Beyond Creativity: Art-Science Collaboration Today What’s New? Why Now? What’s Next?

Public Lecture + Reception
Friday, November 16, 2012
4 to 6 pm

Almost as soon as digital computers were developed, artists began to appropriate them for cultural purposes. Gaming, social media and digital media are now industries that grew out of the work of pioneers in art and technology. In recent years we have seen artists investing in scientific fields as diverse as biology, genetic engineering, ecology, complex network science and complexity science, the behavioral and cognitive sciences, the neurosciences, astronomy and space science. Building on ideas developed in the context of the US National Science Foundation funded Network for Science Engineering Art and Design (SEAD), Malina will discuss what is new in the emerging and rapidly growing field of art-science collaboration, and examine some of the obstacles and opportunities that are appearing. Through SEAD, a hundred teams internationally are currently contributing to a study that will be submitted to the US National Foundation in June 2013. The title of the talk, “Beyond Creativity”, is a reference to the 2003 US National Academy study “Beyond Productivity” that was chaired by the late William J. Mitchell with Alan S. Inouye, and Marjory S. Blumenthal.

Intimate Art-Science: Open Data, Big Data, Citizen Science and the Crisis in Representation

Seminar
Thursday, November 15 2012
4 to 5:30 pm

Malina will explain his own experience as an astronomer participating in the transformation of astronomy during the 1980s when astronomical data started to become public. This period was followed by a dramatic increase in available data and an epistemological transformation. Similar transitions have been occurring in many fields of study, as well as in business, government and medicine. These developments have foregrounded the difficulties in how to represent this kind of big data, not only in the sciences but also in the arts and humanities: big data is not just more data. Malina will argue that this represents as profound a problem in representation as was confronted in the development of perspective in the Renaissance, and provides a natural field for collaboration between the arts and humanities and science and engineering.

Location for both events:
Hexagram Resource Centre, Concordia University, 1515 Saint Catherine St. W., Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, Room 11.705, Montreal, QC

Biography

Roger F. Malina is an art-science researcher, astronomer and editor. He is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Technology and Professor of Physics at the University of Texas, Dallas, where he is developing an Art-Science R and D and Experimental Publishing program. He is a Directeur de Recherche of the CNRS and former Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence at Aix-Marseille University. His scientific specialty is in space instrumentation and big data problems; he was the Principal Investigator for the NASA Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been involved for 25 years with the Leonardo organization whose mission is to promote and make visible work that explores the interaction of the arts and sciences and the arts and new technologies. Since 1982 he has been the Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. More recently he has helped set up the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMERA) and is co-chair of the ASIL (Arts, Sciences, Instrumentation and Language) Initiative of IMERA, which hosts artists in residence in scientific research laboratories of the Marseille region.

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