[iDC] On Interdisciplinarity. An Interview with Simon Penny

[Malian Lahey]

Hullo all:

I find this interview very curious.  At the same time I think Penny's ideas on
interdisciplinarity are more or less sane, I find it problematic that he has
conceptualized "power brokers of the conventional art world" as those who keep
him marginalized.

Being interdisciplinary myself, (anthropologist/artist) I think that it's quite
normal for someone with highly developed skills in one discipline
(anthropology/digital technology) to feel like a stepchild when trying to
integrate into a new community (artist).

I think it's important to point out that there are *always* points where the
disciplines clash and these are wonderful (if hard) opportunities for dialogue,
growth and learning.  To see this as "oppression" is shutting down the
conversation and therefore, likely to escalate a conflict.

Probably digital arts will not be fully integrated into mainstream art until its
practitioners begin to address some EXTREMELY problematic points which likely
disturb many people outside of the digital community.

1) The issue of more and more people dependent on virtual interactivity for
their social needs.  In one sense, it is tragic to see people so alienated from
the physical world that they never act out in the "real" world.  They are so
dissociated from power! (instead, they plug into the "sense" of power)  I have
said this before, but I wish that some computer geeks I have met would quit
internalizing their day to day traumas + acting them out in gaming.  The world
would be a better place if they had real-time strategies for zapping the
folks/corporations who hurt them and holding them accountable!

2) Generally people recognize that the continuing trend towards refining and
hyper-refining urbanization takes people away from nature.  What's the problem
with that?  Oh, well, let's see: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, cancer
caused by toxins in day to day products like PVC, and etc.  We're also
dependent on destroying the environment, in order to obtain our fun fun
technology.  This is setting the stage for a vicious future conflict between
people who refuse to let go of nature and those who refuse to let go of
technology.

SIMON PENNY'S VIEW ON NATURE, AS SENT TO ME IN A PERSONAL EMAIL:
> >After a while humans won't even remember what nature was like.
> Maybe every generation feels something like this. Its nostalgia. 
> Nostalgia is not bad, its just melancholic memory. You can't have 
> nostalgia when you're young. Regretting the loss of nature is like 
> regretting the passing of youth.

Whaddya think?  Scary or not?  Is Penny being subjected to marginalization or
very healthy circumspection?

I am a student and as of yet I am practicing art in sort of a vaccuum.  Penny is
an internationally recognized exhibitor and professor who has founded a big
expensive program at Irvine.  I won't be surprised if nobody wants to listen to
me.  But Penny is in my opinion, a scary scary guy - from the little Hitler
moustache he wore when I met him, down to the artwork he made which is one of
the most fascist things I have ever seen
(http://www.acmi.net.au/fugitive.jsp).

Needless to say I give him a thumbs down as a cultural practicioner:
reconceptualizing his fascist tendencies as "resistance" is would be ridiculous
if it wasn't terrifyingly reminiscent of Hitler and Stalin.

Cheers
Malian




Quoting Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net>:

