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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Art-science
• postgraduate communities
• STEAM
• collaboration
• transdisciplinary

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the artists and scientists who contribute their time, expertise and enthusiasm in the development and delivery of the MA Art in Science programme. We also extend our thanks to Liverpool John Moores University’s academic and support staff for their contributions and passion for art-science collaborations that help to develop and deliver the programme curriculum. Without their passion we would not be able to explore the boundaries of art and science practice-based research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Snow (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede lecture, Cambridge, UK, ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ stands as a benchmark for the relationship between art and science in the mid-twentieth century Western world. As Snow saw it, these two critical social actors were playing out a rather unhappy and fractious affair in which neither could communicate on equal terms as each remained largely ignorant of the other’s foundational tenets.

2. The distinction between practice-based and practice-led research is generally accepted to be defined thus: if a creative artefact is the basis of the contribution to knowledge, the research is practice-based. If the research produces creative artefacts, but leads primarily to new understandings about practice, it is practice-led.

3. Critical visual methods (Emmison, Smith, & Mayall, 2012; Rose, 2016) foreground the application of research tools central to visual arts theory and practice to academic disciplines that have not conventionally considered visual images as research objects (history, anthropology, sociology, law etc.)

4. The lecture was recorded and first published to YouTube by Taney Roniger on 7/11/2017.

5. STEM curricula are based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. Rather than teach the four disciplines as separate and discrete subjects, STEM integrates them into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real- world applications (Hom, 2014). STEAM represents the addition of the arts. STEAM education focuses on guiding students in adopting a disciplinary fusion of learning and interdisciplinary thinking (Chen & Xiaoting, 2016).

6. Foundation for Art and Creative Technology.

7. Tate Exchange is an ‘open experiment; a space for an ongoing programme of events developed by artists, practitioners. It is a place where everyone is invited to collaborate, test ideas and discover new perspectives on life, through art.’ (https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-liverpool/tate-exchange-liverpool).