Hip hop goes Owens

[AKA*NYC]

What examples would you give of successful science-art collaborations?

i know you're asking bsr but this is one of the better ones that comes to my mind with the caveat that handbags are the highest form of art available on today's market.

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/fiers/fiers1-9-01.asp

[doldrums]

^ Phew! I really needed an artist to tell me that, gasp, contemporary art is shit.

[BSR]

However, there are researchers who were surprised that the fish reacted to the music and are now working on a scientific publication based on the phenomena... so I can't say knowledge was entirely pushed to the side.

Sure, but the research is still extrinsic here, where it should have been a proper part of Greaud's work.

What examples would you give of successful science-art collaborations?

Good question... i don't know. But here is a start, it seems: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/artscienceartists.html

[trentk]

Good question... i don't know. But here is a start, it seems: http://www.thamesandhudson.com/artscienceartists.html

Thanks for the list, I've actually been looking for connections between science/math and art lately and have been having trouble finding interesting ones. Too often, it seems like art just takes something from science/math (a microscope image, something sublime from astrophysics, some taxonomically strange specimen, an exotic topological structure etc..) and says "isn't this beautiful?". Or, art functions didactically and makes a scientific/mathematical concept easier to understand via visualization or concrete instantiation, but doesn't discover anything new. I guess I'm more interested in things like: an exploration of thought experiments in science (schroedinger's cat, einstein chasing a beam of light, maxwell's demon etc..) and how art can contribute to better thought experiments or art that (however ambiguously) anticipates scientific developments and/or displays properties similar to those in scientific concepts (Bohr was fascinated with Cubist Paintings and connected them with quantum physics, there's a neuroscientist or maybe neuroaesthetician named Semir Zeki who thinks “. . . artists are neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them and reaching interesting but unspecified conclusions about the organisation of the brain”, some romantic composers were composing intuitively and their compositions display interesting mathematical structure that mathematicians hadn't discovered at the time, islamic tile patterns explored symmetries that were only much later mathematically formalized in group theory etc...).

[BSR]

Thanks for the list, I've actually been looking for connections between science/math and art lately and have been having trouble finding interesting ones. Too often, it seems like art just takes something from science/math (a microscope image, something sublime from astrophysics, some taxonomically strange specimen, an exotic topological structure etc..) and says "isn't this beautiful?". Or, art functions didactically and makes a scientific/mathematical concept easier to understand via visualization or concrete instantiation, but doesn't discover anything new. I guess I'm more interested in things like: an exploration of thought experiments in science (schroedinger's cat, einstein chasing a beam of light, maxwell's demon etc..) and how art can contribute to better thought experiments or art that (however ambiguously) anticipates scientific developments and/or displays properties similar to those in scientific concepts (Bohr was fascinated with Cubist Paintings and connected them with quantum physics, there's a neuroscientist or maybe neuroaesthetician named Semir Zeki who thinks “. . . artists are neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them and reaching interesting but unspecified conclusions about the organisation of the brain”, some romantic composers were composing intuitively and their compositions display interesting mathematical structure that mathematicians hadn't discovered at the time, islamic tile patterns explored symmetries that were only much later mathematically formalized in group theory etc...).

we totally agree on this. same could be said of philosophy which either seems to be a mere paraphrase of science (particularly true in the field of neurosciences today for instance) or to treat scientific thought as a source for very bad, vague and useless metaphors (illustrations are varied, see for instance the well-known case of the pathetic uses of the Gödel incompleteness results for 1st order arithmetic).

[mike]

science -> life -> art

[BSR]

science -> life -> art

thanks this is very helpful

[trentk]

same could be said of philosophy which either seems to be a mere paraphrase of science (particularly true in the field of neurosciences today for instance) or to treat scientific thought as a source for very bad, vague and useless metaphors (illustrations are varied, see for instance the well-known case of the pathetic uses of the Gödel incompleteness results for 1st order arithmetic).