> On Interdisciplinarity
> 
> 
> An interview with Simon Penny 
> by Trebor Scholz
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Trebor Scholz: 
> The Share, Share Widely conference (New York City, 2005) surfaced many
> topics that face media art educators. One of the issues on the front
> burner is a lacking emphasis on art. On the one hand, many media art
> programs proclaim that they educate media artists. On the other hand,
> there is really only a small chance of providing a livelihood for such
> artists through the commodification of their artwork. The traditional
> art world and new media scenes are still fairly disconnected. The term
> "creative industries" (often used in Australia) attempts to address the
> forking of media authorship into commercial and non-commercial branches.
> But the term does not work very well. There really is no one stable new
> media industry to start with and the term "creative" is too broad.
> Numerous new media gurus who teach, make programming and software
> training their priority. The tension between vocational training and
> liberal education is a key antagonism in the field. This is obvious also
> when observing ill-advised job profiles in media art that surface all
> over the US. The prevailing notion seems to be that a few
> industry-strength programming skills are enough to make a good cultural
> producer. Little time is spent thinking through art or cultural studies
> (not to mention art history)! Technologists should know how to open a
> cell phone and tinker with it. Equally, a certain competence can be
> asked of the engineer when it comes to art history. Numerous cultural
> practitioners show discomfort even using the word ³art.² The framing of
> artwork as art is frequently at odds with the funding logic of
> innumerable cultural institutions. Once I was told ³Just take the word
> art out of your proposal and we will fund it.² Cultural producers employ
> scientific formats and language to contextualize their work in the
> process of getting it funded. In the United States the sciences are much
> better endowed than the cultural arena. More often than not a Ph.D. is a
> must when applying for science funding. This is one of the reasons that
> countless media artists drift into newly emerging doctorate programs. 
> 
> Simon Penny: 
> Your introduction cuts right to the heart of the issue of
> interdisciplinarity with respect to "new media" (and I prefer the rather
> clunky "digital cultural practices" to either new media or media art,
> partly because I think the notion of "media" is an irrelevant focus). I
> would disagree with you on the subject of "art": those programs arising
> in fine art institutions are usually heavily invested in art, but have a
> simplistic understanding of technical issues and theoretical issues that
> arise from technical issues. A similar pattern is observed in programs
> that arise in humanities and programs that arise in CS: they each
> privilege their discipline. However, these disciplines arose before the
> new media and its special issues, so none of them are adequate or
> sufficient to the situation: a new pedagogical model is required: this
> is the underlying rationale of the Arts Computation Engineering Program
> I established at UCI. 
> 
> On the subject of funding, it is clear that in the US, of the little
> arts funding is available and minimal part of that goes to media arts.
> Science-side research funding is explicitly not interested in art. So it
> is very difficult to get appropriate funding for media art projects and
> initiatives. Hence the attraction of commercial funding, but the
> downside of this is the imperative of market success.
> 
> In general it is fair to say that the aesthetic or the socio-technical
> modes of cultural production today are rooted in the practices of the
> 1960s-- when radical practices embraced the body, physical site and
> social context, as well as  emerging technologies.  In many ways you can
> see the roots of many new media works in conceptual art practices. You
> can see in various aspects in new media art that refer to mail art, body
> art and site specific art. This is no accident of course, the people
> doing the current work were trained by practitioners from that period.
> The issues that are explored in new media art are often essentially a
> continuation of the 60s and 70s explosion of post-object art,
> transferred to a new technological context. 
> 
> On the other hand, new practices are emerging in the context of new
> technologies which are in a marginal position with respect to common
> notions of art. What we are seeing is a transition. If we look at
> cultural practices of the last two, three hundred years, we realize that
> new kind of cultural practices create their own venues. Cinema is a
> perfect example. Cinema created a novel kind of venue. We don't usually
> go to see cinema in art museums, opera theaters, parades or mardi gras-
> the cinema created a novel kind of venue which was geographically
> dispersed yet synchronous: you could see the same film in a hundred
> places around the world at the same time. It had commonalities to
> conventional theatre venue but in many ways it was different. Those
> precursor venues remain relevant to the work that they supported and the
> new venues that emerge are relevant to the new practices. Right now we
> are seeing exactly that happening with multi-user gaming. You have seen
