| dc.description.abstract | The speaker’s 1999 report Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation,
observed a rising density of interconnections between the worlds of art, technology and science. Designating the site
of this hybrid activity as the studiolaboratory, the report sampled leading institutions active at the time through a
typology of innovation in information and communication technologies – incremental, radical, systemic and
paradigmatic. This talk updates the analysis, introducing a more complex approach for thinking about the
paradigmatic level. In addition to research inside the dominant technoeconomic paradigm at a given time, three
other modes are introduced: pre, anti, and postparadigmatic research/creation. Two are of particular interest to the
theme of MAH ReCreate 2015: the “antiparadigmatic”, or agonistic mode, activity that is both embedded within the
conditions of possibility defined synchronically in a given technoeconomic paradigm, yet deeply critical of the
assumptions underlying that paradigm; and the “preparadigmatic” mode, which anticipates and therefore
asynchronically engages with emerging fields beyond the ICT paradigm. The talk concludes with a view of the
present role of the studiolab in each of the four temporal alignments, emphasizing the particular importance of policy
intervention at the preparadigmatic level – the level of greatest uncertainty, and arguably, the greatest potential for
widescale social impact. | |
