Is Electromagnetism a Fascist Theory?

Unfortunately I'm not joking.

Last week I attended the 2012 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in Sydney.  The final presentation was by a distinguished American curator, Dr Helen Molesworth, on the work of Josiah McElheny, an American artist who uses traditional glass-blowing techniques to make large, more or less abstract sculptures.   Dr Molesworth's presentation was well-crafted and very interesting and engaging.  McElheny has referenced science, in particular cosmology, in his more recent work, and towards the end of her presentation Dr Molesworth referred to the possibility of a "Theory of Everything", and said she didn't want a Theory of Everything: it would be fascist.

At the drinks and nibblies afterwards I asked Dr Molesworth if the theory of electromagnetism was fascist.  She said she didn't know: she didn't have enough information.  This startled me, and I said that the name "Theory of Everything" was a physicists' in-joke (referring as it does to a single theory that would bring together gravity and quantum mechanics), and that it certainly wouldn't produce a theory of the psyche or a theory of art.  I also tried to say that the value of a scientific theory was to be found through observation, deduction and explanatory power, not political attitudes, but I don't think I explained myself well; she disagreed with what she heard me as saying.

I chose electromagnetism as it is a successful example in physics of the unification of previously disparate phenomena, and it would be part of a Theory of Everything, but I didn't explain this during our brief conversation.

I don't want to make too much of this, as it was a noisy environment and not a good time for serious discussion.  I hope that we were talking at cross-purposes, but surely even to consider that the theory of electromagnetism might be fascist is to be grievously confused about the nature of theories in physics.

I was regrettably reminded of one of the silliest episodes in post-modernism, the (by now widely quoted) statement by the otherwise respected feminist scholar Luce Irigaray about Einstein's equation E = mc²:

Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.

I have seen attempted defences of this sort of writing along the lines that although the people writing like this appear to be using scientific terms, they actually have different meanings in mind for the words.  I have not seen the source for the quotation from Irigaray above, but it is hard to give it any reasonable interpretation.

I did find a related article by Irigaray, "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?", Cultural Critique No.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 73-88.  In this Irigaray comments on a range of sciences, from psychoanalysis through biology to mathematics and physics, and by the time she gets to mathematics it is clear that she is using terminology from the subject without understanding it.

There is of course room for a serious study of what scientists do, what biases they bring to their work, who funds it, what questions are studied and what are not, and so forth, and indeed many scientists themselves are very much concerned about these questions.  But statements like Irigaray's had the effect of bringing the whole area of so-called science studies into disrepute, and calling physical theories "fascist" does not help.

Transdisciplinary imaging

(Long post)

At the weekend I attended a two-day conference in Sydney, the First International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture.  The conference title was "New Imaging: Transdisciplinary strategies for art beyond the new media".  The conference chairs were Su Baker (Victorian College of the Arts) and Paul Thomas (College of Fine Arts, University of NSW).  The conference was held at Artspace in Wolloomooloo with support from a number of universities.

There were over twenty presentations.  The "international" part of the title was justified in that several of the presenters, including all three keynote speakers, were from overseas.  Altogether it seemed to be a fairly high-powered group, and I felt a little out of my depth (though I wasn't presenting).  I am relatively new to this sort of discussion, so in my comments I may well have missed the point or misunderstood things.

All the presenters were either artists or people somewhere along the spectrum art historian, art theorist, cultural theorist, and the artists tended to be theorists as well.  I had the impression that there are certain books and articles everybody there had read; the conference was part of a specific discourse despite its wide-ranging brief.  Although science was mentioned in the conference title, no scientists presented as such, though Oron Catts (of SymbioticA in Perth) must be part-scientist, and a couple of the other artists have collaborated closely with scientists.

Rather than summarising the entire conference I mention the three keynote addresses and then try to indicate some common themes.

The opening presentation "Hyperskindexicality" was by Jens Hauser, an artist, writer and curator based in Paris; he gave a wide-ranging discussion of biological art, that is, art that uses living materials such as bacteria, skin cells, or genetically modified organisms.  Jens broached a number of themes that recurred throughout the conference, including "indexicality" (after C.S. Peirce) and notions of representation, the nature of scientific visualisation, and the relation of "new media" to older media.

