Can sources be defined before any discovery?

In science or in art?

What is discovered was there already but nobody knew it.

A source can only be traced after discovery (simple logic).

1 -Somebody sees some difference somewhere, looks twice,

2 -Thinks he/she saw something new, makes this public, and

3 - When the others find this interesting and didn't know it was there his/her name becomes history.

Afterwards the story of this discovery is made.

Afterwards, when tehre has been a follow up, one can speak of "sources".

Was this you question or did I get it wrong?

1) not every culture demands innovation in art, isn't it a modern western phenomenon where innovation is connected to creativity and in particular creative genius?

2) are innovations in art really that innovative? Conceptual art appears to be alterations to a theme-and at one point they all looked remarkably the same-an object with writing beneath it-autobiographical art endlessly repeated-

3) How much innovation was there in the Renaissance. Themes were often the same, focusing on the same religious narrative and often artistic invention was driven by changes in paint (i.e invention of oil paints), etc.

العالم اليوم هو عالم رقمي، وبكل تأكيد فأن العالم الرقمي يحتاج إلى أدوات وعدة فهم ومجال نقدي مختلف عن الأداء الفني التقليدي

Can sources be defined before any discovery?

In science or in art?

What is discovered was there already but nobody knew it.

A source can only be traced after discovery (simple logic).

1 -Somebody sees some difference somewhere, looks twice,

2 -Thinks he/she saw something new, makes this public, and

3 - When the others find this interesting and didn't know it was there his/her name becomes history.

Afterwards the story of this discovery is made.

Afterwards, when tehre has been a follow up, one can speak of "sources".

Was this you question or did I get it wrong?

A very intriguing question. New sources might not be so new, nor actually as unexpected, as they might initially appear. With so many aspects of academic and scientific thinking vertically aligned by specialism into almost discrete silos of thought, the most exciting new sources for concepts in the Arts and Sciences are, I feel, inter and cross disciplinary.

I’ve been working with this convergent approach to research for a couple of years now and have found great value in looking for information in the areas of Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience to apply to the Arts. Whilst these disciplines are academically very distinct, I’d argue that they are, in actuality, deeply intertwined through the workings of human perception. Aspects of the Arts such as the experience of filmic spectatorship, and the somewhat mysterious mechanisms of experiencing a genuine emotional empathy for a character we know to be fictional, make startling sense once placed within the neurological frameworks of visual perception, and social evolution. This cross disciplinary approach offers useful data in theorising resolutions to paradoxical questions like these.

I’ll be frank and admit that this approach has met with resistance from some quarters, with some colleagues simply dismissing out of hand useful, pertinent data which offers a more rounded perspective on some issues, simply because it comes from an academic silo outside their own. To the Arts, the Sciences are rooted in the factually prosaic, to the Sciences, the Arts are fleeting irrelevancies. Rather than broaden their horizons, colleagues simply ignore such vital consilience. Perhaps, it is partly intellectual inertia, perhaps an aspect of academic snobbery.

How we learn and receive data offers a useful case in point. Scientifically, everything we deal with is, in reality, an individual, and at times fallible, perception. Also, it must be admitted that we can never perceive exactly what others perceive. Therefore no perception can really be objectively corroborated. We can, however agree a perceptual consensus. Perhaps a sound approach to all cognition might be to admit that the way we perceive the world around us, and the forces at work within that perception, be acknowledged in everything we intellectually approach. Even something as apparently objective as mathematics can ultimately only be regarded through our percept, a percept which is fallible.

Humans ‘make sense’ of the world around them; this ‘sense-making’ provides a driving evolutionary advantage, yet this ‘sense-making’ is itself constructed by coordination of data from the senses relative to a dialectical understanding of external stimuli. This cause and effect, even in the the most scientific thought, builds a narrative. In this way understanding how we construct narratives, in our lives, our observations and the theories we develop from them, may offer us a better viewpoint from which to identify limits or bias in our observational analysis. In this sense, Arts concepts like narrative theory are applicable, where appropriate, in evaluating scientific data collection, if only to help us recognise that how we formulate and frame a scientific question is one of the factors which innately shapes the answers we find or even look for.

