Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
David Edwards (review of Artscience by Amy Ione in Leonardo)

Edwards espouses the cross pollination of science and the arts with a strategy he calls "artscience." His book is a portfolio of lectures, though more a collection of cheers and anecdotes than of thought out methods and illustrative examples, but he gets close to perceptual thinking in a few of his examples. Edwards suggests that "scientific revolutions" (a la the inevitable Kuhn) come from what we call perceptual thinking, as when Kepler "made his breakthrough scientific discoveries in astronomy by optimizing what he viewed as the harmony of celestial bodies with musical notes" (4). Again, though, Edwards is sitting in the art vs. science box playing mashup when both art and science need an education in the biology of perception.

What Kepler did was look at the motion of heavenly bodies with a set of perceptual schema in place. The ability to recognize, mark and utilize perceptual schema across domains is a hallmark of perceptual thinking. Rhythm and harmony are such schema and the idea of the dance of heaven is ancient and colorful. Edwards may be overstating the importance of music to Kepler's work, but then Edwards lumps writing in with art, reasonably enough, since his divisions of knowledge fall along institutional lines. While good writing, especially fiction and poetry, rely upon perception for engagement, it is not directly perceptual the way listening to music is. (This is actually wrong, as the design of books has a great deal to do with the way we read them.) Writing is mediated in a way that a group of people finding a shared rhythm on a bunch of pots and pans is not.

In any case, while scientific revolutions are great, there are more fundamental problems that could be addressed with pedagogies designed to exercise perceptual thinking. Web pages, zines and clumsy design (webpagesthatsuck.com ?)...

Edward's definition of "art," which comes close to ours? - "a process of thought that is guided by images, is sensual and intuitive, often thrives in uncertainty [Keats' "negative capability"], is 'true' in that it seems to reflect or elucidate or interpret what we experience in our lives, and is expressive of nature in its complexity, a basis of entertainment and culture" (6).

"Among the most formidable of conceptual barriers standing in the way of idea translation is that between the arts and sciences. Those who cross artscience territory... sometimes experience loneliness, institutional discouragement, and even fear; but having overcome the resistance and explored this novel territory between the arts and sciences, they often find it so much to their liking that they never leave" (10). These are "conceptual" barriers? Emotional, more like; these barriers, if challenged, cause revolutionary upheaval. That's why there's so much apathy, mostly, but resistance, too. What we're talking about here may in some ways actually defy our "genius" (Hoffman) for perceptual thinking because it's, initially at least, so messy.

But Edwards is right, I think, that something like artscience is needed. "The consequence" of not practicing artscience, he claims, "is that we're not expressing what we are actually thinking and we're not teaching what we need to learn!" (13) As a flat statement this doesn't wash because, as Arnheim says, there's no thinking without perception. We don't need classrooms to teach perceptual thinking; we need them to harness it and apply it to problems.

If, however, artscience could in ways be institutionalized, barriers could be moved aside, if not removed completely (13).

Edwards has tried, founding "idea accelerators": "The goal of an idea accelerator is... to find ways to move ideas more readily over interdisciplinary barriers, which... are generally artscience barriers" (17).

Dianna Dabby - at Olin College - electrical engineering - chaos theory - strange attractor (28). Dabby was a concert pianist who studied electrical engineering at an advanced level in order to compose new music.

Edwards' artscience ideas strike me as a rich man's game. And Edwards, as he makes clear, can afford to bring together prodigies, geniuses and whiz kids of all ages. Which is great, and more power to him. What we really need are strategies that might work on the budget at a state university.

The example of Julio Ottino, artist and mathematician. He was interested in the math "of how certain fluids mixed," and through his painting came to a breakthrough insight. Mixing fluids was like mixing paint: "Mixing needed to be understood in geometrical terms. Chaotic stretching and folding of fluid elements--like definable pieces of dough--led to effective mixing. Juilo saw this first through his painting--then did a fluid experiment to prove it" (36).

Institutionally, Ottino was hired to teach fluid mixing; "he was not asked to teach his creativity" (38). Perhaps creativity is not so much taught as nurtured. I think it passes on by mimicry. Mimicry trains the senses. (Could that be true?)

The case of Wolf Peter Fehlhammer, organo-metallic chemist who became director of the Deutsches Museum, a venerable science museum. He brought artists into the museum "to challenge and disturb, to show the complexity of art and science and the dialog that must take place between the two" (63).

In The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandelbrot writes, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, and bark is not smooth" (71).

Tensegrity and Don Ingber - taking an architecture class, learning about "tensegrity" (tensile integrity) and applying this idea to cell structure, about which he was creatively wrong. Tensegrity is the opposite of compression integrity, where buildings press down on themselves to hold themselves together while tensegrity uses the tensle force of the materials to hold itself together. Buckminster Fuller; artist Kenneth Snelson.