Image and Meaning - Question Time

My question is about the concept of genetic perfection. What is genetically poor and what is genetically rich? And if you're going to come to a certain definition this is genetically perfect, somebody will have come up with the variables that will determine you are within that category and I am sure we will arrive at that conclusion through a value system. So the whole notion of genetically perfect, I find it quite disturbing and very hard to grasp.

And the last thing I'd like to comment on is representation and meaning. I met this woman from Cambodia and she works in a media centre where they educate people. Of the 2 groups, one group worked with print media and the other with TV and radio. The people with print media were very concerned about domestic violence - they made a poster of a man hitting the woman with a cross. For all of us, that is actually quite meaningful. But what they failed to realise is that it's the children in the villages where at the same time were being educated into literacy and they'd just got the concept of multiplication meaning a cross. Hence confusion. So you have to realise that you have to be very clear about the context.

There are a number of issues. Perhaps Joyce would like to answer part of it - I'll do another part of it.

The concept in the work "I'm a perfect person", that I showed is actually a sarcastic and ironic construction. I totally agree with you - there's a big controversy at the moment looking at the relationship between genetics and behaviour. That there's any connection at all is very suspect. So for me, by putting the work on the internet and making developing the concept of a perfect person is in fact a starting point for people like you to open dialogue about what the future of the human body should be. So it's very much a critical analysis. And I've looked into the Human Geno Diversity Project, which I find very problematic. This looks at different kinds of aboriginal cultures and it classifies them accordingly to genetic constructions and looks at their heritage.

In terms of meaning, yes I do think that artists have a responsibility to think about the relationship between meaning and advertising for example. And so I agree with you on that level.

I think that it's a choice. Ultimately, arts a libertarian field and obviously we do not necessarily have a responsibility to anyone but ourselves. Designers yes. that was what was said yesterday with the user base - but artists can be as itinerate as we like.

You said that a critique of your work had said that it had no meaning. This was a very interesting and provocative remark to make but as you say it doesn't have to have meaning. On the other hand towards the other end of your talk you said that your work is about contemplation - that it stimulates contemplation. And that's what science does - ideally a scientist is a thinker, they make observations and experiments. These days you can't do that, you have to do the next review, get classes ready etc.

In terms of science communication there is no communication between the pages of Nature Magazine and the popular press and television. Journalists don't read Nature. There are those that read Nature and devour the press releases and propagate information. Ian Lowe does that kind of thing quite a lot and very well - translating the terminology in Nature for the popular media. We need scientists to do it. How does an artist extract from those pages what artists do?

Well one can only interpret what I say. But for me it was more than that because I had quite a lot of experience in computer animation and this type of utopianist aesthetic that surrounds computer animation. For me 3D modelling is a synthetic and artificial construction. It was interesting to extract the material from Nature Magazine, learn from it and then turn it around to present it back to the public inside the shadow of your own body of the viewer.

In other words to allow the viewer to experience the future of medical manipulation inside themselves is a way of interpreting the information. It's very different from writing it. It's very different from writings in Nature I'd say. So that's how I'd answer that question actually. It's the potential of interactivity for me that really sort of pushes an artistic realm that's interesting.

But it's an interpretation.

Absolutely.

That's not a criticism, that's a complement.

Art is interpretive by nature.

To go back to what you were saying before, I think that what you've got with the art and science fields is a mutual resonance in certain aspects and that does not mean that art is science or that science is art or that there is such a thing as science and art. I would hope that they always remain mutually exclusive and that they would never give themselves over to each other because I think we'll find that we will have a lot of people producing bad science and bad art in a sense.

But they share some these for example contemplation - this is shared. 'Science is about creating functions. Philosophy is about creating concepts and Art is about creating sensations.' And he justifies that in a fairly traditional way by looking at pictures. It is a very traditionalist argument. But its quite an interesting argument.

I think the Dolorous is an interesting philosopher in that way because he looks at the relationship of the body and also expands the interpretation to include society and a rather larger concept.

What did your Philosopher say science is about?

Functions.

Well you see it isn't. It's about understanding.

But understanding is a function.

Technology is about functions. But science is something else quite different.

It's interesting because I always think that astronomers and physicists are more related to the art field than a lot of the other scientists. I mean I'm not to sure about biologists, perhaps biology is also fairly close in concept. But when I have been working with programmers, the best programmers were collaborative and really knew conceptually what I was talking about.

Because we get so little information about the thing we want to study, the imagination is the important part of our work. This applies to all of science but especially in astronomy where the information content is small. And so the imagination is necessary to kind of visualise what's happening there in a physical sense. It has many strong resonances with the artist world. If you have to understand a star you have to understand it in bits because it is a complex thing.

I think that the other problem that scientists are facing today is the fact that there are many times where you can not really do the research that you would like to do. This is the topic I am interested in and at the end of the day I might be contributing to knowledge. Maybe not, but maybe yes. The point of the matter is that I have to get the funding. So there are a lot of scientists actually at the moment researching on topics that they are not even concerned about. But this is the only funding, or this is the only scientific paper that will provide them with the funding so they can continue. And I am thinking about an example of this women who is a physicist and she also works in chemistry and it took her ten years to get the PhD. And at that end of all this study she ended up working for a polymer that ended up colouring some pill for some pharmaceutical company because that was the only money she had available through the university.