Negotiating the relationship between science and philosophy is a VERY thorny problem, to say the least. I think Gabriel Catren (french-argentinian quantum physicist and philosopher) established a pretty complete taxonomy of the typical forms philosophy and science's relationship takes:

On one hand, philosophy subordinates itself to science.
"philosophy has laid down its weapons and renounced its own sovereignty in order to proudly institute itself as the (non-requested) valet of science. Such a servile capitulation can take place in several ways. Philosophy can try to supply science with methodological, epistemological, hermeneutical, or metaphysical appendixes. It can pretend to provide a ‘supplement of soul’ capable of concealing the inhumanity of science under a ‘human face’. It can attempt to orient the development of science through ‘metaphysical research programs’. It can try to assure the conditions of mediation and translatability between different theoretical fields. It can endeavour to localise the ‘epistemological obstacles’ that impede the development of science and help science get over its ‘foundational crises’. It can intervene in the ‘spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’ in order to trace a demarcation line between the ‘ideological’ and the ‘scientific’ components of science. It can furnish criteria so as to distinguish the legitimate sciences from pseudo-science. In the worst case, ‘philosophy’ becomes a sort of intellectual police apt to denounce the illegitimate uses of scientific knowledge and pursue intellectual imposters."

On the other hand, philosophy attempts to dominate science and the philosopher becomes - at worst - a mystic or priest.
"In order to submit science to philosophical authority, establish its juridical limits, and occupy an overarching position in relation to it, philosophy has tried to define itself as a discourse with a wide range of capacities, including the ability to explain the conditions of possibility of science (be they transcendental, ontological, pragmatic, technological, discursive, institutional, etc.), subordinate de jure regional ontologies to a ‘fundamental’ ontology, ground science in a pre-scientific stratum (Lebenswelt, etc.), clarify its ‘destinal’ essence (be it technical, metaphysical, ontotheological, etc.), ‘demonstrate’ that science is nothing but an inductive stamp collection incapable of unveiling any rational necessity, or denounce science as a ‘rationality of domination’ and the ultimate cause of contemporary barbarism. In the first place, these attempts to trace the insurmountable limits of scientific thought permit philosophy to know what science does not know about itself. They therefore allow philosophy to formulate a theory of science by assuring a position of theoretical domination over the latter. The philosophical theory of science allows philosophy to think the relation between the immanence of scientific practice, on the one hand, and the transcendental, ontological, or metaphysical significance and consequences of science on the other. In this way, science becomes the object of a philosophical theory capable of founding and juridically circumscribing its field of validity. In the second place, this philosophical domination of science enables philosophy to know what scientific faculties cannot grasp concerning the real. Philosophy can thus establish itself as a first, rigorous, and fundamental science of the real. In order to trace the juridical limits of science and assure its submission to philosophy, philosophy proceeds to an operation that we can locate in almost all the arrangements that we have just enumerated, namely the bifurcation of the real in two. If science can construct a knowledge of reality (i.e. of phenomena, regional beings, structures, actual configurations, the ‘contingent’ laws of nature, etc.), only philosophical thought can with any legitimacy seek the truth of the real (i.e. of noumena, being qua being, pre-structural multiplicity, the virtual all-embracing ‘apeiron’, hyper-chaos, etc.). Thus philosophy justifies its existence by trying to localize a stratum of the real that would be subtracted de jure from scientific knowledge. Faced with the implacable progress of modern science, the philosopher—like the priest—is forced to constantly redefine his own tasks and pathetically crawl into niches each time more ‘subtle’, more ‘profound’, more ‘transcendent’, more ‘generic’, and more ‘eminent’ of the real."

(sorry for the excessively long quotes... they're so dense with information that I don't think they can be compressed/summarized any further)

