Professsor Mirian Estela Nogueira Tavares co-ordinator of Centro de Investigação em Artes e Comunicação (CIAC), Universidade do Algarve, Portugal, explains the importance of dialogue between science and the Arts.

A research centre that chooses to work with research in the Arts, and its confluence with communication and technologies, always takes great risks because it deals with both exact sciences and the often imprecise field of humanities. Despite the transformations that occurred in the 20th Century, in the 21st Century we continue to work with clearly inadequate positivist criteria, even for the so-called ‘hard’ sciences. It is necessary to start working with a different paradigm that would allow for a real dialogue between the Arts and science, especially because the boundaries between these two fields have long since crumbled. If the scientific/positivist criteria were never adequate for understanding the Arts, today they are not even appropriate for understanding science itself, since science is looking for new paths and, interestingly, these paths are bringing science closer to the humanities.

Ilya Prigogine, emeritus chemist, worked with the Complexity Theory in an attempt to find satisfactory answers to a number of issues raised by his studies on thermodynamics. Like many other scientists, he recognised that scientific principles alone would not be sufficient to account for an ever-expanding universe where Cartesian certainties are replaced by doubts, and where organisation is replaced by understanding and accepting chaos. Complex thinking is, above all, a dialogical thinking that allows for a transdisciplinary approach between such seemingly diverse fields as philosophy and science.

The neo-positivist belief in the unity of science has long since lost its place. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to continue to imprison an entire area of research within a scientific grammar. Not every scientific research produces knowledge output, but every investigation should produce some output of knowledge as long as the research is based on rigour – a premise that is not exclusive of sciences – in the genuine need to build a fruitful and ongoing dialogue that does not exclude differences, errors and above all tries, wisely, to negotiate with rather than organise chaos.

Presentation

Based at the University of the Algarve, CIAC is not restricted to the space it occupies within the two original institutions, but integrates researchers and collaborators from other national universities and worldwide institutions, as well as PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

CIAC has always maintained an interdisciplinary character, developing research in the field of art studies (the Arts, cinema, theatre), communication and, more recently, in the production of digital platforms and digital artefacts.

The work currently undertaken by CIAC is particularly dedicated to the exploitation of new technologies in order to provide the results of relevant research in the areas of communication and the Arts in a fast and accessible way. A clear example of this need for knowledge sharing is the www.romanceiro.pt platform, which promotes one of the centre’s research work.

It is also worth mentioning that CIAC develops postgraduate training at the second and third cycle and postdoctoral level programmes.

Research lines

The research activities developed within CIAC are organised around three main lines:

• Archives and memory: This includes the production of digital platforms that are interconnected with the base platform of the centre, hosting the outcome of the projects developed in different lines of research in order to promote the circulation and dissemination of contents of pre-existing material archives on the one hand, and to create new archives from scratch using new media technologies on the other;
• Creating digital artefacts: This line aims to produce digital artefacts that promote an interconnection between arts and technology; and
• Literacies: Fundamental or applied research on the mechanisms involved in the appropriation of principles, techniques/methods, codes/conventions, specific of arts or media, in different contexts.

The research projects adjacent to these lines of research are thus an important part of a process that aims to create the required conditions for challenging both the Arts and communication in an increasingly critical and reflexive mode.

Professsor Mirian Estela Nogueira Tavares
CIAC
University of Algarve
+351 289 800908
mtavares@ualg.pt
http://ciac.pt/en

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