[rohrpost] The Future of Art & Science collaborations: Lecture series 7 – 10 October, 2013, Leiden, Amsterdam, The Hague

[Ingeborg Reichle]

The Future of Art & Science collaborations

Lecture series 7 – 10 October, 2013, Leiden, Amsterdam, The Hague

The Future of Art & Science Collaborations is a series of double
lectures by eminent international researchers and practitioners from
the field where art and science interact. From October 7-11 October
the Lorentz Centre (Leiden) welcomes 25 researchers and practitioners
to explore future benefits and challenges, processes and politics and
collaborations between art and science.

Every evening two experts talk about their distinct field of work
related to a theme that is at stake concerning art & science. The
presentations take place at institutions that position themselves in
the midst of the development of art & science interactions in Leiden,
The Hague and Amsterdam.

The Future of Art & Science Collaborations is an initiative of The
Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends, in collaboration with
Waag Society, the Royal Academy of Arts, Leiden Institute of Advanced
Computer Science, The Arts & Genomics Centre and Rijksakademie van
beeldende kunsten, Museum Boerhaave and Hortus botanicus Leiden.

The Future of Art & Science Collaborations is realized with the
financial support from Creative Industries Fund, Mondriaan Fund and
Stichting Doen.

The Lectures

7 October 2013

Communicating art, communicating science (@ Hortus botanicus, Leiden)
The interest for art interacting with science and vice versa seems to
be gaining momentum. Interactions have a wide bandwidth between
autonomous science inspired arts and arts for the sake of positivist
science communications. Do both those ends gain more meaning and
significance where collaborations become more intimate; where artists
really work in labs and where scientists really become engaged in the
artistic process?

Svenja Kratz, currently working as an artist in one the biotech labs
of Leiden University and Kat Austen, trained both in science and art
and writing for The New Scientist, explain from their own practice.

8 October 2013
Art, Science and DIY (@ Waag, Amsterdam)

A flourishing ecology of interactions between the arts and sciences
can be observed the last decades, Bio Art is a diverse genre within
that ecology with an interest in life and the Life Sciences. The
interest in the Life Sciences Bio Art lately shares with a great
number of self organised groups of DIY biologists and self taught
scientists, spread across the globe and facilitated by cheap, easy to
buy or self made hard- soft- and wetware. Both Bio Art artists and DIY
biologists have an intimate relation with the Life Sciences and its
tools, protocols and impact on society and ecology, but with great
differences where comes to an aesthetic as opposed to a functional
approach.

What can Bio Art, DIY Biology and the Life Sciences learn from each
other? Dr. Denise Kera, Assistant Professor at the University of
Singapore has published extensively about Citizen Science and DIY and
follows and supports science community labs and alternative R&D
places. Dr. Ingeborg Reichle wrote her dissertation and habilitation
at Humboldt-University Berlin about artists moving their practice from
the art studio to bio-technology laboratories and her current research
deals with looking "at contemporary science, where the search for
truth and beauty and the production of compelling images suggests an
almost artistic endeavour".

9 October 2013
Positivist arts, fundamental innovation (@ Royal Academy of Arts, The
Hague)

Neither sciences nor arts are neutral or value-free. The same counts
for any form of collaboration or interaction between the fields. The
arts often have a 'bias' towards an aesthetic of the ontological,
specifically when it comes to the natural- and techno-science. In turn
those sciences see the arts often as a rich source of inspiration for
innovation. Observing this, the roles of autonomous and applied arts
and of fundamental and applied sciences are often mingled and swapped,
feeding productive misunderstandings and unexpected outcomes, with
artist behaving like fundamental scientists and scientists with
artistic ambitions.

Artist Bradley Pitts tells about his relation to science, scientific
institutions and scientists and Professor Petran Kockelkoren about his
research into “the technological mediation of perception and the
influence thereof on art and design".

10 October 2013
Art, science and the future of medical collections (@ Museum
Boerhaave, Leiden)

The relationship between art and medical science has a long history.
For long that collaborative relationship was intimate as artist were
of great importance depicting the findings of surgeons as medical
science developed. Technological innovations like microscopy,
photography meant a divide between the arts and medical sciences.
Recently however artists again show a great interest in the
advancements in medical science, with various motives, ranging from
pure curiosity for medical practice to the search for new domains of
artistic expression and representation. What on the other hand does
this mean for medical science and more specific the goals - often
educational - of medical collections?

Associate Professor of Medical Science Communication at Copenhagen
Medical Museion Louise Emma Whiteley and Manon Parry, Assistant
Professor Public History at Amsterdam University explain.

Partners

    The Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends, The Hague
    The Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague
    Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden
    The Arts & Genomics Centre, Leiden
    Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam
    Museum Boerhaave, Leiden
    Hortus botanicus, Leiden University, Leiden

http://waag.org/en/project/future-art-science-collaborations