ART AND SCIENCE AS CREATIVE CATALYSTS

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2015

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...

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...

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?

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.

PLoS Biology, 2013

Oxford Artistic Research Platform, 2017

What is the relationship between artistic research and other academic fields? Due to its proximity to bioengineering, bio-art is an especially telling case study for thinking about this issue. Here I outline ‘the problem of absorption’. An artistic practice (bio-art) attempts to incorporate methods of an academic field (bioengineering), but instead of securing critical distance, it becomes assimilated back into that field. I discuss how bio-artists have come to negotiate this problem, considering the work of pioneers such as Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, as well as more recent work by Maja Smrekar.

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.

Palgrave Communications, 2019

Examining scientific creativity through the lens of artistic practice may allow identification of a path towards an institutional environment that explicitly values and promotes transformative creativity in science. It is our perception as an artist and natural scientist that even though creativity is valued in the sciences, it is not institutionally promoted to the same extent it is in the arts. Acknowledging creativity as acts of transformation and central to scientific pursuit, actively utilizing chance and failure in scientific experimentation, are critical for step changes in scientific knowledge. Iterative and open-ended processes should be modeled after insights from a range of practices in the visual, performing and media arts. Successful institutional implementation requires training through a long-term process of unlearning and learning, organizing interactions to critique results, designing experiments to contain trial and error, and building common and individual spaces ...