What is the most urgent need that you have?
A support for artists, designers and architects involved in interdisciplinary research – for example, creation of communities that can critically and structurally evaluate (peer-reviewed conferences and similar) new project-based research.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
Technologies of Lived Abstraction (2006-2009) is a set of workshops organized by the SenseLab organization, led by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. These events support research-creation through experimentation and probing of new research strategies. The authors say: “What we propose is to ask how movements of thought can engender creative tools (technical objects) that further the production of culture (in the name of sensing bodies in movement). New forms of collaboration are here not simply locales for experimentation: experimentation will function as much at the collective level as at the conceptual level” (Senselab)
In the workshop I attended called “Dancing the Virtual”, artists, philosophers and scientists were engaged in non-traditional ways of thinking, discussing and sensing. Collaboratively, participants were pushed to challenge habitual ways of doing research. For examples, we tried to experience philosophical concepts through our bodies or perform movement exercises in order to stimulate discussion in relations to philosophical texts. This event, allowed me to truly experiment with an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers over three days. The methods used were platforms of new dialogue that fostered a new kind of research exchange.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
Yes. One of the problems seems to be that different funding agencies are shaping their initiatives around applied research projects, meaning those that can have direct effect on the economy. Funding for high-risk and basic research seems to be decreasing. For example European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development did not continue to support the New and Emerging Science and Technology initiative whose aim was “to support unconventional and visionary research with the potential to open new fields for European science and technology” (source). Obviously, the implications for cutting funding for such research projects are large.
