Plenary Session

I think we've touched on a whole range of issues over the last two days with Artists who are working with scientific industry and with issues that are quite important to how we plan. Unfortunately how we see ourselves and the world around us is probably not the right way to describe it. But I just want this last half hour to be an informal session for you all to raise issues that you might think need to be raised and to ask where we might go from here. I'm going to declare a conflict of interest in some ways because my other hat at the moment, other than working for the Adelaide Festival, some work with the Australia Council on their initiative to further develop Art and Science in corporations. So come next week I'll be employed by the Oz Co rather than the Adelaide Festival, so this session will really feed well into that work too. And I think that the issues that Paul raised right at the end of the last session actually feed directly into that. It's how you usefully make engagements, friendships and collaborations between artists, the science industry and environmental organisations. So I'm just going to open the floor and see what comments people might have.

I'll start the ball rolling. One of the things that strikes me is that everything at the moment is so economically driven that we really need to form some advocacy that forces economic morals to take into account the ecological and social issues that are not currently being factored into these economies at the moment. It just sounds so simple, but how do we effectively lobby for that kind of factoring into projects and development? So how do we change the paradigm in Canberra?

I wonder if that's biting of more than we can chew. For us there are many instances where we are talking about what we're campaigning with. It ranges everywhere from to the activists inside large corporations who've already agreed to change their own corporation. The question might be where last, depending on where there are people campaigning.

There is actually a concept for this which is the triple bottom line. For old timers it was the bottom line which was all about money. The triple bottom line is between the social, cultural and environmental. But I think it should go further. I think that it should be a quadruple bottom line. The cultural should be broader. I know it is a big mouthful but unless you've got a vocabulary to actually start dealing with it, you can't.

Well I mean I guess it's worth saying that John Hawkes, a Melbourne consultant about two years ago wrote a booklet called 'The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability' which was written through a Local Government initiative in Victoria. And it stands as a reasonable starting point for doing exactly what you're talking about. Saying there's economy, there's ecology, there's society and then there's culture. You may not like the four way split and it's got holes in it but at least it says that culture has got to be in there. In fact all . says that culture is the pointing of the ship. In Victoria they had a conference last year on health and environment in Local Government, in which the view was put that you get the cultural stuff going as a way of influencing the shire engineer to go greener. So that's happening but it's by no means wide spread in having the Australian artistic community let alone the corporate world understand.

I think that leads back to your question of how and where do artists fit into the approach to these issues of cultural debate.

Often it comes back to education in the institutions and the training of artists. And therefore it seems that most people are trying to facilitate these kinds of activities to happen. But sometimes we concentrate on the activity rather than the facilitation of them. So if we concentrate more on creating people who have in the past, or have a history of collaborative practice and put them into positions that they can instigate collaborations then these opportunities might ignite. But it's very difficult to do.

If you can make Government or a department realise that an artist can be of value to them because an artist thinks so much more laterally than what they do - they can collect the benefit.

The suggestion that the arts are going to be creative all the time and that its always going to think laterally is wrong. Sometimes they just want to paint simple pictures that they've seen. They're not always the lateral great people that you think that they are. I think that you should stop this immediately because there are a lot of other people around. I think that's the thing that has caused the arts so many problems.

Maybe because we come from such different backgrounds, but we do think a lot more laterally than most people. But it does depend on each individual, what they're doing. Artists are taught to see management. We've got to be taught as the observer.

But again you're saying the same thing. You find it problematic and a lot of people say they went to art school without being able to see that well. They'd draw but they couldn't actually see the world. They could conceptualise it but whether they could see it and understand it is another thing.

But that's what scientists do. They try to understand the nature of things.

But then you're saying it's not that simple necessarily to say that you see.

I agree. What you see is an observation.

But its presuming.

It helps and eventually you may be able to add some more to the understanding of what it is.

You might be able to but you might just come in as sort of..

But someone else might be able to start where you left off. What you've seen from another point they might be able to add to and see where you look further down, in another way.

I'm not sure about the other way stuff. I'm both a geologist and a painter and I don't think more or less creatively in the two worlds. I might disagree that there are the two worlds of science and arts. But I do think that the punch of knowledge making is a bit different between the two. In science, the idea is that you make observations and you develop theories and then you use those theories to make predictions about the next bit of the world that you are interested in. It's an attempt to control things and bring them into bite size chunks. Whereas the artists' arch of knowledge is quite different. They still make observations about the world but then they don't bother about universal theories. They're more likely to go for something that's highly contextualised about one of their own experiences or the experience of the community around them. They still might use that to make predictions or make rhetorical cases about how the world is, but it is a different path to knowledge making. That's where I think there's a usefulness in bringing them together. Because they do work in different ways.

