Artscience | The Laboratory at Harvard
Artscience
Labs are places of experience. We enter to explore. Each minute in
a functioning lab is like a page of a smart novel that loses meaning
without reference to what came before and is about to follow.
Art, like science, is such an experience, and, yet, we encounter art and science in our museums more frequently as outcome, as product – dug up, carved down, highly edited – that follows a mysterious process of creative thought and engagement.
Process, of course, is hard to define, to classify or to curate. Occasionally, processes of exploration, discovery and innovation matter more than any result these processes ever produce.
What is this creative process? Idea development in culture, industry, education and society can be conceived as a kind of experimentation, where the catalyst for change, for movement – for innovation – is a fusion of those creative processes we conventionally think of as art and as science. This fused process, what Professor Edwards calls ‘artscience,’ is the basis of Le Laboratoire, new kind of culture center we have opened in central Paris and the inspiration for The Laboratory at Harvard.
At The Laboratory, we look for novel ideas of art and design that cannot be properly formulated without a sustained encounter with a pioneering edge of science. We then help broker encounters between artists and scientists that permit concrete idea formulation. Once ideas are formulated, we invest in development of the experimental projects that result. In this way, artscience, the process of creative thought that synthesizes esthetic and analytical methods, becomes a catalyst for innovation and the basis for partnership.
Art, like science, is such an experience, and, yet, we encounter art and science in our museums more frequently as outcome, as product – dug up, carved down, highly edited – that follows a mysterious process of creative thought and engagement.
Process, of course, is hard to define, to classify or to curate. Occasionally, processes of exploration, discovery and innovation matter more than any result these processes ever produce.
What is this creative process? Idea development in culture, industry, education and society can be conceived as a kind of experimentation, where the catalyst for change, for movement – for innovation – is a fusion of those creative processes we conventionally think of as art and as science. This fused process, what Professor Edwards calls ‘artscience,’ is the basis of Le Laboratoire, new kind of culture center we have opened in central Paris and the inspiration for The Laboratory at Harvard.
Artscience Experiments
Works of art and design resulting from a confrontation with science, or at least with technology, fill art and science museums today. The works of art and design that result from experiments at a culture lab possess a narrower definition.At The Laboratory, we look for novel ideas of art and design that cannot be properly formulated without a sustained encounter with a pioneering edge of science. We then help broker encounters between artists and scientists that permit concrete idea formulation. Once ideas are formulated, we invest in development of the experimental projects that result. In this way, artscience, the process of creative thought that synthesizes esthetic and analytical methods, becomes a catalyst for innovation and the basis for partnership.
Artscience
Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
David Edwards
About This Book
“ArtScience champions the virtues of interdisciplinary work. Using captivating anecdotes of how both disciplines can enhance each other Edwards offers one of the strongest and most original contributions to the literature on creativity. ”—William S. Hammack, Commentator for National Public Radio’s Marketplace, and Professor, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
“The tenor of this convivial, onrushing book makes one think that what the best workers in both fields have in common is what this book consistently offers: a great and moving intellectual generosity.”—Jay Cantor
“Edwards’ book is something of a manifesto for artscience, and for the need to cultivate more porous cultural, corporate and educational institutions...Arguing passionately for the need for new collaborations between scientists, artists, industry and the social sector, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation is ultimately a collection of enticing tales from the trenches for would-be practitioners.”—Michael John Gorman, Irish Times
“[Artscience] is less a technical tool than a motivational one: an exhortation for interdisciplinary intellectuals...Edwards infects us with his subjects’ creativity. When the final chapter turns from vignettes to his utopian Laboratoire, we’re rooting for it to succeed.”—Alice W. Flaherty, Nature
“Edwards attempts in this truly inspiring work to shed light on the perceived dichotomy between the arts and sciences and why it needs to be challenged. He looks closely at the idea of translating concepts or ideas through pure sciences and the arts as they occur in all sectors of life. Essentially, he shows how scientific ideas flourish in the artistic community and how art can inspire science. Edwards takes interdisciplinary thinking to another level, going a long way in demonstrating a kind of symbiosis that can--and for many, does--exist between the arts and sciences. He relates stories of ‘artscience’ innovation in France, Germany, and the United States; discusses his recent founding of Le Laboratoire, an artscience cultural center in Paris; and explains the theory behind his idea of the "laboratory."”—Michael McArthur, Library Journal
“There are scientists, and there are artists. Now, there are art scientists. In his new book, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, David Edwards explains how this group of thinkers melds the two disciplines in innovative ways to make lasting and important breakthroughs for the betterment of humanity, culture, academia, and industry.”—V. L. Hendrickson, New York Sun
“In his concise book, Edwards, a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard, shares the stories of people who have found ways to cross this barrier [between art and science]--artscientists, he calls them--and elegantly communicates the catalytic effect of their interdisciplinary leaps.”—Daniella Maestretti, Utne Reader
- Catalyst
- Process
- Idea Translation in Cultural Institutions
- Idea Translation in Academia
- Idea Translation for Humanitarian Causes
- Idea Translation in Industry
- The Idea of the Lab
- Acknowledgments
Scientists are famous for believing in the proven and peer-accepted, the
very ground that pioneering artists often subvert; they recognize
correct and incorrect where artists see only true and false. And yet in
some individuals, crossover learning provides a remarkable kind of
catalyst to innovation that sparks the passion, curiosity, and freedom
to pursue--and to realize--challenging ideas in culture, industry,
society, and research. This book is an attempt to show how innovation in
the "post-Google generation" is often catalyzed by those who cross a
conventional line so firmly drawn between the arts and the sciences.
David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined. These creators may innovate in culture, as in the development of new forms of music composition (through use of chaos theory), or, perhaps, through pioneering scientific investigation in the basement of the Louvre. They may innovate in research institutions, society, or industry, too. Sometimes they experiment in multiple environments, carrying a single idea to social, industrial, and cultural fruition by learning to view traditional art-science barriers as a zone of creativity that Edwards calls artscience. Through analysis of original stories of artscience innovation in France, Germany, and the United States, he argues for the development of a new cultural and educational environment, particularly relevant to today’s need to innovate in increasingly complex ways, in which artists and scientists team up with cultural, industrial, social, and educational partners.
David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined. These creators may innovate in culture, as in the development of new forms of music composition (through use of chaos theory), or, perhaps, through pioneering scientific investigation in the basement of the Louvre. They may innovate in research institutions, society, or industry, too. Sometimes they experiment in multiple environments, carrying a single idea to social, industrial, and cultural fruition by learning to view traditional art-science barriers as a zone of creativity that Edwards calls artscience. Through analysis of original stories of artscience innovation in France, Germany, and the United States, he argues for the development of a new cultural and educational environment, particularly relevant to today’s need to innovate in increasingly complex ways, in which artists and scientists team up with cultural, industrial, social, and educational partners.
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