> as well as I have, the pitiful attempt to incorporate multi-user gaming,
> for instance, into museum-type contexts. It's peculiar and completely
> inappropriate. This new practice will define its own new venue. I am not
> so concerned if the power brokers of the conventional art world don't
> get it.
> 
> TS: Curators as cultural legitimizers decide about inclusion and
> exclusion. Defining a borderline between art and non-art provides
> curators with decision making tools. To discuss this in educational
> settings is important. With these problems in sight and also
> re-connecting to my earlier comments: Do you perceive a crisis in
> new-media art education? For the past ten years new jobs in this field
> opened up. Few faculty are fully confident with their teaching practice.
> Theory and software are like drift wood in the river. They unremittingly
> pull ahead of us. But there always is the technical solace. Instructors
> should be driven by the discourse of a media instead of focusing solely
> on its material properties. 
> 
> SP: I argued that the new practices may not have their home in the
> museums. Similarly I would argue that the Academy is not necessarily
> the natural home for new-media art education. This is only to be
> expected. The kinds of socio-cultural conditions that shaped this new
> work did not exist yet when the disciplines in the university were
> developed. Quite clearly diplomas and degrees that were set up prior to
> the existence of this practice cannot serve as guidelines in training
> practitioners in an optimal way. The question then becomes: if we want
> to train practitioners and managers for all of these new kind of
> practices-- what out of all these traditional disciplines and fields is
> relevant? What does a person in this field need to know and how should
> these things be integrated in order to equip the student in the best
> possible way? I don't claim to have an authoritative view. What I do
> argue is that knowledge, techniques and methods from the technical
> sciences, the humanities and from the arts have to be combined in a new
> way. I want to give every student the freedom to draw upon any
> knowledge base that they feel is appropriate for their work. We are in a
> period of flux. If a student wants to take a course in ethno-methodology
> or if a student wants to take a course in mathematical logic that is
> fine by me. Ultimately they are the new generation that is creating this
> new context and I sincerely believe they have an intuitive grasp of what
> they need.  I'm naturalized to analog technology. The digital came upon
> me in my teenage years. My students are naturalized to digital
> technology. They have a different approach. My job is to facilitate a
> rigorous development of their ideas, because, thankfully, intellectual
> precision and academic rigor have not become obsolete.   
> 
> TS: New-media art education in North America takes place for the most
> part in universities. Where else do you see effective venues that impact
> very many people and have the financial means to do so?
> 
> SP: Two of the motto of the ACE program: one is hybrid vigor and the
> other one is kind of industrial hazard logo: "danger of permanent damage
> to axiomatic assumptions." That's actually very serious. The longer I
> try to perpetrate a serious interdisciplinarity in the academy the
> clearer it becomes to me -- in doing interdisciplinarity you necessarily
> excavate below the horizon of partisans of particular disciplines. Some
> disciplines have the axiomatic assumption that the justification for
> their practice and the criteria by which they judge their practitioners
> and their students is the production of new knowledge. And they claim to
> know what new knowledge is. They have a definition for it. Firstly, that
> definition of knowledge excludes a wide range of things that many people
> call knowledge. Secondly, there are a range of disciplines on the campus
> for whom the production of new knowledge is not a primary task. There is
> an enormous amount of lip service paid to interdisciplinarity across
> campuses in this country and elsewhere. In my experience that is almost
> never sufficiently intellectually sophisticated to do anything but
> sabotage the entire project. Because if you remain wholly enveloped
> within the world-view of a particular discipline and simply take pieces
> from other disciplines into your practice then you take those pieces out
> of context and in that process ignore the deeper epistemological crisis
> which you create. If you can't create a context in which the two
> disciplines that you are attempting to combine can be resolved or at
> least that the differences in their positions can be negotiated then you
> have not even started doing interdisciplinarity.
> 
> TS: Collaborations between artists and scientists are often arduous
> endeavors. Artists can bring new methodologies to the table of
> scientists. However, they often end up as illustrators of the findings
> of scientists. Genuine collaborations take a long time to develop. They
> need true interest and  commitment from all parties involved. 
> 
> SP: It's a question of whether or not you reflectively engage the
> premises of the other discipline as well as your own. If you don't do
> that rigorously enough then you may sabotage what you are trying to do.
