The Leonardo Network met today in Prague to discuss what participants saw as the burning issues related to creative work at the intersection of Art & Science. I was heartened to hear members bring up topics such as: moving to a solar economy, the ethics of artistic and scientific practice and more. Roy Ascott and many of his planetary collegiate colleagues made a plea for artists to take up ideas of consciousness, and to not only take on issues of the body, which was described as “an easy target.”
Albert-Laszlo Barabassi a complexity scientist made a very interesting case for our community to grapple with the changing nature of research with the advent of always-on geo-informational-databases. It was Barabarassi’s claim that humans have happily given up their privacy and that there is no stopping the technological and social network that supports always-on geo-surveillance, and that the data sets generated by mobile service providers and info mining related databases will be enormously helpful to social scientists in reducing the uncertainty of asking human subjects where they were and what they did. Essentially he made the claim that human subjects lie to social scientists, and that having access to these large databases is exciting to scientists because it will allow for whole new level of quantitative precision in the social sciences. While it may be true that quantitative analysis of human patterns and behavior will be more precise, large geospatial databases do not in themselves mean that social science research will be more ACCURATE or true. Under our current means of knowledge production which seems to always privilege quantitative data over other forms of data (qualitative, visual, sonic etc.) these databases may provide more currency in academic and popular circles, but may not help us understand anything more true or interesting about human nature. Lets not even get in to the ethical dimension….
That being said, its not that this research shouldn’t be done, it should just be done thoughtfully or else geospatial activity network analysis will become a form of Physiognomy/Phrenology applied to the bodies path on the surface of the earth rather than the path of measuring instruments on the surface of the human head. Speaking of Phrenology, Rob O’neill does very cool work on morphology projects that comments on, critiques and plays with the data collected by scientists.
Post a Comment