I'm imagining a collaboration between a logging company and a tree spiker and how the art council would handle that, you know to bring them together as a community. The tree spikers aren't generally grass so you're going to have to fund artists who aren't tree spikers and believe in the progressive change in order to sanctify the deal.

I think that there's a real danger of artists working with industry and with organisations like the Australia Council promoting that. It's almost at the expense of artistic practice and it's like artists do this wacky stuff and they are also useful and valuable in this connection with real labour. That's not to say that it's not incredibly useful for artists to gain employment etc.

I don't want to beat my own drum but I think that for individual artists working in isolation they really must have an organisation that wants the artist. Therefore they are not just in the service of the industry or the scientists. They are much more secure and I know from my own experience as an isolated artist within the residency, I felt as a guest and I felt really uncomfortable making strong comments. However, now we have SymboticA we have much more power and we can convince people that our input is much more valuable than just beautifying their work.

Do you feel out of the industry more? Isn't the Arts an industry by default. Everyone that's been here has been working with companies and dealing with this.

But it sort of depends on what kind of service you provide.

Absolutely.

I was working on a project where they were looking at artists collaborating with architects in public art and they assumed that they would want to get artists involved earlier in the building rather than plonking something on the building in the last moment. And they decided to look at methods of collaboration and assumed that because architects and artists were both creative that collaboration would be easy. The result - it wasn't that easy. The hardest thing was coming up with a method, a methodology to start the collaboration. And it seems to me that some of the ways that it falls down, and particularly when you're working with industry, and that is finding out how that methodology of collaboration would be and that some of the research into the methodology, at least gives a starting point otherwise you just all sit around a table and you're just not getting anywhere. I think that's something people will start looking at more is to come up with a model where they can talk at the same language, because I'm an architect and an artist and I couldn't talk the same language as the artist. And that seemed crazy. So I just thought that that was interesting and if people could come up with some methods of collaboration you wouldn't get some of that, an assumption perhaps that I'm an artist and therefore I will think like that. That there's a way of talking at the table.

I just thought that maybe industries could be looked at as communities rather than just as industry? And I think too that there's a problem with art defining itself by its meaninglessness which is an avant-garde modernist view. But also governments are effected by social movement and the perception of the community so it would seem to me that this kind of agenda needs to be very much based at that grass roots level to generate social movement.

Staying on the same path but firstly to say that it's not just industry. I think we're talking a bit more broadly about cross sectoral work - the arts and health circle is the kind of partnership that on the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council are starting to talk about. There are lots of synchronicities in those areas - Local Government, stable Federal Health Departments, hospitals and so on. So there's the public and the private sector sure, but it's very complex and there are many ways in. The CWA and Landcare are organisations that have been involved in environmental issues in the salt regions that the CCDB now sees as potential partners. The idea of the industry as a community is extremely interesting because I don't think this kind of partnering-up that leads to knowledge building for environmental management is necessarily easy for all artists working in all art forms. There are some artists, particularly those working in Community Cultural Development modes for which that might be more common place. But there is a lot of art done that wouldn't work in that.

I think it might be better in some ways to try and encourage industry and the science communities not so much in partnership but more in being benefactors in a kind of philanthropy. Because I think that artists are being perhaps ambitious about what they can achieve in an outright partnership. I think that occasionally it can work. And Rich, you spoke yesterday about a fabulous partnership at Xerox PARC. I mean that seemed to me to be a definition of a partnership of sorts. But I think that what artists suffer is, for example if you work in technology obviously you can't afford any of the equipment, you probably want some help with expertise, so it's more a matter of them seeing, much like earlier generations of patronage in the arts going back, more a sense of philanthropy and support. And the benefits of that to Society are you get artists in and we can actually change your perspective.

But then there's a danger that, like Paula described yesterday about the Artist coming to do a residency and ending up washing dishes and fixing Xerox machines.

Which is why I am saying philanthropy is more appropriate - if you invite someone who is a partner and part of your team you can get them to do that kind of stuff. But if you're going to be a benefactor and invite them to work then they wouldn't be asked to wash up the dishes.

Why is it so weak in Australia that tradition of Philanthropy?

I don't know.

