What does it mean to collaborate?
Ars Scientia brings together artists and physicists to engage in knowledge exchange and collaboration across disciplines. Last year, Ars Scientia conducted a 6-month residency program pairing physics graduate students and artists, culminating in the Signals and Apparatuses exhibition at the Belkin. A recent workshop at the QMI introduced undergraduate students to Ars Scientia and emphasized the benefits of artistic collaboration for science students. It included a talk by Daniel Korchinski, a panel discussion with last year’s participating graduate students, and an exercise aimed at building collaborative skills facilitated by James Day.
One of the questions to emerge in the panel was: What makes a genuine collaboration? Daniel Korchinski and Rysa Greenwood both mentioned a misconception in their initial approach to the residencies. As Daniel (jokingly) put it, “I am coming in with the science, I will tell you the science, and you will make an art of it.” That is, we may see ourselves as bringing a clear and well-defined project and skill set to the “collaboration”, that the other party will use as their input to produce something. On this perspective, the artist is not seen as contributing to the intellectual development of the project, rather they are presenting the (independently developed) science in an “arty” way.
True collaboration, though, is more open and vulnerable. We may not know which of the elements in our skill set will be relevant to a project, because the project has not yet taken form. The discussion of collaboration in the workshop reminded me of the enactivist model of social cognition in the philosophy of mind. On the enactivist model, social interaction involves regulating coordinated patterns of activity between two agents. There are at least three elements in a simple social interaction: the two agents, and the interaction itself, which each agent regulates. If one party exclusively determines what happens in the interaction, the social element breaks down and the interaction is no longer genuinely social. I am thinking of this model as a way of framing collaboration—“a piece of work is literally created together through a process that would not be possible by the individuals involved on their own” (Di Paolo and Thompson 2014, p. 75). More generally, I am considering a model of knowledge exchange not as transmission of information, but as something created in an interaction that changes both parties.
When the panel reached the question of what it means to collaborate, Shelly Rosenblum, Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin, commented on the larger implications of this problem for the university and academy: “Real reciprocity, real collaboration, real interdisciplinary work often fails.” Why? When collaborating across disciplinary as well as other social boundaries, how do we have, as Shelly put it, “deep intellectual academic respect and reciprocity”?
Ars Scientia is a laboratory for exploring these problems. It places physicists and artists in a position to develop genuinely collaborative models of knowledge exchange. Moreover, it’s a way of rethinking what it means to “disseminate research”. We can consider not how scientists can give information to a lay audience, but rather where, in the “combinatorial space” between us (Daniel’s words), can we meet so that our skills and background knowledge interact?
Di Paolo, E., & Thompson, E. (2014). The enactive approach. In The Routledge handbook of embodied cognition (pp. 86-96). Routledge.
Jelena Markovic is the assistant project coordinator for Ars Scientia. She is a doctoral student in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia researching transformative experiences and grief.