Beyond the Two CulturesA crisis in Data Representation ?

Roger F MalinaProfessor of Art and Technology

Professor of PhysicsUniversity of Texas at Dallas

Balance Un-Balance, Manizales, Columbia

The Narrative•Are we entering a ‘data culture”

• Dark Culture as an Analogy to Dark Matter in Astronomy

•Big Data is not just more data•The Power and Danger of Metaphors• New Metaphors ?

•The ArtSciLab at UT Dallas •The role of art-science hybrids in data culture

Big Data Transition in AstronomyFrom one galaxy at a time To 450 million at a time

What happened to Astronomy after it entered the big data era ?

• We discovered that 95% of the content of the universe is dark

• It emits no light of any kind• It is of an un-known nature

–Dark Matter–Dark Energy

What Big Data did to the Scientific Method• Physical « Laws »:

– Compact Descriptions of the World– Experiments on the world

• Simulations: – Virtual Worlds that mimic our World– Retrodiction vs Prediction

• Pattern Recognition:…Deep Learning ?– The « petabyte » era– Doing experiments on data about the

world, data science– Extrapolation vs Explanation

We underestimate how our nature impacts ontology and epistemology

• Einstein:•“The universe of ideas is just as independent of the nature of our experience as clothes are of the form of the human body”

• Varela: •All knowledge is conditioned by the structure of the knower

• Stelarc and his “third arm”:

Modern Science Doesnt Make Common Sense• Most knowledge about our

world now comes through scientific instruments and data not directly to the senses

• Most of the world is’nt on human “scales”

• Our intuition, languages, metaphors, are built training on the wrong data

• analogous change in culture ?

Arrhenius 1896 On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the

Ground

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By the 1970s CO2 increase measured

Katherine Morizaki: Inside Outside Handbag

The fifteen century invention of perspective transformed our culture

Perspective as a Metaphor: Technology as an Extension and Amplification of the Senses

The Two Cultures Metaphor

Beyond the two Cultures

• There are very good reasons we have disciplines

• ‘third culture’ is NOT desirable• Inter-disciplinarity is expensive• But for some problems we have no choice

but to engage in:• Deep disciplinarity• Inter-disciplinarity • Multi-disciplinarity • Trans-disciplinarity.. Anti-disciplinarity• Para-disciplinarity ( Hybrid individuals)• Individual and Collaborative Practices• But But But maybe we need also to shift

metaphors….?!

Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation • Roger F. Malina, Carol Strohecker, and

Carol LaFayette, • Advocacy White Paper Working Group

• Motivated the convening of a new US National Academy of Science Study

• Open Access Leonardo e-book at MITPRESS

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The power of framing metaphors

We Need New MetaphorsNetwork of Networks ? Field of Fields ?

Other Metaphors: Organology• See Bernard Stiegler

• We often think of technologies as• Extensions of the senses• Augmentations of the senses

• Or extended capabilities• Calculation, Memory

• Stiegler proposes rather externalisation of bodily organs • Cognition, Metabolism • Networked organisms

Other Metaphors: Pharmacology/Pharmakon• Digital organs are externalized and

interconnected• Sickness can arise form lack of

synchronization and coordination• Additional technology can be

poisonous or life enhancing • Dosage, Timing, Side effects• Contra indications,Delayed effects

• architecture of inter connected organs

• How to re think cybernetics for a complex adaptive system

The Age of Entanglement ?• Quantum entanglement is a

physical phenomenon• groups of particles interact in

ways such that the state of each particle

• cannot be described independently

• quantum state must be described for the system as a whole.

Age of Entanglement ?• From Age of Enlightenment to the Age of

Entanglement • See Danny Hillis

• Computer was the ultimate technology of the enlightenment

• Human and networked digital systems are so inter-twined

• The distinction between the natural and the artificial are blurred

• Form a complex adaptive system with emergent behaviours

• Not predictable, not controllable• Must use improvisation and generation not

composition• We are integrated, co-dependent, entangled

Other Metaphors: Consilience• E.O Wilson proposed a ‘grand unification” of the arts

and sciences.• Criticized as the integration of the arts and humanities

‘into’ a scientific world view.• Edward Slingerland and others in a new consilience

proposes rather multiple integrations across • Physical Scale, from the subatomic to the microscopic

to the macroscopic• Temporal Scale from the atomic to the human to the

universe • Human Scales from the individual to the group to the

community to the society • Differing disciplinary approaches provide bridging

mechanisms relevant for crossing scales.

• We have moved from a world of data scarcity to a world of data plenty

• 1992: Historian Daniel Boorstin:

• 150 years ago: • Meaning rich and data poor

• Today : • Data rich and meaning poor.

• « Epistemological Inversion »• Cf Copernican Revolution• A new Phenomenology• New data experts will be artists,

designers and humanists

. • The approach is not a third culture but the creation of new metaphorical structures

• Multi Modal Data Representation• Sonification

• Embodied Cognition• Used differently whether we are problem driven,

object driven, project driven or experience driven.

• We are undergoing a cultural transition• Soon our brains will know as much via direct

sensory experience• As through the data collected by our instruments

and translated for our senses.

Changing our Metaphors as we enter the Data Culture

ARTSCILAB Project Areas• Multi-Modal Representation of Large Data

• Experimental Publishing and Knowledge Curation–ARTECA art science aggregator to be launched spring

2016–Creative Disturbance Multi Lingual Podcast Platform

• STEM TO STEAM–“Blended” Research and Learning –Collaboration theory, science of team science..

DATA Stethoscope Project

•Collaboration with Prof Gagan Wig in UTD Brain and Behavioral Science •Understanding the internal connections in the brain•fMRI resting state data on healthy people of different ages • “dense’ networks cf sparse•Dynamic•17,000 links, 23 ‘regions’• Data exploration using sonification

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Creating Data Forrests• Interactive Immersive Visualisations• Sonification as a technology of attention

• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3O03gcq-sQeeGsxU29ZUlRhUzA

Hybridity in Culture

My Disturbed ChildhoodFrank Malina, Kinetic Artist

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Frank Malina, Research Engineer

• .

A comment on Professional Hybrids:……………………………………. T shaped and “Pi” Shaped

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Contemporary Hybrids

Francois-Joseph LapointePhD Molecular Biology and Phd Dance

Carl DjerassiPhD Organic Chemistry, Novelist/Playwright

Hybrid Collaborations• String Theorist Lisa Randall• Collaboration with Composer

Hector Parra and Multi-media artist Matthew Richie

• Hypermusic; A Projective Opera in Seven Planes

• Premiered Centre Pompidou• « Translating the world of

theoretical physics in a way that appeals to scientists »

A closing thought

26/06/2012

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50 anniversary of The Leonardo Organisations• Journal Founded 1967 Paris• For Scientists deeply engaged in the arts and

humanities• For Artists Seeking to appropriate science and

technology for cultural purposes• For scholars studying the interaction of the arts,

sciences and technology• Champions writing by artists about their own

work. • Peer review. Currently 4th in google scholar art

journal rankings• VVesna, J. Gimzewski, Blue Morph

Creating Data Forrests• Interactive Immersive Visualisations• Sonification as a technology of attention

• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3O03gcq-sQeeGsxU29ZUlRhUzA

one antarctic nightrobotic astronomical telescope in antarctica

ARTSCILAB Project Areas• Multi-Modal Representation of Large Data

• Experimental Publishing and Knowledge Curation–ARTECA art science aggregator to be launched spring

2016

• STEM TO STEAM–“Blended” Research and Learning –Collaboration theory, science of team science..