 A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation Chapter 2 - Humanising Technology: the Studio Lab and Innovation This analysis is extracted from a longer report in which I present a framework for thinking about the artist as an actor in the innovation process in information and communication technologies. The framework differs from most approaches to the interactions between the creative arts and techno-science in two ways. First, it attempts to identify and characterise the range of innovative outcomes and the factors that shape them along multiple dimensions - aesthetic, technological, scientific, economic - and time frames, both long and short. Second, the framework stresses the importance of a new class of hybrid innovative institution, the studio laboratory, where new media technologies are designed and developed in co-evolution with their creative application. The central thesis of the report is that in the emerging digitally networked society, the creative arts and cultural institutions are mutating by forming a constellation of productive relationships with the science and technology research system, industry, humanistic and social science scholarship, and with emerging new structures of civil society. This apparently rising density of communication suggests the need to rethink some aspects of the relationship between cultural support policy, innovation and research policy, and the still nascent but interconnected set of concerns about the requirements for widespread creative participation in a "techno-sphere" increasingly shaped by fast-changing digital media technologies. Cultural theorists will no doubt recognise the shifts briefly alluded to as continuous with a progressive reduction throughout the 20th century of the so-called autonomy of the artist as an alienated or estranged figure existing on the margins of society. Particularly among groups who have defined their "art" more or less in terms of technological innovation, this turn away from the Enlightenment notion of the aesthetic as the "disinterested play of the senses" can sometimes provide the material basis for establishing sustainable linkages with highly charged sectors of the global economy - the entertainment and information industries - and their associated scientific and technological bases. But it would be a mistake to consider the breadth of these shifts only as a widening of the well established role of creators in industrial design to include such relatively new, trendy factors as "interaction design" or "relationship technologies". As art historians have pointed out, the movement of the machine into the studio is a progressive one that can be variously traced to the early 20th century avant-gardes, and in particular, a marked tendency since the 1960s to engage critically with the "technological sublime" as both material and subject matter.[1] This critical orientation, at least among some of the emerging "media art and technology" community, is part of what makes the phenomena difficult to describe from a single disciplinary perspective. Works conceived to make a conceptual or critical point by re-appropriating simple or older techniques can be misread when only evaluated in terms of technological novelty; just as, conversely, the point of "speculative" technological invention may at times be missed by developers seeking only incremental innovation understandable in terms of existing markets and users. Similarly, the sites of innovation with which we will be concerned in this report, "studio laboratories", need to be understood as emergent formations fed by, and flowing into artistic, techno-scientific, economic and discursive sources. This anti-reductionist approach is unavoidable, given the complexity of interests in and about digital media today. In 1974, pioneering electronic artist Nam June Paik assumed the role of technological forecaster and submitted a report to the Rockefeller Foundation urging the construction of a global "broadband telecommunications infrastructure"[2]. While critical of mandarin intellectual disdain for mass media, surprisingly Paik did not even bother to advocate spending on the avant-garde arts, or on the promotion of the work of his fellow video artists. Rather, he envisioned a two-way, high-capacity video and data network the "electronic superhighway" that would augur a profound cultural shift. In the framework of this now familiar wired world, artists and intellectuals would have the opportunity to make a broader social contribution, what he called "output capacity", beyond the convention-bound production of luxury cultural goods for limited circulation. Now, twenty-five years later, much of the infrastructure aspect of Paik's vision seems to be in place, owing in large measure to the incredibly rapid uptake of the internet for multimedia as well as transactional communication. The kinds of immediate benefits Paik foresaw an electronic superhighway providing, easily distributed educational programming and greater connectivity for work and pleasure, are becoming commonplace for the growing members of the "virtual class". The falling costs of hardware, coupled with relatively cheap or free software, make the barriers to entry for creators lower than they were in Paik's day, when he was one of the earliest to adopt portable video equipment and