The second keynote presentation was by Roy Ascott from Plymouth University in England; Roy was physically at another conference in Norway and presented (before breakfast his time) via Skype and PowerPoint slides under the title "The Syncretic Dialogues".  Roy is a visionary pioneer of cybernetic art, telematic art and art around the idea of complex systems; he has extended this to "technoetic arts", to bring in things like telekinesis, shamanic healing and a trans-human "field of consciousness".  I felt that most of the audience could not follow Roy down the New Age path.  Roy indicated five artists of the modern era as significant: Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and the much less well-known Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who created a number of distinct personas, or "heteronyms", each of which is almost an independent author with a distinct writing style and set of concerns.  Roy concluded "the most urgent eco-necessity is the re-design of ourselves".

The final keynote presentation was by Anne Ring Petersen from Denmark, on "The transdisciplinary potential of remediated painting".   Anne discussed three artists who in her view are extending painting into new areas: Thorbjørn Lausten (Denmark), Katharina Grosse (Germany) and David Batchelor (England).  In the works shown, only one of these artists (Grosse) actually uses paint: Batchelor makes sculptural constructions out of lightboxes or brightly coloured plastic objects and Lausten makes abstracted modernist visualisations of scientific data on computer displays.  Grosse uses paint on a large scale, covering long corridors or large spaces with bright swirls, which extend over furniture or other things in the space. The paper brought to the fore the notion of "discipline" and the extent to which the use of specific materials should determine it.

I will only discuss one presentation on a specific artwork, that by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders (Sydney) on their extraordinary "Zwischenräume".  This consisted of two machines or robots (not humaniform), each mounted behind a plasterboard wall.  Each was equipped with a movable eye (a camera surrounded by LED lights) and a hammer.  The robots could move around the wall, and when they got bored they could smash holes in it, to make what they were seeing more interesting for them.  The noises of the hammering also served as a communication system between the two robots.  This piece builds on earlier work by Rob on "curious agents" (computer software agents that exchanged virtual artworks), but has brought the agents out into the world and equipped them with the ability to act on it.

I will now try to identify some of the themes running through the conference.

Firstly, there was general agreement that the term "new media" is no longer appropriate, though it wasn't clear what term or terms to replace it with.  The notion of "remediation" (as in the book by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin), where a newer medium always takes over ideas and conventions from earlier media, was much in evidence; a new medium is never completely new, at least in aesthetics and content.  In the context of "remediation" the terms "modulation" and "transduction" were tossed around quite a bit, but, as far as I heard, without any clear definitions.

The other part of the conference title concerned "transdisciplinarity".  There were two uses of the word "discipline", firstly referring to an artistic discipline such as painting (the paradigmatic artistic discipline), and secondly referring to an academic discipline.  Roy Ascott indicated that a combination of disciplines should produce something new, should transcend the originating disciplines.  I don't think any conclusion was reached about transdisciplinarity, but a related notion of "expanded" art forms came up frequently; thus Anne Ring Petersen used the phrase "expanded painting" in her talk.  The "expanded" works move away from the traditional materials of a specific artistic discipline, but still carry concerns of that discipline with them.  In a way this is the the other face of "new media": at least in the hype, the new media were claimed to abandon or repudiate the old media (the idea debunked by Bolter and Grusin), whereas the works of an "expanded" discipline are still considered to belong to the originating discipline.

A third fairly large and unresolved theme revolved around scientific visualisation and related questions of representation.  Jens Hauser opened this up with a discussion of so-called "DNA fingerprinting", which is a technique that takes DNA, cuts it up by so-called restriction enzymes, and spreads the results out in a two-dimensional pattern on a gel.  The process is quite complicated and indirect, so the name "fingerprinting" is questionable.  Jens introduced the work of the American artist Paul Vanouse, who has used the "fingerprinting" technique to produce patterns on the gel that form things like the copyright sign.

