Roger Malina: Intimate Science; Or Artists in the Dark Universe (Sonic Acts XIII, 2010)

Humans were designed very badly to understand the universe they live in. Our senses filter out almost all the kinds of energy that reach our body. We develop ideas and intuitions based on our sensory experience of phenomena at our own physical and temporal scales. Scientists today obtain almost all their knowledge of the world via scientific instruments, not through their senses. Yet our intuitions, languages, metaphors and myths develop from our daily experience. Over 97% of the universe is in a form that emits no kind of light; it is dark. Because our body does not detect CO2 directly, it took over a hundred years before the increase in atmosphere CO2 reached our individual or collective consciousness. One of the tasks of art-science collaboration is to short circuit this process, making current scientific knowledge intimate. This is no decorative activity, it is part of the toolkit to allow us to survive the decades ahead. Roger Malina (US) is an astronomer, with a speciality in space telescopes and observational cosmology. He has edited the Art-Science publication Leonardo at MIT Press for 25 years and is the executive editor of the Leonardo Book Series. This lecture was part of Sonic Acts XIII within a session called Gardeners of the Future. This session was about the following: In order to survive the near future, humans need to rapidly adapt to the challenges ahead. Artists will play an important role in ‘gardening’ the future, not only by shifting from computer technology to biology and genetic engineering, but also by starting to understand the universe as a single, large natural algorithm that needs gardening in order to function in a sustainable way.

Roger Malina: Intimate Science; Or Artists in the Dark Universe (Sonic Acts XIII, 2010)


http://www.sonicacts.com/portal/index.php/roger-malina-intimate-science-or-artists-in-the-dark-universe/ Sonic Acts is a biannual festival at the intersection of arts, science, music & technology. Humans were designed very badly to understand the universe they live in. Our senses filter out almost all the kinds of energy that reach our body. We develop ideas and intuitions based on our sensory experience of phenomena at our own physical and temporal scales. Scientists today obtain almost all their knowledge of the world via scientific instruments, not through their senses. Yet our intuitions, languages, metaphors and myths develop from our daily experience. Over 97% of the universe is in a form that emits no kind of light; it is dark. Because our body does not detect CO2 directly, it took over a hundred years before the increase in atmosphere CO2 reached our individual or collective consciousness. One of the tasks of art-science collaboration is to short circuit this process, making current scientific knowledge intimate. This is no decorative activity, it is part of the toolkit to allow us to survive the decades ahead. Roger Malina (US) is an astronomer, with a speciality in space telescopes and observational cosmology. He has edited the Art-Science publication Leonardo at MIT Press for 25 years and is the executive editor of the Leonardo Book Series. http://malina.diatrope.com/ This lecture was part of Sonic Acts XIII within a session called Gardeners of the Future. This session was about the following: In order to survive the near future, humans need to rapidly adapt to the challenges ahead. Artists will play an important role in ‘gardening’ the future, not only by shifting from computer technology to biology and genetic engineering, but also by starting to understand the universe as a single, large natural algorithm that needs gardening in order to function in a sustainable way.

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