Art and Science as Creative Catalysts (original) (raw)

Art-Science Collaboration: Blending the Boundaries of Practice

Junctures-the Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2018

The Art + Oceans Project was the sixth in the ongoing ‘Art + Science’ Project series, where artists collaborate with scientists individually, or in pairs, to develop artworks for public exhibition relating to science interpreted in a broad context. In Art + Oceans, collaborators tackled the complexities of our changing marine environment; working together over several months (from October 2017 to July 2018), they produced many generative interactions between art and science. The large group exhibition (held in the Otago Museum’s HD Skinner Annex, 23 July–5 August 2018) represented 26 collaborations between artists (including graduates, staff and senior students of the Dunedin School of Art and the School of Design at Otago Polytechnic) and scientists (from University of Otago science departments including Surveying, Physics, Anatomy, Chemistry, Botany, Marine Science, Physical Education and Science Communication; as well as the University of British Columbia; the Cawthron Institute...

Learning from Scientific Visualisations: Knowledge Exchanges Between Science, Design and Art

The pragmatic turn in science clarified the constructive character of scientific exploration: Scientific knowledge is not inherent in reality, it is a social construction. This process is not only dependent on formula or discourse. It also implies pictures and (mental) images. The research project, of which this paper examines and comments first results, tried to document the possible educational influence of design and art on the construction of such images in scientific research. The paper will present selected visual and theoretical results of an interdisciplinary research project developed within an academic context. Contributing also to the emerging field of image studies at the intersection of art, design and sciences, this project involved a team of scientists, a designer, an artists and art and media theorists, and it aimed at assessing the diverse role that visual design and visual arts can play in changing scientists' relationship with their visual production. Knowledge-Image-Learning in our case denotes the process of learning between disciplines (design-art-science) and the role of images in their different practices. The paper will therefore discuss the lab's scientific visualizations co-designed with a designer and an art project developed with the same team of scientists by a visual artist. The data so-far collected, especially during the design part of the project, suggest that, not only the scientists collaboratively produced new, more effective images. During the collaborative process of making, they also acquired awareness of and aesthetic sensitivity towards the technical images they produce.

Creative Partnerships and Cultural Organisations: “Enabling” and “Situating” Arts–Science Collaboration and Collective Learning

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?

Science at the Interface with Art

MRS Proceedings, 2011

ABSTRACTThe Cultural Heritage Science (CHS, formerly SCIART) Program seeks to enhance opportunities for chemistry and materials research at the interface between science and art. The objective is to promote collaboration between cultural heritage scientists, mainly located in US museums and chemists and/or materials scientists in US academic institutions to address grand challenges in the science of cultural heritage. Through the first competition, eight projects, two to three years in duration, were funded at $270,000 to 495,000 each. Every successful proposal demonstrated a clear need for collaboration with good synergy between the collaborating groups, and provided plans for meaningful training experiences for students and/or postdoctoral researchers in the field of cultural heritage science. It is anticipated that the CHS Program will continue for two additional years in a similar fashion. During this period, researchers should be able to more easily identify the disciplinary pr...

Investigating new areas of art-science practice-based research with the MA Art in Science programme at Liverpool School of Art and Design

Higher Education Pedagogies, 2019

Collaborations between artists and scientists are increasingly a feature of the cultural landscape. Traditionally this relationship is seen as art in the service of science whereby artists use their skills to visually communicate complex scientific ideas. However, a hybrid form of collaborative, experimentally-driven practice has emerged over the last 30 years where artists and scientists work together to explore the creative possibilities and speculative futures represented by the intersection of these two ‘cultures.’ The MA Art in Science programme at Liverpool School of Art and Design facilitates discussions and interactions between subjects that have traditionally been studied in isolation within Higher Education. This paper details and discusses the theoretical foundations that have informed the curriculum design and its pedagogical ethos, describes the collaborative learning experiences at the heart of the programme, and offers an insight on how the programme’s approach to transdisciplinary art-science collaborative practice could be utilised across disciplines.

Facilitating creativity in art-science. A methodological experiment

2017

In this paper we bring together thoughts and experiences of employing facilitation towards creative emancipation in art-science based on our experiences of working on an art-science project. We suggest that this space is a trading zone in which novel links and relationships can be created. We introduce the notion of ‘boundary method’ to describe facilitation as a method that can endure different meaning-making and meanings by stakeholders yet retain its instrumental form of encouraging creativity at a cross-disciplinary interface rather than within a dominant discipline.

Art-Science Collaboration in an EPSRC/BBSRC-Funded Synthetic Biology UK Research Centre

NanoEthics, 2020

Here I examine the potential for art-science collaborations to be the basis for deliberative discussions on research agendas and direction. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a science policy goal in synthetic biology and several other high-profile areas of scientific research. While art-science collaborations offer the potential to engage both publics and scientists and thus possess the potential to facilitate the desired “mutual responsiveness” (René von Schomberg) between researchers, institutional actors, publics and various stakeholders, there are potential challenges in effectively implementing collaborations as well as dangers in potentially instrumentalizing artistic work for science policy or innovation agendas when power differentials in collaborations remain unacknowledged. Art-science collaborations can be thought of as processes of exchange which require acknowledgement of and attention to artistic agendas (how can science be a conceptual and material ...