It is clear that in many cases scientific visualisation is a partial and indirect representation of a complex situation; I don't think scientists would disagree with this statement.  With one or two of the conference presentations I wasn't clear if scepticism about such visualisations was aimed at the scientific use of them, or at the popular and journalistic reduction implying that such visualisation is somehow akin to direct perception.   I would have liked to have heard from scientists as to how they use visualisations, especially when they are very indirect: are visualisations just more or less informal guides as to where a detailed analysis should be carried out, or can a visualisation function in itself as scientific evidence?  What role does the more or less unconscious and unanalysed operation of the pattern-matching abilities of our visual system play in science?  Lucia Ayala (Germany), an art historian who has been collaborating with an astrophysicist, came fairly close to this question but did not actually discuss it in her presentation.

An area that only came up in a minor way was the implications of machine vision.  Linda Matthews and Gavin Perin described a project which, as I understood it, was to provide a building with a cladding so that it would show up as an un-building-like image on a webcam that streams images of Circular Quay to tourism websites.  Kathy Cleland discussed so-called "augmented reality", where symbolic data is overlaid on a view of the real world; an example is the mobile phone application Google Goggles.  Again the hype has got ahead of the reality: if the overlaid data comes from a commercial provider like Google, the data will have a commercial bias.  In this context, someone said something along the lines that "machine vision is uninterpreted", but surely this is not true.  My small digital camera recognises faces and adjusts the focus accordingly, and the robots of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders are even assigning value to what they see.  Petra described the robots as "voyeuristic": they are seeing for their own pleasure.

Another area that also only came up in a minor way in the conference was the "executable" aspect of new media: computer programs do things in a way that only has very tenuous precedents in art (and that is not to be confused with notions of "performativity").  Again the work of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders shows this executable aspect in a striking way.  Mitchell Whitelaw brought up the lack of attention to the executable aspect of new media in the conference, and was fairly answered by Paul Thomas to the effect that this aspect was discussed in the re:live conference on media art history held in Melbourne in 2009, of which Paul was one of the organisers.  Behind this, though, was the feeling expressed by some conference participants that there is a divide or "incommensurability" between discussions of new media art and mainstream contemporary art.  Not everyone agreed with this, but I have a sense of such a divide; maybe it would be a true transdisciplinary project to bridge it.

Although I have mentioned some things that were not much discussed at the conference, it is not clear where they would have fitted in, as we already had two full and very interesting days.  There are many things I haven't mentioned, from Edward Colless's discussion of miraculous images such as the face of Jesus on the Veil of Veronica, through to Mitchell Whitelaw's identification of a trend away from the bland homogeneity of computer and TV screens to site-specific, often home-made and low-resolution, variations on the theme of an array of pixels.  And Daniel Mafe's artwork, which moves seamlessly from abstract painting to visually similar material created procedurally as abstract animations.  And Ian Gwilt's discussion of "compumorphic" art, which draws on computer-inspired forms in the way that biomorphic art draws on natural forms.  And much more!  Many thanks to Su and Paul and all the other people involved!

Super Human

I have just spent two days at the Super Human conference in Melbourne, organised by the Australian Network for Art and Technology. The full title of the event was "Super Human: Revolution of the Species Symposium". It had a focus on the human body, in the context of interactions between art and science, and is part of a suite of events, including an exhibition at RMIT Gallery and the "re:live" conference on media art history.

The conference had quite a strong international representation. The first keynote speaker was Barbara Maria Stafford from Chicago, whose mission is to build bridges between the humanities, especially visual culture, and neuro- and cognitive science. Her talk was wide-ranging, but one of its themes was "slow looking", or paying mindful attention to something outside oneself. Automatic mechanisms of perception and the like have been much studied, but deliberately focused attention has apparently not.

Quite a strong theme was prostheses, extensions of the body (in various senses) and devices to help people with disabilities. Another keynote speaker was Ju Gosling from the U.K., who is a passionate campaigner for the rights of disabled people (she uses a wheelchair herself), and would argue at least in part that the normal/impaired dichotomy is to be avoided; we all have our problems. Not that she is against medical intervention; indeed the opposite. However, she pointed out that so far replacement hip joints, for example, are not as good as the natural ones; in general the technical substitutes available now are inferior. (The artificial lenses I have in my eyes after cataract operations may be an exception. I am much less short-sighted than I was before the operations.) Ju was also strongly opposed to the popular idea that medical science will soon solve all our problems, and so we don't have to worry about the disabled, as soon they will be "fixed".

