5.1. Transdisciplinary Scenarios

By Irene Lapuente de La Mandarina de Newton

The context:

In order to find cross-disciplinary scenarios, it is interesting to look straight into the issues revolving around the individual, the collective, or the environment, leaving out the possible areas of knowledge that might contribute to solving or approaching said question.

If we set out from the idea that disciplines are not actual entities existing before humanity, we see that any subject can be approached in a cross-disciplinary manner. Conflicts emerge when we try to understand our surroundings through our own limitations and end up fragmenting knowledge according to the strategies used to access that knowledge. Such limitations have led us to create disciplines , and to try to solve our problems from the perspective of one discipline or another, giving more weight to the discipline and the strategies belonging to it than to the actual problem and/or the knowledge emerging from that problem's solution. Each discipline (and its methodology) has led to different results on any given topic, and the human obsession for results has made it difficult to establish transdisciplinarity as a natural approach.

The team:

We came up with two types of profile needed to carry out a transdisciplinary project: transdisciplinary profiles per se, and profiles from different disciplines with a strong interest, motivation, and flexibility towards other disciplines.

Those who are already in themselves transdisciplinary have, throughout their lifetime, been immersed in more than one environment which has caused a strong impact on them, making it difficult to classify them as members of a single discipline. Their knowledge is not usually focused on depth or detail, but on inter-relationships and the overall picture. These people are very useful within a transdisciplinary project because they easily act as a bridge or as “translators”, and because transdisciplinarity emerges in them spontaneously and naturally.

People who, though defending their own discipline, want to touch upon new disciplines in order to deal with a topic, must be flexible (not believe in one single reality), respectful (capable of seeing value in different approaches), and brave (have no fear of surprising results, and capable of getting past misunderstandings). These people will be able to contribute more detailed knowledge and more defined strategies. These transdisciplinary projects may or may not include the general public.

The projects:

There are many types of transdisciplinary projects. We will describe and comment below on three examples in accordance with the different features discussed in this text, and during the workshops organised by Hangar.

L_ENTES

The L_ENTES project was a proposal for a contemporary dance show, initiated and directed by the artists and dancers Iris Heitzinger and Natalia Jimenez, in collaboration with La Mandarina de Newton S.L. as scientific advisors. The project was based on the convergence of four disciplines: dance and movement -as the body's overall language-, science and maths -particularly concepts of traditional mechanics, optics, and relativist physics-, lighting -as an independent art form-, and sound.

The project originated in questions revolving around themes that in preoccupy these disciplines in one way or another: space, time, light, sound, and human perception. In all performing arts processes, the concepts of space, time, light, sound, and movement are present, usually as vehicles of expression. This time, however, the focus was consciously directed towards these concepts, turning them into the main protagonists. Physics and maths have always dealt with the concepts of time, space, light, and sound. These concepts are also present in our daily lives and generate the perception of our environment. As a result, this scenario led to the following questions: What do we perceive? How do we perceive it? Where is the border between reality and illusion? What reactions are provoked in the observer when he is invited to explore the limit between the natural and the artificial, between nature and art?

This was a transdisciplinary project with a specific starting point: the concepts of space, time, light, sound, and human perception were dealt with through different fields of knowledge interested in these concepts. Although the form each piece would take, and what would happen during the creative process, was unknown in this case (which is common in creative processes), we did expect there to be a contemporary dance piece that would fit in Barcelona's NEO Festival. From an artistic standpoint, the results were interesting, the piece was in fact nominated for the Dansacat Prizes, organised by the Association of Dance Professionals of Catalonia (ApdC), whose aim is to acknowledge, encourage, and promote the work of dance professionals in Catalonia. But perhaps what was missing was a broader component of exchange at many levels, and in particular in the area of the sciences and/or mathematics.

SCIENCE OF THE CITY

SCIENCE OF THE CITY is a multi-faceted project, with three editions so far. Its starting point has always been a video competition that hoped to bring science closer to the audience’s daily experience. The project was conceived and directed by La Mandarina de Newton, with various collaborators and sponsors such as the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), the La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona's city council, the Tech Museum in San José, Paris-Montagne, and Arts Santa Mònica.

