Emergent Knowledge in the Third Space of Art-Science (original) (raw)
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Understanding Third Space: Evaluating Art-Science Collaboration
CP Snow's mid-century idea that a "third culture" might come into being to connect arts and science is perhaps most publically realised today through art-science -a heterogeneous field of creative research and production, characterised by the collaboration of artists and scientists and by research combining scientific and aesthetic investigation. This paper reports on the development of a new method for investigating the value of third culture collaboration for both the expert collaborators involved (artists and scientists) and the audiences who engage with the work. The visual matrix is a recently developed psychosocial method for evaluating aesthetic experience, which has been used in various sociallyengaged and site-specific art contexts. In 2014 it was experimentally applied to two art-science exhibitions staged in the UNSW Galleries, Sydney: Amnesia Lab and Body Image. This paper discusses the unique potential of this method to capture the shared, complex, emergent and transformative aspects of the experience of these exhibitions. In particular it highlights the ability of the method to capture the emergence of a "third space" at the intersection of art and science in the public domain -a site of trans disciplinary engagement, enquiry and knowledge production that plays a vital role in the contemporary research landscape.
Reconsidering experiential knowledge in the relation of art and science practices
Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA2013, 2013
As practice-theory orientations the arts and sciences have often seemed juxtaposed. We are interested in how a new generation of artist-scientists think, operate and communicate. We argue that it is crucial to find new forms and formats for engagement and communication in communities of interdisciplinary research and practice. In this paper, we investigate the discursive and communicative relation between different disciplines, in social and experiential events (conferences, festivals, and the like). For this purpose, we will build upon the experiences and observations from various 'Remix' situations in which art-scientists meet in conference and festival settings.
Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice and Education
Arts-science activities are proliferating globally, whilst demonstrating significant capacity to shift public thinking (and potentially action) in new ways that confront many of the pertinent challenges of our times, such as sustainability. Transdisciplinary arts-science practices offer enhanced possibilities to increase this agency. However, this can only be assured through the development of supportive institutional material and social infrastructures. In this chapter, we explore how to best enable and situate such projects, drawing upon the work and practices of transdisciplinary media artist Keith Armstrong. By comparing two Australian cultural organisations he has worked with (a university gallery and a public arts organisation), we analyse how institutional frameworks can better support such projects and programs, mitigated by the site and location of the work. We then ask, what is the future of this mode of activated practice and how might we best foster it?
STS Encounters, 2023
What does art have to lend to Science and Technology Studies (STS)? Might we see art and its display in museums and galleries as a method of performing STS ‘by material means’? And what roles might STS scholars play in art-science collaborations? Drawing on our experiences with collaborations at the intersections of contemporary art and biology, we explore the similarities and overlapping practices of these knowledge communities and make a series of observations about the potential of the area of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) to refigure and complicate the art-science landscape. Our analysis emphasizes the museum as a material public forum and curation as a form of knowing, histories of art and science, and examples of scholarly facilitation and intervention in art-science. We examine emerging patterns in ASTS scholarship and emerging roles for STS scholars as facilitators, participant-observers, curators, and collaborators, particularly in art-science institutions and newly emerging STS and art contexts in Denmark, and specifically, the Medical Museion. Our analysis reveals the persistent third leg of curation, cultural history, or STS as party to collaborations between artists and scientists.
Comunicazioni sociali, 2021
The use of arts-based research has recently gained attention among scholars in diverse fields of social sciences for its capacity to communicate research beyond the authority of the written text as well as to engage with non-academic audiences. This article focuses on the dynamics of art as knowledge work from the perspective of contemporary art and its institutions: if academic research 'goes' to the arts then how does this 'going' interact with the already established politics, economies and ethics of the art field? I will be arguing that research emerges as a generalized category, if not a systemic imperative, of doing contemporary visual art, and that within this territory arts-based research encounters similar issues with those surrounding academic production and consumption. I summarize challenges pertaining to issues around deprofessionalization, new forms of distinction and art's increasing resemblance to the information apparatus.
