Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies

Hannah Rogers, Megan Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, Hannah Rogers, Megan Halpern, Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429792830
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science.

This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge- making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world.

This handbook provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.

Section 1 Constructing borders and borders at the intersections of art and science

Hannah Star Rogers

DOI: 10.4324/9780429437069-2

What does it mean to bring art and science together and what is produced? Further, what can STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholars learn from observing art and science in relationship to one another? In this section, artists, STS researchers, and practitioners who have worked with art discuss the relationship between art and science and the relationship between this type of work and STS itself. These chapters are each emblematic of the kinds of work we will see in this handbook because they tell the story of how artists and STS scholars alike have something to say about the intersection of art and science and about its relevance for STS, and vice versa. These chapters are selected to cover a range of mediums, career arcs, and types of analysis. They delve into the role of visualizations in scientific and artistic communities (Chapter 1), collaborative work for policy influence (Chapter 4), an artist and analyst reflecting on her discoveries through film (Chapter 3), and STS scholars considering what their field can learn from the arts (Chapter 2).

STS scholar Silvia Casini investigates the phenomenon of the rising number of data visualizations in scientific and artist communities. She discusses the role of data in some art and science collaborations by considering what counts as data for whom. Casini invokes Donna Haraway’s “modest witness” as a way of reminding readers that data is not separable from its collectors and interpreters. Thinking about the way that the data exists in art and science networks necessarily means considering the artists and scientists who are creating and making use of data in their own ways. ASTS (Art, Science, and Technology Studies) scholarship benefits from comparing points of commonality like Casini’s data visualizations. By comparing the creation, use, and interpretation of these visualizations in art and in science, new analyses of art and science as categories and as communities become possible.

Hanna Rose Shell is a filmmaker and STS scholar whose work in STS takes the form of both making films and conducting image analysis. In her chapter, she argues for film as a mode of research and a means of expression in STS. In particular, Shell argues for the experiential element in film by contending that researchers must add themselves to the picture to set ourselves in relation to practices and materials such that we experience what we are studying. While not every use of film may be said to be aesthetic, Shell specifically argues for the potential of film as a research tool with those qualities. The researcher, she explains, can place herself inside the frame in an explicitly artistic use of the medium. Shell defends analysing images, which are often held in STS and other scholarly circles to involve such a multiplicity of meanings as to elude analysis. She does this by attacking the flexibility of language and suggesting that language is as supple a matter as images by examining the trajectory of her own series of film projects.

Artists and theorists Christian Nold and Karolina Sobecka further the STS tradition of seeking to influence public policy around science and technology. They argue that artists can harness the power of their own tools through “aesthetic strategies” that can enable the participation of artists in governance and public policy questions, particularly on questions that are often the domain of scientific or technical experts. The authors suggest two forms of intervention: one offers a mirror to current governance discourse by taking on the form of, to use their example, a conference on atmospheric experiments, but expanding the included experts by diversifying the makeup of the conference to include artists and designers a decision that also expanded the number of women participants. This mirroring shows what Bruno Latour might describe as “otherwise,” an alternative way that decisions might be made and attempts to reveal the assumptions about how a given problem (in this case climate change) ought to be addressed.

The second “aesthetic strategy” involves bringing together two ideas that are usually seen as separate and recognizing them as newly relevant when considered together. In this case, “emotional maps” were created by participants under the facilitation of the authors that matched reported states from users with locations. The results were revelations about how problems and issues in a city relate to geography and novel ways of presenting the issues at stake in specific localities. Their work points towards possibilities for expanding artists’ roles in STS interventions in public policy. It offers a new type of participant in public policy debates for analysis that may suggest the way that overlapping and competing expertise needs to be incorporated into governance processes.

STS has a great deal to learn from art and science projects, and in some cases, those projects appear to have features that overlap with STS work. This raises questions about the boundaries STS scholars have drawn around their own knowledge production and what counts as STS. Jane Calvert and Pablo Schyfter (2017) use their Synthetic Aesthetics experience of arranging collaborations between synthetic biologists and artists and designers to consider what STS can gain from art. The authors focus on the ways that their interests overlapped with those of the artists and designers working on the project. At the same time, artists who participated in Synthetic Aesthetics approached tasks and, in particular, worked with materials, in ways the authors found novel. Using interview materials and anecdotes, the authors demonstrate what STS scholars might learn from artists and designers based on those experiences.

