Explorations at the Intersections of Art and Science

Project Team

Team leader Kristin Tapson shares the team's work at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase in April 2023 (Photo: Les Todd).
Team leader Kristin Tapson shares the team's work at the Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase in April 2023 (Photo: Les Todd).

Team profile by Mark Olson, Nina Sherwood and Kristen Tapson

When science engages artistic practice, it is often in the service of science’s goals. For example, we might acknowledge the need for aesthetic design in scientific figures or recognize the beauty of experiments and scientific images. However, emerging forms of artistic research point toward collaborative models that intersect more substantially at the level of practice, where art and science meet as equals. 

Our team sought to explore this intersection through a two-semester immersion in laboratory practice, critical reflection and artistic research, cultivating an environment that joins the artist studio, the humanities seminar room and the science lab bench. 

 Students working with foldoscopes (Photo courtesy of the team).  Students working with foldoscopes
 Students working with foldoscopes. (Photo courtesy of the team)

We began the year by brainstorming the relationships between science and art as domains of experimental practice, asking how they differentially inflect notions of epistemology and knowledge-production, socio-cultural value, the tensions between creative innovation and disciplined, documented iteration and among truth/objectivity and imagination/speculation. 

Lab Art team.
Left: Team members work with bioplastics in the lab; Right: Microbial art created by the team (Photos courtesy of the team)

Subsequent sessions wove together discussions of critical readings (social studies of science and lab culture, art historical work on bioart, and speculative science fiction) with foundational exercises that explored the expressive possibilities of laboratory practices (lab notebook documentation; Drosophila husbandry and dissection; microscopy and other forms of instrumentation; bacterial and slime mold culture; biomaterial fabrication) alongside speculative design and ’zine-making workshops. 

re:process poster.
Exhibit poster in the French Family Science Center

The second half of the year was dedicated to translating these reflections into student-conceived artistic research projects and refining them through peer critique, culminating in a public exhibition entitled re:process - semipermeable practices in art and science in the atrium of the French Family Science Center at the end of April. 

Throughout the year we also hosted guest lectures on a myriad of topics, including: slime mold in human-computer-interface (HCI) design; foldscopes and accessibility in science; the aesthetics of microbiology; public science in the Duke Gardens; and the history of ’zine culture. We also curated a relational database of artists and labs working at the intersection of art and science, as well as the publications, galleries and cultural institutions that support them. 

Follow this team's work in the future by checking out the et al lab.