Discussions

Open consultation on STARTS = Science + Technology + Arts

  • Ralph Dum profile
    Ralph Dum
    15 June 2016 - updated 4 years ago
  • 4 comments
    Total votes: 10

The initiative Science + Technology + Arts = STARTS in Horizon 2020 is based on the conviction that Science, Technology and the Arts can jointly foster innovation in industry and society. The Arts can act as a catalyst for an efficient conversion of S&T knowledge into novel products, services, and processes while stimulating the involvement of citizens in innovation.

In 2016, two actions brought the Arts closer to Horizon 2020:

  • The STARTS prize gives visibility to  collaborations between arts and technology that have led to radical innovation 

  • A network of arts and technology institutions will support the alliance of the Arts with technology and industry, and identify the best ways for the Arts and technology to work together.

Any activity in STARTS has to address the double purpose of artistic relevance and pertinence for innovation in industry and society.

For Commissioner Günther Oettinger in charge of the Digital Economy and Society, collaboration between art and technology strongly benefits European innovation and will become a 'win - win interaction'  between the art world and industry. He emphasises that no restriction to the artistic freedom should be applied as it might compromise the creative process and thus, the essence of innovation as the valuable out-of-the-box thinking of artists is rooted in their artistic independence.

We are launching this consultation process to shape the next wave of collaboration between the Arts, science and technology. We are looking for input from players in industry, technology institutions and art on how they see the interaction between the Arts and technology from their perspective. We also hope to receive concrete ideas for projects in STARTS on how to support such collaborations in an industrial context.

The Commissioner suggested to reflect on "STARTS lighthouse projects" in concrete application areas where collaborations of technologists and industrialists with artists could trigger novel and alternative uses for technology and possibly even radically new technologies. Such projects could pave the way for a stronger collaboration of art and technology across all of Horizon 2020.

These projects should propose specific forms of collaboration between arts and industry/technology on novel solutions to address:

  1. Industrial problems - for instance in the automotive sector, additive manufacturing, media or creative industries;

  2. Pressing societal challenges - for instance urbanisation or social inclusion.

They might also include artistic exploration and reflections on novel uses of e.g. Internet of things, sensors, robotics, or (social) media.

The (provisional) deadline for giving input to this consultation is 18th August 2016.

You can publish your contributions as comments (below) or as Library item.

Background information on the STARTS activities.

Tags: 
ICT and artstartsartistsconsultationICT and art consultation

Comments

Log in to post comments
Andrea Bandelli's picture
Andrea Bandelli,
10/08/2016 14:28

What is necessary today are systems and platforms that facilitate the emergence of new practices - in business, research, education and art. Interdisciplinary approaches have a structural limit: after being conceptualised, they usually revert to traditional academic or business realms where they can be further developed, loosing therefore their “newness”.

This is because the space where new practices emerge are very limited, and they are usually adaptations of existing structures (art institutions, business incubators, etc.), which carry institutional memory and practices.

Science Gallery has pioneered a new approach where multiple actors are provoked to engage in open ended conversations. The key elements of this approach (such as using open calls and the tight integration of education, incubation and public engagement activities) were the foundations of the “Studiolab” project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/99496_en.html).

One of the major outcomes of this project was the importance of creating a structure for unexpected results. In this respect, it would be very beneficial to support projects where uncertainties and unexpected results become fundamental elements of the innovation process. To do so, three things are essential:

1) Intent and agency. Unexpected processes and uncertainties are not equivalent to randomness. Similarly to theatrical improvisation, projects should explore how intent and agency enable certain discourses to emerge and open up the discourse to a wide variety of actors - without having to “invite them in”. It is not by planning cooperation and collaboration that innovation will emerge, but by creating the foundations where new technologies can be manipulated and disrupted by diverse actors. Exhibition spaces, educational programs, workshops, mixed used commercial spaces are all examples of the work initiated by Science Gallery which has brought together industry, entrepreneurs and academics, and which can be further developed.

2) Networked approach. Networks are important not only as communication and exchange systems, but also to distribute the risks involved with disruptive approaches. One of the outcomes of Studiolab was the importance of flexible budgets, planning and implementation processes necessary to address the dynamics of uncertainty. This often creates frictions with the administrative and formal requirements of management. A truly innovative approach should strive to advance and challenge current administrative structures and effectively disrupt conventional ways of organising work in order to accelerate the uptake of successful strategies and minimise the negative effects of the necessary mistakes that will need to be done.

3) Opportunities for Participation: Audiences are critical to the innovation process, ultimately when thinking about new products, systems or policies - it is as consumers that we make choices. The involvement of audience at mid points in the creative process through exhibition, events or workshops enables a dialogue that can feed into the creative process. The collaborative practice that is at the heart of art science endeavours is sympathetic to new and compelling ways to engage a range of audiences in emerging research and artistic practice.

Total votes: 0
Jochen Dr. Büchel's picture
Jochen Dr. Büchel,
01/08/2016 08:42

I would like to start a european think tank or task force to expand the current exhibtion on Ramon Lull at universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona with medical realms. The tradition of ars magna and ars combinatoria led to Leibniz` combinatorical concept and its monadic theory which today is included in Bruno Latours ACTEUR NETWORK THEORY. Therefore together with the Catalogue of the "Reset Modernity" exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe an excellent reflexion possibility for systems medical experts can be established.

