Found objects, surveys, and catching frost

working draft

Turning the forms and methods of scientific research into art Found-object taxonomies During my extended run of graduate school, I ran across an art student, Robert Crise, Jr., who was doing something that I thought was very interesting. One of his projects involved picking up objects that had been lost or discarded on the ground. He placed every found-object in a small transparent plastic bag, and filled out a data sheet or card that recorded information about the object and when and where it was found. He had done this for thousands of relatively small objects--many of which were quite interesting and mysterious (unrecognizable and broken pieces from other objects). He would create wall displays of different subsets of these items (e.g., items that contained the color pink, pens, objects found during October). These displays by themselves were very visually interesting--sort of a cross between a butterfly taxonomy and the organized output from an archaeological dig. The display of objects was frequently accompanied by a parallel display of the data sheets. The "data" was part of the art. It all looked and felt very science-y, data-y and art-y--all at the same time. This was inspiring to me because I was also engaged in my own little efforts to use the methods and artifacts of social psychological research (the focus of my studies in grad school) in art projects. Robert Crise's found-objects project convinced me that this was possible--and that there were probably many other creative opportunities for turning science stuff into art stuff. Survey research as art American social psychologists became famous for staging research that disguised the true purpose of the research (e,g., your partner in the experiment was actually an actor following a script)--sometimes by disguising the fact that research was even being conducted (e.g, a staged theft in a library, an innocent request on the street). Disguising the true purpose of the research (so as not to contaminate natural responding) often required a lot of creativity--and I could appreciate that. Some where along the way in graduate school I began wondering about turning "research" on its head and doing it as "art." One of my first forays into this was to conduct a scientific survey that would be more performance art than serious science. In other words, performance art wrapped in a survey. So on St. Patrick's Day in 1981, I walked around campus and town, approached people I knew or had some acquaintance with, stuck out my tongue--which in honor of the holiday had been dyed bright green with food coloring--and observed (then recorded) their response. I later prepared a one-page summary of the research and its "findings" and distributed this document widely. I would like to point out that I was not just doing "silly research." The Journal of Irreproducible Results was already quite famous in the academic world for publishing amusing fake research reports--like research that purported to demonstrate that dead rats display an impaired ability to learn. The purpose of my Saint Patrick's Day survey was not just to be entertaining (although it was), but to use research methods and activities to create art. This project asked my left brain to create a research project around my right brain's idea of turning a simple prank into performance art. It was like asking my left brain to dance a left-brain dance...that had been choreographed and set-designed by my right brain. It was fun. It felt creative. Frost catchers Jamie Newton is one of my favorite artists and inventors. His work (and what I perceive to be the mentality behind it) is--to my mind--very creative. His invention of the idea of a "frost catcher," for example, opened a door to a very interesting and previously-hidden creative space around one of nature's great magic acts: frost. He's beenl creating devices to capture the ephemeral natural phenomenon of frost formation. The creation & construction of these devices bridges both an artistic-object aesthetic and a real do-it-yourself tinkering-around-with-science aesthetic. This concept creates a space in which playing around with frost and the scientific method is now art, art process and performance. This idea is beautiful and inspiring to me and has prompted me to embark on my own backyard frost catcher program. When the left-brain leads and the right brain choreographs Over the years, my interest in this area of overlapping creativity--using science stuff for art stuff--has grown and combined with other areas of interest (e.g., my Fluxus art work, my creativity consulting work). What has emerged (coalesced?) is a fascination with the occasions on which the left- and right-brains dance together creatively. I would divide human creativity into several different types of "dances:" the dances of the right brain--where the right brain choreographs and leads (e.g., artistic expression and creativity) the dances of the left brain--where the left brain choreographs and leads (e.g., scientific, applied, and practical creativity) the dances where the right and left brains dance together Within this last category, I am especially interested in those rare and unusual dances in which the left brain nominally leads (i.e., dances the steps it knows how to dance) but does so under the guidance and direction of the right brain. By exploring and learning how to facilitate this particular "dance" process--this type of creativity--I believe we can liberate even more human creativity and develop the type of creativity that human culture increasingly needs.