Ethics and Art

Now that we have a tri-council ethics policy for social science, humanities, science, engineering and mediacal researchers, what about art research/creation? Art Ethics is a site that links to a number of ethical guidelines for art practice.

This is a new problem, especially in interactive art that can aggregate and re-present information about viewers. Below is my first take on this.

The Ethics of Arts Research

We need to engage Canada Council to get them to join the tri-council ethics policy. Here are some areas of ethical engagement that Anne and I came up with:

• Deception – Any art that deceives people in the making, but not necessarily in the viewing, should consider getting ethics clearance.
• Privacy – Any project that when exhibited would affect the privacy of people other than the artists involved should get ethics clearance and should develop a plan to appropriately consult the participants following guidelines for the press and film work.
• Safety – Projects which involve dangerous materials or practices should get clearance even if the only people involved are the artists. This doubly true where students would be exposed to danger in their work on the project. They need to be informed appropriately.
• Student Credit – Projects that will involve a credit course where students have no choice but to work on the research/creation of the artist need to be appropriately informed. This is similar to a graduate student who, in order to get funding to participate in a lab has to sign non-disclosures that affect their ability to publish. Such courses should not be obligatory (no student should be forced to work on their prof’s research.) The student should be informed of the project at the outset and given a chance to not take the course without penalty. Further, the copyright of the student’s work should be worked out at the outset. McMaster’s position is that students own the copyright on their own work and we only have a license for the purpose of grading and promotion (of the course, program and University.) If I want to use a student’s work I tend to buy a non-exclusive license after the course.
• Interactivity – Any project that is designed to respond to an audience in a public place or to record the behaviour of people in a way that would allow them to be identified needs to be cleared. There are simple protocols that can avoid ethical problems in such cases. The key here is the identification – if I interact with an art work in a way that leaves no trace and could do me no harm there is no problem, but if my interaction could be recorded in a way such that I might be indentified by someone else there is a potential problem.

That said we don’t want this to become a burden which means that there has to be an education of the community that provides clearance and low impact clearance procedures. SSHRC and CC should take a lead on this.