Making Science Intimate

Re Thinking Cyberculture

Artists and Scientists collaborating on

the burning issues of our time

Roger F Malina
Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence

November 2009 ABCyber

We know

• That we have built a

civilisation that is
unsustainable
 We need the “hard humanities”
• Four hundred years ago
Galileo Galilei “invented”
the telescope
• 150 years ago Darwin
published his “Origin of
the Species”

• ? Developing the new

culture that will allow us to
create a sustainable
civilisation ?
 The « hard » humanities
• We face rapid cultural change in order to create sustainable
societies
• Over the next 50 years we must re engineer our cities, our
energy and water systems, our agricultural ecologies
• History, Anthropology, Arts, but also the « social sciences »,
the arts and humanities…..
• How to re design the « human dimensions of the sciences »
• The Arts and Humanities are part of the tool kit for survival
• The « hard » humanities: descriptive > proscriptive
 We know “landscape artists” but
what is a “Climate Artist” ?
1904 2004
Cezanne: Mont St Victoire.........Sabine Raaf: Translator II
We know the taste of water…………..………
But what is the song of CO2 ?
Char Davies……………Sarah Jane Pell
 Modern Science Doesnt Make
Common Sense
• Most knowledge about our world now comes
through scientific instruments
o Few people have experience of mediated senses
o Cyberculture: the human body with new sensuality

• Most of the world isnt on human scales

• Nano science
• Femto physics

• Our intuition, languages, metaphors, arts are

built training on the wrong data for survival
 Techno-Science as a Territory for
Artistic Experimentation
• Forming intuition on mediated sensory data
• Designing/Interacting with simulated systems
• Making sense of dense data, petabyte era
• Coupling the virtual world to the physical world

• Making Science Intimate

• Peoples Science
• Micro Science

• New Ontologies and Epistemologies

– New Intuitions,
» New Sensualities
 Why Collaborate and Network ?
• The burning issues of our times require us to work
differently

• The Hard Humanities require artists and scientists or

engineers to work together
– Coupling micro-science to cultural change

• Existing social networks re-enforce old approaches

and protect old values
– The tyranny of geography and personal history
– Our institutional structures reflect other ways of thinking that
created an unsustainable civilisation
The LEONARDO organisations and networks:
An evolving story….
• Leonardo an organisation founded in the 1960’s
– A generation of survivors of World War II
– Creation of new international science organisations
– A 1950 ‘social contract” between science and government

• Cultural appropriation of science and new technologies:

– The “case for art-science-technology interaction”

• The birth of “digital “ culture

– Success of the computer art pioneers
• R and D budgets of game/entertainment now driving technology
– But now we need RADICAL DIGITAL
 And now….?
• « Ask Not What the Sciences can do for the Arts…
Ask what the Arts can do for the Sciences¨….Roy
Ascott
– The « Strong Case » for art-science-technology interaction

• Enabling and Promoting the New Leonardos

– The mission of the Leonardo organisation and networks
– The individual as genius versus the team as genius
– The cultural transformation of networked collaborations
Leonardo Publications @ MITPRESS
30 books, 4/year
Leonardo Journals
Leonardo Electronic Almanac

eg: Art and Innovation

( XEROX PARC )

Immersed in Technology
(BANFF, Canada).
MA Moser/D MacLeod

Manovich: Language of New Media

Kac: Signs of Life: Art/Biology

DaCosta: Tactical Bio Media

 Leonardo Organisation activities since 1967
• Working Groups:
– Leonardo Education Forum
– Lovely Weather: Art and Climate Change
– Artists and Scientists in Times of War
• Workshops/Conferences:
– Mutamorphosis (extreme environments), LESS REMOTE
• Prizes and Awards
• Collaborations :
– ITACCUS Committee for Cultural Utilisation of Space,
– YASMIN mediterranean rim network
– REDCATSUR/LATAM new latin american network
– LASSI Leonardo Asian network
• …over 40 years we have promoted and documented the work
of over 6000 New Leonardos
Muliple Modes to Mediated Sensuality

• INTIMATE SCIENCE:
« ownership of the data
about ones own
environment »

• Peoples or Citizen
Science

• OPEN
OBSERVATORIES :
» distributed and open
science »
 « Open Observatories »
• The « RIGHT » to the data that exists about you
and your own environment
•
• Taking data about yourself and your own
environment
– A knowledge producing community OWNS the
knowledge
– Extended Senses, New Senses, Intimate Science
– Database Aesthetics: Re-Imagining data
• Open Observatories:
.
• The RIGHT to the data that exists about you and
your environment

• Micro-Science
o Micro Science is to the National Science Foundation
What Micro Credit is to the World Bank
“PRO-AM” Professional Amateurs

• Making science intimate

o Owning data about your own environment
o Science creating communities own their knowledge
o Building intution, language from mediated sensory
experience
o
• Science- Art Projects and Art-Science Projects
• Art driven driven science and engineering
• Science driven development of cultural artifacts
 The Sound of Trees Growing

• David Dunn (composer,

sound artist)
• Jim Crutchfield
( complexity scientist)

• Artist driven recording

of sounds of trees
growing led to research
project in the coupling
of ultrasound from
trees, beetles, forest
fire system dynamics
 The Sound of Thinking
Collaborations of nano scientist Jim Gimzewski and Artist
Victoria Vesna
• BLUE MORPH is an
interactive installation that
uses nanoscale images and
sounds derived from the
metamorphosis of a
caterpillar into a butterfly.

• Has led to a project on the

« sound of thinking »>
Gimzewski is able to
monitor the vibration of
neurons and convert to
sound
 Intimate Science
Pigeon Blog ( B Da Costa) Inside Outside Handbag (Katherine Moriwaki )
New Corporality; Physical, Virtual
Stelarc Marce li Antunez Roca
Immersion in Extreme Environments
Antarctica......Deserts…
Marco Peljham and Macrolab
Nano Intuition :
feeling molecules
Sommerer/Mignoneau
 Embedded in Peta-Data Sets
Donna Cox Ruth West
Weather Data Bases Protein Sequence Data
DATABASE AESTHETICS: Re Imagining the Sublime
People’s and Citizen’s Science

• Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti:

Indian People’s Science
Networks
• Srishti School, Bangalore
• Brazil Digital Culture projects
• Sergipe « Human Project »
o Humbi Umbi in Brazil

• UK Citizen’s Science groups

• Futuresonic

• Open Hardware, Hacker Culture,

Bricolabs….
Crowd-Sourcing
• Distributed Science

• BOINC : Berkeley
Open Infrastructure
Network Computing
o SETI@home search
for extraterrestial
intelligence
o climateprediction.net ,
climate modelling
o malariacontrol.net
 Philanthropy 2.0 and
« open innovation »
• Eg INNOCENTIVE
• Organisations can submit
problems for solution
• Together with award
incentive
• Over 300 problems solved
to date

• Problem solving
communities outside the
Academy
•
• Eg www.fundscience.org
 How
• Artists in Labs
• Scientists in Studios
• Town Scientists
• Micro Science funding
• Open sourcing of data about your own world
OPEN OBSERVATORIES

• Developing the ‘hard humanities’ to change the

content and direction of science
 Thanks

• www.olats.org
• www.leonardo.info

• rmalina@prontomail.com