to devise his own techniques for electronically processing images. And today digital media are widely understood to be facilitating, as Paik predicted, new and varied kinds of relationships between buyers and sellers, teachers and learners, creators and audiences. Further, they have attracted the participation of a significant number of the very cultural élites whose disdain for the public television of the 1970s Paik took pains to criticise in his report. Yet from the vantage of the late millennium, it is no longer possible to share Paik's optimism about the wonders of global connectivity, nor his deterministic belief in the sufficiency of technological infrastructure for stimulating a widespread culture of active producers of new creative expression. The internet repeats aspects of the early history of radio broadcasting [3] with the growing consolidation of corporate interests at the high end of broadband and advanced applications; cultural applications of interactivity have bunched up around a relatively narrow group of heavily promoted large-market entertainment products (even if, in some cases, they are played online in technologically innovative multi-player configurations); and thirty-year-old visions of new kinds of computer-enabled literacy, extending sensory acuity and augmenting intellectual capacity, seem to be more stalled than spurred by the current market frenzy around media technology. In the arts community, disquiet rises among the more reflective, like Carnegie Mellon professor of both art and robotics, Simon Penny [4]: "every day we come to new reconciliations between our artistic goals and methods and the requirements and restrictions of the machines we work with. With a little critical distance, we can see that we are reshaping artistic practice to suit a new set of tools." These concerns, which have circulated uneasily among the electronic art, music, and graphics communities since the 1980s, are rarely considered in relation to those of the apparently opposite end of the technological spectrum (and world) - the digitally disenfranchised, to whom, typically, technological capability is presented as nothing else but the adoption of a set of preset, externally defined "solutions". But the same questioning can illuminate both sides of the spectrum: how can local, contextually relevant capacities be developed that at once build on and provide the potential to transcend the existing media ecology? This report concentrates, as Paik put it in 1974, on those configurations with the greatest potential for "humanising technology". But it also takes careful heed of the various sceptical voices who over the ensuing decades have developed a paradoxically "post-humanist" stance towards the liberating potential of human-machine communication and expression. The vision of human expression seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines, pleasing to few adherents of art's proudly transcendent claims to Truth and Beauty, nonetheless provides a basis for building fruitful understandings between the diverse social actors with interests in the shaping of digital media - researchers, technology developers, artists, and theorists. The nature of the studio laboratories From the 1960s and 1970s, artist centres, networks, university-based institutes and public sector labs were established to support open-ended exploration of new and emerging technologies by artists. Among the most celebrated examples was Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) founded by artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs physicist Billy Klüver in New York in 1966. The goal of EAT was to establish "an international network of experimental services and activities designed to catalyse the physical, economic and social conditions necessary for cooperation between artists, engineers and scientists." The research role of the contemporary artist was understood by EAT as providing "a unique source of experimentation and exploration for developing human environments of the future"[5]. At the same time, other Bell Labs scientists were also engaged in collaborative research, in computer graphics and vision, music and acoustics. [6,7] Also during the late 1960s, at MIT, the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus affiliate Gyorgy Kepes founded the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies, providing a stable location for collaboration between artists-in-residence and university-based scientists and engineers. In the 1970s, composer Pierre Boulez launched the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination en Acoustique et Musique) in Paris, based on a dialectical conception of research/invention as the central activity of contemporary musical creation; not incidentally, Boulez invoked the "model of the Bauhaus" as interdisciplinary inspiration for what he considered the inevitable collaboration of musicians and scientists.