As part of the European Commission’s STARTS initiative, the STARTS Prize and the two 20,000 Euro prizes provide prestigious awards for innovative projects at the interface of art, technology and science that have the potential to contribute to economic and social innovation. The competition is organized by Bozar, Waag and Ars Electronica. Nadav Hochman takes the view of Silicon Valley to Europe – he is one of the jurors who will decide in the coming weeks who will receive one of the two STARTS Prize trophies this year. Submit now: https://starts-prize.aec.at!
You are co-founder of The Tech + Arts Initiative and have already built bridges between the worlds of art and design, industry and research. Why is the connection of these fields so important – as with STARTS?
Nadav Hochman: Art advocates often argue that the arts and sciences are two sides of the same coin, usually as a means to defend the value of artistic practices in larger professional milieus. But the arts are not and cannot be the same as other forms of creative scientific research or creative technological entrepreneurship as they serve a different purpose. Meaningful contemporary artistic reflections must act as crucial mitigators between discrete categories such as the arts, design, industry, and research while providing a cord that connects us to our deepest values and protects them.
Europe likes to look at Silicon Valley when it comes to how cooperation between art, research and industry can work. Give us a few examples from Silicon Valley and why they have become so successful!
Nadav Hochman: The connection between the tech industry and the arts in Silicon Valley has proved to be the most successful where artists have been included in the frontline of technological development and acted as active, powerful participants in the creation process of new human experiences. As opposed to just providing artists with existing tech that is already in the market, Silicon Valley offers artists opportunities to work with companies that are still in the process of developing new hardware. In this way, Silicon Valley companies not only provide artists with a specific medium to reflect upon but also provide them with the opportunity to reimagine and recreate it at the same time or even before it’s presented to the public. Some wonderful initiatives that try to follow this logic can be found in initiatives run by major companies such as Autodesk, Adobe, Facebook, and in cultural incubators such as Gray Area or Dart17, to name a few.
Nadav Hochman at his lecture during the 2018 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Credit: Gregor Tatschl
In your career, you’ve spoken to a lot of people from science, technology, and arts – what do you think are their common goals?
Nadav Hochman: I think that the answer to this question has always been to achieve control over and a sense of agency in our world. The most typical example for that are the Greek words “poiesis” or “techne”, that describe the process of creation and bringing something to being that didn’t exist before. Aesthetic investigations or capitalist problem-solving practices provide different answers to inherently similar human positions.
We are creating new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, which offers us new opportunities, but at the same time, it has the power to change us as a society. What do we need to look out for so that this doesn’t get out of hand?
Nadav Hochman: One of society’s great recent challenges is how our use of new technologies are causing increased detachment and disconnectedness from ourselves and one another. I think that media arts operate both as critical explorers of the menacing effects of technology as well as its humanizing potential. By exploring new technological tools from differing perceptions and enabling people to not only get to know and understand technological phenomena with their minds but to also feel it emotionally and viscerally, media arts encourage us to cherish intuition, uncertainty, and creativity.
“Media arts create a point of view through which we can look at contemporary culture from a multitude of differing perspectives helping bring us closer to ourselves and others around us through contemplation and discussion.”
Do you have a tip for the entrants to the 2019 STARTS Prize?
Nadav Hochman: Given the increasing dominance of technology over the contours and rhythms of our lives, it’s more important than ever that works at the intersection of art, science, and technology endeavor to critically address our modern condition without forgoing accessibility in its myriad forms.
Nadav Hochman is co-founding director of The Tech + Arts Initiative at The Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley (CA, USA), facilitating creative collaborations between global artists, designers, industry partners, and research institutions. Prior to joining The Tech, Hochman led acclaimed projects in the tech industry, academia, and the art world. His work has been exhibited in MoMA (NYC), Google Zeitgeist, and SXSW and featured in media outlets such as Popular Science, the Atlantic, Wired, and the Guardian. Hochman holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732019. This publication (communication) reflects the views only of the author, and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therei