The Noncomputable

One of my favorite blogs to read is at the Resilience Alliance.

Recently it directed my attention to the abstract for a paper in Ecology and Society called Resilience: Accounting for the Uncomputable:

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledge.

(Here’s a link to the paper.)

It made me think that poets and artists and dancers could provide that counter since surprise and the noncomputable are often comfortable places for them to reside as it is integral to their discipline.

Again and again I hear that artists are the ones who can benefit from a collaboration with scientists, but I believe scientists can benefit too. This would be one concrete way.

Sciart and the Benefits of Art/Science Collaboration

INSIGHT AND EXCHANGE: An evaluation of the Wellcome Trust’s Sciart programme was recently released.

It is an important and useful document because there are not many studies on the value of art/science collaboration. Usually there is an intuition that they are positive, often more positive for the artist than the scientist. (Although you can see some of the anecdotal evidence I have been collecting to show the value to scientists here.)

Sciart was launched to fund “visual arts projects which involved an artist and a scientist in collaboration to research, develop, and produce work which explored contemporary biological and medical science.”

Some of the overall benefits of Sciart recognized in the report of the first decade are:

• Attracting media coverage

• Considerable educational benefit for the public

• The emergence of new processes of working

• Removing barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration

Specific benefits artists provided scientists, included:

• Preparing some scientists to take more risks

• Improving scientist’s own communication

• Generating more reflexive awareness of the wider context of the scientist’s work

• Assisting scientists in rediscovering their personal creativity

There are other recommendations for organizations that would want to get involved in funding these kinds of collaboration. iLAND has already implemented many of these recommendations unintentionally and we could look at some of the others, especially on reporting. There is still time to apply for an iLAB residency from iLAND. If you are a dancer, movement artist, or scientist, please check out the iLAND website.