Re: LIFESCIENCE: Re: A Reactionary Reaction

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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One of the things I would love to see begin happening on this net
symposium is some critical, creative, and problematizing work done on
the familiar categories of "art" and "science."

On the one hand it would seem naive to suppose that we can simply break
out of the supposedly repressive constraints of categorization; in
addition all of our activities as artists, scientists, cultural
theorists, are always already enframed by a complex network of
discourses, institutions, policies, norms, and of course media.

But on the other the breadth, potential, and complexity of fields such
as autopoiesis, transgenic art, and tissue engineering, as well as
other, more familiar art-technology hybrids, all suggests that perhaps
our modern disciplinary epistemes are currently being refigured,
renegotiated, transformed. By who and for who is another important
question. But there is a sense in which reducing the work of, say,
Humberto Maturana or Mongrel to "science" or "art" is in some
significant way reductive.

Trevor: > Concidering the current "Lifescience" discussion takes place
within an
> artistic context, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a general
> ondertone that Science is dangerous and frightening (although potentially
> useful) but fortunately we have Art which will save the world from all things
> evil.

Birgit: no that is not the point for me. The point is not either that
art itself has to
become evil. I mean in just like Niklas Luhmann told us, that art will
produce the
objects for communication in the field of lifesciences.

I think that we need to begin to develop some kind of working-definition
or at least field of questioning with regard to these historically
well-established categorical markers. Several questions:

- What are the boundaries, outlines, and silhouettes which demarcate the
disciplines of art and science for us in the West? Are these markers
institutional (the gallery/the lab; the art school/the med school;
Duchamp, Haacke, Orlan - just brainstorming here...) - that is, are they
conditioned by the context within which certain activity takes place? Or
are they rooted in the discourses and knowledges which are said to
constitute a discipline (anatomical knowledge of the body; sculptural
knowledge of the body; the medical body; the dancer's body;
motion-capture...)? Or is it defined by the way in which the
knowledge/discourse networks are put into practice and implemented
within the social (Beuys, Situationists, RAFI, ECD, SuperWeed....)?

- I mentioned the word "problematize" above, & I was specifically
thinking of some comments Foucault made on his own methodology -
bascially he referred to "problematization" as a way of asking how
something becomes a problem. Not causes, teleologies, agencies, but the
different elements whereby something is brought up as a problem. For
instance, these sharply differentiated roles between science and art
are, I would suggest, modern inventions - in other words, it doesn't
necessarily go without saying that science is not art and vice-versa -
these relationships, in the West, had to be established thru a variety
of means. How did that happen, say, during the early Renaissance? How
did it happen w/ the various art & technology movements of the 60s? How
is it happening now w/ net.art?


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