As part of the international expert meeting The Future of the Lab, BALTAN invited a few people to engage with some of the themes being addressed during the meetings. The first text in this series is by Joost Rekveld. His essay deals with notions of (inter-, multi- and trans-)disciplinarity, their limits and possibilities for new approaches.
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By Joost Rekveld
Head of the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague
Openness and its closed side
In the second half of the 20th century there has been much talk about openness. During WWII, Karl Popper developed his concept of the ‘Open Society’, describing the mechanism of free exchanges of opinion a society needs in order to make maximum development possible of the talents of the individuals in it. A couple of years later, theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy coined the term ‘Open System’: a system being a whole that is defined by the organisation of its parts, it can be called open if matter and energy flow through it. In again a very different field, Umberto Eco formulated the idea of the ‘Open Work’, a work of art that is in some explicit way not finished until it is complemented by choices made by the viewer. And, finally, Dutch composer and philosopher Dick Raaijmakers coined the term ‘Open Form’ for a method of collaborative composing.
Even though these concepts come from very different fields and are difficult to compare, one can say that they were all formulated against opponents that were perceived as being closed in some way or another. The adversaries in these examples were totalitarian regimes, classical physics, the traditional artwork or the hierarchical pecking order of composer, musicians and audience. These new concepts were seen as an act of ‘opening’ an existing, closed situation and focus on aspects for which there had not been room until then. In some of these cases, opening what was previously closed was a destructive act, an attempt to at least partly destroy a tradition and make room for an emerging alternative. (more…)
