View source for Social Fields



=Description=

Armin Medosch:

"The ways in which we use the term Fields today owes everything to James Clerk Maxwell’s paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (Maxwell 1865). The field as an agricultural entity had wielded its very strong social, organisational power for thousands of years; and the field as a metaphor, a sign or a signpost of divisions, has long been the driving force of scientific inquiries. With Maxwell, the field became thought as something that makes it possible that one body exerts power over another one without any visible connections. We will interrogate the cultural history of fields as a metaphor in science and scientific theory, as well as the way it resonated (sic!) in the arts and humanities."


=Typology=


==Social Fields==

Armin Medosch:

"Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of culture as a relational field (Bourdieu & Johnson 1993) is a welcome stimulus for this work. Our initial search and research has taken us to the curator and theorist Jack Burnham who proposed the notion of relational fields in art in the landmark publication Beyond Modern Sculpture (Burnham 1968). Like Burnham, Umberto Eco’s notion of the Opera Aperta (Open Work) (1962/1989), understood as creating a ‘field of possibilities,’ was based on a cultural interpretation of quantum physics (Eco 1989). Long before Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002), relational field theories about art were flourishing. The epistemological implications of quantum theory left their marks on the art of the 20th century in ways that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged (cf. Bachelard 1984; Barad 2007).


==Gestalt Fields==

In the early 20th century, Gestalt psychology developed a field theory of visual perception (cf. Koffka 1935; Köhler 1947). Whereas some of the assumptions of early Gestalt psychology were built on poor understandings of the physiology of the brain (Piaget 1971, p.55), the structural form of those theories has shown to be very productive in the arts and social sciences. Artists have explored the ‘phenomenological vectors’ that create force fields between works and viewers (Weibel 2007). Participatory and interactive work by artists such as Gianni Colombo or Rafael Jesus-Soto drew on Gestalt principles while proposing a role for artists as agents of change (Brett 2000). Exactly because that type of inquiry has been discontinued, we will re-engage with Gestalt ideas about structure, form and perception and examine to what extent they are supported by current neuroscience.

Kurt Lewin combined influences of Gestalt psychology and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic fields to create psychological and social field theory (Lewin 1951). His ideas, together with those of Jacob Levy Moreno, became influential for social network analysis (Scott & Carrington 2011), which also underpins the new field of network science (cf. Barabási 2002). Social network analysis has become a very controversial field because of the practices of state and private actors who collect and data-mine large sets of data on citizens. It is thus a good example of how in the proposed project hard science inevitably becomes linked with social fields."
(http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1459)


[[Category:Relational]]

[[Category:P2P Theory]]

[[Category:Art]]