BH : Some critics assert that the whole debate about visual culture is over, which is ironic now given that in most contemporary colleges visual-culture courses have come to dominate the curriculum. Digital technology is ones and zeros, it's also the very intricate chemistry of the chip which is not taught in colleges of technology. And that's become a very elitist discourse - who actually understands, not programming software but the manufacturing software?

MW : But I'm interested too in the idea that   the discussion about art and science   is re-situated by digitisation. I think that it has to do with claims on cognitive value. Art might   not be understood primarily as an aesthetic domain but as an area of particular kinds of cognitive activities, the cognitive value of which is questionable - that they don't have great credibility. And what is happening with digitisation is that the cognitive claims of science are becoming questionable. Say, for example, a PhD submission in genetics or biology may include photographs of what was viewed through the microscope. You then import these images into the computer and clean them up for the submission. In this way, you end up with a construct ( that's not to say that the photograph was not always a construct),   but in this case, you have something which is more decisively constructed, that the intentionality of constructing it is more emphatic. And that's something that seriously worries the scientific community who work with visual evidence   since digital processes make it possible to fabricate.

BH : You think that it highlights this issue of the visual?

MW : I think digitisation introduces a further degree of uncertainty, ambiguity   and distrust and certain anxieties about the cognitive claims   - the solidity of them, and that's   tied to the recognition and the nature of the institutional structures through which science now propagates itself. So that seems to beg some questions. To go back to the AIDS example, there was a scandal   about the manipulation of data and an extraordinary competitive battle between the French and the Americans as to who's making breakthroughs and so forth. There's a grave sense of anxiety about the cognitive value and   about the solidity of the claims being made from within science,   And I think that's been partly reinforced by digitisation and I am conscious of it in the imaging and the visual area but I suspect you can find it in other areas...

BH : Is it also bound up with the computer as a tool   which, despite the early claims that computer data would be sure, fixed and steady, is now facing bit-rot, digital degeneration as well as the visual issues (which have always been there)? So what happens if all the e-mails and data of all these joint projects were wiped? Seemingly, nobody can provide information as to what the early browsers looked like. The Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque Nationale Francaise can't provide info on what the Web looked like in 1992, which is interesting given that you can get  a Daguerreotype, see what it looked like in 1839, in a digitally-enhanced image for free. But nobody can tell you what the Web looked like ten years ago. So I wonder then, is it a combination of factors, the visual is there but also there is an unstable thing in computer technology as well...

MW : But people are still using paper...nobody's just virtual. Maybe where this arts and science thing becomes interesting is when art is no longer simply reduced to the aesthetic but when it's seen as a cognitive domain. And when science opens itself up to the possibility that some of its cognitive claims are questionable. Some interesting things happen with scientific projects...for example, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) project was   big in the 1970s. There's not a lot of coverage of this now because they seem to have reached some intractable problems so they have to go back and re-think the model of consciousness or the model of intelligent behaviour   that they're working with.That's the point   at which it ceases to be interesting for the larger scientific community and for the popular media. Yet that's when the really interesting conversations happen between scientists, when they need to re-think the model...and also that's potentially quite challenging and that's also where science begins to operate as critique - when it starts to experience its own puzzles as intractable and has to re-situate and   reframe them. If that struggle to reframe them happened in the public domain, perhaps then you would have useful critique...

BH :   If we take AI, an entire spook-conspiracy   has grown up around how computers will be made to programme the self... and that really is the Frankenstein monster rather than some genetic thing. So you have Robocop , Total Recall , all that stuff...But where does science really face up to the ethical dimensions? Where does science take up issues of global inequality, the means of production, the means of destroying the planet, climatological problems... where might that critique come in?

MC : One of the difficulties of   a critique with Big Science projects is bound up with who is paying the bill at the end of the day, and very often it's the US military or various organisations like that.   But before you can point to third-level institutions or the universities as some kind of critical space (although I think that's grossly overstated because the complicity of the universities in open   class-warfare in the 20th century is quite horrendous),   there were certain critical spaces but they are more and more imperilled as the whole notion of the universities as   public- service institutions is gone.   So now they're increasingly dependent for survival on private research projects and the quick-fix that that   implies, or else looking to sources of financing that have very suspect ethical implications. But there's one thing on the cognitive issue that Mick [Wilson] mentioned and it's to do with a perception that the traffic between the arts and science is all one-way - that artists   are using ideas from the sciences   but that science itself is soldiering on and is not really interested in these joint, collaborative projects.   It just appears as   a kind of cultural window-dressing for institutions but they're not really all that interested. In other words, there is an argument to be made about the cognitive specificities to do with how art and art practices can be of value in terms of conceptualising problems. I'm not sure that that argument has been won at all. Another aspect of the way in which science seems to see itself is to do with notions of time itself, as a kind of linear thing, that "yesterday" is uninteresting.   Occasionally, somebody like Mandelbrot might go back to work done by mathematicians in the early 19th century but on the whole, the model is "yesterday is bunkum" and you move forward. The result of that linear perception of time is that a certain kind of cognitive model gets privileged over any other.