[8] The relative autonomy of these new centres in the case of IRCAM., established with a fiercely guarded aesthetic independence setting it apart as a modernist citadel distinguish them from the more publicly oriented type of media centre that began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s. Typically incorporating festivals, exhibitions, commissions and competitions of electronic art, this second phase saw the increased commitment of both public administrations and private corporations towards exposing the most radical media-based creativity to a wider public. As festivals such as Ars Electronica or SIGGRAPH's non-commercial art exhibition became global in scope during the 1980s, so plans were drawn up in most advanced industrial countries to establish permanent centres able to incorporate a dual research/development and public education mandate. Some critics feared that this media centre bandwagon would serve only to accelerate the public acceptance of automation in everyday life, on the one hand, and to co-opt artists into becoming commercial application designers, on the other. But as it has turned out, explicitly designed linkages between art, research and innovation have developed a good deal and now form the basis for the new phase of the contemporary studio laboratory. Many observers would probably count the MIT Media Laboratory as the main propagandist, if not initiator, of this phase, in spite of the secondary importance of artistic practice or input in its research activities. Xerox PARC since the early 1990s has prominently supported an in-house artist-in-residence programme (described briefly in the next section). Other Silicon Valley, Japanese and some European private firms have followed suit, in differing flavours, though more or less in agreement with PARC's position that the traditional model of "corporate support for the arts" - hands-off, patrician, and marketing-driven - overlooks basic potentials for core innovation. Among cultural organisations, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada was early in initiating a large-scale investigation of "virtual environments" as a partnership with university researchers and industry sponsors.[9] Since 1995, research networks have begun to appear with the express aim of linking multimedia art with technological development and the social sciences. In short, the deliberate involvement of artists as collaborative researchers in innovation programs now takes place in a wide variety of social and economic settings, with a corresponding diversity of approach and programme design. The studio laboratory as a class is by no means homogenous. Some are privately funded by corporations, seeking to understand the properties of radically new media technologies via aesthetic R&D programmes; others are public-funded and linked to traditional museological mandates for public education; others are industrially sponsored pre-competitive laboratories based in universities; still other models are network-based and more or less explicitly tied to long-term regional industrial development objectives. The studio laboratory can be understood as providing a site for an ongoing and progressive series of negotiations between artist-users and technology designers, which simultaneously shaped the technology, its use, and users. Discussion themes Instruments and the imagination One fruitful way to think historically about the kind of techno-cultural creativity manifest in studio laboratories is to recall the role that instruments have long played on the margins between science, art, magic, entertainment, and philosophy. Citing science historian Thomas Hankins: "To understand actual scientific practice, we have to understand instruments, not only how they are constructed, but also how they are used, and more important, how they are regarded." Hankins does just this in a book about curious, mostly forgotten instruments from the 18th and 19th centuries - ocular harpsichords, animal automata, stereoscopes and magic lanterns ñ that oscillate between demonstration, entertainment, magic, and measurement. The crucial point that Hankins makes is that even such "objective" devices as the telescope, microscope or air pump were the subjects of controversy in their time; just as the photograph later was in the 19th century, and today, as digital processing of images makes the veracity of any picture questionable. Instruments are a way of "questioning nature", a "language of inquiry"; and the historical examples retold with verve in Hankins' book suggest a way of considering today's investigators - artists and scientists - in the spirit of those "natural philosophers" whose "instruments move easily between natural science and other human activity". Media technology as boundary object A striking set of examples where today's investigators specifically designate technology as a shared medium of joint exploration is available from the Xerox PARC artist-in-residence programme <www.parc.xerox.com/red/members/richgold/PAIRBOOK/pair1.html>. This programme allows artists to collaborate with scientists on common projects. Each case indicates the medium taken as point of departure, and the contrasting way in which they were regarded and employed by scientist and artist respectively: * scanning tunnelling microscopes (STM): as a sub-atomic recording device; used by musicians to convert atomic bumps into sound patterns * images: as glyphs in which technical data is embedded; as iconography carrying metaphorical and linguistic layers * website: for corporate communications; for social-action art project with mental patients. The PARC commentators refer to the medium as a common language, but a more apt metaphor is perhaps that of the boundary object. This is a term introduced by sociologist of science S Leigh Star, describing "scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements for both of them" [10]. Through a radically opposed dialogue about the STM, one PARC researcher recounts, a new line of questioning grew about how the senses are extended through instruments: "Are there untapped sensory channels for interacting with the unseeable which enable powerful conceptualisation?"