Fielding Questions: Notes on the Fieldworks Symposium

Fielding Questions: Notes on the Fieldworks Symposium
Ryan Griffis

In an April broadcast of the radio program "On the Media," ABC News
editorialist John Stossel was asked why he had invited well known
fiction writer Michael Crichton to appear on one of his programs to
discuss science and the global warming debate. The exchange ended like
this:

On the Media's Brooke Gladstone: "In December, you featured novelist
Michael Crichton on 20/20, and you praised him for contradicting
something most people believe and fear. You went on to say that
environmental organizations are fomenting false fears in order to
promote agendas and raise money. Why use a fiction writer to refute the
scientific community?".

John Stossel: "Because he's famous, and he's interesting, and he's
smart, and he writes books that lots of people read, and I could
interview the scientists for 20/20, but more people will pay attention
when this particular smart fiction writer says it."
( http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_040805_skeptic.html
)

This particular exchange is interesting to consider in light of debates
around all manner of cultural and scientific developments, including
stem cell research, evolution, sex education and energy production just
to name a few. What makes this interesting to me is the visible and
unashamed collision of claims to truth with tactics of representation.
Stossel recognizes that the global warming debate is constructed as a
"he said, she said" debate, so truth claims are only as valid as the
prominence of the person making them, not the verifiability of the
claims themselves. Likewise, the "other side" often points to consensus
as verification.

This discussion was in the back of my mind when I attended the
Fieldworks symposium just a month later. Organized through a
collaboration between Departments of Art, Art History, Geography and
Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fieldworks
was designed to discuss "the emerging relations between geographic
sciences and artistic production" found in the work of certain
contemporary practitioners. From the preliminary program, it was
apparent that the two-day event would attempt this exploration through
both creative works and traditional discussion.

The first event included a video screening and audio performance within
the space of UCLA's Hammer Museum. Heather Frazar, a recent graduate in
cultural geography from UCLA and one of the organizers of the
conference, presented "Core Matters," a video narrative of the
Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two core sample. This sample of ice, the
deepest ice core record of the Northern Hemisphere at more than 3000m (
http://arcss.colorado.edu/data/gisp_grip/document/gispinfo.html ), was
traced from the site of its recovery in remote Greenland to its
residency in an archive at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver,
Colorado, where it is parceled out for research. By focusing on the
language, images and instruments through which this object of inquiry
is understood as one containing "information," Frazar reveals how
scientific knowledge is produced, distributed and differentiated from
other kinds of knowledge. The difference, for example, between the way
the core sample is treated by the technicians collecting it as a
material artifact and those preserving and distributing it as a
container of knowledge illuminates the process of transformation that
occurs as material becomes information.

Following the screening, the LA-based sound artist/activist collective
Ultra-Red ( http://www.ultrared.org ) performed a site-specific audio
intervention. Called "Silent/Listen," the performance began with an
interpretation of John Cage's famous silent composition "4'33"," used
here to invoke ACT-UP's famous "SilenceTHath" slogan, redirecting
attention away from the phenomenological experience of the space and
toward experiences that may not be seen or heard in the moment, yet are
ever present as we move through any space as an HIV positive or
negative (or somewhere in between) identity. After the scripted
silence, pre-arranged participants were invited to a table to speak of
their ongoing battle with the personal and political ramifications of
HIV and AIDS. These speakers' stories, both deeply personal and
polemic, were recorded and mixed into an increasingly complex montage
by the members of Ultra-Red, highlighting key phrases within ambient
and discordant soundscapes. This technique has been used by the
collective before, especially in their collaborations with activists in
LA's fair housing struggles. While it may seem to stretch Fieldwork's
thematic to the point of breaking, Ultra-Red's practice has been well
defined by the group as site-specific and has consistently tackled
perceptual and political conditions as inseparable properties of space.
In this context, the performance, perhaps arguably, offers a challenge
to a science of geography that does not account for its role in the
distribution of housing and health care and especially people.

The next day, formal presentations set the stage for discussions about
the developing exchange occurring between the sciences and aesthetic
production. The presentations ranged from artist and architect Laura
Kurgen's analysis of declassified satellite images to examine the
political implications of imaging technologies and information networks
( http://www.princeton.edu/~kurgan/ ) to Canadian draftsman Juan
Geuer's anecdotal narrative of his experience as an artist and
researcher among geophysicists ( http://www3.sympatico.ca/fred.mrg/ )
and Trevor Paglen's summary of his performative research on the "black
world" of the US Military's classified defense programs (
http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/nowhere/index.htm ). One common
thread to all of the presenters, aside from the whole geography thing,
was their deliberate transgression of recognized academic fields, while
still maintaining a rigorous relationship with them.