> In disciplines there is a disciplinary hubris. Most practitioners of
> certain discipline have the sense that in the end their discipline is
> the master discipline and they have the master discourse and all the
> other disciplines can be drawn upon to help them. It doesn¹t matter if
> you talk to architects, or engineers or critical theorists-- there is
> almost always hubris. Doing interdisciplinarity is inherently
> psychologically very challenging. You have to be prepared to say: "I
> don't have the majority of the relevant knowledge. I don't have the
> master discourse. It's entirely possible that I am working with partial
> knowledge". That makes people insecure. It takes humility and
> intellectual courage because if you claim to be an interdisciplinarian,
> someone who is deeply involved in one of the disciplines you are
> referring to can always turn to you and say "you are a dilettante. You
> don't have a deep enough knowledge of this discipline to speak to it".
> And you have to respond by saying "yes, I am not steeped as deeply in
> that discipline as you are but on the other hand I'm bringing a
> different perspective to your practice and surely there is value in
> that". It's very difficult when you begin to challenge the sense of
> authority of disciplinary partisans.
> 
> Then there is the question of vocational training. There is another
> element in there, which is the predatory nature of employers. I have
> seen repeatedly students being drawn into employment part way though
> their undergraduate education. They'd suddenly be drawn into jobs where
> they were earning many times the salary that they would expect to be
> earning at the end of an undergraduate or graduate degree. They work 120
> hours a week and in three years their knowledge was out of date and they
> were on the street. I have seen this happening many times and it's a
> difficult problem in a context where the tools are changing so rapidly.
> My position has always been that there is no point in providing
> vocational training in a tool which will be obsolete by the time the
> student graduates. That was clear for sure ten years ago, but things are
> stabilizing. The dot com bust was not a bad thing.
> 
> TS:  How do you position yourself within the many different approaches
> to teaching programming? I argue that the principles of programming are
> part of a more stable trajectory that will allow students to learn new
> languages when necessary. Think of the Python programming language, for
> example.
> 
> SP: Certainly, it is crucial to understand the behavior and logics of
> the machine, you have to speak its language. A grounding in computer
> architecture, software architecture, digital logic and programming
> styles is required. This is required basic literacy. But if you look at
> the change in, say, web programming languages over a very short period
> the change is extraordinary. The industry is in flux and things that
> were regarded as being basic skills have disappeared into hardware
> instantiations and people are not even aware of them anymore. It's an
> awkward pedagogical situation, no question about it. This where the
> experience of the educator comes in. The educator can say- I have seen
> ten or fifteen programs or software packages in this area and this one
> has the qualities that I want to teach. That's why we get paid as
> teachers. 
> On the issue of Theory, it depends on what we mean by theory. Computer
> science theory and critical theory are separate pursuits. In my opinion,
> its crucial that technically inclined students be exposed to ways of
> thinking which require them to look at their work and their field in a
> large socio-political context. There is no question that critical theory
> of the last twenty or thirty years can be extremely valuable and is
> important as it is part of the contemporary intellectual climate and
> students ought to know about it. But there are two key problems. One of
> them is the naive art production as implementation of theory, which is
> almost always in my experience underwhelming in its presence as art. And
> secondly, the questionable relationship between theory and practice from
> the point of view of theorists. For instance, sometimes, when one sees
> the meeting of practitioners and theorists the transfer of intellectual
> property is usually one way. The artist provides examples or substance
> for the imaginations of the theory machine. But the products of the
> theory machine stays within the confines of the theory machine. Often
> theorists see artworks or cultural practice in the way a cow sees grass.
> It's for consumption. I'm looking for ways in which there can be a
> closer integration of theory and practice. I'm looking for a way in
> which theorists can engage with practice and give back to it in a
> constructive way.
> 
> TS: Relating back to an earlier discussion I wonder if there is no valid
> space for a cultural practice that is informed by, rather than conflated
> with, theory. 
> 
> SP: Of course. My concern is with a naive and superficial implementation
> of theory which produces bad art. One can point to examples in which the
> use of theory has precluded in the production of rich and intellectually
> deep art. But you don't get that by going to a couple of lectures on
> Deleuze and then flashing around some Deleuzian jargon. There is a need
> for a process of integration. 
> 
