Wednesday, July 11, 2012

[Yasmin_discussions] consilience and trans-disciplinary bridges as enablors

Pau

let me pick on your topic of 'bridges' and consilience

like you i think E O Wilson's concept of consilience turned out
not to be very productive and rather totalising - am not very familiar
with Gould's " conscilience of
equal attention"

but yes- one of the way to enable science/engineering to arts/design/humanities
is to find these bridging concepts

i have been reading recently in the field of translation studies and have
found some interesting ideas- for instance of 'travelling concepts=
but also the idea that un-translatability exists and one needs methods that
are well established in cross cultural translation and now interdisciplinary
translation ( or inter-media)

there are bridges that are technological- when artists and scientists use
the same tools then they start have overlapping epistemologies etc

paul fishwick in his white paper looks at how gaming technologies are such a
collaboration enabling tool

http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/abstracts/learning-computing-through-game-experiences/

one area that is fertile right now is the science of complex networks which
has been found to be productive across the science and humanities

I do think that we need to start being more rigorous in discussing
collaboration - as depending on the context ( interdisciplinary, multi
disciplinary
and trans-disciplinary) there need to be differing approaches- but certainly
collaboration as a learned skill is a bridging problem also

it would perhaps be interesting to inventory these bridge areas that are
currently enabling collaboration between science/engineering with arts/design

here in marseille the area of history and philosophy of science is rather
strong and i have found some of the discussions interesting especially
since history and philosophy of science is very disconnected from the doing
of science in general - at lunch today we were discussing meta-mathematics
and meta-philosophy !

Roger


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pau Alsina <palsinag@uoc.edu>

Roger,

> In the book by allen repko on interdisciplinary theory and practice
> one of the things he does is discuss how different kinds of scientists
> have different cultures
> eg observational sciences like astronomy
> vs experimental sciences like chemistry
> vs field sciences like ecology
> vs mathematical sciences like complex networks
>
> they are all sciences but in fact the scientists have different practices.
> does it make sense to combine them all or should we create
> translation methods between culturs of practice ?
>
> in arts and humanities we also find similar variations on how
> the discipline deals with information about the world
> and intervening in the world= time based arts differ
> from architecture etc
>

You mean creating "bridges"? I believe, as Loius Bec says, that art itself
is a rare transformational agent that would do that function.

Those other "methodological" or "epistemological" bridges are really hard
to imagine as a universal set of tools. But of course there are
"practice-based-theories" that migth prove better bridges than others. This
would lead into another deep philosophical debate....(that I also enjoy a
lot, but migth be a whole new focus of discussion)

You migth not agree with Edgar O. Wilson's concept of consilience as it has
proved to be reductionist, and at the end not taking seriously all fields
of knowledge equally. But do you think that something not just theoretical
could came out from what Stephen Jay Gould says about "conscilience of
equal attention"? Are there already methodology or epistemology tools
coming out from that? Some techniques or strategies for "jumping together"
as Gould says?

Just wondering...



>
> Anway i know that the FECYT report and the process that led to
> it was very useful in spain= as are other efforts internationally
>
> for instance in the USA the mellon foundation has just funded a major
> project to promote integrating arts practice into the research university
>
> http://artsengine.umich.edu/
>
> ArtsEngine National has been awarded a $500,000, 3.5 year grant from
> the Andrew W. Mellon
> Foundation to create the first comprehensive guide to best practices
> in the integration of arts
> practice in U.S. research universities. To be published in Fall 2015,
> the guide is to identify models,
> obstacles, implementation strategies, costs, and impact on students
> and faculty as well as on
> research, practice, and teaching in other knowledge areas.
>
> With this award, the Mellon Foundation has enabled the national
> network to make major progress
> toward our mission of integrating arts practice into the research
> university.
>
> This activity of course is a heads on collision between the "studio
> based" artists practice
> versus the research model for the arts ( and all the debate on to PhD
> or not to PhD )
>


As you already know In Europe there is the Studiolabs innitaitive
http://www.studiolabproject.eu/ that migth work quite in the same way, am i
right?


Pau
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--
Roger Malina
I am in France at the moment
33(0)6 80 45 94 47

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Leonardo EBOOK on Arts Humanities and Complex Networks
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007S0UA9Q

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Aug 5-9 If you would like to be invited contact me.
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