Catren doesn't find any of these existing forms satisfactory, so he proposes something new. Rather than philosophy dominating science or science dominating philosophy, Catren proposes to desuture science and philosophy such that they're no longer locked in battle over theoretical knowledge of the real.
1. Philosophy has a a history of progressively giving away portions of its body to create specific scientific fields. Catren wants to take this process to its logical conclusion such that Metaphysical and the Ontological (and not merely the Ontic) are part of Science, and no longer strata of the real which Philosophy has authority over. Badiou already proposed outsourcing ontology... but he outsources it only to mathematics, and a narrow section of mathematics restricted to set theory and category theory at that. Catren on the other hand, proposes outsourcing formal ontology to all of mathematics (symmetry is accounted for by group theory, multiplicity by set theory, relation by category theory, quantity by number theory, localization by geometry, operativeness by algebra, predication by logic, stability by dynamical systems theory etc..) and also proposes creating biological and physical ontology.
2. Philosophy - now that metaphysics and ontology are part of science - preserves only its synthetic function. That is, a philosophical composition, in this new kind of philosophy, is one that "entangles a set of abstract mediating operations provided by the different local modes of thought in a non-trivial global section, i.e. in a concrete mediator that cannot be completely localized in the space of abstract procedures. In other words, the philosophical system is a delocalized concrete machine capable of connecting and articulating the various local abstract machines (be they artistic, political, scientific, etc.) in a non hierarchical way so as to set in place a generalized constructivism, a general musaic of thought. Paraphrasing Xenakis, we could say that such a ‘symphilosophy’ (F. Schlegel) should be able to construct the most concrete musaical organon in which the disindoxicating vectors of Bach, Freud, Grothendieck, and Marx, for example, would be the singular components of a polyphonic mediator. Whereas the various local modes of thought are characterized by their subjective typologies (the scientist, the artist, the analyst, the militant, etc.), their regulative ideas (the True, the Good, the Beautiful, etc.), the typology of their productions (works, theories, effects, interventions, etc.), their modes of discourse (the university’s discourse, the analytic discourse, etc.), and so on, philosophy’s own task is that of diagonalizing these different local structures via operations of translation/transduction, synthesis, transposition, crossbreeding, resonance, grafting, connection, and counterpoint."

If that lack of good science/art collaborations is any indication, philosophers in this synthetic sense are - as of now - rare or non-existent.

[HWith]

[Lane]

yo, at least make that shit less intimidating to read by lessening the length of paragraphs son.

[trentk]

yo, at least make that shit less intimidating to read by lessening the length of paragraphs son.

here's a TLDR version. leaving the long version up there for philosophy/science nerds:

Negotiating the relationship between science and philosophy is a very difficult problem.
Most existing forms of the relationship aren't satisfactory:
1. On the one hand, philosophy bows down to science and becomes at worst an almost useless maid. Or - at absolute worst - philosophy becomes obsessed with crisp/clean logical clarity (and sometimes even conflates theoretical proof with theoretical construction) such that it replaces science/math and all its richness, ambiguity, creative construction techniques, complex interactions across varied domains etc.. with a sterile duplicate. An example of this would be analytical philosophy of mathematics, which - at its worst - myopically thinks its unnecessary to look outside of logic and set theory.
2. Philosophy attempts to dominate science by a. finding a (metpahysical, ontological, pre-structural/pre-conceptual) portion of the real that is offlimits for science (which is limited to the ontic and structural/conceptual) and/or b. uncovering the truth of science that cannot be grasped from within science (unveiling science as about power struggle rather than truth, pre-determining science's teleology etc..)
Maybe Science and Philosophy can get along if - rather than existing in a relationship of subordination or domination - they are reoriented such that their tasks are different enough for science and philosophy to preserve their respective sovereignties. Rather than fighting over X, Science does Y and Philosophy does Z. For Catren - this involves an intensification of the Theoretical Knowledge of the Real function of Science, and the polymathic, rampantly multi-disciplinary, synthetic function of Philosophy. Science, in order to attain full theoretical knowledge of the real - must expand from the limited strata of the Ontic into the Ontological and Metaphysical, and even perform its own sociological/cultural/hisorical/linguistic critique so as to absolve itself from the "too-human" (i.e. from things like biases, uninterogated non-universal preconceptions, linguistic distortions etc...). (This expansion of science is both a question of adding to science, and uncovering areas where it already has expanded / is inextricably implicated with an expanded science whether it knows it or not. What it is not, is a dissolution of serious philosophical questions such that scientists' unreflective ontological/metaphysical assertions are given as truth.) If Science, Art, and Politics are the 3 local modes of disindoxicating (taking out of doxa) experience, philosophy becomes a non-local/diagonal mode of production which mediates between, crossbreeds, synthesizes, hybridizes etc... the aforementioned 3.

[Faust]

At least maybe this thread will die now? Or should I revisit the manifesto? "The aim of this forum is to divorce fashion from consumerism and celebrity culture except when it comes to Rick Owens and Poell"?

[Fuuma]

science -> life -> art

cow -> burger -> shit

[messenoire]

the new a$ap rocky album has a song that specifically mentions the likes of rick, ann, damir, and a few others. swagzeitgeist

[messiisgood]

the new a$ap rocky album has a song that specifically mentions the likes of rick, ann, damir, and a few others. swagzeitgeist

http://hiphopwired.com/2013/01/02/exclusive-aap-rocky-says-rapper-clothing-lines-are-corny/

i guess this is related