Event 1

Gerald Bast, the President of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, delivered the keynote address at the symposium on “Arts based Research in times of Social and Climate Change” on campus on April 4^th.

Me with Keynote Speaker Gerald Bast on April 4th at the Symposium.

Bast’s presentation effectively proposed one of the main points of DESMA9 thus far, which is that science and art ought to be infused for the betterment of the world. Bast constantly quoted figures from a variety of disciplines such as performing arts, political science, and even sociology while broadly discussing global effects of technology, climate change, and urbanization. Grabbing wisdom from various disciplines perfectly exemplified Bast’s main point – that the worlds of art and science must be one.

Bast discusses challenging times in the world and the need for interconnectivity between art and science.

He discussed a contrast from Renaissance art where paintings reflected political and economy landscapes of society to post-Renaissance times where arts and science were in distinct spheres. More and more scientific knowledge is being produced, including research published every 20 seconds! 

Bast then got to his main point when he urged people to find the interconnections between the vast scientific knowledge and arts. I thought it was pretty cool that his university pushes for cutting-edge strategies to infuse science and art with interconnections and overlaps, so he’s actually putting his words into practice. He believes these connections can be achieved through 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, and 3) creativity.

We must find the intersections of Art and Science.

I found his need for holistic ways of thinking – in that science alone isn’t a solution – to be extremely valuable. Moreover, I really valued his proposal that arts can help build universal human identities in a world of Artificial Intelligence and Global Warming.

He quotes Fukuyama, a political scientist, about how one’s dignity and identity are scientifically split into various categories like race, religion, ethnicity but we need creativity in the arts to help us  form more complete, rounded human identities. Just like science and art shouldn’t exclude the other, humans cant be limited to a single role or identity.

I think this speech was a great introduction to the symposium and I would recommend attending it. Having this baseline in the world of art and science will be very helpful in understanding the greater importance of their interconnections both for the midterm project in this course and the progression of planet Earth.