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Two unrelated topics for today: I've had a look at some services that help promulgate research to the masses. But first a brief comment on more serious matters.
Luddites and those who overdo their actions
A state sponsored act of terrorism involving explosives in consumer electronics may have succeeded in creating fear and confusion, but on the surface it also looks like a luddite action gone wrong. Luddites, I believe, would never directly target people, no matter how hostile. The state involved (forgive me for having forgotten its name) is known for its sophisticated technological products that everyone wants. Wanted to have, I should say. In the 1970's some activists injected quicksilver into oranges, that too quickly turned consumers off. I can't condone that sort of action. Only a deranged surrealist could propose firing at random into a crowd (the example is of course drawn from Breton's second manifesto).
L'acte surréaliste le plus simple consiste, revolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu'on peut, dans la foule.
I think Breton's point is that there are more sophisticated surreal acts. Blind violence is only for desperate simpletons.
A few years ago there was a sabotage of internet infrastructure, outside of Paris, I believe it was. I'm not sure if the attackers were caught and whether the motive ever became known. James Howard Kunstler use to mention on his podcast how vulnerable the US electric grid is. Apparently there are right wing extremists who have considered or already carried out attacks against it. But the grid might be vulnerable even if spared from attacks.
Now, a reliable ISP is another useful thing to have. As I just discovered, Kunstler's homepage with the podcast is temporarily unavailable due to "a hardware problem" at the hosting service. His blog posts are still available though:
I don't agree with all of Kunstler's standpoints, but I do respect his relative open-mindedness which he puts to good use when interviewing people he might not fully agree with.
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Conceptual artist On Kawara used to send telegrams with the text "I'm still alive." We can all say that, for now, but it's not a given. Suffice it to mention geopolitical tensions that could spiral out of control. Someone just would have to call a bluff which isn't one. Or as likely, a mistake might happen.
A note on academia
Academiology, that's a nice word, sort of similar to how pataphysics relates to the other physics, plain and meta-. Since I got an essay published in June in a Springer anthology a steady stream of spammy invitations to contribute in virtually every field of human knowledge has trickled into my mail folder. I'm not particularly keen on travelling abroad and giving pretend lectures on advanced chemistry or satellite communication, or any other topic I know nothing about. The mismatch between my abstract, which these polite spammers say they have read carefully and admire for its deep insights, and the topics of conferences or journals they invite me to is glaring, to say the least. But what strikes me is that there is this whole service industry for people in academia. There are folks who want to popularise your research in all kinds of media and crank it out to a mass audience. From the point of view of communicating abstruse scientific results in a lucid and engaging way to the rest of society that could be a very useful thing. If you don't do it, or don't to a good job popularising research, people outside of academia will tend to lose trust in science. This is tricky, it's not enough to try to make the research look exciting and fascinating. It would help if it feels relevant or can be put to practical but not nefarious use, and there must be no suspicion of conflicting interests. Any remnants of trust in medicine have clearly vanished in some groups of the population (whether deservedly or not is another question) because of the funding from the pharmacological industry.
I don't think life in academia is as easy today as it once was, but from the outside it may seem rather comfortable and reasonably payed. Academic journals take advantage of the wealth of universities first by demanding publishing fees for open access papers, then by forcing university libraries to pay for expensive subscriptions. Now there's also all these symbiotic, sometimes parasitic services that draw on the wealth of academia. I doubt they would exist without a "wealth differential" and I don't recall that such PR services were available when I did my PhD twelve years ago. Now they offer podcasts, writing up articles, even making animations. I thought this phenomenon was so interesting in itself that I gathered a handfull of examples on one long page.
To be fair, it's not a one-sided interest from these popularisers who suck money from researchers, there is also a push inside academia to communicate to the wider audience, precisely for the already mentioned reason of legitimisation. Another way research institutions try to communicate is through collaborations with artists. This approach is perhaps less common, but there have been some notorious projects such as those initiated by CERN who have invited composers to work with their physicists. Currently my Alma Mater has an ongoing project where they first invite research groups to propose projects where artists then may apply as collaborators. An excellent idea, in theory, but I must say I have found the proposed projects disappointing.
The scientists who seek artist collaborators typically are interested in making their research more accessible, and to attract public attention to their field which they think is the most important thing in the world; that's how researcher psychology works. The researchers' conception of what an artist might contribute may vary, but perhaps they have in mind some fancy variant of Tufte's elegant graphics that will illustrate their results. Illustration is precisely the point. "Art must never illustrate" is a dictum in contemporary art. What's in it for an artist if they are only asked to draw a diagram of data provided to them? In reality, the mutual expectations between artist and researchers might be quite well aligned, because of the way contemporary artists work on topics and do artistic research. The topic of an art project might be anything a research group is working on, no problem as long as it arouses the artist's curiosity.
Much more could be said about artistic research and the autonomy of art as it enters projects where it is supposed to serve a practical, utilitarian function. I'll leave that discussion for the book I'm writing on modernism and contemporary art.
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