Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but 
with due respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic 
twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society 
could believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's 
winter fires, it seems that much greater things than an academic field 
could "overheat" and "melt down."

And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively 
rich. The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian 
floods of 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically 
new: harbingers of the present.

Why can't deal with what's all around us?

Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. 
Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is 
separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present 
circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the 
other. Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.

Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications 
and consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe 
fundamental research into the constitution of twenty-first century 
authoritarian racist capitalism is now going on in the US White House 
and in the vast actor-network of which it is a part. This is highly 
consequential research into the denial of the present.

The three-field formation of Science-Art-Politics would be much stronger 
than authoritarianism: more robust, more dynamic, able to integrate 
vital energies for transformative work in the present. Why not make a 
vast social movement for urgent times, instead of another specialized 
niche for all eternity?

thanks for your reflections,

Brian

PS - As the below shows, you yourself are arguing, not for a fusion, but 
for two "complementary" disciplines. Why not add the third essential 
one? Because the window of opprtunity is short: in ten years, if nothing 
changes, "politics" will be replaced by "the military" as the necessary 
partner in any transformative process.

> 4) Closing the experiential gap between rigorous scientific enquiry and 
> subjective appraisal
>
> Through the reconciliation of scientific method and subjective 
> experience ArtScience can contribute to efforts to close the 
> experiential gap between the abstractions of scientific enquiry and the 
> experience of everyday life. ArtScience can do for science what art does 
> so well for itself: turn abstract ideas into lived experiences. Here we 
> see the unique intersection at work of two methodological 
> universes considered to be ‘incommensurable’ [7], where in fact they are 
> complementary and mutually reinforcing modes of understanding and 
> experience.
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