Secondly, I trained as a scientist in biology and at the end of my training I realised that I will be working for a weapon somewhere in microbiology or I'm going to be locked in a lab somewhere for the rest of my life without getting sunlight and probably I'm going to be killing lots of animals. But these are topics that people coming into science should be talking about. Biohazard was something that we talked about twenty years ago. And why are we so concerned about these people with all these weapons because we know exactly what they have. We provided them with it. They've been researching for thirty years.

I think in terms of the ideology that's been going on, I was in the Cyber-Feminist Conference last year and we had a big discussion about ideology. How this whole Anthrax scare and how the press handled it has brought up issues from long ago and made us realise that actually the ideology has broken down. What we thought we were going through as artists, and perhaps as scientists too was the sort of progression from a dualist 70's world to a more pluralist 80's concept to a paradigm of mixed realities in the 90's. We see this as a linear theoretical progression. I think this whole September 11 phenomena and Afghanistan, you just realise again that the ideological Us and Them dualism has in fact been used by the press and the media to push people onto the backfoot of ideology. And that's really sad because the paradigm of mixed realities is much more excepting of all sorts of different cultures and all sorts of different kinds of situations.

Just when you were talking about dualism it made me think about how we continue to define science and art as different entities. You've already had to try and define that today and it's a funny thing because we also talk about individuality and making a difference. There are ethical scientists and there are artists dealing with ethics. There are commercial artists and there are commercial scientists. So I am just wondering how useful it is to try and categorise or set up those dualisms?

Can I say something about that. Art and science are different intellectual activities. I think they started in the same place, I think they started as a species trying to understand and explain the world around us. There are several was to do this - one is scientific and one is artistic. Science as we define it nowadays didn't start a few hundred years ago, it started right at the very beginning of human consciousness and imagination when we became a species that could represent the world and think in abstract terms. Full-life science that we have today didn't start until relatively recently. But I see these as two separate streams - they don't converge. Wile they started at the same point they are in fact slowly diverging.

But what we don't have now are very strong bridges between the two streams. Those bridges are strengthened by meetings like this where people get together with ideas and cross that divide. I don't think that art and science will ever converge again, I think they'll go their different ways just as the links between them will strengthen. As all structures, the links strengthen the whole edifice, the whole intellectual edifice. So that's how I see it. There is a dualism and it will remain.

I disagree. There has been an artificial dualism. And I think that not only are art and science are getting closer and closer with the links as you say, but also within the disciplines. There is more and more merging than there used to be. Fifty years ago, there were much more distinct lines between the different branches of medicine than there are today. There are more and more collaborations which link to joint research.

These are the bridges I'm talking about.

But I think we have to be careful with that. I think that we have to be very careful with the art and science relationship because I would not like to see art simply become in service to science. Art can very easily come in service to other areas - it services science by being; Art is very public. It's got a wonderful cannon of activity and it can provide a public face for science. Science doesn't need art to provide its public face. Science is absolutely wholly contained and I agree with you that there are bridges. These bridges are innovative bridges but the integrity of the areas are terribly important. If art simply ends up being in service to science, giving us the space to see scientific images as nice images, just art for art sake, I think it's a real shame.

I'd be horrified if I thought that art felt it was in some ways servicing science. I think that it's the other way round in a sense. Scientists derive so much from what artists do. Not necessarily scientific inspiration, but inspiration of a different type. Clearing out corners of the brain that haven't been illuminated for a long time. Artists do that wonderfully. Scientists have a lot of trouble doing that. So we have things to offer each other I think.

It was like what Rebecca was talking about with the rainbow machine and we were talking about big science and small science. And I've had this experience as well which is walking into the people who are designing the most efficient solar panels in the world and saying "Do you think we could make lightening out of one of those?" and they go "Hey look, you know we're not allowed to do that kind of stuff but we'll do it for you." It's really easy and fun for them whereas it's impossible for me. I couldn't do that kind of thing but there ends up being a really fabulous and experimental bridge that does happen between us. And I think that the bridges are amazing.

But the bridges I think would be a lot easier to cross and form if in fact the education wasn't so streamed into different places. I think it all goes back to when you're eleven years old and you have to choose Maths or Humanities. And I think that this is a big issue.

There's been some interesting, almost contradictory comments in what the responsibility of the artist is.

It's up to the individual artist really. We're only responsible to ourselves. We don't have the same ethical dilemmas. I don't know about science but art's a libertarian field. We can speak in whatever way we choose. We can say the most inane thing, we can say the most crass thing, we can say it in the wrong way, we can say it in the right way. We don't have a responsibility in that sense. We only have a responsibility to freedom of speech.

But that seems to be different from what Jason was saying in a sense. Do you want to comment.

