Hacking Horizon 2020

In my blog last week I mentioned that I would be undertaking a hack of Horizon 2020. In case you are not aware, Horizon 2020 is the European Union’s Framework Programme of research and development. It consists of many different specific research programmes and is run by the European Commission. If you do not know what hacking is, I will just limit my explanation to a few words – creative misuse. I leave you to discover for yourself, or not (depending upon your willingness to explore strange worlds, which in this case is that of art) what hacking is about, and to learn also the importance of this concept for innovation.

As part of this hack I have appointed myself as a Horizon 2020 artist and writer in residence! I have also appointed myself as Chief Artistic Advisor to the President of the European Commission!

I will be undertaking a number of artistic studies. Last week I announced that one subject of study would be Anne Clover who is currently Chief Scientific Advisor to the (outgoing) President of the European Commission. Her term of office also comes to an end when Barroso goes, and some will say good riddance to her as well. Others will not, especially the vested interests that she represents. Why this is so I will be exploring in my study of her. This particular study, I should point out, has a long history, for I have been examining the Anne Glovers of the world for close to 30 years. I am, one might say, an expert on Anne Glovers! Scientists construct theories and probes to explore nature and the universe, while I construct theories and probes to explore scientists! There is more to a building than its facade!

Other subjects of study include: the Research Executive Agency (often called REA); the Factory of the Future Public Private Partnership; the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) initiative; agricultural policies and research and development activities; Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI); and of course ICT & ART CONNECT. Other topics may be added later.

The results of this work will appear in various novels and other artistic outputs, and towards the end of Horizon 2020 I plan to publish a book which will be an exegesis presenting an alternative picture of Horizon 2020 to the official one that will be presented by the European Commission, which is likely to be one of a highly successful Framework Programme. Recall the story of the emperor’s new clothes – I shall be acting as the little boy in that story and asking very awkward questions about these new clothes.

My proposed book will also demonstrate why Presidents of the European Commission need to have a Chief Artistic Advisor. And by way of the final outcome, I will propose a new Framework Programme – Horizon 2027 in which artists take over science and technology research and all scientists will be expected to use their know-how and skills to communicate the marvels of art to a public that seems not to understand art and its importance – clearly a case of a deficit in their thinking!

In future blogs I will also publish updates and preliminary results. Look out for these!

Chief Religious Advisors, Chief Scientific Advisors

In times long past, here in Europe, rulers (mostly unelected monarchs), had Chief Religious Advisors. Then sprang up an intellectual movement, which we today call The Enlightenment, which argued (correctly) that dogma (in this case the beliefs of the Christian church) had no place in government, and that such dogma had a pernicious influence on the lives of the governed. The emphasis was also on people thinking for themselves, rather than believing what they were told.

So began the secularisation of government, or so most people think. Here is not the place to reflect upon the failure of The Enlightenment. This is something that I will reserve for a future blog. For now I just note that dogma was not driven out of government, nor did people, on the whole, start thinking for themselves. What happened was that we swapped one pernicious dogma, for many others, and in the western world, two in particular took hold – free market economics (Industrial era capitalism) and science, both of which are products of the age of enlightenment, both of which also have many things in common, and both of which are also deeply bound to the dominant culture (and dogma) from which they were born – European culture. More about this matter in future blogs.

Thus, in effect, what happened as a result of The Enlightenment was that Chief Religious Advisors were replaced by Chief Economic Advisors and Chief Scientific Advisors, so rather than just having one pernicious influence, we ended up with two!

As with Chief Religious Advisors, Chief Economic Advisors and Chief Scientific Advisors reflect the self-interests, values and beliefs of the rulers. Most hereditary rulers of times past, believed in their divine right to rule, and having a Chief Religious Advisor was an essential part of the process of maintaining this delusion. Today, rulers, mostly elected (but also still some unelected) politicians in the western world, also subscribe to economic and scientific delusions, about which more will be said in the future, and therefore have both Chief Economic Advisors and Chief Scientific Advisors.

The current President of the European Commission (Barroso) whose term of office comes to end this year, decided in 2009 appoint a Chief Scientific Advisor, to, as he put it, “… reflect the central importance I attach to research and innovation.”  The name of this advisor is Anne Glover.

Now, Anne Glover had already come to my attention as being one of those scientific types who subscribe to the deficit model theory. This is a belief held my many scientists that it is a lack of right-mindedness that leads ordinary people to question science, to reject certain types of scientific results, etc. So such people are suffering from a deficit in their thinking, which, to cure, requires a good dose of communication to enlighten people to the glorious nature of science, what is does and has achieved, and to show them that through science we will build the best of all possible worlds.

It was therefore, no surprise to me, that when she addressed a meeting of ICT & ART CONNECT, she immediately launched into praising science, and then had the audacity to announce how pleased she was that artists would be participating in the quest to enlighten the public concerning the glories of science. In response to this I therefore began to reflect upon how to demonstrate to Anne Glover what art can do for science.