[11] Similar conceptualisations of the sensorium characterised the collaborations during the 1960s between AT&T Bell Labs researchers in vision and perception, and the varied artists - musicians and filmmakers, mainly - who worked with them. In the words of vision researcher Bela Julesz: "Visual perception is historically a common area for both the artist and scientist, a common intersection where there is no gap or artificial bridge. The same kinds of things can be artistic or scientific; the only difference is the motivationÖ the artist is searching for an artistic truth, an intimate truth he wants to convey, and I am searching for scientific truth, which is testable and very defined. "[6] The activities of these teams tended to focus around the digital computer, which was constructed as a tool for understanding human perception, and at the same time, as a potential new medium for artistic expression. Bell researchers tended, in the main, to locate the artistic added value in the unique ways in which artists could train themselves to perceive, and thereby, shape, images or sounds. John Pierce, director of the Communication Sciences Division, acknowledged that in seeking to program computers to produce intelligible speech, "one of the most important human faculties is that of being able to judge qualities even when we cannot measure them. Here the ear of the trained musician may be as valuable as the digital computer." One area where the boundaries today are notably blurred is the field of "artificial life", attracting artists with interests and background in biology and computation to create evolutionary digital systems. Broadly speaking, ideas from genetics have begun to shape the way many computational artists conceive the inter-relationships between their formal materials.Ý In the simplest manner, style can be characterised in terms of traits, and as objects - drawings, or melodies, for example - replicate, they change form according to programmed rules of reproduction and mutation. Artificial life extends evolutionary metaphors even further, in the work of the team Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, who develop artificial-life installation works as researchers at ATR in Tokyo. They build imaginary eco-systems that evolve and mutate as artificial virtual worlds, but are able also to react to observers' gestures when provided. The musical instrument as interface metaphor There is one special case of the projection of human imagination through skilled instrumental performance: musical instruments have long served as metaphor and analytical model for philosophers (think of Heraclitus or Confucius), mathematicians (Pythagoras or Galileo), and in our own time, computer scientists and interface designers. From the earliest years of personal computing, a controversy has simmered about the trade-offs in designing systems that are easy to use but quite general in their scope, or more challenging to master, but with greater depth and power. Alan Kay, credited with conceiving the personal computer as a portable "Dynabook" (and later helping Xerox to implement one of the first "personal workstations"), was also influential in promoting the notion of computer use as a medium for creative thought. In their 1977 paper on "personal dynamic media", Kay and Goldberg [12] explained their design goals as wanting to combine both the broad, standard-model usability of inflexibly mass-produced items like cars and TV sets, with the plastic, mouldable, open-endedness of tangible media like paper or clay. The key, Kay argued in 1977, is learning to use a high-level programming language, inspired by Seymour Papert's artistic approach towards teaching children to program. In the meantime, the trajectory that actually became locked in once personal computing took off in the 1980s is based not a style of programming, but rather a graphical means of manipulating and selecting surface icons - the ubiquitous "graphical user interface". Far from Kay's subtle, even dialectical conception of fluency within a dynamic medium, most computer use could be characterised as brittle, fault intolerant, and closely coupled with proprietary software "solutions" - packaged applications - that offer only minimal room for user-programmed extensions or variation. In a book about Douglas Engelbart and his Palo Alto research group, Bardini sharply pinpoints the actual losses entailed in the "lock-in" of the PC in its present form. [13] Early researchers, like Engelbart during the 1960s, thought of the user as acquiring progressively more powerful kinaesthetic and motor skills; in effect, operating interfaces with greater instrumental virtuosity to keep pace with the mental scope and expressive boundaries set by the user's intellect. The idea of learning to "play" a piano-like key-set, in order to navigate conceptually through information space, may seem