With my work and the situation with my family lifestyle up in the Alice, I sort of combine my art with my family lifestyle and looking at some of the political stuff that happens in Aboriginal communities and issues and stuff there. And over a period of time that makes you pretty wild and pissed off with things. So the way that I can sort of help out is to re-tell stories through my artwork and look at this new medium with Photoshop and technology that can re-tell stories and hopefully give inspiration to other people to get out there and do things. It's pretty hard. There's a lot of bad things happening out there in the communities and a lot of people turn a blind eye to that kind of stuff. I got inspired to keep studying and doing things so that's what I want to do anyway. Keep going with it. It's just that you find new ways of doing things there and then along the way you maintain them and you find new areas to - you know you just keep going with it.

Perhaps the responsibility is more as an instigator for change.

It's really sad seeing some of that stuff out there I suppose.

I would like to say that even if artists who say that they don't have responsibility, there have been many situations historically where artists have been held responsible. So maybe they don't feel they have a responsibility but they certainly have suffered for it in various historical times and in the recent times especially.

Are there any more questions from the floor?

Maybe it could be helpful that to the definition of science and art, that we add a different distinction between exploring and expressing because both sides need to be expressed. The public needs to be educated not so much like the political side of it and communicating the ideas to other people then there's like with art, exploring yourself, exploring ideas and stuff presumably the same with science.

Well Science is about understanding as I said before. But that understanding is no use unless its broadcast in some way. So communicating that understanding is a very important thing. To make it interesting and relevant as well. You might say that in my field for example, astronomy has no relevance to everyday life. It's out there somewhere with the stars but there are many profound links to our every day life that if we have time we can go into. So it's important that astronomers and scientists in general make their science interesting especially for those people who are not necessarily directly interested in science, and explain its relevance to our society. Science is a cultural activity, it's not just a scientific activity that lives in this box here. It's part of our civilisation. And it behoves us as a civilisation to understand what underpins our civilisation. The science and technology that makes things work around us and the issues we have to face as a species are now suddenly very large and some people see as very threatening. It's important that there's enough scientific knowledge in the community to make enlightened decisions about the way we're going to handle these new things. So it's a matter of communication of knowledge.

That is your communication brings out the whole issue of technology. And of course technology comes from the Greek word 'Techni' which is skill and also of course was the word for art in Ancient Greece. But I am going to see ConVerge sometimes the actual technology can seem like the science. So I wonder if you could just comment on that distinction between the technology and the science behind the technology.

Would either of the artists in the show like to comment on that?

I guess we're at Marshall McCluen?.in some point. You know that medium is the message and that medium i will always speak. In the same way in sculpture the materiality or the presence of something speaks alongside what is being communicated. So in many respects a lot of digital media is not transparent. Everyone imagine that well cinema was considered to be a transparent medium. The medium that you didn't actually experience. You looked straight through it. And Jill's actually done a lot of work on the hot and cold nature of the medium and you actually did a work called 'The Medium is the Message' didn't you. In that exhibition you are encountering the media and it speaks. It's not transparent. It does speak alongside the work and I don't know that you could say that the media is technology. You could say that its science. It's engineering and what we're seeing is very rapid advances in engineering at this point, and they're very interesting and they are changing the way they are influencing what we're able to do, the speed we are able to do it, the colour saturation, projection, plasma screens and the like.

You're trying to differentiate between science and technology in your question. Science as I said earlier is about understanding. Science doesn't have to have a directed purpose, it's just about understanding. Technology is about transforming that understanding into ways you can interact with it. So in forming the knowledge in the laws of physics for instance into a machine that does things, that's what technology is about. They depend on one another. Without technology, science wouldn't be able to explore in the way that it does. And without science, technology would never have developed. So they are inter related but separate things.

For me there is no difference between technology and us. It's an extension of ourselves, we invented it therefore it's there. For me it's always been an interesting tool actually, and that's why, even now working on the web, I see it actually as a special tool. And I see the internet as a venue really, like a space. So for me the whole idea of the separation of creativity and technology doesn't exist in fact. They are just run side by side and I think we at this point in time we receive everything from the media. We're mediated nomads in fact. We're just sort of wandering in this mediated space which has all these qualities of immersion and these possibilities of being incorporated into screen space. And so therefore in this area of media particularly if you are interested in Science, I think we are interpreters; we are interpreting with our technology. We are helping to interpret some of those scientific understandings. And I think that's, I see my role as a fairly responsible one in that all of my work is about issues, political and social issues. It's think it's because I believe in something that Sandy Stone said that I think is really interesting, and that is that she says that, "Technology's driven forward by the need for social reality." If we didn't have the need to be social we wouldn't be inventive at all and that goes for both the use of it in Science and Art.

On the question of responsibility. We're all sitting up here and we're all so responsible. Science is not very responsible at all and neither is art, which is quite interesting. We're all sitting up here thinking that we're all doing the right thing and we're all interested in that but it has a big side of it that is completely irresponsible. I mean hence we have the world that we have. And art by the same token is interested in itinerants, irresponsibility and negativity in the same way.

Yeh. It has to be from the individual.

And it's part and parcel.