It is important to be free to speculate on topics like this. It is all to easy to ask how can new sources exist before we have even formulated questions, but, as Gioia, Corley and Hamilton* assert, sources and research methods are often selected to predicate results toward usefully expanding already established bodies of knowledge, and thereby securing recognition and vital funding, rather than facing the more intimidating challenge of gathering new and original knowledge in unpredictable and unexpected areas. Eisner** also recognised this concern, suggesting that researchers at times unwittingly allow available research tools to set the agenda for them, frequently choosing to seek only data that they knew they had the ability to find.

Working across disciplinary areas and mixing approaches from the Sciences and the Arts, to my mind, offers a huge range of exciting potential. I’ll willingly admit that some of this promise will probably deal with areas of thought and human experience which won’t easily translate into the limited evidences we use to measure our intellectual usefulness within or outside academic institutions. Wittgenstein’s seventh proposition seems to suggest the possibility that some human experiences cannot be represented in that way without denying their reality or value: ‘That whereof one cannot speak, one thereof must be silent.’

*Gioia, Corley and Hamilton in ‘Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research: Notes on the Gioia Methodology,’ in Organisational Research Methods, Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013.

**Eisner, ‘The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data Representation,’ in Educational Researcher, Volume 26, Issue 6, 1997.

Re writing your statement-

How to define the sources of new concepts in art and science,

As per my experience ,we do not "define" sources , for convenience in academic communication we can some time classify sources as per main domain of the study.

A new concept comes when many sources contribute to the wisdom and extent of contribution of these sources can not be quantified.

The new concept may be source of next studies.

Much art now is democratically driven. There are numerous poetry sites where anyone and at times everyone can make a contribution. Painting etc, because of cost and time factors, is less democratic except in its products. To an extent, but only to an an extent, functionalism plays a huge part.

The sources of a new concept are complex, multiple. For example, the concept of drive in Freud's work: Freud remembers Greek mythology, Plato's stories, the myth of androgyny. In a concept creation, imagination, memory of ancient narratives participate in inventiveness ... Freud also remembers Nietzsche... To create a concept is a psychic process that also calls for audacity: to take a step towards what has not been formulated in this way ... So there is an entanglement between memories, memory, imagination and audacity...

As I see, there are several ways for creating new concepts: two examples of them are the heuristic processes, and refreshing the old concepts with constrains as the french group Oulipo has done.

In the answer I put forward yesterday to the question 'do we need a definition of art' I mentioned the philosopher Vico. Vico lived at approximately the same time as Descarte, the founder of the scientific method and was opposed to this method. I suspect that the common ground between artistic practices and and the scientific method is happenstance or fortuitous finding. This is documented in the sciences but not in artistic practices. I have begun to do this.

In answer to the comment by Stanley Wilkin above concerning the democratic in artistic practices like painting in the long experience or Erfahrung of practices, we may gain a sense of autonomous agency that in turn makes us aware of the ethical complexity of political life without necessarily addressing it directly. I have seen this happen in art education. Painting is clearly a very resilient practice. It has not 'died' as many thought it would in the face of technological change. Wilkin's comment smacks of the kind of re-education that is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes where if what you are doing does not fit 'the blueprint of the future' you are 're-educated'. I recall that Francis Bacon when asked about his political views said he was an 'old whig', that he veered more to the liberal right than the left because the right left him alone. We should leave artists alone. Their practices, which is Wilkin's point, should remain autonomous and free form this kind of categorization unless, like Leni Reiffenstall the photographer, their art actively served a regime that promoted the active expression of hate and condoned murder. But otherwise leave the painter alone in his studio. In the time it takes for a painter to acquire this very difficult practice and for the time a painting takes to achieve closure there is absolutely nothing undemocratic, quite the contrary.

I find this question very hard to answer. First thing that come to my mind is Paul Feyerabend's book Anything Goes, where the author claims that in the proces of scientific investigation one is allowed to use almost anything that can have pozitive effect on its outcome. If this principle is applied, than the list of (new) sources of concepts could be endless. Another dilemma is whether all sources can be identify. Research is a very complex process, which also include hidden elements, like for instance emotions.