As part of my overarching theme, which I call The Silent Narratives, I have decided to hack Horizon 2020, and to make Anne Glover the subject of artistic enquiry. From this not only do I intend to demonstrate the true value of art in science, engineering, and technology, but to show the true nature of western science and its Abrahamic characteristics, and to begin to introduce a new, more powerful scientific paradigm based on eastern cultures. And given that the incoming President of the European Union has yet to decide whether to have a Chief Scientific Advisor, I will be using the evidence and knowledge generated from this process of artistic enquiry to offer him advice on the matter.

Thus over the coming months I will be examining Anne Glover’s public pronouncements in the context of her stated mandate. I will be investigating her conflicts of interests too, and the controversies she has created as a result of her work. I shall be taking some of, what she calls, the fascinating science being undertaken in Europe, and applying this to Anne Glover to see how Anne is transformed by science. Given the emphasis on innovation that is the foundation upon which Horizon 2020 is built, I will be developing exploitation plans for these results in the form of new and improved versions of Anne Glover that offer significant savings in public expenditure and more effective use of Chief Scientific Advisors. In this re-engineering of Anne Glover I will also explore the potential for economic growth in the form of wealth and job creation.

I call this body of work Anne’s Fascinating Science. Welcome to the world art!

Sustainability and Moving beyond Solution based Thinking

If you care to read my work, you will find that it contains quite a lot of critique of, and commentary on, the modern world. What you will not find however is the advocacy of any particular solution or solutions. Why?

About this I could say much, but will limit my comments to the observation that history tends to show that what have been presented as solutions, have quickly been transformed into problems. Communism is the classic example, but so is capitalism. And the same can be said of science, technology, some religions, and so on.

It is often the case that (so-called) solutions to the woes of the world are the product of a process that typifies the (western) European-oriented mind – a process that I call, the discovery of the truth, which, in the case of European minds, is often the sole truth. Thus, with the sole truth revealed, people quickly stop thinking, and proceed to the next step which is the selling of the idea (almost as though it were a product), often with missionary zeal, and then, even worse comes the implementation, regardless of the consequences. Then, to deal with those whom, because of some deficit, a lack of right-mindedness, have not discovered the sole truth, compulsion has to be deployed to bring about the discovery of the truth, and failing this, the final solution is implemented.

Communism and Christianity both share this feature, but you will also find the same thinking in science and capitalism as well, but here we have not yet seen the implementation of final solutions on the scale that can be seen with Communism and Christianity (although they are all bound together in ways that I will one day come around to explaining). But there is still time for this!

The influence of science in government is growing, and in a most undemocratic way, and one only has to read the pronouncements of the current (unelected) incumbent to the position of Chief Scientific Advisor (her name is Anne Glover) to the President of the European Commission, to realise that those who have discovered the sole truth are once again gaining influence and power, and using this to spread their dogma. As I have said before, it is not the obvious extremists that one should be wary of, but those like scientists, whom, subscribing to the science delusion, come forth saying what may seem to be reasonable things.

My position on the matter of solutions is that the problems of the world are far too complicated to be amenable to such a simple, European approach. I believe also that, the world has had enough of solutions, and that it is time to adopt a different approach that reflects the true complexity of the challenges that we now face. And this new approach is based on an eastern understanding that there are in fact many truths, and the pursuit of a single truth, is to embrace an ideology, a dogma, which if you care to look very closely, is what many people do. Scientists, along with engineers, technologists, and free-market advocates, are the most notable examples of this in the western world.

What I seek to create are processes whereby all peoples can engage in the discovery and understanding of the elements that create our unsustainable civilisation, and to then begin to explore and experiment with the means of changing behaviours, lifestyles etc. And in doing so my aim is to liberate people from the imposed definition of problems and solutions that come from those with vested interested, and to bring about, in a peaceful non-ideological way, profound structural changes.

The difference between the solutions-oriented and processes perspectives can be compared to building a new path, which is a metaphor that I use in my book A Tale of Two Deserts. The person who has discovered the truth, the sole truth, knows the destination, the place towards which the new path will take us. Socialism, Christianity, Islam, European science and technology, and capitalism all share this deterministic characteristic. It is also something that is deeply embedded in European culture.

But there is another way to build a path, and that is to acknowledge that we do not know where it should lead, and that we need to build it, one step at a time, and discover as we go which direction to take. This is not a process that Europeans find very attractive, being as they are, deterministic, and caught-up in a mind-set of control, conquest and domination. Yet in reality, most people and organisations operate in a non-deterministic way. Who at the age of 16 knew exactly what they wanted to be doing when they reached the age of 60, and among those that did know this, how many ended up doing exactly what they set out to do?

What I am trying to do through my work, is to lead people away from solutions, towards processes that will enable those who want to, to participate in the building of a new path based on the understanding that we need to change our civilisation in quite fundamental ways, but the destination can and should not be defined, for what we are embarking upon is a journey of discovery, which will most probably lead to places we would never have visited if we set off with a fixed destination in mind. And this is one of the most profound changes that we can make in our way of interacting with the world and shaping the future, and is also one way we can begin to deal with the curse of ideology and dogma, which in the end, always lead people towards anger, hatred, violence and oppression. A civilisation founded on dogma cannot be regarded as sustainable, nor will it ever be.