like science fiction; but this is what Engelbart himself built and mastered, and arguably, its originality is such that it deserves to be considered a more profound interaction paradigm than the "mouse" with which he is actually credited. Turning back towards what might be dubbed the more "cognitive" pole of the mind-body continuum, it is still worth recalling how Kay and Goldberg had envisaged the system design of a "dynamic personal medium" two decades ago: "Our design strategy, then, divides the problem. The burden of system design and specification is transferred to the user. This approach will only work if we do a very careful and comprehensive job of providing a general medium of communication that will allow ordinary users to casually and easily describe their desires for a specific tool. We must also provide enough already written general tools so that a user need not start from scratch for most things she or he may wish to do." [14] Creative users in IT design and diffusion "User innovation" has become a commonplace term, indicating the importance of the user (customer, client) as a partner in the innovation process. Von Hippel explains the benefits of turning users into designers as "faster and better and cheaper learning by using" [15]. Advanced firms, he argues, are changing the very economics of design, by investing in software-based application-specific toolkits that "transfer a capability to design truly novel customised products and services to users". His examples come from manufacturing (custom-designed circuits and software), and he stresses that the design toolkit reduces the iterations and flow back and forth between users and designers. Consider these points in a non-manufacturing case now, the software used by artists to make movies, music, or multimedia - all dynamic, time-based expressions that technically challenge the computer's capacity to synchronise and co-ordinate various kinds of audio-visual representations. Software applications have been widely available for some 15-20 years that permit artists to create more or less independently from the system programmers on whom they formerly depended if they wanted to use computers without learning to program. As a class, software for animation or music abstracts [16] some aspects of the craft of movie-making or composition. But what about support for individual expressiveness, corresponding to the distinctive traits of an artist's style or signature? Recalling Simon Penny's present-day concern about artists' practices being reshaped to conform to the restrictions of their computer-based tools, it is evident that the ability to design novel capacities beyond the base mechanisms embedded in common applications remains elusive. As has been shown by the successive diffusion of desktop publishing, image processing, music composing, and now multimedia/animation software, the distinctive appeal of such programs lies in the way they facilitate for new classes of user a degree of creativity that formerly required a specialist's craft training. In the mid-1960s, when computers were completely intractable to all but engineers, the very idea of applying digital calculation to the intensely artisanal production of animated film was by no means obvious. A host of contrasting, often conflicting interests existed from the start of computer graphics, and the earliest encounters between artists, system designers and programmers reveal a fascinating story about the conditions under which creative users enter into productive relationships with designers. Another way of saying this is that between the 1960s and mid-1980s, the computer itself was constructed as a medium for making movies, within a wide and sometimes contested zone of interpretive flexibility, to use the phrase of Dutch sociologist of technology W. Bijker [17]. Artists as lead users of early computer animation systems The base technologies for interactive computer graphics were largely developed in US military research programmes, often closely aligned with key universities like MIT, and supported by the Pentagon's aggressive funding of fundamental information processing research. By the mid-1960s, development of civilian applications was underway as well, notably in aviation, architecture, scientific communication. Many of the same organisations also experimented with artists as lead users of early mainframe animation systems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, researchers at Canada's National Research Council and National Film Board - both federally funded agencies - began to investigate the potential for using computers in filmmaking. The approaches taken, in each case, differ markedly from those of the American research sites. In both cases, the Canadian investigators were scientific and technical followers, not leaders, and they had very restricted budgets for equipment and personnel. They began their research by intensively studying everything the Americans had done to date. To start with, the NRC researchers chose filmmaking as an application domain through which to study the problems of the man-machine interface. As well as computer animation, they began an equally important programme in computer-assisted music composition. Their goal was general understanding, ultimately to better support the use of interactive computing