Interdisciplinarity

This research aims to create an audiovisual performance through interdisciplinary collaboration. It is therefore key to create a clear understanding of the term “Interdisciplinarity”, as it will give insight into this collaborative process. Firstly, this chapter concisely addresses the historical context of interdisciplinarity in the arts, as the aim is to open the mind to interdisciplinarity, and how it has changed over time. Secondly, this chapter looks into the terminology regarding “Interdisciplinarity”, and will conclude with a definition of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Historical context

In the last decennia, there has been an increasing amount of interest in interdisciplinary practices and art.[4] This can be largely attributed to the fact that we are more and more exposed to interdisciplinary cultural expressions in everyday culture (Verkuil, 2007), but foremost it comes from two changes: “the transformation of universities in the twenty-first century and the challenges posed by postmodernism” (Condee, 2016).

Throughout history, there was not always a clear distinction between different art forms and disciplines and it was often not the case that one could study a particular discipline at a university. For example, in ancient Greece, there was a more integrated approach to disciplines. In the case of the arts, it “was a unified activity where dance, music, and poetry were all mentioned under the banner of drama” (Shaw-Miller, 2011). As the founder of the Music Department at Indiana University Southeast and longtime Professor of Music, Dr. Wil Greckel mentions in his article Visualization in the Performance of Classical Music: A New Challenge: “If pictorial references on Greek and Roman artifacts are accurate, music (…) was, more often than not, associated with dance” (Greckel, 2021). This idea continued from Renaissance humanism through Romanticism, “but in the nineteenth-century universities became more specialized and fragmented” (Condee, 2016). This was a result of the German academic structure that arose, where professors had to cultivate the existing knowledge, but also the way they produced their knowledge. This became the model of modern research universities: “Discipline now equals department, with authority to regulate standards, bureaucracy to organize societies, and budgetary control to subsidize research” (Klein, 2005).

Discipline’s borders (also in the arts) went back and forth during the Romantic era, as some claim that the arts functioned best alone and in isolation (Lessing, 1887, as cited in Shaw-Miller, 2011). Others, like composer Richard Wagner, believed that “‘the arts’, had come to a point where their independence had provoked a crisis of comprehensibility; they had individually reached their limits” (Shaw-Miller, 2011). He introduced the German term “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total work of art) in his operas in the 19^th century. As a response to the aforementioned separation of disciplines, the concept of interdisciplinarity appeared in universities in the early twentieth century. At first, it came from a “nostalgic search for a lost ‘golden age’ of unified, holistic knowledge” (Klein, 1990), but this turned into an urge and “the desire to explore problems and questions that do not nest comfortably within one discipline, the quest to solve society’s problems and the opportunity to exploit the power of new technologies” (Klein, 2010). During the modernist era at the end of the 19^th century, there was a on one hand the tendency for purity and separation, and on the other hand, hybridity and conjunction in the arts. Art movements such as futurism[5] or Dada strived for a synthetic form of expression. The transgression of boundaries in postmodernism[6] (as mentioned in the first paragraph) has led to clearing paths, and innovative approaches appeared to revise interdisciplinarity in the arts. Postmodern artists move across and between media. In the 21^st century, disciplines are still dominant. However, at the same time, there is a growing presence of interdisciplinarity, which can be traced through the establishment of interdisciplinary departments. This progress is, as read in this paragraph, a “culmination of a process that has been going on for decades” (Condee, 2016).

Terminology

It is important to know the meaning of the term interdisciplinarity when aiming for an interdisciplinary collaboration, as it provides an understanding of the cooperation process. Throughout different sources, this term is used in a variety of ways[7]. The first major typology was published in 1972 (Apostel, Berger, Briggs, Michaud, et. al, 1972 as cited in Klein, 2010), but there have been more than a few different ways of formulating. Next to interdisciplinarity, commonly used terms are multidisciplinarity and cross-/transdisciplinarity. As Katri Huutoniemi (et. al), senior advisor in Research at the University of Helsinki, mentions in her research Analyzing interdisciplinarity: Typology and Indicators: “Of all the definitions that have appeared, the distinction between multidisciplinarity, a conglomeration of disciplinary components, and interdisciplinarity, a more synthetic attempt at mutual interaction, has been the most influential” (Huutoniemi, Klein, & Bruun, 2009). Below are three other definitions mentioned from various sources to show the differences between them. The chart is made by the author of this research.

So in conclusion, an interdisciplinary collaboration asks for a “more synthetic attempt at mutual interaction” (Huutoniemi, Klein, & Bruun, 2009), whereas a multidisciplinary collaboration is more about coexistence, and not necessarily synthesis. To define interdisciplinary collaboration, the following definition results from the combination of Karen Scopa’s definition of collaboration[9] and the information mentioned in this chapter: a process of working with and a synthetic attempt at mutual interaction with people from other disciplines to create a collaborative outcome that could not have been achieved individually. As this research is about interdisciplinary collaboration, it is key to look for a synthetic attempt at creating[10], an interdisciplinary work process. An example of such a process can be MONOLITH: “a hybrid between an installation and performance, [which] magnifies the fascinating world of growing crystals” (De Bruijn, 2022) mentioned in an interview in 2022 by Maarten De Bruijn with the creators on the social publishing platform Medium. This process started when pianist Helena Basilova wanted Vincent Rang to create visuals to accompany her take on Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. In the end, this resulted in a collaboration between a visual artist, a composer/pianist, an electronic musician, and someone who built the installation. Everyone was inspired by the slow growth of chemical reactions with iron salts and every individual inspired the others while working from their disciplines, but by creating synthetically as a larger collective.