MW : Isn't there conflict within the sciences, though, about the hegemony of any particular model of cognitive value? There is conflict over what is valuable and competition over what is a meaningful type of knowledge to produce.

MC : Do we need to make a distinction between social value and cognitive value? I can see that they may be debates within the sciences about the relevance of certain research but I'm not so sure the notion of prior time and   the value of the work in the present and in the future would be considered.

BH : But isn't it interesting that science sets up a kind of timelessness.? For instance, a previous experiment can be repeated based on the meticulous details and notes of the Royal Society of 1820. So you could actually recreate what Humphry Davy did in this experiment because it was all recorded and the results would turn out the same. QED, this experiment is timeless because it stands on its own as an entity.... but it seems to set up this timelessness whereas   there is always a kind of openness to the work of art. Someone may well return   with additional   historical and archival information to rethink or dispute the Caravaggio painting or whatever so that the meaning is less fixed, whereas the timelessness in science, as well as a myth of the science object, is that you can go back to that experiment and rewrite it. It doesn't have quite the same impact as a rewriting in the art context such as,   say, Borges' rewriting of the text of Don Quixote.

MW : It's important to remember that there is a degree of openness in science too. In various science disciplines weird,   unforseeable things happen and notions of non-mastery are entertained. I think of say, Einstein, that's incredible stuff or the argument in mathematics based on the problems in set theory and the concern about the incompleteness of axiomatic systems. That's   a huge area of uncertainty that they're moving headlong to embrace. It's intriguing. For me one of the most amazing thoughts of the 20th century is the Turing Machine which is essentially the computer as an idea. A machine that contains information about itself....the Universal Turing Machine. It's just this incredible idea that to me, in some ways, cannot be reduced to social context, cannot be reduced to inherited cultural framework   but   really brings something new into the world and that science can do that   and that it does not have to adhere to some notion of linear progress in order to believe in the possibilities.   Very often it is the key figures   within the sciences, the Nobel Laureates,   who champion the re-reading of the history - who champion the re-reading of Descartes,   to say that the reading of Descartes proposed by Crary is actually wrong. Descartes proposes a physiological model of seeing - that there's also something else going   on there. I really hold out against a monolithic notion of science.

BH : Well isn't that the critique? That's why I like that essay's form. It's the area of uncertainty that challenges the totalitarian argument whether in art or science.

MW :. Because cognition is the subject of science, it does have a reflexive moment and it is argued as to what constitutes cognition. Affective cognition as an idea, for example, comes directly from the so-called dry, clinical, experimental laboratory context   and affective cognition throws out a radical separation between affect and reason. There's a productivity within science that destabilises, that creates conflicts within sciences and for any application outside itself. For me,   if there is a bridge-building or rejoining, that's what's interesting   - the ability of science to interrupt and challenge the assumptions and expectations of the person conducting the research and force a re-think. That happens and while it doesn't necessarily characterise all science, it is one aspect and hence it's important to resist a monolithic idea of science.

CF : But it is this monolith of science which is presented to us in popular media as a   linear notion of progress and technological advances. The complexities and the difficulties seem to be ironed out of the accounts...

MC :The other problem is the way in which people respond to science - either seen as a Pandora's Box, the source of all unhappiness or as Merlin, the magician with miracle cures. Both are sides of the same coin, the idea of science as a magical intervention.   And I think the internal contradictions and tensions that you have in mind, Cathy, are glossed over because science is not seen to be acting as an instrumental   solution but as a charismatic cure. And it's in this sense, in the laying of hands, as it were, that you don't want the detail, you don't want to know of the uncertainties, complexities and the figures back in the lab.

BH :   You can see a parallel with the scientific in Beckett,   it's impossible to understand   the work - that it's meant to be a play on meaning and not reducible. That becomes the isolated abstraction, so while these complex ideas are there, they are distant and removed,   and meanwhile society gets on with its dirty work in this Newtonian paradigm. What interests me is when other shifts happen in the society that some of that uncertainty becomes important or other art practice emerges. So, for example, in the 1960s a lot of the   Modernist high-canon work broke down in favour of   an activist, dematerialised work and a lot of the time it didn't necessarily look like art but was defined as art. So perhaps there is a challenge there for science - to ask the question; "Is this really science?" Some eco-science and   other counter-scientific elements are quite interesting in that way. So you may have someone with a PhD in science but who is involved in a very intricate project on social housing - or other examples may involve someone in an anti-war movement. There's   an entire range of potential relationships and projects and that's where the ethical dimension is - where   science comes back into the society and brings the critique with it. I do think that there are changes occurring with the digital idea but my worry is what kind of a shift it is. It's a   synthesis of military, industrial, technological and the aesthetic...