After Ju we heard a rather wide-eyed and visionary talk from Natasha Vita-More (U.S.A./U.K.), who doesn't have any doubt that the combination of "nano-bio-info-cogno-neuro" will solve all our problems, and improve on our natural bodies. In particular she very much likes the idea of extended life spans.

Another talk in this area was from Junichi Ushiba (Japan), a scientist who has been working with a practical brain-machine interface device. It allowed a quadriplegic with essentially no limb movement to control an avatar in Second Life purely by thinking (imagining movement). But its most widespread potential use is in allowing stroke victims, who typically lose control of one side of their body, to regain some function on the affected side. This work is tied up with the body image of the participants, which is often damaged after the stroke.

All this was related to another theme that emerged, that of "embodied consciousness". How important is feeling and moving to thinking? The consensus appeared to be that our sensory-motor systems are indeed very important to thinking. The role of the emotions also came up.

There were two talks on scientific visualisation. Dolores Steinman (Canada) talked about the different representations of the same data (in this case on blood flow) required by physicists, engineers and medical practitioners; the different requirements are due to training and disciplinary culture as much as anything else. Tami Spector (U.S.A.), who is an organic chemist, talked on "nanoaesthetics", about the visualisation of atomic-scale structures, through conventional chemical structure diagrams, and through images obtained by techniques like atomic force microscopy. These images are derived in an indirect fashion and are not comparable with photographs, but we tend to accept them as such. There is a very good question as to what they actually represent.

Svenja Kratz, a student at QUT in Brisbane, talked about her artistic work involving human cells, and the ethical issues that arose. It is apparently possible to buy cell lines, in Svenja's case cancer cells derived originally from an anonymous 11-year-old girl, and use them, even feed them to ants, without ethics clearance. But when Svenja wanted to obtain cells from volunteers (who were keen to be involved), an elaborate ethics clearance process was needed. Svenja said that her own views on ethical matters had changed considerably as a result of her experiences. She also devoted some of her art works to creating an imagined identity for the 11-year-old from whom the cancer cells originally came.

Kathryn Hoffmann (U.S.A.) talked about some extraordinary displays that used to be seen in anatomy museums, essentially artworks made out of bones and other body parts. There is a link here to the nineteenth century practice of mortuary photography, photographs of dead people (even children) taken and used as mementos. The anatomy collections discussed by Kathryn are now very largely inaccessible and placed in storage; Kathryn is campaigning for some to be re-opened. The public treatment of death oscillates over time, and Kathryn thought a public focus on death was coming back. The question of respect for the dead was raised. Kathryn said that she thought the present treatment, stuck in boxes in a warehouse, was more disrespectful than any public display would be.

There was a lot more, including the phenomenology of avatars and virtual bodies, using software that can read faces to detect emotions, a project from Sydney University to make a figure with artificial touch-sensitive skin (how should a robot react to being touched?), the design of "medical jewellery", that is devices that serve medical purposes as well as looking attractive, and so on. Many of these topics were introduced by artists discussing their own practices.

The final talk was by Paul Brown (U.K./Australia), who had the task of summing up the conference. He outlined three possibilities for engagement of art and science. In the first, an artist appropriates scientific ideas for artistic ends, often treating the science in a critical or hostile manner. Conversely a scientific group may use artists as designers to make their own scientific work look good, essentially for PR purposes. The third and most desirable engagement is a true collaboration, where artists are involved early in the project, both sides contribute on an equal footing, and both sides benefit. We heard about several such successful collaborations during the conference.

Most of the speakers were women, an outcome apparently not particularly planned by the organisers. I did hear a rather acid comment (from a woman) that women were playing out their traditional role of handmaidens to someone else, in this case (male) scientists. I don't think this was fair, as in many cases it seemed that the artists in a collaboration were taking the lead or were equal partners. Also among the six or so (self-identified) scientists and engineers who spoke, two were women, and at least some of the (self-identified) artists obviously had a high degree of technical knowledge. And a substantial proportion of biologists (in particular) are female. The divide male scientist/female artist may still exist, but it is getting pretty blurred. My take on all this is simply that there are a lot of successful female artists.

It appears from the conference that just now Australia is a pretty good place for art-science engagement.