Clashes and Conjunctures in the Epistemic Cultures of Studio-Laboratories

Michael Century

Department of the Arts
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Date: Friday, May 14, 2004
Place: Engineering Pavilion
_____ Engineering II, Rm. 1401
Time: 4:00 pm — 5:00 pm (Refreshments served at 3:30 pm)

Abstract:
This talk summarizes the findings of a detailed study of how the first computer animation software systems were co-developed by groups of artists, engineers and scientists in various research and experimental development sites in the U.S.A. and Canada between 1965 - 1985. The results emphasize and differentiate between the hybrid qualities of these sites, each of which sustained, with varying degrees of stability and longevity, the collaborative efforts of highly skilled individuals who are usually assumed to inhabit very different occupational worlds. These complex mixtures of disciplinary diversity, attitudes toward the conservation or surpassing of conventions, and means for motivating and organizing cooperative efforts, combine in the concept of epistemic culture to underpin the analytical framework.

The study reveals how the social categories of artist, scientist, and engineer are losing their definitional stickiness, a result which offers a fresh perspective on de-differentiation in knowledge societies. Differences between these highly charged keywords of modernity are not dissolving outright, in an anything-goes style of postmodern leveling; instead, likenesses in the way they seek knowledge and organize work are more helpful in accounting for the outcomes of their interactions than the received, antithetic definitions. Epistemic cultures, in short, help reveal how artists and techno-scientists may be more alike in some ways than different, and to understand the consequences of this way of rethinking disciplinary verities for the organization of innovative work.

The empirical material offers detailed analysis of six innovation scenes, 1965-85, blending accounts of the research agendas of scientific researchers and their institutional conditions with the artistic pre-occupations of the animators with whom they collaborated. Five are located in the United States, and one in Canada. The American settings are (1) AT&T Bell Laboratories, (2) the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT and Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, (3) a chain of linked projects from Utah University, New York Institute of Technology, LucasFilm, and Pixar, (4) the University of Illinois, (5) animator John Whitney's various projects with IBM and CalTech. The Canadian setting is a joint research program between the National Film Board and the National Research Council.

MICHAEL CENTURY is Chair of the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he joined in August, 2002. Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts, Century founded the Centre's Media Arts program in 1988. Before that, he headed the Inter-arts program, which produced interdisciplinary performances and workshops, and the Banff Jazz Workshop. The Media Arts program at Banff was one of the first to focus on the artistic potential of interactive computer technologies, and served as a model for related projects around the world. Notable projects produced under Century's direction include The Glenn Gould Hypermedia Profile (1989); the Artist's Television Workshop; and The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94). From 1993-1996, Century was a program manager at the Canadian Centre for Information Technology Innovation (CITI), a federal research laboratory located in Montreal, with responsibility for new media arts funding. He also heading a research group there on "networked cultural information systems". From 1996-98, he served as policy advisor to the federal department of Canadian Heritage. For the Rockefeller Foundation, he researched and wrote a report in 1999 entitled Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. He was panelist and co-author for the U.S. National Academy of Science 2003 report on information technologies and creative practices, Beyond Productivity. He was educated in humanities, piano performance, and musicology at the University of Toronto (B.A.) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A.) and the University of Iowa (M.A). At the University of Sussex (UK) he attended the doctoral program in Science and Technology Policy Studies at SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit).

Host: George Legrady, Professor of Art Studio and Media Arts & Technology