Art x Science Methodology: Map
I want to read a 1955 paper on motion capture technology history and the mechanical modelling of the human body. It's dense, complicated, overwhelming. Many sensations and emotions happen at the same time in my body. I don't know where to begin. I get excited by every idea. Every page opens ten more doors. I want to understand everything at once.
I want to rub the paper against my body. As if I were drying my wet skin with a towel after a shower. Tear it apart. Chew it. Spit it out. Dance to Madonna's Confessions II wearing only a “slip in French” (briefs) and a T-shirt stained with breakfast.
Instead, I have to sit down and read. This tension is where this methodology begins. I don't want to become less of an artist while reading. I want to understand what an artist can do with a scientific paper. So I wrote a draft of my art × science methodology before reading. The draft grows from this wrong.fit research, my tools and works, conversations, and collaborations with mathematicians and scientists. It's a map of operations.
Core Principle
Move intentionally between different modes of thinking, giving each mode its own attention, time and space. Don't mix them. Stay long enough in one mode to produce something before moving to the next.
Cross disciplinary borders, but always know which role you occupy by understanding the methods and rules of each discipline: artist, scientist, illustrator, engineer, designer. Become familiar with a discipline by inviting an expert to encounter one of your works. Focus on the differences in interpretation. These differences show the assumptions and blind spots of each field. Accumulate encounters, observations and knowledge. Then take analytical distance. Temporarily suspend personal interpretation and study the research on its own terms. Classify before interpreting and producing. Validate through dialogue with collaborators and audiences. Integrate the feedback and repeat.
The value of interdisciplinarity is not the mix of disciplines, but the new questions produced at the borders between different ways of thinking. This methodology is a map. It is made of operations organised as nodes in a dynamic network rather than steps in a linear workflow. The order of operations changes according to the project. The artist navigates the map intentionally, annotates where they are, revisits previous operations, takes detours, drifts when necessary, and creates new operations when the work needs it.