of Bay Area culture, a place where idealism, art, science, and technology commingle, often with exciting results. I'm encouraged to see sessions like "DeFragging Government" on the list, and I have the impression that many of the Sci Foo participants recognize our responsibility -- both that of the individual and the group -- to be active beyond our more particular spheres.

BAASICS will be live tweeting from the event and I'll provide a short update -- with photographs -- after my return.

Image credit: ripped from the Sci Foo Camp website

Help Make BAASICS.3: The Deep End Possible

In 2011, I co-founded BAASICS (Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), a series of San Francisco-based evening programs that brings together artists, scientists, and interdisciplinary thinkers to present engaging multi-media lectures and performances. Each BAASICS program is built around a particular theme, with participants given the green light to express their brilliance and share their passions in ways that don't always involve a Powerpoint presentation and a microphone. All BAASICS programs are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. We aim to make the contemporary arts and sciences more accessible and less esoteric, thereby inspiring guests to think about how the two spheres relate to one another and to society at large. To date, we've put on two successful programs, BAASICS.1: A Live Animal (July 2011) and BAASICS.2: The Future (June 2012). Our third program, BAASICS.3: The Deep End, will take place at the ODC Theater on May 6, 2013.

Making More "Live Animals"

Two weeks ago, I presented a lecture at the Art College Center of Design, in Pasadena, California, titled "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Experience." It was my first attempt to respond to the question of how contemporary artists might connect the "fine arts" to society at large, and I drew from an array of sources, classical (Heraclitus; Aristotle) and contemporary (Dave Hickey; David Milch; Erik Reece), to constellate what I'd like to think Aristotle would have described as a virtuous way of being in the world (as an artist). After the lecture, one of the students remarked that it was the "most liberal arts style" approach she'd come across in art school. I appreciated her compliment, but it reminded me of the urgent need for more generalism in arts education.

As I often insist, there is a lot of beautiful and compelling artwork produced and exhibited today, but it generally lives apart from popular culture. We -- that is, those of us active in the fine arts -- are complicit in this ghettoization because we're content to carry on a conversation among ourselves. Moreover, because we've come to preference our tribe's voices over others, there is a surplus of insider commentary and critique passed off as art. Almost all of this work and wordiness is irrelevant to the world outside the ghetto walls and, because young artists are educated in this context, with little or no pedagogical emphasis on disciplines other than art theory, the art and commentary become, over time, increasingly provincial. The wellspring of this contemporary predicament is as old as modernism.

On the heels of co-curating "A Live Animal" with Selene Foster, I've been rereading John Dewey's brilliant Art & Experience essays (1934). Dewey writes, and I quote him at length because he articulates the crux of the problem so eloquently:

" [Art is today] isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience. [...] Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience which are works of art and everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.

[...] So extensive and subtly pervasive are the ideas that set Art upon a remote pedestal, that many a person would be repelled rather than pleased if told that he enjoyed his casual recreations, in part at least, because of their esthetic quality. The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of love-nests, murders, and exploits of bandits. For, when what he knows as art is relegated to the museum and gallery, the unconquerable impulse towards experiences enjoyable in themselves finds such outlet as the daily environment provides.

[...] For the popular notion comes from a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that many theorists and critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating. The times when select and distinguished objects are closely connected with the products of usual vocations are the times when appreciation of the former is most rife and most keen. [...] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, if more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience. [...The] trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that 'spiritualizes' it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience. Were works of art placed in a directly human context in popular esteem, they would have a much wider appeal than they can have when pigeon-hole theories of art win general acceptance.

[...] The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals."

Amen, Mr. Dewey...though I'd add that the "primary task" to "restore continuity between" works of art and the everyday is not only the obligation of the art writer; it is also incumbent upon the conscientious artist. Artists need to make art that connects to common human experience, and both artists and art writers need to communicate more effectively with the general audience.



I thought of Dewey's argument when watching a video of Scottish cyclist Danny MacAskill that was recently shared by a friend on Facebook. The video offers a more visceral (and therefore meaningful) aesthetic experience than most of the contemporary art I've viewed in the last weeks. An acrobat with his bike, Macaskill is Dewey's "live animal," "fully present, all there" because of he has honed his craft and is, as we often hear athletes put it, "in the zone."

Can contemporary fine art inspire people to exclaim, as one person did in the comments under my friend's Facebook posting of the Macaskill video, "That's crazy & beautiful!"? Can artists again enthuse the general audience?

I believe that we can, and I hope that I can one day have an opportunity to design (or help to design) an undergraduate or graduate art curriculum that prioritizes generalism and social responsibility.

