Roger Malina talk for Diana Dominguez

2. Making Science Intimate
Science as a Territory for Artistic
Experimentation
The LEONARDO Network: Artists and
Scientists collaborating on the burning
issues of our time.
Roger F Malina
Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence
September 2009

3. We know
• That we have built a
civilisation that is
unsustainable

4. We need the “hard humanities”
• Four hundred years ago
Galileo Galilei “invented”
the telescope
• 150 years ago Darwin
published his “Origin of
the Species”
• ? How are we developing
today the new culture that
will allow us to create a
sustainable civilisation ?

5. We know “landscape artists” but
what is a “Climate Artist” ?
1904 2004
Cezanne: Mont St Victoire.........Sabine Raaf: Translator II

6. We know the taste of water…………..………
But what is the song of CO2 ?
Char Davies……………Sarah Jane Pell

7. Modern Science Doesnt Make
Common Sense
• Most knowledge about our world now comes
through scientific instruments
o Few people have experience of mediated senses
• Most of the world isnt on human scales
• Nano science
• Femto physics
• Our intuition, languages, metaphors, arts are
built training on the wrong data for survival

8. Techno-Science as a Territory for
Artistic Experimentation
• Forming intuition on mediated sensory data
• Designing/Interacting with simulated systems
• Making sense of dense data, petabyte era
• Coupling the virtual world to the physical world
• Making Science Intimate
• Peoples Science
• Micro Science
• New Ontologies and Epistemologies
– New Intuitions,
» New Sensuality

9. Why Collaborate and Network ?
• The burning issues of our times require us to work
differently
• The Hard Humanities require artists and scientists or
engineers to work together
– Coupling micro-science to cultural change
• Existing social networks re-enforce old approaches
and protect old values
– The tyranny of geography and personal history
– Our institutional structures reflect other ways of thinking that
created an unsustainable civilisation

10. The LEONARDO organisations and networks:
An evolving story….
• Leonardo an organisation founded in the 1960’s
– A generation of survivors of World War II
– Creation of new international science organisations
– A 1950 ‘social contract” between science and government
• Cultural appropriation of science and new technologies:
– The “case for art-science-technology interaction”
• The birth of “digital “ culture
– Success of the computer art pioneers
• R and D budgets of game/entertainment now driving technology
– But now we need RADICAL DIGITAL

11. And now….?
• « Ask Not What the Sciences can do for the Arts…
Ask what the Arts can do for the Sciences¨….Roy
Ascott
– The « Strong Case » for art-science-technology interaction
• Enabling and Promoting the New Leonardos
– The mission of the Leonardo organisation and networks
– The individual as genius versus the team as genius
– The cultural transformation of networked collaborations

12. Leonardo Publications @ MITPRESS
30 books, 4/year
Leonardo Journals
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
eg: Art and Innovation
( XEROX PARC )
Immersed in Technology
(BANFF, Canada).
MA Moser/D MacLeod
Manovich: Language of New Media
Kac: Signs of Life: Art/Biology
DaCosta: Tactical Bio Media

13. Leonardo Organisation activities since 1967
• Working Groups:
– Leonardo Education Forum
– Lovely Weather: Art and Climate Change
– Artists and Scientists in Times of War
• Workshops/Conferences:
– Mutamorphosis (extreme environments), LESS REMOTE
• Prizes and Awards
• Collaborations :
– ITACCUS Committee for Cultural Utilisation of Space,
– YASMIN mediterranean rim network
– REDCATSUR/LATAM new latin american network
– LASSI Leonardo Asian network
• …over 40 years we have promoted and documented the work
of over 6000 New Leonardos

14. Muliple Modes to Mediated Sensuality
• INTIMATE SCIENCE:
« ownership of the data
about ones own
environment »
• Peoples or Citizen
Science
• OPEN
OBSERVATORIES :
» distributed and open
science »

15. • Open Observatories:
.
• The RIGHT to the data that exists about you and
your environment
• Micro-Science
o Micro Science is to the National Science Foundation
What Micro Credit is to the World Bank
“PRO-AM” Professional Amateurs
• Making science intimate
o Owning data about your own environment
o Science creating communities own their knowledge
o Building intution, language from mediated sensory
experience
o
• Science- Art Projects and Art-Science Projects
• Art driven driven science and engineering
• Science driven development of cultural artifacts

16. The Sound of Trees Growing
• David Dunn (composer,
sound artist)
• Jim Crutchfield
( complexity scientist)
• Artist driven recording
of sounds of trees
growing led to research
project in the coupling
of ultrasound from
trees, beetles, forest
fire system dynamics

17. Intimate Science
Pigeon Blog ( B Da Costa) Inside Outside Handbag (Katherine Moriwaki )

18. New Corporality; Physical, Virtual
Stelarc Marce li Antunez Roca

19. Immersion in Extreme Environments
Antarctica......Deserts…
Marco Peljham and Macrolab

20. Nano Intuition :
feeling molecules
Sommerer/Mignoneau

21. Embedded in Peta-Data Sets
Donna Cox Ruth West
Weather Data Bases Protein Sequence Data

22. People’s Science
• Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti:
Indian People’s Science
Networks
• Brazil Digital Culture projects
• Sergipe « Human Project »
o Humbi Umbi in Brazil
• Srishti School, Bangalore
• Ubiquitous micro science
producing communities
• Open Hardware
• Hacker Culture, Bricolabs
• OPEN OBSERVATORIES

23. Crowd-Sourcing
• Distributed Science
• BOINC : Berkeley
Open Infrastructure
Network Computing
o SETI@home search
for extraterrestial
intelligence
o climateprediction.net ,
climate modelling
o malariacontrol.net

24. Philanthropy 2.0 and
« open innovation »
• Eg INNOCENTIVE
• Organisations can submit
problems for solution
• Together with award
incentive
• Over 300 problems solved
to date
• Problem solving
communities outside the
Academy
•
• Eg www.fundscience.org

25. How
• Artists in Labs
• Scientists in Studios
• Town Scientists
• Micro Science funding
• Open sourcing of data about your own world
OPEN OBSERVATORIES
• Developing the ‘hard humanities’ to change the
content and direction of science

26. Thanks
• www.olats.org
• www.leonardo.info
• rmalina@prontomail.com