Anatomy of an NSF Proposal Unable To Be Funded

Here’s another rejected proposal. It was a long shot, even as I wrote it last summer. (The summary of the proposal is available here.)

In quick words, improvising: It is a proposal to study collaboration amongst scientists, engineers, and artists through the lens of science and technology studies. I want to understand the particular ways in which art/emerging-technologists work within the DIY sensibility, along with collaborations with discliplinary engineers/scientists to create a differentiated ecosystem of research & development practices. Like..what does it all mean when engineers and artists get in the room and work together? It can’t all be just about aesthetics, can it? Isn’t there something about the nature of those collaborations that has the potential to produce some other kind of design practice that reaches beyond what other formal R&D practices are able to produce? Like, mixing artistic sensibilities with engineering sensibilities seems like it would be a potent way to create richer designed experiences, or fashion designs that create an imaginary for more habitable worlds, or other things that go beyond the narrow tenents of traditional R&D? No? Am I wrong? I think I’m on-point here, but I doubt I was able to get the point across in the short time I took to write the grant proposal. Oh well. There’s next year, too.

I did get one “Very Good” and a “Good/Fair”, but two “Poors” (I’m being optimistic in hoping that there is no “Very Poor”), and someone who said I was going on a fishing expedition around the world. I’ll skip any substantive editorial or direct response to the review comments except to mention a couple of my favorites:

Reviewer 1: What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?
NA (not applicable)

bleechhh..

Reviewer 2: What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

The relentless administrative demand for “inter-disciplinary” or synergistic work in academic settings over the last decade is badly in need of historicization. Crossovers between technical and humanistic disciplines have, intermittently since the 1960s, represented to many knowledge-making institutions (universities, museums, funding agencies) the best hope for innovation and productivity. This project is one of very few I have seen that asks questions about the cultural origins and meanings of that demand, and its central case (art-and-technology collaborations of the 1960s, and subsequently) seems well suited to answering those questions. However, support for interdisciplinarity in America other developed nations has been, as noted above, intermittent and has been vigorously fought by scientists and humanists alike. It is not clear to me that this study, as presented here, has the cultural grounding necessary to track this complicated story or to draw general lessons about disciplinary behaviors. This study may need a much broader examination of the customary division between high-culture and science/engineering activity in which to ground its study of how different cultural practices “‘think’ ‘make’ and ‘do'” (4) to achieve the interesting and important findings it seeks.

That is a very, very helpful remark. It will be played out in the next iteration of this, for certain!

Reviewer 5: Summary Statement

I do not recommend supporting this proposal. It is filled with jargon and vague references to knowledge production…As it stands, he will be going on a fishing expedition that takes him around the world.

Harrumph..fishing, indeed.

Full reviews

PROPOSAL NO.: 0551776
INSTITUTION: U of Southern California
NSF PROGRAM: SOC STUDIES OF SCI, ENG & TECH
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Bleecker, Julian
TITLE: A Study of Inter- and Transdisciplinary Collaborations Amongst Scientists, Engineers and Artists
RATING: Poor

REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?

This proposal requests support for a study of collaboration among scientists, engineers, and artists. The proposal puts forth numerous questions that might be asked in such a study and suggests a number of companies that might be visited and individuals that might be interviewed. The proposal also invokes STS methodology and cites some of the literature of that discipline. However, I do not find a systematic or coherent set of well-developed questions, nor do I see a coherent research plan that would suggest that a coherent well-focused book would result. The proposal on the one hand mentions numerous individuals and possible focuses of attention; on the other hand it is overly general. It does not contain a developed theoretical methodology or a well-worked out research plan. Nor is it at all clear what the resulting product from the research would look like. As a result, I would not recommend that this project be funded.

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

Summary Statement

This is a request for support of a research project that studies the collaborations among scientists, engineers, and artists. However, the reviewer did not find the research plan and theoretical approach well enough developed to merit funding.

REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?

