Comment by nhf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm at MIT and there are definitely people in other groups on campus that like to shit on the Media Lab for this reason. I think this actually raises an interesting question. If you want to position yourself at the intersection of science and art, what's the correct balance of practicality, rigor, and imagination?

The stereotypical person from the "hard science" communities will never totally buy into this kind of work being science. It's not exact, it's not rigorous. On the other hand, artists and designers more often inhabit this speculative, rapidly-prototyped, thought experiment-esque mode of creation and take it as a valid form of inquiry.

Personally, I love it. It's not hard science or hard engineering in the same way that someone in EECS or biology might treat those fields, but it's a wonderful way to root artistic exploration in current scientific technique.

Is that the right balance between the two? Is there a point along the spectrum where you need to stop calling yourself a scientist and start calling yourself an artist? I think that's an open question.

I think you bring up interesting points, but in Neri Oxman’s case the answer seems to be that the science is essentially absent in its entirety. I won’t pretend to have a good answer to “what is art,” but the question “what is science” is much easier to answer. Her work may be art, but it utterly fails the test of science insofar as it doesn’t adhere to the scientific method. She’s a scientist in the same way that a color therapist is a medical doctor.

Better examples of the intersection of science and art might be found in the work of someone like Buckminster Fuller. The nature of science being what it is, the science probably has to come first, with the art emerging from it

> The nature of science being what it is, the science probably has to come first, with the art emerging from it

Most of science fiction kinda disputes this though. A scientist has to have the imagination to construct the experiment.

this is overly constraining the meaning of science to the process of deduction. science includes observation and exploration.

Observation and exploration are part of science, but only when mated with the rest of the scientific method. On its own “observation and exploration” can be equally applied to playing in beach sand. If you’re not forming and testing hypotheses, analyzing data from experiment, and attempting to replicate results, you’re not engaged in science. You can’t pick one or two elements of the scientific method and call it science, anymore than you can claim that buying running shoes and standing at the start of a marathon is racing.

It's still an interesting problem of division. Let's say the end result (bees in space!) is not science. However, in the process of getting those bees to space, her lab invents a novel 3D printing method [1]. Science in service of art?

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17452759.2012.73...

"Although some scientific research is applied research into specific problems, a great deal of our understanding comes from the curiosity-driven undertaking of basic research."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

Reply on news.ycombinator.com