Does anybody have an idea?

Don't know. Perhaps Steve over here and then.

I'd just like to throw in a couple of things in. The first one is that in terms of the principle of convergence, we've really betrayed that. And I mean that because the conversation even the conversation right now, is based fundamentally on a principle of specialisation. You're an artist, you did this - you're a scientist, you do this. There's really not much respect for a persons being. I'm not just an artist - I mean I do things like manipulate images, but I'm also a teacher and an activist. I also do things in science. I do all of those things and then that's what comes together to make this practice an actual practice, a combination of thinking and doing. And that's trying to figure out the process and engaging those that are going to be of interest. As long as we maintain this idea of specialisation and not professionalism and competence and especially efficiency, we only go on to amplify the separations and alienations that we have faced for the past 200 years. I think that in situations like this there needs to be more attention made to independent models. Not just to bureaucratise the collaboration, but how is it that you make a collaboration that is rooted in something like a friendship. For Critical Art Ensemble in our model we never used to be artistic ever to make the collaboration set we've had. We've done it through making friends. We've gone ahead in the world and meet people and talk with them, discuss, lunch and drink. As Rich says, find people where the sparks fly. You know you don't necessarily need that orchestrated for you. Each one of you, and I've talked to almost all of you, and you are interesting people, you can do it on your own. It doesn't need to be mediated. And that's when I think the more efficient and the more amazing inventive and creative things happen.

I just want to follow up on Steve's point. In both their programs and in RED in particular most recently I mostly looked for 'bridge' people with multiple disciplines. Because there are language problems that can be very real. If you can find these people who are rich, it really helps because then they can bring in other people from different places. I never try to bring artists in to work with corporations but bring artists to work with specific scientists.

Fortunately, I think that you have to create some meeting point. A halfway house where those kinds of relationships can form. You should go and talk to a scientist as an artist.

But you shouldn't go to speak to him as a scientist but as a Human and find out where that commonality is. It might be that you decide that you like each other and that you've found support. It might be one that you find you have a common political ideal and you can build off that. You can then make a language and start to work together. But you can't just go - here's an artist and here's a scientist, now sit at a table and make it work. The bridges are going to be elsewhere. These sessions should be more about independent lobbying, of how to do it and to discuss what are you're experiences rather than who's the expert on the stage. Of how did you do it? How did you make those collaborations function efficiently? And if it was through bureaucracy how did you navigate that system? What were the steps you took to make that? That would be endlessly fruitful and everyone could find a place where they could feel comfortable, instead of a dependency on cultural institutions or industry which definitely have their own agendas.

Who else should come together for a future conference of this sort of nature. Because I do think that that was one of the things we were trying to set out to do was starting and not finishing.

I would just like to say that I think that I'd like to follow on from what you were saying that it probably needs to be a range of things. Often the price of autonomy of thought or practice has really been synonymous with a type of isolation and artists are often left alone to solve their dilemmas - like moral, ethical, equipment, instructional etc. I think it's very useful for us to talk as a group because often when we go into collaborative situations we are the only one and we are left alone with the dilemmas. So perhaps even having arts law and intellectual property people would be great to know what to do when you just found out that the company you've been working with for years is going to use your image to sell their product. I've been in the fortunate position of having a patron who allowed me to have whatever resources I wanted so I could build a laboratory and actually really extract on a technology that I could only take to a certain point in a collaborative situation. And I think that perhaps the institutionalised part of the Arts Council and the Australian Research Council might be able to provide a very luxurious thing which is in fact artists access to technology on the terms of being an artist.

Amanda I think one of the answers to your question about what we do next by way of putting people together is James' answer with salt. At this time in Australia and in the next three years, I don't think a project where a forestry company working with the tree spikers is an option for various political reasons. Similarly, if you wanted to start making art about how to stop making Australia's green house gases with a mining company you wouldn't get very far at all. But there is an area where no matter what the political complexion, there is very broad agreement and this is with the salt issue. It's with salinity that we've seen convergence from the conservation movement, the Farmers Federation and all sides of politics. One of John Howard's close advisors came to a recent Australia Council meeting and made it very clear that Cabinet would yield enormous pressure to just cut out all this ecological stuff. We see that all over the world after September 11. But salt is one area where you could move forward. Identify the artists and scientists that have already worked in that area, bring them together.

Finally, I was going to say that on the website that we've built for the Biennial there are a lot of discussion areas that might be usefully employed. Thank you to all participants and audiences