Vienna Week 4 – An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Before I set out on this dialogue, I’ll admit I was a little intimidated because my background is so different from the theme of the dialogue and from the backgrounds of everyone else on the trip. I’m an International Affairs + Economics major on a studio art and coding dialogue, with little-to-no experience in either of those disciplines. But I’ve had a long-time love for art, and was looking for a way to learn about it more formally and try my hand at creating art myself, instead of just observing it. I’ve also tried (and failed) to teach myself coding skills on and off for years now and wanted to learn it in a more formal setting to keep myself accountable and have some necessary in-person instruction and one-on-one help. Luckily, I was surrounded by people with a mix of experiences, but all with the same level of passion for what we were doing!
In our Creative Coding class, I was constantly drawing connections and differences between coding and the work that I do in my majors. Much like the languages I learn through my International Affairs degree, learning coding was like learning an entirely new language; a language with its own vocabulary, grammar, traditions, and culture. Because of the short length of the course, I was truly thrown into the deep end (albeit with a lot of wonderful help). The vocabulary, structure, and “traditions” weren’t that hard to pick up, as I had a textbook, search engines, and instructors/classmates to guide me. I actually really struggled with the more abstract concepts of manifesting and developing ideas in the way that I wanted. We we’re making a lot of “generative” art, meaning that we could code a structure for the program to follow, but include some aspect of randomness so that the end result would “surprise” us, or change over time. I realized that a lot of work I do in economics research requires me to come up with a concrete idea, or hypothesis, and work my way to either proving it or disproving it. Very rarely do I just start doing some research and just see what happens. In this way and others, I felt myself being challenged in ways I could never have expected in the most invigorating way possible.
I was also able to draw some connections between my discipline and our Color Pattern Textiles course. I learned about the strong and complex ideological and political narratives inter-woven — pun heavily intended — into pattern-making and textiles. Both the creation and siting, or installing, of an art piece can have inherent and/or explicit political meaning carried in it. I was able to consider the meaning of my piece through the lenses of what I’m passionate about in my studies on campus.
But most importantly, I discovered that we should put less emphasis on the boundaries between disciplines. A big theme of this dialogue was the idea of blurring the lines between art, science, and technology, and how they should work with each other, criticize each other, and encourage dialogue around the subjects they work with. You don’t have to label yourself as an “artist” or a “scientist” or an “economist” etc. The more we straddle these boundaries, in my opinion, the more we can converse with each other in deep, meaningful, and impactful ways. The culmination of this idea for me was in my final project for Creative Coding. I was able to use data from a research paper I did on the economics of the opioid epidemic in America to create an art piece that was both an infographic and art piece. It was important to me that I didn’t just make an infographic or graph, as that’s what we do in economics all the time. I wanted to make an art piece that had inherent aesthetic and political value, that could also be interactive in its meaning. After creating it and sharing it with my classmates, they asked if I’m going to add to it or make more pieces for other data/research I have. After some consideration, my answer is “why not?” I look forward to the spaces I can create that marry economics and art in meaningful ways!
