St. Joost Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving, Breda, Netherlands.
Daniela de Paulis and I were invited to present an (online) workshop for the St. Joost Academy for Art and Design on March 5th, 2021. Daniela was invited to speak on the topic of collaboration, as her work is examplary of complex interdisciplinary collaboration. As a part of her latest project COGITO in Space, she invited me to contribute with some reflections on our collaboration. It was an opportunity for me to reflect more general on the many art-science projects and collectives I’ve been part of, to consider what worked and what didn’t, and perhaps why. However, rather than presenting a ‘how-to’ textbook, I felt it was much more important to present it as a personal point of view, and to emphasize that any art and/or science collaboration is one between people: The ‘person’ is far too easily lost in the ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ labels. Furthermore, at least in my experience, a satisfying art-science project needs those (false?) boundaries between fields to be moved from between people to within people. In other words, if at least some artists don’t get drawn into science, or vice-versa, the project stays hopelessly disconnected. The art-science collaboration therefor not only happens between people, but within the participants. To bring that point home, I started my presentation with a personal time-line of my own interactions between fields, with a selection of some important events. I always felt disconnected in those activities, but they are slowly coming together. While I was first somewhat hesitant to make so much ‘about me’, I really wanted to bring across to the students that it was about them: their interests, ideas and abilities. I was very happy when a student told me afterwards that it made him realize that he was allowed to pursue his interests and create his career, rather than trying to find a single study (or job) that would ‘fit’ him within preset boundaries.
Secondly, I tried to emphasize in several (graphical) ways that while art and science are often regarded as separate – even opposite – disciplines, they should rather be considered more similar than different. For example, art often involves a lot of research, while solutions to scientific problems are found through creative processes. Also, let’s not forget that both in art and science we struggle for survival in an increasingly ‘liberal’ economy. Both artistic and fundamental science are both a luxery allowed by society, as well as perhaps the most important activity that defines society.
There is a lot to be said about how to organize satifying interdisciplinary collaborations. The reason we might want to do so in the first place, might not be to inject one into the other, or to emphasize their opposites. Rather, we might want to allow the participants to embrace their own knowledge and creativity, use both critical reflection and speculation and engage in both play and serieusness. When such a project then involves a group of people that can contribute freely and creatively, it does need to contain one or more what I would call “centers of gravity”. These might be strong concepts or practises that draw individuals together. Multiple and very different attractors can exist at the same time, and revolving around each other, e.g. an artistic concept and a technical challenge. In COGITO in Space, an important artistic concept was that of the ‘unknown’, while a technical challenge was the transmission of EEG by radiotelescope. This provided a meaningful artistic context for scientific thinking and technical problem solving. Vice-versa, the scientific discours informed the artistic concept and clarified the limits of our understatnding, i.e. the ‘unknown’.
Ideals aside, practicalities become increasingly important as a complex interdisciplinary project might run for extended periods of time. Good project management is aware of the differences between people’s expectations, their differnent working methods and necessities of their individual livelyhoods. E.g., scientists often have (short) full-time contracts, and need to find time during off-hours and weekends. They are also generally less mobile, as they might use very specific labs and facilities. Artists, in contrast, might need to find time between other projects for intense full-time work sessions. Financially, artists might less stable and need more perspective, while scientist need to consider the time spend on their scientific career. In other words, interdisciplinary projects require interdisciplinary project management. The ability and willingness to deal with these challenges determines for a large part whether a project will last long enough for its goals to be realized. For now I can identify the following checklist, although many more points can be added: please let me know your ideas and experiences!
- Communication: Different methods of communication depending on person and profession.
- Language: Professional idiom requires time to learn
- Planning: Unexpected and unknown situations typical in complex interdisciplinary projects requires one to be flexible, but individuals often require long-term perspectives as well.
- Livelihood: Different backgrounds results in differences in ability to invest time, take financial risks, require different career considerations, roles and enumerations.
- Integrity: Different understanding and interpretations should result in expanded meaning and ethical considerations, not less.
Much work is to be done here, and these describe just some of the challenges. However, there is nothing more satisfying than doing (and concluding) a project with a diverse group of people, with topics and methods that are allowed to evolve over time.
I would like to thank our friends at St. Joost Akademie for the opportunity to share my thoughts, and of course Daniela for her continued support and collaboration. I hope we will soon have more chance to develop our thoughts on these interesting topics further, and create more experience to test them. Until then – make sure to support your local artist and scientist by hanging out with them or inviting them for talks :).