This book provides detailed descriptions and big picture thinking about over 120 art-science collaborations at the University of Lille in France. Initiated by the late Christophe Chaillou it provides exemplars of overcoming both inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional obstacles in a variety of art forms, scientific topics and technologies of different kinds.

So what? I have been involved in this community of practice when I became editor of the Leonardo publications in 1981 after the death of my father the scientist-engineer-artist the late Frank J. Malina. Is there anything worth rereading ?

As neuroscientist Semir Zeki explained the human brain is an expert pattern finding machine. I noticed a mistake in the text on page 15, top right. It says my father’s journal Leonardo was started at MIT in 1986. Wrong. It was started at Pergamon Press in 1968. The scientist in me crossed it out, but the thinker thought, so what? After all, in the arts it is the narrative that matters more than the facts. A story is a pattern that others learn to follow.

The book provides numerous short examples of the narratives the artists and scientists involved told themselves about their work, in short form. The institutional obstacles, disciplinary walls. The book is full of two-dimensional illustrations, though most of the work is three of four dimensional. Most of the artists are graduate students, most of the scientists are professionals in universities. The result is partly trans-generational. However, it is culturally focused on the environs of Lille now in northern France.

Over the centuries it has been in County of Flanders → Burgundian Netherlands → Habsburg Austria- Spanish Netherlands → France so in a sense it is trans-cultural. One of my interests is how art-science collaboration with local and non-local intelligences has been enabled by the data cloud and internet. Are the outcomes similar or different than local collaborations. Does it matter?

I would mention two articles that caught my attention, one was by Myriam Suchet. It is titled, “Un cas de recherche-action-création indisciplinée et hétérologue: le la lecture en littéraire au desaprentissage de la «Langue». ChatGPT translated this title as: “A Case of Undisciplined and Heterological Research–Action–Creation: Literary Reading in the Unlearning of ‘Language’.”

AI went on to summarise: “Myriam Suchet argues that certain forms of literary reading function as a practice of unlearning dominant ideas of “Language” as a fixed, standardized system. Through an indisciplined, heterological approach combining research, action, and creation, the article shows how reading can disrupt linguistic norms, reopen marginalized or minor ways of speaking, and generate knowledge through practice rather than method alone. The piece positions literary reading as an experimental, political act that resists disciplinary boundaries and linguistic authority.”

Art science and technology are all languages that act as filters on what we can know about the world. Mistakes in translation such as 1986 for 1968 are not always problematic. AI hallucinations are exemplars.

Another group of artists-scientists whose work caught my attention was “Marches et Mesures au Bord de la Carte, sur les plages de Dunkerque” or “Walks and Measurements at the Edge of the Map, on the Beaches of Dunkirk.” Dunkirk or Dunkerque. We tend to focus on parts of the world that human senses can detect, a bit at least. In this case the group created art from GPS data of where humans went on the beaches.

That’s what I as an astronomer learned to do. The universe was not designed for human sensing. The members of the group included Sebastien Cabour, Pauline Delwaulle avec la participation de Emmanuel Blaise, Alain Trentesaux et Olivier Cohen. ChatGPT translated the surnames of the people as “Little goat, of the wall, blaze, thirty hops, priest”.

I highly recommend this book even though I am an expert on the topics. It’s ok if you have AI mistranslate it; the images will help you understand more than the words.

Unfortunately, since Christophe Chaillou died, the artscience research center has subsided. But so did the Bauhaus, E.A.T, Kepes’ Center for Advanced Visual Studies, In the emerging world of collaboration between local and non-local intelligences the dead are as important as the living. Christophe Chaillou died in 2023 as the book was being written, so what? Read on.