Explorations at the Intersections of Art and Science
Project Team
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.
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.
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.
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.