1 Hopkins
Dialogues Between Two Cultures
John Hopkins
This brief set of notes circumscribes two experience bases (i.e. art andtechnology/science) of the author and maps intersections between the following set ofsuggested issues and those experience bases.
(1) Assess the value and applicability of the readings,seminars, lectures, facultyinteraction, etc. Were the two cultures effectively engaged? What was successful,unique and/or worthwhile about our efforts, conversations, aspirations, etc.?Based onour experiences, to what extent was "dialogue" a means to an end and/or a worthwhileend in itself? Could include reflections, anecdotes, general feedback, etc., from seminarand lecture participants.
True trans-disciplinary engagement takes place within afacilitative meta-structure[1] I thatserves as a vessel for the embodied act of engagement. In the case of the Dialoguesprogram, that meta-structure could be defined by three separate situations. The first wasthe 'traditional' situation of a single human standing in front of a medium-sized groupingof others. That single human, as presented by the organizing agent, was accepted assomeone to listen to, collectively, with the requisite call-and-response of a seminar. Thesecond situation was a significantly less formal setting where the invited 'expert' wasengaged on a more one-to-one (witnessed-by-several) basis in a small group. The thirdsituation may be defined as the total accumulated interaction between all participants on aone-to-one (point-to-point) basis. Clearly, at a level of social structure, the seminar fitwell within the bounds of traditional academic event. However, it was significant that thebroad subject of the conversations that operated in those three situations and resonatedafterwards on a variety of channels was the dialogical engagement of humanities andscience. I found that both the level and experiential quality of most of the presentationsand subsequent discussions was inspiring. It is not so common for a group of professorsto get together and discuss the difficult aspects of teaching, much less from a widespectrum of disciplines.
Deep engagement requires focused attention, concentration, and presence. Without thesebasic constitutive elements, no amount of meta-structural facilitation will result in deeperengagement, though the meta-structure in which the engagement takes place is of greatsignificant and cannot be discounted or ignored. It is at the granular level of individualhuman dialogue that engagement takes place, and a carefulconsideration of theimmediate, practical, and facilitative conditions is essential. At the scale of institution,the most important consideration is the ease with which any two people might gettogether to activate this granular dialogue. The social forces arrayed against any twopeople coming together in a focused and attentive manner are legion. Many of theseforces are cultural (vs social), most are deeply structural and relate to the collectiveimposition of pre-determined paths of exchange that for many people are impossible toovercome. The primary deterrent factor is fear.
Number (of people) is always a critical factor in the meta-structure surroundingengagement. It is clear that depth of engagement is inversely proportional to number ofpeople. Smaller groups, down to the base level of two, where the most importantgranular human interactions take place, must be the driving impulse for broaderinteractions.
The Dialogues project could have been mapped over less familiar meta-structuralterritories, given the willingness of the participants and their individual abilities totranscend the dominant and highly traditional university meta-structure. To have an'open-source' community develop, one with distributed knowledge generation, eachindividual should develop direct communicative pathways with each other in the group. The basic element to be facilitated is a multi-nodal series of dialogues in addition to themore traditional seminar situations. A human dialogue, one between two open humanbeings is a radical locus for building up a reserve of creative energies. When a networkof such dialogues is woven together over time, and through a variety of scaled situations,the network becomes the locus of a massive excess of creative energies which may thenbe focused selectively on the issues at hand.
This particular scenario did not happen in an optimal form. While a small core ofparticipants did stick with the program, there was a fair degree of discontinuity thatadversely affected the ability to facilitate a broader exchange.
It was clear that those individuals had a deeper and independent interest in trans-disciplinary engagement that is probably not specifically related to the Dialoguesprogram, but they identified the program as a positive meta-structure facilitatingexchange.
However, having critiqued the program, it is my opinion that ANY interstitial/meta-structural facilitation of communication, discussion, dialogue across disciplinary,political, social, or other boundaries merits support.
To specifically rate my own experience of the project, I thoroughly enjoyed participatingin a forum of intelligent people who were willing and able to engage in the difficult issueof bridging the art/science divide. I represented the somewhat unusual constituency ofthe practicing artist and arts educator with a significant background in hard science andengineering, so I was able to immerse in almost all the topics that were raised.
In conclusion, a deeper consideration of the meta-conditions and structures could havefacilitated a more empowered result, but given the myriad of traditional constraints on thegroup (schedules, other commitments to university service, etc), the energized dialoguesthat did take place are sure to yield results which mayor may not be easily quantifiable.