For the first edition, participants were invited to send music videos, for which there were three categories: discovery, questions, and experimentation. These categories echoed some of the phases in scientific methodology. An international jury and the audience’s offline votes selected the best clips. All the videos presented were analysed and categorised according to a research process open to both artists and scientists. In collaboration with the latter, an exhibition of participative ArtScience was created, produced by Hangar. It was installed at Arts Santa Mónica, La Mandarina de Newton’s space, and the space of the Regional Government of Extremadura.

The second edition experienced some changes based on the lessons learned in the first one. There were only two categories: questions and proposals. The best videos were selected in the same way as in the first edition. The questions and proposals sent by the participants were shared with various science and technology research centres. We organised co-creation workshops with researchers from the Donders Institute (Nilmegen, The Netherlands) and the winning participants. In this way, both groups defined and shared a research process that concluded with a science paper presented at a Youth Science Congress.

In the third edition, the contestants contributed with videos that, according to them, connected science or technology to their cities. Part of this material was then turned into a TV program (Science of the City) by the Xarxa de Television network in Spain.

This was a transdisciplinary project with an open and participatory outlook, which included the views of the supposed public from the start. Each edition included a collaboration with a different collective: artists, architects, designers, researchers, or moving image professionals. Although the final format had been pre-defined, the process included an element of uncertainty, and nurtured artists, scientists, moving image professionals, or science communicators. The research process, directed by Ramon Sangüesa, was framed by different fields of study, whilst its results were applied to different spaces. The dialogue process between disciplines, on the other hand, was not carried out in a single space or time, but was instead spread out in various phases so that the content, and not so much the people, travelled and mingled.

The project received recognition for best practices in the field of science communication from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), and was presented at numerous meetings, conferences, and congresses.

LIVE SYSTEMS. CHRISTA SOMMERER & LAURENT MIGNONNEAU

LIVE SYSTEMS. CHRISTA SOMMERER & LAURENT MIGNONNEAU was the first retrospective exhibition of this artist duo. It was inaugurated on the 1st of June of 2011 by the science department at Arts Santa Mónica, directed by Josep Perelló. La Mandarina de Newton collaborated, together with Pati Homs, in the design and execution of the educational activities associated with the exhibition. The project offered the possibility to experience, in a participatory way, works that were closely connected to the study of live systems: Eau de Jardin, Phototropy, Life Spaces II, Mobile Feelings y A-Volveré.

Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau are two of the most recognised and innovative artists within the international field of media and interactive art. Their work naturally and intuitively develops interactive interfaces that put into practice the principles of live systems theories associated with ecology, artificial life, and the study of complex systems. Ricard Solé also collaborated in the development of the scientific vocabulary needed to understand artists’ virtual ecosystems.

Fractals, It's not all in the genes, and Phototropism, were some of the proposals that attempted to bring us closer to the scientific elements hiding amongst the works of this interesting art and science exhibition. The three workshops and their numerous variations were intimately connected to the works Eau de Jardin, Life Spaces II, A-Volveré and Phototropy. The dialogue between science, art, and design, was very important during the process of creation and production.

This project originated in an artist duo who were transdisciplinary artists to begin with, and was enriched by transdisciplinary collaborators. The boundaries between areas of knowledge were blurred, and although the resulting exhibition was expected, the creative process in the workshops did shifted and evolved along the way. The results obtained reached different disciplines and inspired and nourished very different types of audiences.

Conclusions:

There are many different scenarios within which transdisciplinary projects may take place. It is important to keep in mind the complexity and the interrelations inherent in what we wish to address. This complexity will naturally bring us closer to transdisciplinarity.

It is important, on the other hand, to look for a good hybrid team that includes transdisciplinary people, as they will act as bridges and mediators between the various fields of knowledge, but also people who will defend a specific cognitive field more incisively, but still hold values of flexibility, respect, and permeability. There is also the possibility of including users, audiences, or external participants.

Finally, it is very important to define the phases the project will have and how the different agents will connect. It is more interesting to try to choose projects with a margin of uncertainty in their final results, as well as projects that might affect, to a greater or lesser degree, more than one discipline. The maximum degree of transdisciplinarity would be to obtain not just a new and unexpected result, but to create an altogether new heuristic field made up of a combination of pre-existing disciplines. This field would then have a new language, new methodology, new practice, etc. This is what probably happened when maths, physics, electronics, engineering, telecommunications, design, etc. were combined, giving birth to computing.