Total votes: 0
Salvatore Iaconesi's picture
Salvatore Iaconesi,
19/07/2016 07:51

I wish to describe the process which is going on with La Cura project, as an example of the ways in which art has become a catalyst of a wide process uniting sciences, technologies and society, involving companies, institutions, research centers, cultural organisations and the population as a whole.

When I was diagnosed with a brain cancer in 2012 I transformed it into a worldwide collaborative performance whose objective was to reframe the word "cure", in order to extract it from the state of separation which is typical of medicine and hospitalization (through classification, in the body, in time/space, in psychology and in its economic aspects), and to bring it back into the middle of society, where everyone can participate to curing, each with their own role.

As a result, a wide movement formed, uniting doctors, researchers, artists, designers, engineers, farmers, students, and all sorts of other people.

To this day, about 150+ scientific publications have been created for this; 3 books; hundreds of artworks; dozens of concepts for applications which enable collaboration between doctors, patients and society, 3 of which are already on the market; 2 wearable devices which interconnect human beings, giving them access to their medical condition and emotions; 1 experimental technique for a low cost (<5000 euros) MRI apparatus; an entire farmers market in Rome has embraced usage of technologies which allow its members to coordinate production of biodynamic, organic food by organising large numbers of small producers, even at very small scale, and by creating a peer-to-peer certification system involving experts and ordinary citizens in informed ways; and many more things.

People have started interconnecting. Artists have started working with doctors. Researchers have started working with hackers. Hackers have started working with companies. And meny other types of interconnection, which have brought up even more concepts, designs, service prototypes, participatory initiatives.

All of this generated coverage on worldwide media channels, causing a massive network effect which has proven to be extermely beneficial to the initiative.

In march 2016, La Cura became a book which is also a toolkit: it provides the narration of the whole process from multiple points of view, a trans-disciplinary research, and the access to a knowledge commons which is fuelled by an inclusive education process which is functioning on a continuous basis and whose results are placed on GitHub, to be accessible, usable and remixable by everyone who wishes to contribute.

This has caused a spike in the activities, leading to initiatives in 2016 involving farmers, universities, hospitals, biotech companies, artits, children, elderly, artists, designers, engineers, hackers, anthropologists, schools and more.

All these results came together in a 3 day festival in Bologna which was completely organised and executed in an emergent fashion and whose outcomes are beginning to show under the form of collaborations, further concept development, funding processes which span public and private sector, education processes and further initiatives.

Among these is an international summer school in which we will produce a wearable technology which creates an "augmented sense" which gives people tactile sensibilty of online phenomena, an installation which captures data from sources from all over the planet (social networks, sensor networks, urban interventions) and transforms it into an "interconnected brain", and an urban visualisation of this data, under the theme of "living the planet as an interconnected mind". All of these will be on show at Milan's Design Triennale in September, and an international event will be created around it.

A collaboration with an important medical research foundation in Italy has formed to include these processes in its CyberBrain project, in which La Cura will establish bridges between arts and neuroprosthetics, robotics, HCI, neuroanatomy, robotic surgery, advanced imaging and tele-medicine, creating concepts in which arts and design work on these domains' inclusiveness, collaboration, interconnective and relational patterns, materials development and usage, formalisation of innovative concepts, information visualisation, aesthetics and access, and many more domains.

A series of consortiums are forming in this way, through which a series of further initiatives will be started in the next few months.

Aside from the book, a series of manuals, tutorials, documents, reports and how-tos, together with a set of recommendations about tools, technologies and methods, have already been made freely available (currently edited by a team of 15 people) to create an effort for making this process "readable", accessible and re-contextualisable, to be studied, reused and combined with other dynamics and contexts.

As of now, about 1.5 million people interacted with the project, and 170+ researchers, 400+ artists, 300+ doctors, 19 companies, 2 ministries in Italy, 6 hospitals in 3 countries. 20k people participated to the festival in Bologna. 800+ people participated to the education initiatives since April 2016. 30 people from 12 different countries will participate to the summer school in August.

As of this day, no funding has been received for La Cura, which remains a completely peer-to-peer experience which has managed to create an "aesthetic of interconnection" and has proven the role of art as a catalyst of collaboration between arts, sciences, technologies and society.

reference webites:

La Cura project:
http://la-cura.it/
(new website in english coming soon in September 2016; italian language is used now to support the launch of the book)

La Cura Festival:
http://la-cura.it/cura-festival-2016/

La Cura Summer School:
http://la-cura.it/summerschool/eng/

The Story, including press release until 2016 at the bottom of the page:
http://la-cura.it/la-storia-della-cura/

Total votes: 4
Anna Dumitriu's picture
Anna Dumitriu,
02/07/2016 01:34

An important way in which the arts and sciences can work together is by embedding artists within science settings to explore and reflect on cutting edge technologies that will in the future impact strongly on the lives of ordinary people. Artistic engagements can create narratives around such new technologies/new research directions and promote understanding and dialogue. Art has the capacity to connect with audiences in different ways, through our aesthetic senses as well as conceptually. Through such engagements you also open up the possibility of new forms of co-creation or by simply sharing (in a transdisciplinary way) methodologies that enable novel ways of thinking. Long term art residencies are a useful vehicle for this and something constantly raised by participants in the FEAT project, which aims at longer term engagements between artists and FET projects. However greater support, for the full length of an EU research project is the ideal scenario and is likely to pay huge dividends.

Total votes: 3