Photo credit: photo of Danny MacAskill ripped from CyclePath Magazine

Navigating the Flood

"By [Claude] Shannon's definition, the world now produces more information in 48 hours than it did throughout all human history to 2003. [...But] if the universe is information, it has always been producing a deluge of data, and humans have always found patterns of meaning in the waters visible to us."

-uncredited writer in The Week

Cooperation through opposition

"Joints are and are not parts of the body. They cooperate through opposition, and make a harmony of separate forces. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars; distinct particulars occur in wholeness."

- Herakleitos, circa 500 B.C.E.

I announced last week that biologist, writer and artist Jessica Palmer contributed a short essay about one of my 2008 drawings to SEED Magazine's Culture Section. In her article, "Seeing Antlers, Feeling Dendrites," Palmer asserts that good art acts as a vehicle of consilience.

Palmer has a more recent, related post on her tremendous blog Bioephemera. In it, she riffs on the complementary relationship of art and science.

"Basically, I think that good art prompts the viewer to find meaningful connections between things that seem unrelated, to draw parallels that previously went unnoticed. Art can be a springboard to insight. Science, which can so easily become insular and near-sighted, needs that springboard, even if - like a shared birthday - it's just a hook to get the story started.

It's worth noting that Darwin was a great scientist precisely because he could make meticulous, minute observations of a single species - he wrote a whole book about earthworm digestion, for heaven's sake! - while also seeing the grand, universal, far-reaching forces that shape finch beaks, beetle shells, poodles and pigeons. It's not easy to make those linkages, in history or in science; sometimes art, literature, or music can give the roving mind a nudge in the right direction. As Gopnik notes in his book, 'there is no struggle between science and art': both are ways of understanding the world, and their strengths are complementary."

I agree heartily, though I would widen the scope of such "linkages" further.

There need not be struggle between science and any of the humanities, including - and this is the controversial inclusion - imaginative theology. The x-factor in these relationships is dogmatism. A rigid mindset stultifies ideology, and when science, philosophy or religion become dogmatic, they retard the human imagination and, with it, possibility.

Art Connect "Extraordinary Art Blog" Series

I'm honored to report my selection as the third interviewee for Art Connect's "Extraordinary Art Blog" series. Read my interview with Managing Director Peter Cowling here.

Art Connect is a relatively new website that provides the valuable service of reviewing and cataloging art blogs. The blog reviews are terrifically helpful and the interview series is so far excellent. From the Art Connect site:

"In the process of compiling over 100 art blog profiles, and starting what will be an ongoing survey of the art blog scene, we accumulated a whole range of questions we wanted to investigate further. As a part of this series, we have explored the extraordinary growth of an art blog with Ruben Natal-San Miguel, from ARTmostfierce, how to produce extraordinary art critique with Catherine Spaeth, and providing extraordinarily cohesive coverage with Christopher Reiger from Hungry Hyaena."

The interview with Catherine Speath is of particular interest to me, given her defense of accessible, yet rigorous art writing. She writes,

"I do, however, take very strong objection to what you are referring to as 'dumbing down' when it is relied upon as uncritical fodder for the market. For this reason there is a very important role for the academy and the museum to uphold a place for scholarly research. But I have also seen some atrocious academic writing, produced by galleries especially, that relies upon a history of philosophical thought to dress something up for the market."

Ms. Spaeth also discusses the issue of online plagarism, particularly as it relates to bloggers. This issue is very important, and I hope that it will engender more conversation.

I encourage readers to check out the Art Connect interview series.

"Art and the Commons"

An essay I wrote for Hungry Hyaena in January of 2007, "Creative Restraint and Responsibility: Artists, Documentarians and Copyright," was referenced by Chris Desser in a lecture given at The California College of Arts on March 10, 2008. Desser is a fellow at On the Commons, an organization dedicated to encouraging cross-disciplinary engagement and an open-source approach to all resources, be they natural, artistic, or intellectual.

The text of Desser's lecture, entitled "Art and the Commons," is reprinted on both the On The Commons and GreenMuseum websites. It's worth a read, particularly on the heels of my previous post, about finding our way back to wonder via a more integrated approach.

Excerpted from "Art and the Commons":

"It is perhaps an inescapable part of the human condition to 'divide up the world' into mental categories. The categories may be immensely useful, but they are also partial and misleading. Philosopher and scientist Jacob Brownowski has described the process of science—the process by which we gain empirical knowledge—as that of decoding a 'completely connected world.' This decoding requires dividing that completely connected world into what is relevant and what is not relevant to the matter at hand, in order to create a meaningful context for study. But this division, Bronowski warned, does violence to the actual, organic nature of the real world. We must always bear in mind that we are 'certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that [we] have made about dividing the world into the relevant and irrelevant is in fact a lie.'"