Here's the definition you asked: A = w (p . i)

Art = Artist (T) x Artwork (W)

Artist (T) = Artwork (W) x Art-world (D)

Art-world (D) = Art-Public (p) x Art-Institution (i)

Art = Artwork x (Art-public x Art-Institution)

Art = Artwork (W) ( Art-Public (p) . Art-Institution (i))

A = A

A = T.W

T = W.D

D = p.i

A = w (p . i)

Here's your scientific definition (it's quite the same): A = w (p . i)

science = scientist (T) x discovery (W)

Scientist (T) = Discovery (W) x science World (D)

Science World (D) = Network (p) x institution (i)

Science = Discovery . (network . institution)

Science = Discovery (W) .( Network(p) . Institution (i))

A = A

A = T.W

T = W.D

D = p.i

A = w (p . i)

A = w (p . i)

A = w (p . i)

For example

a discovery of or an artwork is made, but has no succes :

A = 1 x 0 = 0

a lot of public, but no institutional response (Banksi's?)

A = 1 (1000.000 x 0) = 0

but when a little institutional succes occurs:

A = 1 (1000.000 x 2) = 2.000.000

(ok, this is my little private joke, so don't take it seriously, but then again, I am not as crazy as I might seem - there is much more in it than visible on first sight, ...)

I find the answer of Peter Sinaplus interesting. While I do not believe the source for new concepts is beyond our consciousness but exists in the form of our relation to objects in the material world, the way such a source is developed is unpredictable and is often a question of the non-identiy of the object with its concept . Discovery of the new is a process of immediacy and mediation in relation to objects that exist in the material world. At the risk of repeating myself, the quality of the work or the new concept will hinge on how ready we are to allow ourselves to find what we need in the object of the work of a predecessor/s (see Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence). Mediocrity stems from a rejection of influence and the misguided belief that such a rejection will give us access to some hidden inner source of creativity rather than a relation of inter-determinacy between subject and object in the material world. For Adorno, in his Negative Dialectic, to discover the source of new concepts or new artefacts in any field we must look at what the subject does in terms of the structure of mediation.The discovery of something , especially if we use this word in terms of art, is not a question of something that was already there. In the words of Blanchot 'it never was already there, it is always to be rediscovered or reinvented'. Thus it is, as Blanchot states, ' not the work but its pursuit, the movement which leads to it, the approach that makes the work possible' that stirs the artist. In other words if we want to answer this question we must look at the distinctive activity performed by the agent whether scientist or artist. This in itself makes a comparison between art and science difficult because the scientist has her method, and validation through repeatability while the artist has her practices.

But a more serious objection to the entire tenor of this question is the use of the notion of 'concept'. Adorno's non-identical moment in the immediacy of our encounter with an object is one where our relation to the object exceeds conventional conceptualisation.This if anything is the source of the new.

If a thing is NEW, nobody knows what to think about it

When a thing is new, one has to have a thought about it in the first place. More than one thought is than always welcomed. :-)

The answer of Peter Sinapius is of the greatest interest and especially his characterisation of 'the emergence of the unforeseen third as arising from an encounter'. There is to my mind no better example of this encounter than the way Rodin absorbed, along with the expressionist artists of his time , the medical interest in hysteria and its somatic expression as depicted in the photographic records compiled by Charcot and the codification of these convulsions in the drawings of Richer (see Gomez Phd thesis and Werkner 1994 in Expressionismus in Österrreich pp.138-148). This interest and the way it was placed in a relation of adjacency to works of visual art literature, theatre and dance found their echo in Nietzsche's writings on, what Blanchot has called 'the mad-god' Dionysus, that was widely read at the time.Thus, we have the encounter between medicine and the arts but also philology and philosophy. Further to this encounter Freud's psychoanalysis has its beginnings in his study of hysteria when he departed from a diagnosis based on looking at the patients convulsions and began listening to them that generated his concepts of repression, repetition and deferral.But there is another encounter that is of the greatest import in the form of Aby Warburg's 'pathos formula' and present day somatic expressions that have their origins in ancient works of art. Much of the emphasis since the 1900's on art as the expression of emotions and the self has its beginnings in these developments. This research theme will form part of the book I am at present writing and later a separate publication.