MW : I do agree that there are changes afoot,   but the way in which a technological determinism   immediately frames that conversation is a problem.   How do we talk about change? How are   machines changing our world?   I think it's a treacherous way of talking   that we have in talking about change, about how machines are making the future.

BH : It's not so much   the machines. Why   would   the ubiquitous computer become so   valued and so quickly dispersed throughout our society? Why has this happened?

MW : Because of expensive advertising campaigns. In some ways, it's incredible the way that   the facts of the market had been ignored in the launch of computers. Earlier ventures failed but now there appears to be a strong marketing drive for computers in education.   Their approach: Don't change the machine -- redefine the nature of education,   making the computer the ideal fix. Coming mainly from science and mathematics, educators who have this idea of constructivism   which asserts that   this is the way the mind works, this is the way you put things together to build knowledge so here is the machine that allows you to put together pre-exising data from different sources and that constitutes knowledge.   So I wouldn't think it's any surprise that the computer has been dispersed successfully. It's successful because   there has been a huge weight behind it. People bought into the hype - people at the level of European planning, national planners and so forth.

MC : I don't doubt that there is a great deal of money going into the promotion,   but one of the crucial things to remember is the ways in which the economy functions have changed dramatically since the 1970s - in other words, the way in which you get the rise of what Castells calls "the networked society,"   the horizontal corporation, and the drive to decentralise production for cost reasons. This process was already in train before the IT explosion,   and   the IT explosion was the right tool at the right time - because it allowed for the development of the concept of 'just-in-time' production, small batch processing and adapt the goods to changing consumer tastes and so on.   That kind of informational networked paradigm has become deeply embedded in our society because that's the way capitalism has operated in this contemporary phase.   So I think,   to some extent, the idea of computers in education and the kinds of paradigms that go with it   - the kind of thing that Naomi Klein talks about in No Logo - I see that as something which follows on from   that fundamental restructuring of capitalism rather than the people with the bucks deciding to put money into IT.

MW : I suppose that essentially the meeting of art and science is happening in the market   and a particular type of market   where the critique is being thrown out. It is so clear that there is a process to marginalise any form of reflection or evaluation or   any kind of public display of uncertainty.

BH : But the entire academy is so obsessed with difference, with critique with postmodern irony,   with multiple readings and uncertainties and so on that I wonder if the very   form of critique is   too blunt? And there are other issues beyond this to do with the environment and the depletion of resources   and so forth...

MC : There is yet another irony in so far as while we are trying   to get rid of uncertainty or critique is under attack, our society is obsessed with uncertainty, obsessed with insecurity, obsessed with the lack of safety. From CCTV cameras in Dublin to gated communities, the way in which science is often presented as a way of limiting risks.

The way tourism is   constructed is that you're going around the place in a global bubble, insulated against risk...and yet, the more you're getting this kind of witchhunt against uncertainty, against particular kinds of critique, the more it betrays, it seems to me, an abiding and profound obsession with uncertainty. I mean, look at our cities - they're constructed on fear.

MW : Isn't that just an escalation or   further stage in that anxiety of modernity?

MC : Well it's the idea of the risk society that   Ulrich Beck talks about... the idea that science generates it but science is also brought in to monitor and contain those risks as well.

BH : Well this is the point which brings us back to the potential or renewal of some kind of ethical or political dimension, in that scientists and artists might feed back into the society. In that way,   people can point to different value systems, different   kinds of sustainable types of economies, utopian projections or whatever...I wonder if that's a possible space in which artists and scientists might co-operate? To encourage different types of projects, for example, for sustainable energy or in art, dealing with cultural difference in a more tangible way?

MW : I think it's useful to think about the nature of such projects. I detect, at an anecdotal level, a rising anti-science or anti-intellectualism that often goes hand-in-hand with an eco-politics and a hostility to sciences as the Establishment which is also a closure to dialogue. I think it's a problem if you forego the rules of argumentation which science at its best can provide.

BH : Well I'm talking about reviving the alliance between research, social critique, social science and art,   and it's in their coming together that there could be a more visible platform. Here, we're about to see a platform of artists and scientists in this country establishing a forum to do with social justice and that would, in some way, alert us to what   these disciplines are getting involved   in this for?

MC: There's a fascinating precedent in Irish history in the late 18th century with the United Irishmen. Science, for them, was a political weapon. Their method of dealing with political subjection / oppression was to subject it to a scientific critique and say, these arguments are not tenable for political control. I think it would be exciting if art and science could show that people's fate does not have to be their destiny - what's exciting about certain ideas in science and art   is you can show that the world can be conceived of differently.

MW : It's the very premise of criticism - that things can be other than they are.