Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

The Future of Art & Science collaborations- science -art project

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 - register here (@ 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 - register here (@ 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 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 - register here (@ 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.

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