[ExI] LA Times: 'Artscience' by David Edwards

[PJ Manney]

Interesting foray into the growing awareness about the intersection of
art and science.  However, the review seems to indicate he may not
have taken his argument far enough.

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book15mar15,1,4731331.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Artscience' by David Edwards
Blurring the boundaries of science and art
By David L. Ulin
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 15, 2008

Several years ago, in a collection of her fiction, nonfiction and
poetry, Lynne Sharon Schwartz made a vivid argument against
specialization in the arts.

"I had never planned to be a novelist in the first place," she
declared. "I had planned, from the age of seven, to be a writer. A
writer writes anything and everything, just as a composer composes
anything -- not only sonatas or only nocturnes or only symphonies."

She's right, of course, for specialization offers a progressive
narrowing of vision, rather than the expansion upon which discovery
depends. And yet, we live in a culture that prizes specialization,
that distrusts serendipity or the blurring of boundaries, that tells
us it is better to be an expert than a generalist.

Such a notion -- or, more accurately, its refutation -- resides at the
center of David Edwards' "Artscience: Creativity in the Post- Google
Generation," a book that seeks to bridge perhaps the widest of the
specialization gaps, the one separating science and art.

"Among the sources of administrative inertia that weigh heavily on our
educational and culture institutions," Edwards writes, "is the famous
divide between art and science cultures. . . . That chasm still cuts
through our cultural institutions and universities."

For Edwards, this is not an intellectual conceit. A professor of
biomedical engineering at Harvard University, he also is the founder
of Le Laboratoire, an art and science center in Paris, and he's
passionate that these areas of inquiry can overlap.

The key is to rethink the traditional roles of art and science, to
find a middle ground where we might frame aesthetic solutions to
scientific questions, or apply a scientific rigor to the challenges of
art.

"[T]he fused method that results," he argues, "at once aesthetic and
scientific -- intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical,
comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, embracing
nature in its complexity and able to simplify to nature in its essence
-- is what I call artscience."

Edwards is hardly the first observer to identify a confluence between
art and science. The most interesting science always relies on leaps
of the imagination: "[W]here gaps exist among the facts of geology,"
John McPhee noted in his 1981 book "Basin and Range," "the space
between is often filled with things 'geopoetical.' "

The same is increasingly true of art, which in the digital age has
become fluid, technological in content and form.

"Today," Edwards reminds us, "we encounter in theaters, museums,
cinemas, opera houses, city streets, our own living rooms, and just
about anywhere we can imagine, artists of dizzying varieties
integrating into their work the science and technology that change
cultural expression as fast as it is changing lives."

Here, we have the idea behind the book's subtitle, "Creativity in the
Post-Google Generation." Yet as "Artscience" progresses, that turns
out to be a misnomer, for Edwards is less interested in art or science
than in -- irony of ironies -- a highly specialized sub-category in
which scientists who are also artists apply both methodologies to
their work.

This, it turns out, is the fundamental flaw of "Artscience" -- not the
concept but the book. In the name of raising broad philosophical
questions, Edwards focuses on a small group of individuals, many of
whom are his colleagues, which is troublesome in itself.

More problematic is his insistence on framing these people as
universal symbols of the process, when in fact they work almost
entirely in rarefied realms.

There's Peter Rose, a Canadian architect now at Harvard, who pioneered
a kinetic design style based on the intersection of "space, form, and
light." Or Don Ingber, who adapted Buckminster Fuller's notion of
"tensegrity" (in which a form retains, rather than loses, its
structural integrity when compressed) to the study of cancer,
developing a new model of cellular mechanics, a "cellular tensegrity."

These are fascinating people, and their work is profound and often
beautiful. Still, Edwards never makes the case for them as pioneers
whose efforts illustrate a wider set of connections, the latticework
of interdisciplinary nuance upon which, or so he tells us, artscience
depends.

Part of the problem may be Edwards' narrowness of vision, his tendency
to accept ideas that seem questionable to say the least.

"A product sells. . . . [But the] recognition of a sale, and the media
coverage that attends that sale, is frequently not enough," he
suggests, describing the frustrations of economic success, as opposed
to aesthetic success. "Creators, whoever and wherever they are, wish
to be understood not for what they sell but for what they value."

The implication is that the concerns of creativity and of the
marketplace are inherently similar, but is that really true?

Then, there's his faith in academia as a center of culture: "The
research university," he avows, "may be the most powerful current
engine for social engagement through artscience."

Maybe so, but with its encoded bureaucratic structures, its dependence
on peer review and tenure, the university more often has been an
engine of stasis, of the status quo.

Edwards admits as much, acknowledging that "over the last half century
the business of science, perhaps of academia in general, had created a
standardized format that misled you, misled you as a scientist and as
a non-scientist, and you never stopped to question what science really
was, or what it could be, because it seemed too thoroughly agreed on."

But this suggests a number of questions that Edwards does not raise.
How many groundbreaking cultural ideas have come from universities?
And how many from independent artists and thinkers, operating in some
unbound territory of their own?

In the arts, the most profound academic movement of the last 30 years
has been the rise of theory, which is the creative equivalent of an
autopsy, less about culture than about the dissection of culture --
and as such, a kind of cultural death.

Unfortunately, that's precisely where "Artscience" leaves us, with a
theory that never quite comes to life.

Edwards is a smart, dedicated thinker, and he's definitely tapped into
something; art and science are coming closer, and technology has
transformed not just our aesthetics but the very ways in which we
create.

It's a big idea, and Edwards deserves credit for having seen it, for
recognizing that specialization represents its own slow death. But in
the end, the territory is too big for him to master, and his argument
too small to measure up.

david.ulin at latimes.com

David L. Ulin is The Times' book editor.


Artscience
Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
David Edwards
Harvard University Press: 196 pp., $19.95