(2) Best practices/what we've learned from our guests and their programs. Couldinclude a collection of ideas, readings, syllabi, practices, objectives, approaches, etc. thatare worth emulating or building upon.
Again, a careful facilitation of the basic building-blocks of trans-disciplinary encounters isessential. Those building-blocks consist of:
1 - Careful consideration of the actual (and complete aspects) under which the encounterstake place. Traditional academic structures generally do not facilitate the promulgationof interstitial spaces that are seeding-points for trans-disciplinarity.
2 - Implementation of alternate structures and conditions on a distributed basis. It is clearthat if trans-disciplinarity easily arose within an institutional structure, institutional lifewould be radically different than it is now. A focus on distributed autonomous agentswho each are facilitating direct encounters along with a mechanism for bringing theresulting energies forward to others in the network.
3 - An avoidance of mapped, expected, or pre-determined outcomes that would in anyway affect the procession of encounters.
4 - The wholesale cultivation of idiosyncrasy.
(3) A list and discussion of curricular objectives for a potential suite/ program/confederation of multi-disciplinary (technical-humanistic), collaborative courses.
-- facilitate student awareness of the porosity of discipline-specific boundaries (i.e., thatthey are 'merely' results of structural social impingement).
(4) Objectives and methods for faculty development that would involve and/or looktowards multi-disciplinary (technical-humanistic) teaching and/or research.
Again, a primary consideration must be facilitating connections and providing interstitialspaces for encounter and dialogue; identifying specific individuals among the facultywho are interested and able to engage.
(5) Assessment of the local (and/or the typical research university) organizationalstructure and recommendations that would allow for transdisciplinary (technical-humanistic) collaborations in teaching and/or research to occur more freely, if not thrive.
Speaking as an artist, educator, and former engineer with a long-term presence at theintersection of art and technology and a deep commitment to facilitating learningsituations at that intersection, attendance at the year-long series of seminars organized byErik Fisher was a fruitful context during which there were many honest exchangesexploring the "ground-truth" of the actual gap between those faculty from hard sciencesand engineering, and those from humanities. The exchanges were also fruitful in framingthe similarities.
In the learning-based act of bridging disciplines - specifically art and science (as twogeneric descriptors for complex human activity sets) - the most powerful threads toidentify are those which hold both areas of activity in common. The sum total ofcommonality (for example, a linguistic space that overlaps, or a common materialresearch target) may provide a practical departure point for a dialogue to develop.
Several basic realizations were confirmed through the Dialogues project. The first ofthese is that despite many (superficial) differences mapped in the two areas ofbe-ing,there are significant overlaps. Personally, the space of these overlaps was of greatinterest as I embarked on my art research and allowed the development of a powerfulworldview that easily superseded the dominant worldview of the society I was embeddedin. And, based on that worldview, I believe that the areas of overlap are fundamental,essential areas of human be-ing that far outweigh contemporary social differences.
One clear difference is mapped over the issue of social valuation of different pursuits. Itis clear that the society in which the seminar took place values technology and scienceover and above what are perceived as academic or artistic pursuits. I would say that thisdifference is a dominant factor not easily dealt with, given the social embeddedness ofthe seminars. It is yet another example of a traditional structural hurdle to be overcome(or side-stepped).
Identifying and subtracting fundamental differences from the equation leaves a remainderof commonality which is as important to the discussion as are the differences. It is thesethreads that must be identified within the participants themselves and followed until aconvergence is met.
As for the actual character of difference, it is myunderstanding that often thosedifferences are mapped over the model territory of materialism--literally formaldifferences. If the differences are mapped over a model based on flows and energies,these differences often become (merely) life-experience-based differences in point-of-view. A will accept alternate points-of-view is an essential character trait of someoneengaged in trans-disciplinary collaboration. Transcending discipline-specific languageand culture might be facilitated by an acceptance that the phenomenal world that issensually experienced, traversed, by individual humans is essentially the same for each. That we are indeed dancing (so-to-speak) around an un-representable Void that we are alltrying to re-present to each other in an understandable form. I believe that there arealways commonalities regardless of materialistic and methodological framing ofdiscipline.
This point loops back to the idea that the model system(s) that one is embedded in, theone used to approach the question pre-determines the outcome.
[1]by meta-structure, I am referring to the agglomeration of situated conditions, social, conceptual,architectural, physical, etc, within which the human encounter is embedded.