Artscience

"Either way, the fused method that results, at once aesthetic and scientific--intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to simplify to nature in its essence-- is what I call artscience" (7).

"It is this process of creative experience that interests me here. I call it idea translation. To translate ideas is to move them from some conceptual stage to some later stage in the general process of realization. Realization may be any combination of economic value (new technologies, say), cultural value (new forms of art), educational value (new scientific theories), and social value (new medicines or political policies). In the process of realization our ideas often cross disciplinary boundaries" (8).

-David Edwards, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation

In some ways, it seems the economic crisis has created a kind of global idea accelerator, as Edwards terms it. There is a reignited desire and opportunity for change and this change is being driven by a desire to integrate ideas that have been excluded or othered in different times. Given that possibility, there is still a somewhat schizophrenic push and pull between the recognition of a need for different models, new ways of thinking and problem solving, creative responses to our environmental stimuli (our world), and a return to what is known, or familiar, or comfortable. How else can we explain the Chrysler union managing to gain majority ownership of the company, but not have a voting member on the board?

Edwards' idea accelerator connects social, educational, and industrial sectors with cultural sectors of thinking and idea making. And then there is a purposeful motion of exchange between the "lab" (17) and the public. For the accelerator to achieve its function of breaking down barriers to interdisciplinary exchange, a fluid acceptance of experimentation is necessary.

"We value creators in business, culture, education, and society, but somehow we struggle to create institutional environments to welcome them. That is because we made our institutions to resist change that did not reflect where we wished our culture to go--while the world changed in spite of us. Cultures mixed, people and information moved rapidly around the world, new ideas emerged and old ideas were swept away. This change--the hand that molds our children's future--is precisely the kind we engineered our institutions to resist. The consequence is that we're not expressing what we are actually thinking and we're not teaching what we need to learn" (13)!

How do we know what we are really thinking? As I work in the region and see a creative economy marketing plan for our county developing, how do we differentiate or individualize our uniqueness? What is easiest and most manageable, is to emulate sameness, exploit efficiencies. But, we seem to be creating something that has a potential to be soulless in a time when what people need most of all is to retain that core sense of place and authenticity. 

At a recent meeting at the college, a researcher asserted, the thing that would differentiate her plan from any other off the shelf policy/plan, is the data that has been collected about our catchment area and our students. The data for this particular policy is compelling, and I believe similar data needs to be drawn for the region around the creative economy, but I also have a rooted desire to move beyond demographics and employment figures, and dig deeper into the more core needs of the community.

If there are basic life/survival needs that we have as people for basic sustenance, our communities also share basic elements, that are sometimes out of balance, but reach a kind a equilibrium (hopefully) with the assistance of neighboring resources. And they beyond basic survival are the aspects that impact the quality of life and how that quality of life is perceived and experienced. How comforting and fraternal is it to be caught up in a movement? How desolate and demoralizing it can be to feel as if you are the only one of your kind. How invigorating and emboldening it can be to find yourself as the first, a pioneer. How does the translation of idea into action occur within one's life? Is there a capacity, an opportunity? Is there the choice? And if there is not, or there does not appear to be, how can you build that capacity?

Interplay of Perception

"To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our sense; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies. [...] To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animatedness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world" (56).

-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Abram seems to be drawing a connection to something I'm thinking of as how performativity and perceptivity are inter-related. To truly perceive a thing is to give it life and make it, as Abrams, and Abrams drawing on Merleau-Ponty, calls carnal. 

To expand on Abram's sense of the senses, the human experience is not complete without the metaphysical, the awareness of how to interpret the synaesthetic stimulation. Not in the strict form of classification and separation, but how the perceiver is acted upon and responds to the action of the perceived. 

"...Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are  unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear, and feel" (60, Merleau-Ponty qtd. in Abrams).

So, as we perceive and are stimulated by the physical environment, natural and human made, we are also perceiving and being stimulated by the metaphysical environment of concepts and knowledge, pertaining to both natural (wind turns a leaf through an interplay of friction and resistance) and human made (an economic crisis manifesting itself in a cold and rainy day) ideas. It would be hard to argue that a person's sense of well-being does not influence his or her act of perceiving, and that in turn is performative in how that individual's world is constructed.

To examine a thing like the economy as if it is a separate inanimate thing, or perhaps a disembodied animate thing, dehumanizes what is inherently a human construct and activity, whether it is in the design of an assembly line or the purchase of a coop farm share. Similarly, to be able to perceive a thing is natural, but that perception is altered with an increasing awareness of (or perhaps an openness to) sensuality, or how the senses interact in synaesthetic complexity and harmony. 

