I appreciate that the final week’s readings, on Becomings, further complicates the projects of feminism and technology that have already been interrogated, dissected and expanded throughout this course, and gives further examples of art that intersects and hybrids to science and technology, very welcome in this context of an art and design university. I was saddened to learn that Beatriz DeCosta passed away last year; while I didn’t know her well, we did attend Carnegie Mellon University at the same time, she as a graduate student, and myself as an undergraduate, and I equate her with subversive science art, alongside a fellow CMU alum, Rich Pell, who formed the Institute for Applied Autonomy (creator of the Streetwriter and Grafitiwriter robots, that I refer to in an earlier blog post, and that DeCosta discusses in this chapter), as well as the Center for Postnatural History, http://www.postnatural.org/ his current project, an active storefront museum in Pittsburgh, PA, examining the intersections of culture, nature, and biotechnology, human interventions into living organisms, such as transgenic crops, or genetically engineered species. I have often been reminded of CMU through the reading materials of this course, and it feels fitting that this closing week should also reflect upon the work of those who studied and began to collaborate there, and its complicated reality as a recipient of so much research funding from the US Department of Defense, while many of its students critique those institutions.
DeCosta’s writing on her own experiences in working at the intersections of art and science provoked so much criticism from classmates, who felt that bridging the two disciplines did the science a disservice. What I did note was how framing projects as art can lend them immensely more freedom and flexibility, and the room to ask important critical questions. Science-art also often serves a pedagogical purpose, of demystifying complicated technologies and facilitating understanding from laypeople, i.e., non-scientists. Artists can also draw out the beauty and poetry in scientific information; the grace of the flight of the pigeons in DeCosta’s “Pigeonblog,” for example. We also noted the importance of response-ability, the ability to respond effectively; how the new technology of a failed or put-to-rest art or science project can be harnessed and expanded by those with more economic resource, for material gain; see the evolution from TXTMob to Twitter (in my blog post on October 31 on Free Labour, Dark Matter.
There are many other examples of making science fun edutainment from my home base of Pittsburgh. The Children’s Museum, for example, holds a Tough Art Residency, in which artists are invited to create educational, interactive and fun displays in the museum. The Carnegie Science Center additionally often works with artists, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which shares a building with the Carnegie Museum of Art, has recently cross-pollinated its youth programs with those of the Andy Warhol Museum (where I used to work in the education department), further blending the pleasures of art and science. As DeCosta noted, demystifying science and encouraging creative experimentation and hobby knowledge, i.e. public amateurism, is political, creative, fun, and necessary for science to be shared more widely. She draws out the politics of these endeavors, and their form of creative resistance:
“Activists’ pursuits can often have a normalizing effect rather than one that inspires social change. Circulating information on “how bad things are” can easily be lost in our daily information overload. It seems that artists are in the perfect position to invent new ways in which information is conveyed and participation is inspired.”
This brings to mind the oppose-and-propose form of activism, of critiquing and asking critical questions while also creating counter-institutions, building on counter-power, and creating the world we need now, without waiting for change from above. It also brings to mind the theories of queer futurity from José Esteban Muñoz, who sadly passed away today. Creative science can expand potentialities, bringing about a more queer and multiciplicitous world for everyone.
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