Positioning the Arts in the Research Process: Perspectives from Higher Education
Springer Series on Cultural Computing, 2020
Research in the visual arts has contributed to the creation of environments that involve cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary projects in departments within and across universities. An overview is provided of the historical context of doctoral awards in the arts with a definition of the terms practice-based, practice-led, and practice as research discussed. It articulates the challenges when acquiring explicit and exact knowledge alongside more subjective approaches that utilize tacit knowledge from artistic practice in research projects. Drawing on examples from art practice and doctoral students work, it analyzes objective, subjective, empirical, and hermeneutic paradigms, as described by Pierre Bourdieu, which can combine empirical approaches and individual understandings to re-enforce our understandings of the world. Keywords Practice-based research • Practice-led research • Practice as research (PaR) creative arts Ph.D. • Collaboration • New technologies • Cross-disciplinary • Interdisciplinary 2.1 Introduction Most researchers are aware of the need to position themselves in relation to other fields or disciplines in order to reveal the particular characteristics of their research findings. At the start of the research process, usually in writing the proposal, it can be challenging for artists when "oneself" often plays a significant role in the object of an enquiry. Research in the arts can be largely hermeneutic; that is the understanding and interpreting of it exposes the subjective limits of the artists' ways of doing and seeing. It is this epistemological method of socially constructing meaning that gives the arts authority within a process of enquiry. However, it is all too easy for knowledge gained tacitly to be "overlooked because it is subsumed into the rational logic of discursive accounts of artistic production" [1]. The articulation of possibilities of artists for shaping consciousness and providing cultural capital can be difficult even
Leonardo, 2019
To normalize ArtScience, examples need to be shared of its average practitioners within the sciences, in addition to its historical exemplars. Described here are two cases of arts practice informing scientific research as experienced by early-stage researchers in postdoctoral or PhD work. Each case involves different arts approaches and yields different effects on the science; both inform ideas for how to better support and institutionalize ArtScience work.
Hybrid Matters: Art and Science as a New Epistemology
DNA and Cell Biology
Why do art and science collaborations matter? Hybrid Matters outlines an epistemological mapping of art and science as an emerging method of interrogation. Through the prism of COVID-19, Warner proposes a paradigm shift driven by care and empathy. In opposition to the notion of art as a vehicle for communicating science, Warner suggests a model in which art and science become mutually reinforcing, discovering alternative pathways of understanding in our relationship with natural ecology and one another.
At least since C.P. Snow’s seminal Rede lecture The Two Cultures, the idea of a significant difference in kind between the natural sciences and the arts and humanities has been prevalent in Western culture. A gap has been perceived to exist not only in methodology and theory, but more fundamentally, in understandings and worldviews. This has resulted in a dichotomous debate both in academic and media discourses. As a reaction to this, and parallel in time, some actors have strived to achieve a ‘third culture’. This is a common attitude in the still emerging field of ‘artscience’, whose actors seek to combine the advantages and knowledges of the sciences with those of the arts and humanities. Researchers from every concerned field have contributed to the exploration of the interface between ‘art’ and ‘science’. However, I argue in this article that the very term artscience, in simply joining together the words ‘art’ and ’science’, is reenforcing an old notion of a binary opposition between these two fields. The idea of ‘two cultures’, still implied within the image of a ‘third culture’, disguises the plurality of perceptions and approaches within and across fields. While useful in pointing out lack of communication between fields, it tends to overemphasize divisions, ignore complexities, and, in some cases, leave out important parts of the picture. I suggest that the discourse of the ‘third culture’ and the term ‘artscience’ may jointly occlude the multiple possible constellations of practitioners, roles and approaches, and may be a potential limitation to interdisciplinary collaborations.
Performing Science: Blurring the Boundaries Among Art, Research, and Academic Communities
2017
When and where does the art performance stop? Are there boundaries? The aesthetics of actions can be viewed as a series of unique artistic and genuine experiences and expressions. Through these aesthetics, a narrative unfolds, action turns to progress, and consciousness expands with each portion of new knowledge. When life and its contents are viewed as a part of this artistic experiential process, it is impossible to disconnect one action from another. After intentionally opening the art performance, there is no way for an artist to consciously determine what this performance includes and, more importantly, what it excludes. This paper discusses a performance project that was initiated in 2004 called The Researcher. The Researcher began as a probe into academia as an institutional system that constitutes and reconstitutes itself through the rigor of categorization, critique, and measurement. Here, science is a performance of simultaneous positivism and constructivism, structuralism and deconstructionism.