Panel 2 : Wrong Turnings
On the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary interpretation of scientific theory

"Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of wrong turnings" – Wittgenstein

Participants seated L to R in the video as follows:		video
Chair Panellists	Darren Tofts (Swinburne University, Australia) Stuart Bunt; Alan Dorin (stand in); N. Katherine Hayles.

Starting points and additional material for the panel discussion...

Individuals of diverse backgrounds are by and large able to participate effectively in discussions using colloquial language. When issues become complex, special purpose languages and carefully constructed definitions and metaphors arise within sub-cultures and academic fields to clarify and specify what is meant by particular terminology.

What happens in a multi-disciplinary environment, where discussions cross numerous academic fields, each with their own terminology and metaphors? What happens when different fields define (or understand) the same word in different ways? What happens when metaphors in one field, become truths in another? How well does an artist convey to a biologist the 'life' of a painting, or the manner in which a musical work may be considered an 'organism'? When a cultural theorist discusses Science with a physicist, are they both thinking along similar lines? Are their viewpoints contradictory, complementary, indentical, or a combination of all of these possibilities? What does this do to their chances of effectively communicating and/or collaborating?

When Science and its terminology are adopted by writers and theorists, critics and artists, what are the outcomes? What are the benefits of this interdisciplinary dialogue and what pitfalls need to be avoided? What effects do Science, Art and the Humanities have on one another?

- from Steve Reich (on Music for 18 Musicians), liner notes, Nonesuch records 1998

from Gottfried Mayer-Kress, "Reflections of Chaos in Music and Art",
in Art@Science, Sommerer & Mignonneau (eds), p183, Springer-Verlag 1998

"Morphologies: a symposium on shape-shifting and Media Arts.

When Michael Jackson first 'morphed' into an animal using digital software he seemed to signal that the instability of physical form and shape had been incorporated into the popular visual imaginary. But shape shifting has become a regular feature of the contemporary mutating mediascape, as forms multiply and transmogrify at an exponential rate. Yet the morphogenic development of new media, from cinema to virtual and immersive space, CD-ROM to DVD-ROM, interactive art to net art, has not moved in a clear direction,
erasing older media in its wake. Instead we have a new ecology of the media arts in which forms overlap, contribute to and mutate into each other. This symposium focuses on this altered mediascape and focusses our attention on its aesthetic, physical and biological implications."

from http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/events/morphologies01/default.html, Dec 2001

Waldrop then wrote (of a computer programme), "To date, the Structure Mapping Engine has successfully been applied to more than 40 different examples; these ranging from an analogy between the solar system and the Rutherford model of the atom to analogies between fables that feature different characters in similar situations. It is also serving as one module in... a model of scientific discovery."

There is an isidious problem in writing about such a computer achievement however. When someone reads "the program makes an analogy between heat flow through a metal bar and water flow through a pipe", there is a tacit acceptance that the computer is really dealing with the idea of heat flow, the idea of water flow, the conceptsof heat, water, metal bar and so on.... [and many facts about these objects/entities] ...Needless to say it turns out that the program in question knows none of these facts."

from Douglas Hofstdater, "The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers"
in Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies, , preface 4, p155, Basic Books, 1995

"Others are interested in computer music not for its own sake as a means of expression, but because music almost certainly can tell us much about the workings of the brain. Marvin Minsky [...] bases much of his research on the logic behind computer music. He reasons that the different steps of composing in the sequence of logic - the algorithm - that forms the bones of a computer program, can reveal much about the complex network of nervous reflexes that make our brain tick over during thought."

from Robin Maconie & Chris Cunningham, "Computers Unveil the Shape of Melody",
in New Scientist, p206, 22 April 1982

from the writings of Darren Tofts (the panel chair), on Troy Innocent's work Memespace.
Extract appeared in MESH : Altered States, Experimenta, issue #11, 1997