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Abstract
In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.'s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment.
Notes
1. The study was part of a larger project funded by the ESRC's Science and Society Programme: A. Barry, G. Born and M. Strathern, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society: A Critical Comparative Study’ (2003-6, RES-151-25-0042-A). We thank warmly all our informants who allowed us to observe their work and to interview them, in particular those figures involved in the British art-science field, and Beatriz da Costa, Simon Penny, Rufus Edwards and other faculty based at the University of California, Irvine.
2. See http://ace.uci.edu/.
3. As others have argued, Snow also failed to address the ways in which the sciences were themselves divided between sub-specialisms, rendering scientists outsiders to the culture of other specialisms (e.g. Knight Citation2006, p. 108).
4. The term ‘science-art’ was often preferred in the UK; however this term and ‘art-science’ can be considered interchangeable.
5. Interview with art-science administrator, 2005.
6. The idea that there is a ‘crisis’ in the relations between science and society is not, of course, a new one (Agar Citation2008, p. 571).
7. See http://www.artscatalyst.org/. The work of Arts Catalyst was stimulated in part – like the later Arts Council of England/AHRC Fellowship programme – by dissatisfaction with the prevalent instrumentalism of support for art-science in the UK.
8. We are grateful to Simon Penny for allowing us to use this material.
9. This concept underlies Simon Penny's interaction design work, ‘Fugitive’: see http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/fugitive2.html.
10. CalIT2 and the Center for Ethnography are two of numerous interdisciplinary institutes and research centres based at the University of California, Irvine, itself founded in the 1960s as a model of the interdisciplinary university: see http://www.calit2.net/index.php and http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/.
12. Interview with Rufus Edwards, 27 April 2006, p. 5.
13. Interview with Rufus Edwards, 27 April 2006, pp. 10–12.
15. This issue is itself a point of contention among some art-science practitioners.