This proposal initially suggests an extremely rich approach to questions about differences and commonalities among seemingly disparate cultural fields: science and engineering on one hand, art on the other. Its main subject is Billy Kluver’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a Bell-sponsored project inaugurated in the 1960s that resulted in a series of collaborations between high-tech experts and artists of many media. It also plans to examine subsequent collaborations based on that model. The study proposes to consider art and technology as symmetrically as possible: In both spheres it says it will identify habits of institution formation, work practices, valuations of knowledge, and other categories of productive and evaluative work. The author promises to compare “measures and meanings of innovation” in single- and multi-disciplinary enterprises (5). In so doing, he would help us understand what it meant in the 1960s (and means today) to posit not just a commensurability between scientific and aesthetic creativity, but also a societal benefit to be derived from collaborations between the two spheres. I am somewhat concerned about specific questions and aspects of the project’s research design, and have some doubts that it can fulfill its goals as now planned. Some of the inconsistencies and vagueness in the proposal may arise from the fact that the author “has not yet determined what cases to use” (4). The lack of concrete detail is worrisome (Who did what work, where, and when, for the E.A.T. projects? What kinds of decisions about artistic or technological matters or patronage were made, and which matter to the author’s thesis, and why?). I am also concerned about a lack of cultural context, which might leave the important and incisive questions the author poses with only partial or misleading answers. First, what exactly is the “enduring legacy” of Kluver’s work? (5) Although the author cites “easily thousands” of collaborations between science, engineering and art since E.A.T.’s day, in fact technology-based art remained deeply stigmatized in conventional art worlds for at least 15 or 20 years after E.A.T.’s founding. While some technology-based art has certainly found support since the late 1980s, traditional mediums retain their dominance even today in many venerable scholarly settings and at the highest art-market levels. If some critical venues, and some corporate supporters, have established significant advocacy for art-and-technology collaborations, their departure from other historically prestigious avenues needs to be thoroughly problematized. E.A.T. represented a minute portion of American and European high-culture activity in the 1960s; technology-based art still competes today with a much larger and more popular array of conventional kinds of art-making. If E.A.T. offered a template for either corporate R&D or art-world innovation (7), it was not a pervasive model. It is absolutely worth studying, but perhaps as an exception to rather than a norm of corporate or aesthetic disciplinary behavior. In art and scientific spheres, many voices decried the contamination of one practice with the goals or techniques (or practitioners) of the other. Some history and philosophy of technology from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s sought a humanist infusion through art or literature; but many engineers worried (and still do) that humanities requirements were diluting the value of college engineering degrees. Similarly, many art critics were utterly dismissive of technology-based art through the 1980s, until post-modernist critiques gains a considerable foothold in the mainstream art world. In the 1960s that firewall between art and science was challenged, but not by everyone and it was certainly not dismantled, as a glimpse at science and art curricula (and funding or criticism) today instantly testifies. Some of these matters are explored in Matthew Wisniewski’s very detailed recent dissertation (Princeton, 2005), which considers E.A.T. in the larger context of cultural valuations of aesthetic and technical innovation. These tensions are not addressed in this proposal, which nonetheless claims to analyze a representative instance of science and art activity.

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

Summary Statement

While the E.A.T. collaborations and their offshoots represent an ambitious and interesting intellectual undertaking, and a moment in which American corporate culture reconsidered its role in the production and consumption of high-culture products, this proposal remains somewhat unclear about how it will analyze its subject. Its rating is based on both its intellectual merit and impact.

REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?

the interface of art science and technology is a wonderful study and I am glad PI wants to learn about it but one can hardly be expected to fund a research project of 14 months that contains the following statement
My intention is not to provide any sort of definitive ‘catalog’ of such collaborations, but to use particular instances as cases to work through the pertinent questions about how different practices ‘think’ ‘make’ and ‘do’, what different practices consider their objectives and goals, and how different disciplines practice their craft, work toward their objectives, frame their goals while attempting to work together in inter- and transdisciplinary groups. (I have not yet determined precisely what cases to use, and will base my choices primarily on how well they draw forth the intellectual goals of this study, and on the availability of primary sources for interview and availability of project archives.)
So he doesn’t know what he’s producing, what questions he asking and whom or what he plans to investigate. That’s OK at some point in a research design but not at the point where one asks for the money to do it.

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

Can’t be scoped without specification of the research plan

Summary Statement

PI wants to investigate instances of art, science and technology collaboration. Project looks potentially valuable and exciting, but is as yet not formulated or at the stage where one might fund it. There is here an interesting clash between the new â€“loose open style of these endeavors, and the demands of traditional peer review to know what you are doing. Both art and science depend on open and creative rumination, but these funds (NSF) are under this funding scheme directed too accomplishing the goals of projects already formulated

REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?