If our normal socialized human state is one of disconnectedness with our environment, as Abram suggests, then the process of regaining that connection with our world, participating in the dialogue, is one that must be relearned. Relearned, in a way that integrates the spheres of the natural environment with the impact of the built environment, the familial, civic, and intellectual environments, and relearned in a way that empowers the creative capacity to imagine and participate in one's own actions.

As work in the community colleges focus on the local needs of community members and job availability, we see opportunity in providing services to others, what our demographers call service sector jobs. How we perceive the field, and our actions to prepare students to participate in that field can shape the fabric of our communities in how we provide care for our growing population of elders, and how we provide for each other and steward the environment we live in.

Community Colleges as Commons

Community colleges are rooted in a geographic context of service to a community. They have been the resource for local economic development and a grassroots based education and class revolution. In relatively quiet and modest ways, community colleges have altered the landscape of access to higher education and access to the skills one needs to be successful. The community college experience is about raising the quality of life for local community members and the opening of possibility. In this way, community colleges have fulfilled a need for a commons where ideas and knowledge is transferred and exchanged where ownership is not by the student, or faculty, or administration, but by the community.

 

The community college as commons, is the place where research and data is collected on community needs, and the place where the resulting action or preparation can take place. The same way fishing communities have used the collected knowledge of shared maps to better traverse costal waters that they all share, and through the sharing of plotted maps in a kind of commerce, of building a sense of identity and belonging, so too have community colleges shaped identity and diversity within regions.

 

The stereotypical view of community colleges as purely job retraining sites for a nation’s blue collar needs, denies a much more complex narrative, one that includes the local industry needs, but also includes the exchange of information that spawns innovation and curiosity. It includes the micro-economies that are neglected by larger metrics, and the diverse economies that impact quality of life in more humanistic terms than a purely capitalist reading. We have to discover ways to help communities re-discover their investment in the commons and the possibilities engendered there, and re-engineer the metrics in ways that can demonstrate the greater impact community colleges have on their regions.

 

From Kevin St. Martin’s “Disrupting Enclosure in New England Fisheries”

 

The fishing commons of New England is represented by a dominant neoclassical discourse of fisheries as a site of potential tragedy only redeemable through a movement toward enclosure and privatization of access to fisheries resources. While this particular narrative of the commons (in fisheries and elsewhere) has been roundly criticized and qualified, it remains hegemonic in New England and is increasingly used to represent fisheries throughout the world. The pervasiveness of this representation is due not only to its enticing promise of delivering stability and environmental sustainability but also to the impossibility of any alternative. This and other representations of the commons relegate economic difference to an epoch before (or beyond) the present of the capitalist commons.

 

St. Martin, K. 2005. “Disrupting Enclosure in New England Fisheries,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16(1): 63-80. 

And further still....

Here is what I've stumbled upon... or evolved into. I believe we can see communities as living organisms that are made up of interlinked systems that interact with people, animals, and plants, and the result is something tangible in human experience, tied to quality of life, but also to how place is experienced, and how perception is experienced. Central to this, is how we develop, define, and value aspects of economies, with differing results emerging from how we weight or emphasize particular elements. With, of course, the idea that a healthy community is one with a rich array of diverse economies and that the performative nature of emphasizing and investing in these diverse economies, allow the communities to participate in and benefit from the production of these economies.
One of the challenges with the creative economy discourse, at least at my level, is all the aspects that are not measured, that are othered by standard metrics, and it is here that the diverse economy concept really rings as a path to pursue.

And then, thinking further... a layman's understanding of Gaia...

The role of a diverse creative economy as found in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and the role it plays in defining place as a living entity complete with interrelated systems that engage in a symbiotic relationship with the (organisms?) people, flora, and fauna that live in a city, and how together they shape the experience of community. Case studies will be drawn from communities in the Flathead Reservation, Montana; Hazard, Kentucky; and Gyeongju, South Korea that share similar assets and challenges.

Thinking about creative economies...

I am hoping to do an examination of four regions anchored by community colleges and how they have adopted diverse economic practices in implementing economies that support the local culture and contribute to the ecology of community (the Flathead Reservation, Montana; Hazard, Kentucky; Gyeongju, South Korea; and Greenfield, Massachusetts). I plan to document complementary approaches to developing economic models and create compatible research strategies that can be shared among the communities as ways to stimulate the recognition, growth, and sustainability of diverse creative economies that are centered on the improvement of the quality of life for the people in those communities.