research

Fields Q & A session

A premise behind this question is that practices which were once subsumed under terms such as media art, digital art, art-and-technology, art-and-science, have become so diversified that no single term can work as a signpost any more. The assumption is also that typically those practices are transdisciplinary and socially engaged, combining imaginative use of technologies old and new with participatory processes and interventions in the social fabric. The changing role of art in society is one where it does not just create a new aesthetics but gets involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations.

Report from Arcus, Japan November 2011 | Trans Artists

“One cannot be an amateur, or decide one day ‘Let’s be interdisciplinary”. A university may decide to develop in that direction, but what matters is that each researcher finds and establishes some complicities with other researchers so that interdisciplinarity comes from the base of the pyramid and works its way up. One can only benefit from interdisciplinary practices if researchers meet other researchers whilst learning how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction; therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks inherent in an interdisciplinary practice…the first obstacle is often linked to individual competencies coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”

Julia Kristeva

Transvergence in Art History

Transvergence creates a distinction between art that is interdisciplinary and art that is transdisciplinary. In interdisciplinary pursuits, disciplines collaborate. Scientists and artists, commonly regarded as ideologically opposed practitioners, can intersect and contemplate their common relationships. However, these interacting disciplines ultimately retain their identities as isolated from each other. Transdisciplinary projects also have an agenda to explore common practices among disciplines, but with a more holistic approach. By transcending conventional notions of what appropriate activities within a discipline are, participants attempt to bridge disciplines in innovative ways. The result is that new commonalities are discovered among disciplines, which have implications for future innovative transvergent events.

A New Vision of the World : Transdisciplinarity

As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world , of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.

A New Vision of the World : Transdisciplinarity

Disciplinary research concerns, at most, one and the same level of Reality ; moreover, in most cases, it only concerns fragments of one level of Reality. On the contrary, transdisciplinarity concerns the dynamics engendered by the action of several levels of Reality at once . 

Cultural Creatives – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Paul H.) Ray gives the term Integral Culture to the growing subculture also referred to as Transmodernism, and which he refers to as the Cultural Creatives. They are concerned with ecological sustainability and in the case of a core group have a commitment to personal and spiritual development. These are individuals who can meld the best of Traditionalism and Modernism to create a new synthesis, having a cognitive style based on synthesizing varied information from many sources into a big picture. 

Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi [Das Glasperlenspiel]

Mark well: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and yet be full of fantasy and music. One can be a musician or a bead-player, and yet be devoted to law and order. The person whom we take as our ideal and try to emulate should be able at all times to exchange his art or science for any other, should allow the most crystal clear logic to radiate from his Bead Game and display the most creative fantasy in grammar. That is how we should be, and we should be prepared at any moment to be transferred to another post without opposition or allowing ourselves to become confused.

http://www.transartists.org/article/report-arcus-japan-november-2011

“One cannot be an amateur, or decide one day ‘Let’s be interdisciplinary”. A university may decide to develop in that direction, but what matters is that each researcher finds and establishes some complicities with other researchers so that interdisciplinarity comes from the base of the pyramid and works its way up. One can only benefit from interdisciplinary practices if researchers meet other researchers whilst learning how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction; therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks inherent in an interdisciplinary practice…the first obstacle is often linked to individual competencies coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”
Julia Kristeva