Art and artists have a fundamental role to play in the creation and operation of these processes, and about this I will have more to say in due course.

Has the European Union Abandoned its Peoples to the Power of Money?

Recently interviewed by the BBC was the actor Peter Fonda. Most of the interview centred on his movie Easy Rider which was released in 1989, and the relationship with his co-star Dennis Hopper. Fonda was asked for his reflection on America today, over 40 years on from Easy Rider. His response was that America is a beautiful country with a government that has abandoned its people to the power of money!

So I ask the question, is the European Union doing exactly the same thing, abandoning its people to the power of money? The answer is yes, and here in the UK the government is leading the pack. And, science, engineering and technology are right in there, among the pioneers, building this brave new world of the power of money, with its materialism, greed, vast disparities between the haves and the have-nots, environmental destruction, and the increasing loss of hard won employment rights, and ultimately, other rights as well.

And the above is one of the reasons why ethics in science and business will not work, and why we will increasingly see human concerns about the damaging consequences of these aspects of our civilisation being pushed aside. It is already happening: fracking, nuclear power, high speed rail, and genetically modified crops and animals are the current concerns which are being ignored in the race to keep the UK economy consuming, from which comes the growth so desired. Next comes the underground burning of coal reserves and biomedical technology. And what comes after these?

Selfies at Auschwitz – A Sign of a Dysfunctional Civilisation?

Recently in the news was an American teenager who took a selfie while visiting the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. People looking at the image of a smiling teenager standing in a place of mass industrialised slaughter, and reading her unrepentant words of explanation, may well ask if she is a sign of the dysfunctional nature of European based civilisations. Indeed one can ask whether a society that produces such dysfunctional behaviour is worth calling a civilisation. Ghandi also asked such a question many years ago. And perhaps such behaviour is such a sign, along with scientists arguing for optional convenience killings, which as I said last week is but a short step away from compulsory convenience killings – another Auschwitz.

While it is the case that this teenager’s actions represent a crass act, the bigger issue is the nature of a so-called civilisation, namely Europe, that Auschwitz is a product of, for European civilisation is indeed a highly dysfunctional one, and one that, no doubt, provides the fuel that justifies the similarly dysfunctional behaviour of those religious fanatics who wage war on European societies through acts of killing and destruction – killing in the name of God, which is yet just another manifestation of the same urges that lead people in Europe to argue for the killing of the terminally ill. Killing it seems is the final and easy solution to all humanities woes. The reality thought is that killing, in whatever form it may come forth, is our woe.

In the actions of Europeans over the ages, and that also includes the present age, dysfunctional behaviour can be found in most aspects of this so called civilisation, most notably in the institutions known as science, engineering and technology. And these institutions played a part in the creation of Auschwitz, and they will do once more, when the conditions become such that those who wish to kill gain the upper hand.

Here you might be thinking that I am referring to the application of production engineering and logistics principles that were used to design and operate Nazi death camps, and those appalling so-called medical experiments that were carried out on people. But actually what I am referring to is the underlying and largely hidden values and beliefs that form the ideologies that are science, engineering and technology, and the highly deluded nature of many people involved in these spheres of activity. It is these values and beliefs that were partly responsible for creating the social, economic and political conditions that made the horror of mass slaughter of human beings possible.

And these values and beliefs are still with us, and they will one day help to create a new Auschwitz. Of course it will not happen in the same way as before, but as long as the hidden values and beliefs of scientists, engineers and technologists remain as they are, a new Auschwitz is an inevitability. But is does not have to be so, for we can choose to walk a different path, based on different values and beliefs and different ways of undertaking scientific, engineering and technological endeavours. Yet I find no inclination among the bulk of people involved in these activities to admit that science, engineering and technology are no longer fit for purpose, and to suggest such is to be regarded as a heretic, which in itself should serve as a warning that all is not well. And so we move a step closer to the inevitable, which in effect is a point that I made last week when considering the matter of assisted suicide, otherwise known as convenience killing.

The fanatical extremist spouting forth words of evil is easy to spot, but a more insidious form of evil, one that is less easy to identify, comes in the form of that which we take for granted, that which is slowly normalised into our behaviour and values. This can be likened to story of the frog and the pan of boiling water. Put a frog into a pan of water that is too hot and it will seek to get out. Put a frog into a pan of water that is comfortable, then it has no motivation to move, and it will not notice, until too late, that someone has started to heat the water. This well represents that which is currently happening with science, engineering and technology. As I have said before, the madness of science, engineering and technology is at its greatest when people come forward speaking of using things to better humanity. And the reason for this lies in those hidden values and beliefs, what I call the Silent Narratives, and it is the exposure of these Silent Narratives, and their consequences, that you will find addressed in my books. But what you will not so easily see is the work that I have being doing over the last 30 years to reinvent science, engineering and technology. I will therefore be saying more about this in future blogs.