Advertised recently was a meeting, to be staged in the
European Parliament, of the highly schizophrenic, extremely noisy circus that
is STARTS. This is the third time that such a meeting has been hosted in the
European Parliament buildings. Interesting!
A grand total of three European Commissioners have also now lent
their support to ICT-ART CONNECT and STARTS, but being politicians they will
not know what they are talking about, as was the case when the former Chief
Scientific Advisor to the President of the European Commission turned up at an
ICT-ART CONNECT meeting talking nonsense about art and science. Interesting!
And we have this rather empty ICT ART CONNECT study report
that contains some strange statements that, should you care to explore them
further … Under normal circumstances such a report would be an embarrassment to
DG CONNECT, but it is not! Interesting!
As to the matter of the application of due diligence procedures before including STARTS in the new,
2016-17, ICT Workprogramme – none can be detected. Interesting!
It has become very evident that DG CONNECT is out of its depth, and
they have once more engaged in their usual habit of forming those allegedly morally
corrupt relationships with their experts. Interesting!
It can also be seen that various other people are jumping on
the bandwagon – me too they cry, and in doing so are reinforcing a delusion! And
I am sure that there are many more who will want to join in. Plenty of
opportunities to say stupid things! Interesting!
And then there are the Members of the European Parliament
who also want to lend their names to this circus. Interesting!
In a different place, people are talking about how they
bring their artistic hobbies to work and have started making claims about new
discoveries made because of this, but of note, is a lack of critical assessment
of such claims. Positivism, is seems, flies away when it is found to be inconvenient.
Interesting!
Elsewhere too, many people (mostly scientists,
technologists, engineers and mathematicians) with vested interests are talking,
in a manner that mostly amounts to baby talk, about art-science and
art-technology practices, yet seem not to be aware that their discussions at at such a level, or
if they are, are not concerned about it. Interesting!
The growing interest in the so called nexus of art-science,
or art-technology, is happening at a moment in time when people are beginning
to understand just what scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians
are doing to our world in their role as handmaidens to economic interests:
global warming; acid rain; ozone depletion; desertification; mass extinction; lowering
of river levels and water tables; bacteria resistance to anti-biotics; resource
depletion; Fukushima; plastics polluting the world’s oceans; nitrate contamination
of water resources; destruction of habitats; Fraking; … the list is too long to
continue, but they are all brought to you courtesy of scientists,
technologists, engineers and mathematicians (STEM people)! Interesting!
So what is going on? Why is art-science/art-technology being
hyped-up, turned into the latest fad, and politicised? We know of course that
the smell of money is in the air and that there is an opportunity for – 15
minutes of fame! And self-evidently people are now re-branding what they do
(for example UX) and calling it by a new name (STARTS). But what does all this
mean for the notion of a fair and proper evaluation of the proposal submitted
to ICT Topic 36? Are the results already known to DG CONNECT?
I have seen these very noisy circuses before and they all
end the same way, with little to show, for they are all style and little
substance, and most of what goes on, is already what has been done under a
different name. The result of STARTS will be that some people will end up with
bigger bank balances, but the public will be out-of-pocket, with, most likely,
nothing very much to show for the expenditure of their hard earned money.
Collectively people seem determined to make of themselves fools, by declaring
that the emperor is wearing a fine suite of clothes when in fact the emperor is
naked. This perhaps is the nature of the Emperor's Court, the EC, otherwise
known as the European Commission. STARTS is about style and has very little to
do with substance, for what substance there is, already exists. It is about
image making – DG CONNECT’s image!
It is now very clear that the European Commission are
playing a political game, and are using art and artists for political reasons,
so all those concerns about instrumentalisation turned out to be very well
founded indeed.
“The grazing herd has arrived! It will of course eventually
move on in search of fresh pastures, but that zone of discredited practice looms large because of all the dung
that it will leave behind. Yet …
“I am wondering why this opportunity has presented itself to
us. All this dung! Any thoughts about this Julia?”
“Yes Paul, indeed I have for we will use it to fertilise our
thinking, so keep it coming, for all the nonsense, the emptiness, the re-branding,
the grasping at straws, the vain attempts to find some justification for
working with artists, feeds us, sharpens our minds, and, in the process of
developing our critique, helps to know
in ways that seem to lie far beyond the very limited horizon of this grazing
herd. While you are busy pulling at the meagre grass and chewing the cud, we
fly as eagles and see as a result, a very different world that is most
certainly not one of dirt and grass.”
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