Kevin Kelly on transdisciplinarity and failures
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Founding Editor/Author, Wired Kevin Kelly gave the final key note at IFTF's Tech Horizon conference in San Mateo yesterday and finished the conference perfectly by tying themes like transdisciplinarity, intentional biology, and simulations of health, energy sources and ecological systems together in a long term view of future technology. To touch on the former theme, the scientific pursuit to understand and unlock such complexities as the math of Mother Nature, you are not only in need of interdisciplinarity but scientists who speaks more than one language of science methodology, understandings and intuition. A new group of people is required, that have the ability to navigate in fields such as math, biology and engineering all at once. New science fields like nanotech, biochemistry and biomimicry are all boundary objects for this need of transdisciplinarity among the research community if millions of years of evolution are to be decoded and reengineered. Kevin Kelly finished the key note with some thoughts for action about wider distribution of failures, like the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, so you sort of speak can follow the evolutions of successful technologies or just dead end paths. I think that’s an interesting point-of-view and another area where scientist can learn from artist since a painting is like 20 layers of failures and one layer of success or a mix somewhat in between the last layer of failure and the first layer of success, if paintings like the Mona Lisa and her smile are to be explained for its attraction. |
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hi peder. interesting point... i just don't really know if you can compare these things just like that without taking into consideration the different (financial, political) environments that arts and sciences are acting in, even though i very much support your heideggerian view on the two.
part of the problem may be that the media traditionally is very prone to jump at scientific "achievements", and so are we, aren't we? the approach of making a negative journal is highly interesting. i don't really know if you can (besides that journal) actually publish papers of negative/failed research without it having rejected by the reviewers.
maybe WMMNA could introduce something like the thing that tabloid-papers tried: just publishing good news. WMMNA could go for failed stuff - bad research, abandoned art projects, etc. every once in a while! :)
Surely, the call for transdisciplinarity within and across the sciences is a valid request, however, I find it conspicuous that the future of technology is still conceived of as a 'scientific task'. The belief that 'science discovers, technology applies' is both outdated and potentially dangerous in the sense that few actors obtain exclusive rights to defining what is 'right' and 'wrong'. I strongly agree there is a lot to learn from the arts yet the social sciences, namely anthropologists and sociologists, have an awful lot to offer in terms of depicting futures, too.
And a bit of promotion; may I suggest you to have a look at the webcasts from the James Martin Forum 2006, which touches upon this issue from a number of different perspectives.
excellent idea Sascha! I name you wmmna's Head of Failed Projects! jokes apart, posting about abandonned art project would be interesting: ask why artists have given up, see whether as time passed new opportunities have arisen for the project, maybe other artists could adopt the failed project?
Reading "Kevin Kelly on transdisciplinarity and failures" I was reminded of
a debate I am immersed in with my girlfriend about whether art is a form of research (as in R+D).
For me the artistic process is, among other things, a metaphor for research. But reading about failures made me think that this is what makes scientific research so valuable (despite what you say): the fact that science has a very objective measure for what is a successful or failed experiment makes science failures more useful.. One of my favourite moments in science is the Michelson-Morley experiment, where they set out to measure the speed of the luminiferous ether, only to find out there was no ether at all!
I know that failures in art can be repurposed as successes too, but
not in the same way. My favourite quote is poet Philip Larkin's, who once
said "A good poem about failure is a success". Even a good failure can be a successful event in art, but therein lies the rub:
Research sets out to find out; art sets out to create. If you fail to find out and signpost it, it is useful for other trailblazers. If you fail to create, what is left is no use for whoever comes after you.
I agree that media focus on success and the mindset of people not wanting to acknowledge failures as an important acceptance for learning publicly could make it hard to get unsuccessful projects out in the open if WMMNA where to advertise for them.
The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine have only had 33 articles since September 2002 to go through the peer-review process and the Journal of Negative Results in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences with far less articles combined since 2004. I guess the mindset of hard science hasn't changed in the direction of publishing failures and this comment from the Green Hat Journal sums it up I think:
Negative Results
In 1997, Lutz Prechelt started the Forum for Negative Results in the Journal of Universal Computer Science. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any papers related to this forum. It would be invaluable to publish good ideas that failed, but academic competitiveness doesn't lend itself to this kind of forum. Too bad. I could build an entire career on bad research.
Posted by surana at July 7, 2002 05:15 PM
Though, on a grassroots level you see lots of websites with online discussions of problems and failures, so real world social aspects - status and face saving must be key - since only the distance and anonymity of online communities can trigger individuals to cross the barrier of accepting a failure in public (very general speaking with room for further discussion!).
To comment on Javier that failing to create art is no use for whoever comes next compared to failed science of finding out – how can you distinguish if an artist has failed to create? Even if a portrait doesn’t look like the original you have still left something behind to be modified, destroyed or interpreted in its given state.