This document discusses the need for more interdisciplinary collaboration between fields like art and science, similar to Leonardo Da Vinci. It argues that instead of focusing on individual geniuses, we need teams and groups that can behave with collective genius. Examples are given of existing art-science collaborations like Symbiotica and the ArtsCatalyst. The document outlines some lessons learned for developing successful collaborations, including having diversity in gender, age, disciplines, and more. Finally, it suggests some of the big challenges modern "Leonardos" could work on, like redesigning science and addressing climate change through cultural transformation rather than just policies.

2. In praise of artscience hybrids and amphibians

3. What would Leonardo Da Vinci
Be doing today ?
A village of about 300 people, animals and
our shared microbiome
Roger Malina

4. Nothing
• We don’t need more geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci, especially not more men
• We need groups of people that behave with genius
• Couples:
• Victoria Vesna and Jim Gimzewski
• Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignoneau
• Helen and Newton Harrison
• Small Groups:
• Symbiotica
• V2
• ArtsCatalyst
• Larger Groups
• SACRE Paris Phd Faculty In Art and Science
• Leonardo networks
• Co-Working Hacking and Making spaces
• Temporary Autonomous Genial Zones (cf Temporary Autonomous Zones)

5. How to design teams behaving as genii and
or genies
• The emerging field of “science of team science’ is one beginning of
some useful methods
• Using design theories and practice , such as Transition Design ( Terri
Irwin) are others- not paradigm shift but phase changes
• There are no such things as best methods , but there are many good
methods in todays Artscience
• Applying theory to practice is one of the biggest challenges
• Translational ArtScience ( cf Translational Medicine)
• How to get Humanists, Artists, STEMM professionals to redesign the
sciences themselves
• And redesign the arts and humanities too

6. ArtScientists Let’s Get to Work as a Leonardo Da
Vinci would do today

7. The Personal Narratives
•Disturbed parents
• My disturbed childhood
•My perturbed career
•Physics, Phd Astrophysics (1979), space telescopes,
director of the astronomical observatory of Marseille
Provence
•Art Journal Editor, two successful Non Profit start ups
•Art Phd ( 2016) University of Valencia (Honorary)
•ArtScience Postdoc ( 2017-2020)
•Co-Founder University of Texas at Dallas ArtSciLab

8. Lessons learned for our ArtSciLab at UTDallas
• A high tolerance for strange people
• We don’t need more geniuses,
• we need teams that behave with genius
• Heterogeneous groups can come up with ideas that homogenous groups
might not
• Gender
• Age- and intergenerational collaboration
• “Ableness”..nearly no-one is normal
• Professional/Vocational discipline
• Ethnicity/Culture/ Mother Tongue
• Designing avocations that drive professional/vocational creativity
• Robert Root Bernstein: Avocations correlate with Vocational Success

9. A few example projects from the UTD ArtSciLab:
MicroLux Chant:
Ritwik Kaikini, Jeremiah Gassenchmidt,

10. Data
Stethoscope:
Re-Imagining
Chess
Art Performance
as a Scientific
Research
Method

11. Creative Disturbance and ARTECA.MIT.EDU:
Experimental Publishing and Curating Platforms
• Discussing art-science problems and ideas
• How to use the Methods of Translation Studies
• for transdisciplinary projects
• Multi ethnic projects
• Trans-media projects
• 14 national languages
• 2 regional languages
• 3 indigenous and aboriginal languages
• Intellectual Dating
• eg connecting the professional esports community in Africa with the
esports community in Dallas using the Virtual Africa Project

12. Astronomy was easy,
artscience research is difficult
•So what are Leonardos working on today ?
•Redesigning Science Itself
•Redesigning the scientific methods
•Redesigning the social embedding of science
•Cf Helga Nowotny, ex President European Research
Council
•So that science is more socially robust
• Designing the Hard Humanities
• Apply what we learn from the Humanities to
redesigning human cultures so they survive

13. And yes the New Leonardos must work on the
problems of Climate Change :
• survival will require “phase changes” of human societies
• Not just laws and decisions
• Must redesign human cultures
• No Human Culture has ever redesigned itself
• In the past when the climate changed we migrated
• There is no where to migrate to ( sorry Ellon Musk, Tourism doesn't
work)
• Don’t bother sending humans into space
• Send DNA samples of all life forms on earth into space ?
• That’s called PanSpermia: It has worked before ? We don’t know

14. Some Provocations
• David Peat: If we closed down all universities what would we put in their place
• Transdisciplinary Apprenticeships & life long continuing education deep learning
networks
• Somatic Research: neither the body or mind “exist” ---Embodied Cognition
• Cognition that is BOTH individual and collective
• All Instruments (and Beings) “hallucinate’ and see things that aren’t there
• Need teams behaving like geniuses there to develop reliable concensus
• Or Consensuses (maybe there are multiple realities, universes).
• Augmenting the human senses ( eg big eyes aka telescopes..)
• Extending the human senses ( eg X Ray medical imaging…)
• New Senses ( gravitational waves, neutrinos..)
• Create different kinds of beings with different senses ( Artificial Intelligence)
• Collaborate with ETI using METI techniques

15. Observation: Science has failed to lead to a sustainable
and peaceful human society
• In the case of astronomy what did we learn in a 100,000 years ?
• We “agreed” a reasonable overall “geometry”
• Heliocentric for the solar system
• Primary hadronic content of the solar system ( sun, planets, plasmas)
• Oops concept of a “planet’ may be misleading, we cant agree on constellations
• Big Bang and Expanding Universe ( but but but)
• That 95% of the universe doesn’t emit light of any kind: Dark matter/energy
• It is ‘unknowable’ by relying on the human senses
• even using augmented senses (big eyes, electromagnetic ears)
• Or extended senses (X rays, Infrared )
• We have to design new senses and develop “multi-messenger” astronomy
detecting gravitational waves, neutrinos etc etc
• Human beings were badly designed to understand the universe

16. So what do astronomers ask after 100,000
years ?
• Just give us more money
• The scientific method is just fine thanks
• Lets just extend augment and develop new human senses
•
•
• Hmmmm
• Maybe we need to design new beings with different kinds of
senses ? (artificial intelligence in 100 years ?)

17. We need New Leonardo ‘collective minds”
•Stavros Katsanevas: Both artists and scientists are expert
‘Noticers”
•Leonardo Da Vinci was an amazing “noticer”
•Eg What do we notice today: The Tragedy of the Internet
•Like the Tragedy of the Commons
•Maybe we need a new “Magna Carta” and Charter of the
Forest to redesign the internet to help human survival not
contribute to its downfall.. With the help of medievalists !

18. Thank you
• Welcome to a New Renaissance?
•Thank you to the medieval scholars who are helping
us make a necessary transition to sustainable human
societies
•Thank you Leonardo Da Vinci for teaching
contemporary heart surgeons to take a lead in some
of the required transformations and enlist the
peripheral ganglia and neurons