Foreword: Conflict of Interest by Roger Malina

As a working scientist I am accustomed to declaring my conflicts

of interest before I serve on peer review panels or juries—indeed the
ethos of science seeks to disconnect scientific discovery from personal
context. Art, of course, is another matter, where “conflicts of interest”
drive artistic creation and motivate viewers’ aesthetic curiosity. So, it is
with a flourish that I declare my conflict of interest: I have known
Sonya Rapoport’s work for many years, and have had the pleasure of
working with her at Leonardo/ISAST (the International Society for the
Arts, Sciences and Technology). We’ve met in her studio innumerable
times, and she has often showed me her work in progress, most
recently her work using the web such as Smell Your Destiny and
Kabbalah/Kabul.
Rapoport is an exemplar in an emerging movement in the arts,
sometimes called “artscience”. This artistic movement seeks to
appropriate contemporary science and technology—not to explain or
communicate science, but rather to create the new artistic visions that
will root tomorrow’s innovations in science, art, and other fields.
Rapoport’s use of science and technology is never literal: it combines
ancient texts and deep personal and cultural meaning with new
scientific discoveries that relate to them. She seeks to create new
conditions for the emergence of meaning by way of “autopoetic” acts.
Autopoetics has been a powerful idea in the community of artists
whose work links to contemporary science and new technologies:
originally a term in biology, autopoetics seeks to elucidate the ways in
which self-organizing processes contribute to living systems. Her early
appropriation of computer printouts from her husband’s laboratory
(Henry Rapoport was an organic chemist well known for synthesizing
biologically important molecules); her interest in the periodic table of
elements; and her more recent fascination with genetics as cultural
code all illustrate her interest in systems.
Rapoport has continually employed new methods of artistic
creation that combine the intimate and the public in disarming ways.
Scientific fact, feminism, and technological innovation come together
in her conceptual art, and in her evolving career she has relied on a
bewildering variety of physical supports. Gyorgy Kepes, in “The New
Landscape in Art and Science” and other books, boldly integrated
scientific instruments into artistic practice. In this tradition, Rapoport
has appropriated the scientific method itself as a form of artistic
practice. Not only does she use scientific apparatuses for non-scientific
purposes (the computer, bio feedback, genetic mapping), but she also
uses methods of scientific analysis (charts, graphs, questionnaires) to
illustrate and to explicate.
The scientific method itself is not a stable artifact: it has evolved
over the centuries as scientists have developed new ways to construct
the testable descriptions that become scientific explanation. For
instance, the computer has had a number of epistemological impacts.
In some complex systems that lack mathematical formalism, a
computer can now accurately predict behavior based on testable
simulations. In recent years disciplines that were data-poor often find
themselves data-rich as a result of “big data” approaches to pattern
recognition and prediction. It seems to me that Rapoport’s work—with
her early adoption of computers and new media, and later the internet
and the web—in some ways anticipated or interpreted this evolution
and even reveals the scientific method as a cultural object.
A number of sociologists of science have argued that we need to
embed science in society, thereby creating a “socially robust science,”
as Helga Nowotny calls it. She has specifically called for new, “mode 2”
(interdisciplinary and context-driven—versus investigator- and
discipline-driven) approaches in the biological sciences and genetics.
Similarly, Indian philosopher of science Sundar Sarukkai, in an
examination of the ethics of scientific curiosity, has attacked the idea
that scientific inquiry can be separated from human nature: it is
meaningless and theoretically un-defendable to separate the pure from
the applied sciences. A number of Rapoport’s works, “Make Me a Man”
to name but one, tackle these issues head-on, unpacking the tangled
web of science and sexism, science and military, and science and
cultural mythology. Rapoport seeks everywhere to reveal the objective
connections that deny such dichotomic separations. These “conflicts of
interest” become mechanisms for cultural—and human—survival.
References
The New Landscape in Art and Science. Kepes. G, Chicago: Paul
Theobald, 1956.
Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of
Uncertainty (H. Nowotny, P. Scott and M. Gibbons) (2001). Cambridge:
Polity Press
Die gläsernen Gene, Die Erfindung des Individuums im molekularen
Zeitalter Helga Nowotny and Giuseppe Testa , Frankfurt a.M.: Edition
Unseld, Suhrkamp 2009
Sarukkai, Sundar (2009). Science and the ethics of curiosity. Current
Science 97(6): 756-76