AHRC-NSF MOU: Art-Science Collaborations, Bodies, and Environments

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The distinctions drawn between scientific and artistic endeavors have a long, historical trajectory, punctuated by a series of debates on the relative merits of each. T he apparent consensus regarding the impermeability of their categorical boundaries has two roots. The first was the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, predicated in large part upon the rise of Copernican cosmology, empiricism, and the systematic development of modern mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry. The second was the gradual institutionalization of disciplinary divisions in the faculties of the modern university, which in the 19th century culminated in the segregation of the European educational system between classical studies and scientific and technical training. Despite the legacy of a modern-day institutional compartmentalization that seeks to distance the arts (and the humanities of which they are a part) from the natural sciences, they revolve within a shared history characterized as much by negotiation, mutual learning, and symbiosis as by pronouncements of fundamental difference. The recognition of this shared history as well as a desire to draw upon it as both intellectual resource and source material helps drive the emergence of what has been termed the "new Leonardos" and "Renaissance teams," a loosely held movement that thrives upon the collaboration between artists and scientists. The participants in these collaborations have forged new intellectual pathways, often articulating areas of study that combine insights from the sciences and humanities. This international collaborative research project will explore the institutional, political, epistemic, and technological matrices that both allow for these interfaces to emerge and that shape their development and wider impact. The investigators will conduct a multi-sited study of contemporary collaborative projects involving diverse groups of scientists and artists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Major questions that the investigators address include: What sorts of resources (material, financial, and regulatory) are marshaled for the collaborations? How and why do artists engage with and reinterpret a range of scientific practices? Why are scientists interested in artistic representations of their work? What new forms of public access are created when scientists open their laboratories to artists? How do such collaborations tackle the ethical and political dimensions of complex problems? How do these collaborations allow for a shift to occur regarding how participants and their various audiences understand the content and purpose of art and science as well as their place within society? In pursuing these questions, the investigators will employ participant observation, interviews, focus groups, surveys, and visual interpretative methods in order to generate detailed descriptions and analyses of the day-to-day activities and products of five sites of art-science collaboration. In addition to previously used approaches, the investigators will focus particular attention on geographic aspects of the interactions among scientists and artists in order to recognize the spatial situatedness of people, things and the relations that bind and transform them.The project will make a substantial contribution toward understanding how "lessons learned" can be transposed into other contexts, thereby developing and realizing models for public outreach at different sites. Because the examination of science-art collaborations often entails the advancement of public knowledge about a number of contemporary world-wide crises and discoveries, the project will serve as a study of the development of innovative strategies for the delivery of popular education and knowledge transfer devoted to timely, policy-related issues of the larger public interest. The project will aid in the mapping of a broad network of emerging resources for further collaborations across the humanities and social and physical sciences, making it a resource for researchers and funding agencies seeking to develop new directions in research collaboration. The project also has the potential to have a transformative impact upon funding agencies. As interdisciplinary, collaborative projects, funded by both public and private foundations and occurring both inside and outside the bounds of the academy become more widespread, projects like this one can help provide a model for investigation and a baseline for assessing their effects and effectiveness.