in science and engineering. But it was by no means irrelevant to their choice that the NRC was already a kind of studio laboratory, supporting in the same radio and electrical engineering department the groundbreaking research of a physicist-cum-composer on electronic musical instruments. By modelling the user as a creative artist, an original outlook resulted that at the time of its formulation in 1969 was notably different from the US corporate or university labs [18]: "Up to this point, it has been assumed that the best possible way to design the computer would be to make it transparent. That is to make it look to the user as though it were not even present, so whatever idea occurred to him, it could be rapidly formed into a final creation. This is not necessarily true." "Most computer languages now available ...are unsatisfactory either because they are mathematically oriented, or because they result in cumbersome and slow programs. As a result we are usually left with the situation where an artist-programmer team is formed, the artist uses the system without having intimate control over the functions of the blocks he uses, and the programmer builds blocks without fully appreciating the needs of the artists." Pulfer and his team chose therefore to develop a system in which: Crucial to the implementation of this design was the just published research of the first graphical user interface published in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart [19] - interestingly, as a system for "augmenting the human intellect". The NRC team considered the results produced by the US "artist-programmer" teams to lack validity for their purposes; for this reason, they chose to work only with professional filmmakers (or composers) who could teach them something about movie-making (or music composition). Cultural critique, reflexivity and innovation In the main, humanists have had considerably less to do with the kind of co-operative development of technologies undertaken between artists, engineers and scientists. One thoughtful commentator has summed up the usual interests of humanists in information technology as follows: "Computation becomes the object of humanities research: the history of computation, the sociology of computer use, cultural criticism of Artificial Life Computational tools are used for humanistic projects. Humanists compose with word processors, send each other email, read the latest articles over the Web. Computational artefacts become essential research tools; automatic text analysis is used to support literary criticism, scholarly papers appear in hypertext, collaborative writing environments are used to co-write texts. In conjunction with the adoption of computational tools, computational concepts are borrowed and adapted to humanist projects: chaos theory as a method of literary analysis, the cyborg as a model of subjectivity, the robot historian as first-person perspective.[20]" The author of this passage, Phoebe Sengers, is a rare case of a computer scientist with equal background in cultural theory [21]. Her own original contribution is a widened conception of what she terms "cultural informatics", The term "informatics" is preferred by some scholars to designate the disciplines usually called "computer science or engineering". Yale professor David Gelernter has called for a complete re-thinking of the training of "computer people", though not emphasising cultural theory but an in-depth knowledge of history of art, design and aesthetics. "Software programming should be taught in studios, like art", Gelernter writes [22]. Far less stress should be placed on correctness, and more on elegance. What Gelernter is pleading for is a higher standard of design in digital media, a balance of form and function that goes far beyond the usual "requirements-based" conception of user-centred design. To convey that extra measure of aptness, of conviviality past mere usability, elegance accounts only for what might be seen as the "surface design" elements. Taking seriously Sengers' proposal to consider computing as a humanist discipline actually pushes at the intersections between deep system-level design, philosophy, and social science. It is hardly surprising that this agenda is, so far, little understood in the academy. "... as an expression of social discourses that are already in place. One of the intentions of the residency is to address the broader context of socio-cultural shifts that are both the cause and symptom of technological changes."[23] The goal was to develop a set of alternative conceptions - metaphors, scenarios, speculative designs - that could inform the development team through the actual implementation phase. In fact, few linkages were made at so functional a level. The actual experience revealed the very wide gaps separating the world-views of critical theorists and those of engineers and programmers (much less so, most of the artists). As noted by one of the participants self-identified as a "theorist": "While the majority of artists appear to have been theoretically and practically ill equipped to deal with this new technology at the level of its technical organisation, those involved in developing its hardware and software are equally ill equipped to deal with its social and cultural dimensions as well as its political implications." Yet, as