Todd

Siler, Presentation at the University of Tartu, Estonia (November 9, 2011) 1

Study the science of art and the art of science. - Leonardo da Vinci There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole. - Isaac Asimov There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance. Albert Einstein Knowledge is fragmenting at ever-increasing speed; understanding becomes ever more rare. C.P. Snows two cultures have now multiplied to hundreds of noncommunicating cultures. Technology feeds reliance on the mysterious and even magical workings of black boxes. Even as more and more information becomes available, we understand and use less and less of it. If society cannot find ways to make integrated understanding accessible to large numbers of people, then the information revolution is not only useless but a threat to humane civilization. - Robert Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the Worlds Most Creative People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999); Schooling the Imagination, p.29. SJ: The things I'm most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came togetherI actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest caliber. I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it. -- Smithsonian Oral History Interview with Steve Jobs (April 20, 1995) It is time to realize that what science does best is create art, and what art does best is envision new science. - Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D., author of The Dreaming Universe and Taking a Quantum Leap (This quote is part of a testimonial for Breaking The Mind Barrier: The Artscience of Neurocosmology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990) The scientist or the artist takes two facts or experiences which we separate; he finds in them a likeness which had not been seen before: and he creates a unity by showing the likeness All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. - Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values. (New York: Harper & Row, 1956)

Todd Siler, Presentation at the University of Tartu, Estonia (November 9, 2011) 2

Great works of ArtScience draw you deeply into the beauty of creativity and the truth of critical thinking. They engage you at a heart and gut level of understandingthat is, through experience itselfwhich Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, John Dewey, and countless other experiential thinkers have recognized exists at the core of real learning. Thats where learning lives: through experience. Thats when learning becomes personally meaningful and productive: with experience. ArtScience doesnt belong in any one category or compartment. Rather, it relates to all categories. Thats why for the past twenty years Ive been doggedly referring to the elusive work of ArtScience not as Art/Science, or Art-Science, or Art & Science, or Art-ScienceTechnology-Society, or any other awkward label of combinatory and exploratory work between or within fields. The key to this eternal, genuine synthesis of disciplines, visions and worlds is implied by this single, concatenated word: ArtScience. Underlying this word is the world of ANDthat ingenious linguistic device that unites the arts and sciences, providing new purposes and possibilities. To this day, I regard ArtScience as an overarching category that embodies all other categories; theyre nested in it, like Russian nesting dolls. Its the ultimate generalized field of knowledge built from a potentially infinite number of specializations. Consequently, its both broad and deep. -Todd Siler, The Wisdom of ArtScience: Enjoying the Unbearable Lightness of Being, in Sci-Art: Extensions of Being [Post-Millennium Project]. (Maryland Art Place, Sci-Art @Park, 2000; pp.4-6). "ArtScience connects. The future of humanity and civil society depend on these connections. ArtScience is a new way to explore culture, society, and human experience, which are synaesthetic experience, integrated with analytical exploration. It is knowing, analyzing, experiencing and feeling simultaneously." - "ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration To Create a Sustainable Future" by Adam Brown, Kenneth Snelson, Robert Root-Bernstein, Todd Siler http://www.leonardo.info/;
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_e_00161

In order to change our organizations and continually improve their capabilities for managing the complexities of todays workforce, we will need to learn to collaborate creatively in generating new knowledge as we work across the silos of specialized knowledge. A pioneer in building business intranets, Robert Beckman (former Chairman of Beckman Labs [and author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization]). has a proven method for enabling virtual teams to collaborate and share knowledge. Buckmans methods are built on the reality that every human being is a community of one, naturally networked with a wide array of communities. Today, we are reaching out to the general public in an effort to engage individuals/communities to learn and apply the ArtScience process as they see fit in developing aspects of their lives, lines of work and endeavors. This process is as generalizable as the scientific method, which is more useful with imagination than without it. - Todd Siler, "The ArtScience Program for Realizing Human Potential," in LEONARDO Journal / International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (The MIT Press) Issue 44:5 (October, 2011) (http://www.leonardo.info/leoinfo.html).