The project proposed here would contribute a much-needed critical examination of initiatives in â€˜science/art’ collaboration. In researching these initiatives the PI promises attention to ‘the contingency of knowledge production and the social-historical character of art, science, and engineering practices,’ and to the degree that the project explores these issues with some degree of specificity it will be an exciting contribution to STS. The orientation to the interests and agendas that inform these initiatives, and the politics regarding criteria of success, is welcome as well given the predominately celebratory accounts that are available. I appreciate also the re-focussing of attention from the influence of science and engineering in the (new media) arts, to the question of whether and in what ways the traffic flows in the other direction. And I think the use of the E.A.T. â€˜experiment’ as a way in to these questions seems extremely promising.

The PI is in many ways ideally positioned to carry out the research. He has a track record of innovative cultural research in the area of computationally-based technologies (e.g. his studies of Sim City), expertise in relevant areas of technical practice, knowledge of relevant sites and networks, and an institutional affiliation directly relevant to the focus of the research.

For these reasons I strongly support this project. With that said I also have some reservations about the proposal as currently written:

1. The proposal tends toward generality and repetition, rather than digging into the questions sufficiently to give us more of a sense for the issues and the direction of the argument. As just one example, on p. 3 there’s a reference to ‘work practices typical of the modern sciences and engineering.” This category is a large one; it would be good to clarify more specifically what work practices the proposal will address. I suspect that this would be a stronger proposal if some of the initial survey work had been done.

2. While the terms ‘inter- and transdisciplinary’ may well be established parlance, given their centrality to the project I would have liked to see them discussed, particularly in terms of similarities and differences in their implications. While there is mention of a critical consideration of how the categories scientist/engineer/artist are mobilized in these discourses, at other times the disciplines seem taken as given, rather than as themselves enacted through the discourses of disciplinarity. It’s crucial to get at the ways in which these collaborations restage as well as trouble disciplinary boundaries. In this regard I miss as well an orientation to the actual material practices through which practitioners acquire hybrid skills and sensibilities through their work together. What are the conditions of possibility for, and implications of, that work?

3. It would be good to clarify the sense of â€˜archaeology’ being cited p. 4. And how, more specifically, will the work of Foucault and Haraway be a resource?

4. The reference on p. 2 to â€˜third world’ scientists and engineers seems a bit gratuitous. How is this taken further in the proposal?

5. To the list of laboratory studies on p. 5 it would be good to add Michael Lynch’s â€˜Art and Artefact in Laboratory Science,’ as well as recent discussions within both art history and STS on relations of art and science.

6. The workplan emphasizes interviews with directors, â€˜thought leaders’, etc. I would have liked to see a greater emphasis on engagement with practitioners as well. This is tied to the question of the relation between rhetorics of inter- and transdisciplinarity and material practices raised in (2) above.

7. I wonder how the â€˜People and Practices’ lab at Intel incorporates the arts?

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

A book that would trace the history of science-art collaborations and provide a critical contextualization of them would be timely and valuable, given the currency of these initiatives and others aimed at reworking disciplinary boundaries in other fields. The PI is also well positioned to bring the results of this research back into relevant pedagogies. The planned use of a blog as a research tool could also yield methodological as well as substantive insights.

Summary Statement

An extremely promising project by a PI well-qualified to conduct the research, albeit that the proposal would be strengthened by greater specificity.

REVIEW:
What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?

The project proposes an interesting a potentially important topic: the study of the value and meaning of collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers from a variety of perspectives and goals from the perspective of social studies of science. As outlined in the proposal, however, the project is vaguely described and loosely planned so as to raise the question of whether there will be any concrete outcome or any answers to what he describes as “likely” or “suspects” may be the case.

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity?

The applicant suggests that the project will benefit community understanding, engineering and scientific education, etc., but it is difficult to see how, in that no mechanics for dissemination via specific contacts are provided.

Summary Statement

I do not recommend supporting this proposal. It is filled with jargon and vague references to knowledge production. There is only one case study [EAT] mentioned, while the possibiiity of finiding others to round out a book-length study is only alluded to. There needs to be evidence that the applicant has done some homework for the project by providing a list of case studies, a list of individuals to be interviewed, a bibliogrpahy that includes citations to work in the EAT archive at the Getty, to the large body of work by artists, art critics, theorists on the art-technology nexus. As it stands, he will be going on a fishing expedition that takes him around the world.