was proved in the subsequent implementation phase, the artist-developer teams were eminently capable of developing, at a project level, cooperative strategies sufficient to produce what one commentator has since termed "projects that would permanently extend the tools we have for seeing and hearing"[24]. But what remained under-realised in this project was precisely the kind of conscious integration of what Sengers called "humanist perspective" in ongoing technical practice. The Banff technical group disbanded after the project, and the cumulated expertise and software capability dispersed among the participating artists and researchers. A newly announced programme sponsored by Microsoft Corporation at Carnegie-Mellon University illustrates a more active model for engagement between artists and technicians. This pilot fellowship programme will connect three established artists and a critic-historian-curator to the robust science-technology resources at Carnegie Mellon. The artists will: 1) engage contemporary science-technology as it provides tools, media, and content to their work, 2) assume leadership roles in generating and implementing complex, collaborative projects, and 3) connect the process of the projects and its results to the larger community. www.cmu.edu/studio/ Applied research combined with critical perspectives has been termed "critical technical practice" - another term, like "cultural informatics", that aims to create a new space for heterogeneous activity. [25] Still, very little of this community seems to be connected to or even aware of the potential resources and talents of the electronic art"community. Broadening public awareness of techno-science In an informal evaluation of the Wellcome Trust's Sci-Art program, Cohen noted the deep sense of urgency expressed by many of the applicants, that they felt the need to look outside the limitations built into their careers and institutions. "It may be too strong to say that they felt some kind of moral imperativeÖit is rather that they appeared to feel that the boundaries of their discipline were (and indeed are) weakening at the edges, that people from outside were doing work similar to their own, and that by moving outside the discipline, they may be rewarded by a new perspective and new ways of thinking about their subject"[26]. If this type of programme has indeed struck a nerve, it would be worth considering how it might be made more accessible beyond the UK. While the outcomes of such collaborations can clearly be very broad, here it is worth underlining the potential contribution to public discourse about scientific and technological issues. Conclusion This report attempts to present a multi-perspective framework from which to view the rising density of communication between the worlds of art, technology, and science; the "site" of this hybrid activity is designated as the studio laboratory. By its boundary-spanning nature, a good deal of this activity stretches the limits of established paradigms, whether these be considered from the techno-economic, social or aesthetic standpoint. The assembly of scientist-artist-engineer teams in studio labs usually takes place in a specific context of application, which can range widely from art commission to teams of more or less equal artist-scientist researchers. In many cases, the crucial collaborative communication still takes place in face-to-face encounters, as a rule laboratory or production rather than seminar/theoretical settings. Where distant teams work on common projects, periods of intensive "residential" development are interspersed with tasks still often divided by discipline. This makes particular sense for cyclical, iterative projects, like system design and development, where the learning by using can only go on so long before major overhauls are needed. The temporary media lab notion is the most lightweight version of the contingent manner of organising the conjuncture of artists, programmers, and theorists . With the price to performance ration of commodity hardware continuing to decline, specialised equipment is becoming less critical to the studio lab than the range of collaborative dynamics they can accommodate. Individual artists are, more and more, acquiring effective home-based studios that even five years ago were rare outside high-end labs or commercial facilities. It is apparent, however, that much of the innovation emerging from both the older and more recently founded structures takes place in the flesh, within particular settings, whether these be temporary special events, industrial labs, cultural centres, or universities. How the specificities of particular studio labs relate to the "system of innovation" in which they function is a rich subject for further study. A dialogue is already occurring in the EU between the arts/cultural sector, industry, and university researchers, and new mechanisms are being devised to turn that dialogue to action. In North America, there are no large scale public-oriented studio labs operating with the kind of ongoing government sponsorship found in Europe, or corporate sponsorship as in Japan. But the tremendous dynamism of the US information/media sectors generates lots of "studio lab" activity that could not be addressed in this report; for instance, Intel's support for artists working