Surveying the literature on technoscience art: from pioneer stories to collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers as the object of study

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to describe, analyse and categorize the literature on technoscience art in general and technoscience art collaborations in particular. I argue that the literature could be characterized by three thematic traditions: pioneer stories, writing aiming at mapping and categorizing, as well as those problematizing and contextualizing the field. Given that earlier research on technoscience art collaborations primarily consists of art historical and anthropological and ethnographic studies, I further discuss the relation between these approaches and intend to provide a connection between them. Whereas art historical studies are more concerned with issues concerning art history as a discipline, ethnographic studies tend to be more concerned with challenges faced by interdisciplinarity. Finally, I discuss the role of artistic research and art practice in future studies on the topic and emphasize the diversity of the literature on technoscience art, as well as the understanding of technoscience art collaborations as an interdisciplinary effort.

KEYWORDS:

• Technoscience
• technoscience art
• art
• science and technology
• artist in residence
• collaboration
• historiography
• artistic research
• interdisciplinarity
• art history
• ethnography
• anthropology
• knowledge making
• STS

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the valuable support by Per Lundin, the research seminar at the Department of Art History at Uppsala University and the Digital Creativity anonymous referees for their valuable comments to improve the original draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anna Orrghen is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of Art History at Uppsala University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in media and communication studies from Stockholm University and has published on art and media, history of computer art, as well as art, science and technology.

Notes

1. Reichle pays particular attention to the contributions made by the scholars Bruno Latour and Donna J. Haraway.

2. Although Reichle (2009), on one hand, pays attention to Popper’s introduction of the term technoscience art and uses the same time frame as Popper does, and, on the other hand, builds her understanding of the concept of technoscience mainly on Latour’s contribution, her study does not address the differences in the understanding of the concept of technoscience as it is expressed by Popper and Latour.

3. The literature on technoscience art contains a number of concepts for describing different aspects of technology and science in contemporary art such as ‘bio art’, ‘virtual art’ and ‘new media art’. Christiane Paul has paid attention to the terminology for technological art forms as ‘extremely fluid’ ([2003] 2008, 7) and subject to several name changes.

4. Shanken pays attention to Henderson (2004) as an exception.

5. On the part of the universities for the development of early computer art in Australia (see Jones 2011), in Spain (see Moraga 2008), in Germany (see Klütsch 2012), in Sweden (see Orrghen 2011) and in the Netherlands (see Fritz 2011).

6. Put together, Century (1999), Harris (1999b), Shanken (2005), Zwijnenberg (2009), Naimark ([2003] 2004), Born and Barry (2013) and Miller (2014) provide a thorough review of the institutional development of efforts aimed at supporting collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers from the 1960s through the twenty-first century.

7. For an updated analysis of the development of the studio laboratory, see Century (2015).

8. The categorization of these traditions shows a striking resemblance with how the history of computing (Misa 2007) and the history of video art (Hedlin Hayden 2015) have been categorized.

9. See also Reichardt (1969), and interviews, manifestos, excerpts from exhibition catalogues, articles and other documents republished in publications mainly belonging to the second tradition in this article (e.g. Davis 1973; Stiles and Selz 1996; Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003; Shanken 2009).

10. Further examples document the activities at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Moser and MacLeod 1996), ZKM (Frieling and Daniels 1999), the art and science collaborative research laboratory SymbioticA (Catts and Bunt 2001), the scholar programme founded by Intel Art and Innovation Committee (IAEC) (Plautz 2005), the Swiss exchange program Artist-in-Labs (Scott 2006, 2010), the art–science center Le Laboratoire in Paris (Edwards 2008, 2010) and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF) (Milosch 2013).

11. On the relation between art and the IT industry, see Mitchell, Inouye and Blumenthal (2003).

12. See, for example, Stonyer et al. (1986); Vesna and Gimzewski (2005); Niemeyer (2005); Seaman (2005); Sorensen (2005); Demain, Demain, and Palmer (2006). According to Bijvoet (1997, 78), Leonardo’s contributors during its first seven or eight years were either practising artists describing their own works or scientists and engineers contributing with general or theoretical articles, whereas there were hardly any contributions made by art historians or art theoreticians. Shanken (2007, 46), on the other hand, means that it took until the mid-1990s before art historians and art theoreticians started to contribute to Leonardo.

13. For example, Klüver and Rauschenberg ([1967] 2009]. An extract from the article is republished in Shanken (2009, 267–268).

14. See also Broeckmann and Nadarajan (2008); Higgins and Kahn (2012).

15. The first time the question appears is in the article ‘Artist in Industry and the Academy: Collaborative Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship and the Creation and Interpretation of Hybrid Forms’ published in Leonardo (2005). The same article also appears as a contribution in Scott (2006). Thereafter, the question reappears in Shanken (2007) and Shanken (2010).

16. On the impact of the Vietnam War on the reception of art and technology, see Collins Goodyear (2008).

17. Douglas Kahn (2012) pays attention to the composer James Tenney as an artist in residence at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and argues for Tenney’s contribution to engineering; Paul Brown (2008) claims that the early generative art at the Slade School of Fine Art contributed to the scientific development of computers; Stephen Jones (2011, especially chapters 1 and 4) argues for the role of artists in the development of new technologies in Australia; and Anne Collins Goodyear (2004, 628) argues that many collaborations supported by EAT led to engineering breakthrough and innovations.

18. On these issues, see for example Scott (2010, 96–123); Stettler (2006, 37); Zschocke (2010); Seaman (2005); Steinheider and Legrady (2004).

19. Also Shanken (2009) and Wilson (2002) are using headlines underneath which they present collaborations.

20. On ‘co-production’ within STS, see for instance Jasanoff (2004); on ‘co-construction’, see Oudshoorn and Pinch (2003).

21. It might be interesting to note that the theme of the Media Art Histories conference taking place in 2015 was ‘Re-create: Theories, Methods and Practices of Research-creation in the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology’; that it partly took place at a venue for conducting research-based creative practice in technoscience art, Hexagram; and that the anthropologist Georgina Born gave one of the keynote speeches.

Additional information

Funding

This article was written as a part of the research project ‘The Art of Co-Production: Collaborations Between Artists, Scientists and Engineers, Sweden 1967–2009’, funded by the Swedish Research Council [Dnr 421-2010-1531].