The new is that what cannot be undestood within the framework of known understanding (network of references, language, continuity, history, experience...) .

so:

Change the framework an you change your understanding.

or:

every framework grows by trying to understand what it does not. (Piaget)

I would add to Peter's answer learn to suspend all expectations and when you enter your studio or other place where you work creatively begin by doing very mundane tasks then very slowly go over to the work in hand.

follow

of the "new" in art.

A discovery is not made in the studio but by the public.

What is not shown does not exist

What has never been shown has never existed -what rests of all the thoughts thought but never spoken?

I agree with Dr. @Willy LJ Van Buggenhout

Although I respect and appreciate Dr. Van Buggenhout's position I am afraid I disagree. Nobody saw the completed version of Rodin's 'Gates of Hell'. He worked on it for almost thirty years and at his death in 1917 it was incomplete. After his death the pieces lay around in his studio but there is no evidence as to how he would have arranged them. A decision was in fact made by a government official as to the order and later seven casts were made, one of which I have seen in the Zurich museum of art, but was I looking at the way Rodin would have envisaged it? No. We will never know if this was the way Rodin intended it to be seen.

I have another, far more contentious point to make in this discussion, where , following Agamben on Aby Warburg, 'Warburg, would never have considered the essence of an artist's personality as the deepest content of an image'. This is a position I entirely endorse and one that if explored in greater depth would free us from the worn- out narcissistic notion of art as self-expression. A freedom that does not imply a move into the dubious motivation of an impossible return to some kind of primary vision of abstract art, the contrivances of surrealism, the mathematics of minimalism or the pretentious linguistic contraptions of the conceptual but would reinforce the momentum of the allegorical turn in art (for this see Owens brilliant essay on the allegorical in art). An allegorical turn in which the past is redeemed to create a new constellation with the present rather like Walter Benjamin's 'dialectical image'. My own artistic work has its inspiration in Warburg's notion of the 'Mnemosyne' or cultural memory and is most definitely not an expression of self but a withdrawal of the art work from the self and its replacement with historical/cultural memory with its roots in ancient Greece, Judaism, Heidegger's 'Das Gestell' of technology and Warburg's 'schizophrenia of western civilisation' (see Derek Pigrum home page).

You have a foot in both camps; because while science seeks explanations - art on the otherhand seeks to innovate ever new perspectives.

I completely see what Willy LJ Van Buggenhout is stating.

What is new might have been discovered by not shared.

What is new might just be be the same thing seen from a different point of view.

I think it depends where we stand.

Art and science can be the two sides of the same coin. One needs the other to fully illustrate the other.

Art would never have evolved without science and science needs art to demonstrate its findings.

How to define the sources of new concepts in art and science? When something has stepped outside the boundary and someone has noticed it.

let's take Lacan - a psychoanalist

For Jacques Lacan the "new" is a stain.

Something that has not found its way into the symbolic order.

It is an arstist's job is to get a choosen "stain" into the chain of accepted significations.

If he succeeds he will be famous.

And the "stain" he signed will be called "a work of art"

This "stain" is than not "a" stain anymore - it has become a sign within a laguage.

That was the history of modern painting (1850-1960) for instance - Jackson Pollcok dripped stains on a canvas in a way that became accepted as art untill this day.

Now all possible stains on a canvas have their history, - and therefore theri signification and their place in the symbolic order of art.

'Contemporariness inscribes itself in the present by marking it above all as archaic. Only he who perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary'

Giorgio Agamben 2009 What is an Apparatus?

Standford Univ. Press: California. P.50

The person that stands out above all others as contemporary, both in his own time and in ours is Aby Warburg. There are a mere handful of artists including Anselm Kiefer, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti and a few others are contemporary as defined by the above quote.

But there is something "biblical" about the New

- something defended, prohibited by a universal law.

The New somewhat resembles the confusion of tongues in Babel.

Every time an artist tries to introduce a "new" sign in a language, he encounters this resistance.

As if the flaming sword of the cherubim is withdrawing him.

That lasts until an art historian or critic formulates a closing interpretation, and in doing so, finalizes the artwork by turning it into culture.