> TS: I agree. It takes a long time until theory you can call up theory
> when needed. Your program at UC Irvine brings together art and science.
> Recently I noticed a certain scientification of the arts. Scientific
> formats enter the arts. This practice can be witnessed all over the US
> and is related to the business logic of the University and funding
> bodies like the NSF. In addition to self-organziation and a full embrace
> of the unregulated digital commons, this scientification
> of the arts is a response to the prevailing resource scarcity.    
> 
> SP: I think this is where the Canadians again have shown remarkable
> wisdom. In Quebec but maybe even nationally now, there is a new
> definition of a kind of fundable practice, which is called "research
> creation". This recognizes the kind of hybrid practice that is part
> technical research and part artistic production. We don't have that in
> this country. The fact that we have an NEH and NSF reflects the
> disciplinary division on campus. There is little support for practices
> that straddle the boundaries. And those disciplinary definitions are of
> course completely artificial. Another more insidious mode of
> scientification is the insinuation of values and criteria from
> scientific and technical practice into cultural practice. Computer
> technology is a philosophical Trojan horse. Take the issue of
> productivity. Because of the linking of technology and commerce, which
> is what computer culture is all about, there is a high emphasis on
> productivity. One has to ask if a value like productivity is in fact
> constructive when one is talking about cultural practice. Would
> Shakespeare have been a better playwright if he had forced himself to
> produce one play a week? The answer is "no." If you try to optimize
> words towards poetry in terms of redundant characters, would it make
> better poetry? Again-- "no." The whole question is, of
> course, absurd. All these values like optimization, efficiency,
> productivity, reliability, provability, which come upon us because of
> the tools we use, are really dangerous. So I must return to a rigorous
> analysis of the disciplines which we are attempting to combine. If you
> would apply criteria like productivity to art you would empty it out
> until it would simply be a shell. You'd destroy it. In a lot of ways I
> think that we are destroying it. At least let me put this out there as a
> provocation:  ultimately we are employing a technology which is based on
> the idea of man-machine interaction where the man is secondary to the
> machine for the purpose of productivity. I find it odd that this is not
> regarded as a fundamental problematic in the field. 
> 
> TS: So far we discussed radical issues in education. But all of this is
> still safely situated behind the thick firewalls of academia. Do you see
> aspects of media art education that can serve as models for processes
> outside of it?
> 
> SP: I have to say that I have been so focused on establishing
> appropriate educational programs within the academy as substantial part
> of my career, that I don't feel qualified to address your question
> except in a reflexive way. I taught in self-contained art academies and
> I think I chose to establish ACE not in such location because while
> there are problems with the academy as an environment and as a context,
> it's also true that nowhere else, I think, can you have such easy access
> to such a breadth of knowledge, experience and techniques within walking
> distance. Access here is a given. If I have a student who is interested
> in the electrical engineering aspects of RFID technology, I can say- go
> across to the electrical engineering department. Within a day or two
> that student can have a top level meeting where key issues are
> addressed. Having all these mind on campus works better than a search
> engine. You get what you need in a very efficient way. I think that is
> the real value of the academy. Virtually any question a student asks me,
> whether be it the history of racism or new practices in biomedical
> engineering- I can send them directly to an expert.
> 
> 
> 
> About Simon Penny:
> Simon Penny is professor of arts and engineering, a joint appointment of
> the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and The Henry Samueli School of
> Engineering at UC Irvine. He is the architect and founding director of
> the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation Engineering
> (ACE) which offers three masters degrees in the field, one in Fine Arts,
> one in Engineering and one in Information and Computer Science. Mr.
> Penny is an artist, theorist, teacher and curator in the field of
> Electronic and Interactive Art. His art practice consists of interactive
> and robotic installations, which have been exhibited in the Americas,
> Australia and Europe. His essays have been published and translated
> widely. He edited the anthology Critical Issues in Electronic Media
> (SUNY Press 1995). 
> 
> About Trebor Scholz:
> Trebor Scholz works both collaboratively and individually as an artist,
> media theorist, activist, and organizer. <www.collectivate.net> He is
> researcher and professor in the Department of Media Study, SUNY at
> Buffalo. In 2005 he facilitated ³Share, Share Widely²
> <http://newmediaeducation.org>.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Malian Lahey

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