Monday, May 24, 2010

[Yasmin_discussions] International Collaboration in the Sciences and Humanities

jean baptiste

thanks for your many thoughtful responses on our collaboration discussion

you state:


The engineering context of many historical art/sciences conferences
and projects can be a political terrain and thus inform a specific
discourse or mode of production. I am thinking here for instance of
militaro-artistic collusion in the 50s and 60s in conferences, events
and places such as Macy (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences ), 69th Regiment Armory
(E.A.T. http://www.9evenings.org/ ), Rand + Lacma (
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=706 ), JPL (
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) and CAVS ( http://cavs.mit.edu/ ).


i want to pick up on your connected comment about including the
humanities in this
discussion about collaboration- as you mention IMERA is hosting residencies
of artists and scholars in the humanities= patrick mccray

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/people/person.php?account_id=14

who is organising the imera workshop on collaboration is a historian of
science, but he is particularly interested at the moment in how popular culture
cross couples to the techno sciences:

he says

Currently, my work focuses on the the creation of a national research
infrastructure (with Cyrus Mody and Hyungsub Choi) and the activities
of various pro-technology futurist movements. This work, which is
sponsored by the NSF, will be part of my next book project which
explores the intersection of technology, culture, and political
thought in American culture at the end of the 20th century.

his comment above about pro-technology futurist movements connects to your
comment about how EAT, CAVS, and indeed leonardo were created in a period
of techno futurism/optimism= a period that dissipated very much in the
1970s partially as a cultural push back during the vietnam war when
the military scientific industrial
complex was seen as being allied to to the destructive forces at work=
this period
was of course also

the art-science discussion sometimes doesnt bring in the humanities=
which is a booming
area with what are called now the digital humanities, and scholars in
the humanities
are key to understanding collaboration cultures and methodologies

http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/about/

and see for instance the
high throughput humanities conference

http://hth.eccs2010.eu/

collaboration cultures/methodologies vary within the areas of science,
engineering,
arts and humanities= and when collaborations occur between these areas the
issues of underlying values -in in particular techno-philia vs techno-phonic
outlooks need to be made explicit

and there are very different regional differences ( cf the differing
attitudes to
genetically engineered foods in different countries, or the differing attitudes
of different green movements to technological solutions )

roger


an other issue is the time allocated= most residencies are so short that they
are barely enough for the collaborators to begin to explore the shared
interests


That's a crucial issue, usually related to the impossibility to build
a "deliverable" that can be "monetized" and hence sustain a sabbatical
for bot the artists and the scientists involved. In addition, and in
relation with the topic of "Doing and Studying International
Collaboration in the Sciences, Arts and the Humanities ", usually
Humanists are missing from this equation and it is very agreable to
see that IMERA for instance is hosting historians and philosophers :)

Jean-Baptiste

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jean-Baptiste LABRUNE <labrune@media.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, May 20, 2010 at 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] : International Collaboration in the
Sciences and Humanities

Jean-Baptiste

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanbaptisteparis/
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