Cross-discipline research, especially between the humanities and
technology-based sciences has become something of a holy grail in
academia (in the US, at least), as both sides seek to capitalize on new
funding sources in an increasingly privatized funding environment. One
of the targets of Fieldworks is the accepted definition of the "field"
itself, i.e., the boundaries that compartmentalize knowledge into
discreet regions that must be defended. University departments now
routinely offer joint degrees, and many art programs have dissolved the
traditional walls between media. This may seem like an academic
problem, and perhaps it largely is, but when Business Journals assert
that "the MFA is the new MBA," the paths of commerce and academia don't
seem so divergent (
http://www.latimes.com/extras/careereducation/brush_wsuccess.html ).


In this competitive climate, where notions of a science free from
commercial influence have all but disappeared, the distinction between
making something of value and merely illustrating or understanding
reality has become all-important. The production of illustrations –
representations of different phenomena designed to reveal something
about them – is now merely one step in the development of commercially
viable goods. For the physical sciences, it is a matter of not just
reading and interpreting the world, but of making something from
interpretations, whether it's a new pharmaceutical product, a faster
computer processor, or hydrogen powered cars. While art may not feel
the same pressure toward utilitarianism, the historic struggle of the
aesthetic avant-garde to move beyond illustration, whether one looks at
modernist abstraction or tactical media, is a provocative parallel
development.

One of the comments made during the open discussion pointed out that as
social science moves more towards cultural studies (developing a
critical language of its own histories and languages), art seems to be
moving toward invention-oriented and empirical methodologies typical of
the physical and social sciences. In the work of Paglen, Kurgen, and
many of the speakers at Fieldworks, observational instruments that are
considered to be within the domain of science - statistics, geology,
astronomy, physics - are used toward creative ends not exactly familiar
to their origins, but not completely alien to them either. The tools of
observation and recording, considered illustrative in the hands of
science, become generative in the realm of art, where the "performance"
of the instruments is itself a final "product." The comment mentioned
above about social sciences moving towards cultural studies, made by a
geographer, may be true within high academia, where science is indeed
becoming more self-conscious and critical, but perhaps it also has some
resonance with the further commercialization of research within
universities, where the "scientific method" is applied to test the
marketability of a particular research venture. While the geographer
most likely intended to reference the growing numbers of science
scholars, like Bruno Latour, who are creating a critical theory of
science, it could be argued that science and art are becoming
complimentary methods of production, both situated in terms of
"markets."

How does all of this impact upon daily life and cultural contexts
broader than museums, classrooms and conferences? Well, Michael
Crichton appearing as an "expert" on climate change may be one
instance. The example of John Stossel citing Crichton as both an expert
and a popular figure, is what Bruno Latour might call iconoclastic. For
Latour, iconoclasm - the renunciation of religious iconography - is
used to describe the process (in Western society) of destroying and
creating images in a cyclical search for truth. In this sense, images
can be understood as instruments that point to what is not immediately
visible - and understanding that encompasses satellite photography as
much as religious icons, despite major differences in how such images
relate to notions of information (see:
http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/expositions/001_iconoclash.html ) Crichton
can be seen as an iconoclast (or Stossel for using him), as he keeps
the distinctions between knowledge production and social conventions
intact while destroying images that seem to represent that distinction
- namely that of specialized experts. Images that are assumed "empty"
vessels of information for scientists, such as photographs of fetuses
or of the planet Earth, can become weaponized icons in fierce
ideological battles. And representatives of the scientific community,
in attempts to keep the distinction between truth and social invention
in tact, are finding themselves on the front lines of battles over such
images and their constructed meanings.

This concern for iconoclasm lay just below the surface of my experience
of the discussions framed by Fieldworks. While there was certainly much
to celebrate in terms of the diversity of practices and the ability of
artists and scientists to blend and stitch together innovative methods
for observing and imagining reality, I wondered if this collision could
escape the confines of professionalism. In many ways, it appears that
these collaborations between disciplines were taking up the role of
producing illustrations and questions about our surroundings that was
once expected to be played by an "autonomous" science. But, what is to
prevent any interdisciplinary effort from become just another, and
potentially more obscure, guarded dialogue? The question for me is how
to replace the "fielded" expert with interdisciplinary and amateur
knowledges–without following an iconoclastic program that seeks to
destroy established fields only to replace them with new,
interdisciplinary ones, in a search for more accurate and descriptive
methodologies. In other words, how can the field be expanded without
leaving the position of expert open to Michael Crichton?

The Fieldworks Art-Geography Symposium was held at the UCLA Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, May 5-6, 2005
http://www.fieldworks.org/index.html