Todd Siler, Presentation at the University of Tartu, Estonia (November 9, 2011) 3

ArtScience: Cultivating A World of Metaphormers (Lifelong Learners, Creators, Discoverers, Inventors, Innovators, and Problem Solvers)
This visual overview of ArtScience and Metaphorming explores some proven ways we can tap our creative potential to meet the urgent challenges of the 21st century, while growing our lives. No challenge is more pressing than learning how to learnand, learning how to collaboratively innovate as rapidly and continuously as need be. The three interrelated parts of my presentation highlight the ArtScience process: how it works, and how it is being applied to help create and share new knowledge, and advance human development. In the first part, I show how naturally art integrates science and vice versa in its adventurous acts of creative seeing and innovative thinking. The second part will focus on how I have applied ArtScience over the past three decades, exploring the nature of creativity, collaborative learning and innovation among other related topics. My works of art visualize and interpret how the human brain is connected to Nature, and how Nature is connected to everything the brain creates. To summarize these personal ArtScience adventures: they envision Nature as one infinitely interconnected creative process one that ties everything together in indescribable ways and with countless hidden purposes. The third part of my presentation will show-and-tell how a world of diverse individuals, teams, groups, and organizations have used various aspects of the ArtScience process to connect, discover, invent, and apply a spectrum of ideas they have generated collaboratively in facilitated, hands-on, goal-oriented innovation workshops. Using common building materials, participants are guided to make freeform, multi-dimensional symbolic models that represent the essence of their ideas, views, and visions in response to some focal questions. Aesthetic value judgments are suspended in the process of creating and exploring the meanings of these symbolic models. This seems to help stimulate everyones creativity and curiosityfreeing the mind and liberating the imaginationto envision new possibilities for solving a problem, or illuminating an opportunity, or tackling a challenge, or achieving a common goal with concrete outcomes. Progressive teachers and schools have used the ArtScience process and other arts-based learning tools to develop Curricular Models in grades K-12 and higher education, and across curriculum. Leading businessesfrom advanced technology start-ups to Fortune 500 Companieshave used this experiential, arts-based approach to inspire and catalyze innovative thinking company-wide, and to accelerate innovation, which sustains their competitive advantages. The symbolic models serve as a global common language for communicating our thoughts, feelings, ideas, knowledge, experiences, and views in a nonthreatening way, which works to keep our minds open for learning rather than closed. Some case studies will point to how Metaphorming fosters essential lifelong learning skills that encompass creativity, critical thinking, problem posing / problem solving, and goal setting. All of these things fuel and maintain that brain engine of innovation, which rests on everyones shoulder. That remarkable enginethat personal creative operating systempowers not only ones personal growth and future. It also empowers everyone to contribute to the invention of our collective future.

Todd Siler, Presentation at the University of Tartu, Estonia (November 9, 2011) 4 Overall, the examples I plan to present will suggest how we can bridge our polarized ways of categorizing the world: art as subjective and suggestive; science as objective and demonstrative. I find that our experiences of art and science are only limited by our definitions of themand consequently, our practices, too. We tend to experience things by how we define them: The broader the definition, the deeper and richer our experiences become with imagination. As the 19th century American physician and author, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., has written: The human mind, once stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

ArtScience workshop at the 7th International Conference on Thinking, National Institute of Education, Singapore. (1997 The ArtScience Program.)

ArtScience aims to stretch and strengthen our imagination, enabling everyone to continually transform ones tacit and explicit knowledge and life experiences into personally meaningful and useful things. That is, providing our minds are open to dwell on possibilities, as the poet Emily Dickinson wisely advised everyone to do. For the fun of it, and for its serious practical benefits. Today, we are all pressed to innovate in countless ways, in order to grow our lives and thrive. As concerned parents and world citizens, we are also responsible for managing the complexities of our lives with our families, communities, co-workers and businesses. This often entails having to collaborate with friends and strangers to make intangible things tangible, such as showing our ideas for solutions to the problems, issues and challenges were all facing. Nothing could be more intangible than the future, which awaits our invention everyday.

Todd Siler, Presentation at the University of Tartu, Estonia (November 9, 2011) 5

Think Like a Genius Process

www.thinklikeagenius.com

Several peer-reviewed published articles accompany this presentation (please see pdf attachments). Thank you. www.ToddSilerArt.com