in a variety of university labs, or Disney Corporation's now very substantial scientific research department. In the specific US setting (and to a lesser degree in Canada), the difficulty seems to be less about attracting corporations to finance educational facilities with hardware/software; the more important dilemmas arise over the strings attached to such sponsorship. For this reason, the key question in the North American context will turn on how independent media labs can be sustained, whether on campuses, through "enlightened" corporate programmes like Xerox, or, what has been less attempted on this continent, building onto existing cultural infrastructures like museums or theatres. Clearly, this particular discussion will need to be framed broadly enough to bring industry, artist/designers, technology researchers and social/cultural theorists around the same table. From a policy perspective, it is important to think of the cultural shape of future digital media in terms of the accumulation of expressive traditions: ancient and modern, individual and collective, purely informational and materially embodied. Support for "projects", valuable as they will invariably be, should nonetheless be understood in these larger terms. From this assumption, though, arises yet further questions: what models of studio lab fit best into which national innovation context? A report of this nature leads necessarily more to openings than to prescriptions. More knowledge is needed about a host of issues and questions, a partial list of which includes:
Art historian Erwin Panofsky, writing about the Renaissance, attributed the flowering of the arts and the birth of observation-based science to new "transmission belts" that re-connected theory and practice, art and science, instrumentation and sense-perception. [27] At least as much may be at stake, five hundred years later, as we face the challenge of continually re-humanising our technological world. Notes 1. Jones, CA, 1996. The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2. Paik, NJ, 1976 (1997). Media Planning for the Post-Industrial Society, in The Electronic Super Highway. Travels with Nam June Paik. Cincinnatti: The Carl Solway Gallery. 3. Douglas, S, 1986. "Amateur Operators and American Broadcasting: Shaping the Future of Broadcasting" in Corn, J (ed) Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. 4. Penny, S, 1997. "The Virtualization of Art Practice. Body Knowledge and the Engineering Window" in Art Journal Fall 1997. 5. EAT, 1969. Experiments in Art and Technology Proceedings, No 9. New York: EAT. 6. Bell-Telephone, 1967. "Art and Science: Two Worlds Merge" in Bell Telephone Magazine. 7. Spiegel, L, 1999. "The Early Computer Arts at Bell Labs". http://www.dorsai.org/~spiegel/ 8. Boulez, P, 1985. "Le modËle du Bauhaus" in Points de repËre. Paris: ditions Seuil. 9. Moser, MA, D MacLeod, and Banff Centre for the Arts, 1996. Immersed in technology: art and virtual environments. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. 10. Star, S. and GJL, 1989. "Institutional Ecology: ëTranslations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39" in Social Studies of Science, no 19. 11. Harris, C, ed, 1999. Art and Innovation. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. 12. Kay, A and A Goldberg, 1977, "Personal Dynamic Media" in IEEE Computer, no 10 (March 1977). 13. Bardini, T, 2000. The Personal Interface: Douglas Engelbart, The Augmentation of Human Intellect, and the Genesis of Personal Computing. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 14. Johnson, S, 1997. Interface culture: how new technology transforms the way we create and communicate. San Francisco: HarperEdge. 15. Hippel, E v, 1999. Toolkits for User Innovation: The Design Side of Mass Customization. Cambridge, US: MIT Sloan School of Management. 16. McCullough, M, 1996. Abstracting craft: the practised digital hand. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. 17. Bijker, WB, 1995. Bicycles, Bakelite and Bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change. Cambridge, US: MIT Press. 18. Pulfer, JK, "Man-Machine Communication in Creative Applications" in International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, no 3. 19. Engelbart, D and W English, 1968. "A research centre for augmenting human intellect. in Fall Joint Computer Conference. 20. Sengers, P, 1999 (submitted). Computing as a Humanist Discipline. 21. Sengers, P, 1998. Anti-Boxology: Agent Design in Cultural Context (PhD thesis). Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University. 22. Gelernter, DH, 1998. Machine beauty: elegance and the heart of technology. New York: Basic Books. 23. Richards, C and N Tenhaaf, eds, 1991. Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus. Banff: Banff Centre for the Arts. 24. Heim, M, 1998. Virtual Realism. New York: Oxford. 25. Agre, PE, Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 26. Cohen, C, 1998. Sci-Art: An Evaluation. Division of Management Studies, Brunel University. 27. Panofsky, E, 1952. "Artist, Scientist, Genius. Notes on the Renaissance Dammerung" in The Renaissance: A Symposium. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. - continue to CH 3 Surveying the Scene and Analysing Data on Good Practice and Desired Software - return to the table of contents |