ASTS scholars hail from STS, art, and theory backgrounds. They work directly with artistic mediums but also shape their artistic practices to science and technology contexts, for use in public policy debates, and to reach the public. As the field develops, more practitioners are likely to be recognized as older boundaries between art engaged with science and technology and STS fall away in the face of studies of practice. Like scientists and technologists who have worked with artists, the potential exists for STS scholars to instrumentalize art for their own ends. At the same time, STS scholars may increasingly look to art for potential methods and find both common ground and novel ways of working with materials and other people. These chapters help to bind the expanse of methods currently in use in ASTS. As more art and science work is analysed, ASTS scholars can look forward to a better understanding of how the categories of art and science operate and how artists and scientists may work together to produce new knowledge.

1 What counts as data and for whom? The role of the modest witness in art–science collaboration

Silvia Casini

DOI: 10.4324/9780429437069-3

The many stuffs – matter, energy, waves, phenomena – that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds.

Goodman (1975)

Making and experiencing world(s)

Upon entering the white room, the visitor finds herself in a net of interwoven elastic black ropes stretching from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The gossamer thin filaments of webs arranged in a labyrinth-like geometry are disorienting. Is this a representation of a spider’s comings and goings, of neural networks or a monumental installation of galaxies forming along filaments like droplets on a spider’s web? Whether or not the artist meant to posit an analogy between the origin of the universe, ourselves, and the spider’s web, the visitor embarks on a journey where interdependent life systems are the result of chance and play not just of careful reasoning and planning. Is it a world in which humans could live? And how?

The immersive environment created by the artist Tomás Saraceno for the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale, Making Worlds/Fare Mondi, curated by Daniel Birnbaum in 2009, looks like a cosmic landscape or a neuronal network. Saraceno’s Galaxies Forming Along Filaments and Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008) can be experienced haptically: when touching the cords, visitors experience a vibration propagating through the network, thus sensing the entanglement of the elements composing this artist’s world. Tomás Saraceno’s work of art is a universe of autonomous sense with its own rules. Saraceno’s installation gives me the opportunity to raise two points that are at the core of this chapter and that will enable the reader to gain a firm understanding of the emerging field of inquiry and collaborative practice called art–science. Firstly, art (like science) is a way of world-making (Goodman 1978). Secondly, the visualization and use of data is a common denominator of some art and science practice.

The benefits of visualizing data include the ability to see the similarity of structures that are mirrored in many network-like systems in the world. Different systems such as the human brain, the internet, transportation grids, and even social structures operate under the paradigm of the network (Lima 2011). The visualization of data, which is one of the key techno-cultural phenomena of our age (Manovich 2011), can enable or hinder both the perception and understanding of structure and dynamics in complex network systems. The impact of data visualization has extended beyond areas of scientific inquiry: their aesthetic has also caught the attention of artists, whose work is characterized by the representation of network topologies and complex patterns of nodes (Talasek 2015: 2295). Saraceno’s installation shows how art–science collaborative work enables users to experience a complex network of data (itself a world) with the sensory-motor apparatus.

In this chapter, I introduce the concept of the “modest witness” in art–science projects to understand how facts are generated from data, validated, and then circulated within and beyond the laboratory into the public arena. The expression “modest witness” is used ironically by the feminist, cultural theorist, and philosopher Donna Haraway to unveil the key figure in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century that was coined by Robert Boyle, one of the fathers of the experimental method.

The modest witness was the scientific observer whose disinterested observation of phenomena has been presented as central to the scientific method (Haraway 1997).¹ This term described those who were witnessing the experiment, and by doing so, contributing to establishing it as truth. In her essay “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium,” Haraway first deconstructs the figure of the “modest witness” and then reconfigures it as a kind of “mutated modest witness,” who could help bring better technoscience and better worlds into being (Schneider 2005: 91). The modest witness, far from being an objective observer whose testimony is crucial, can determine what counts as knowledge and for whom.

Theoretical or curatorial work engaging with art–science using the framework of data visualization should ask the question of what counts as data and for whom, specifically in the material culture of the laboratory and the studio. Data visualization does not simply illustrate a phenomenon but intervenes in the knowledge-making and interpretative process. Artists and scientists use data visualization tools to construct knowledge about ourselves and the world. Art and science collaboration deals, selectively, but consistently, with processes that touch on people’s lives, including the constitution of subjectivities and the distribution of power within society. These exchanges and processes are based on data creation, visualization, and circulation.

The term “visualization” varies across knowledge domains. It can be defined as any message presented in a format suitable for display, which provides evidence to the viewer. Visualizations can have descriptive, aesthetic, instructive, explanatory, interpretative, evaluative, and persuasive intents (Hegarty 2011; Polman and Gebre 2015; Tufte 2001). They can also function as bridges between communities of users from different backgrounds (for example, scientists and artists) and their ways of seeing (Wise 2006). In this sense, visualization works as a boundary object favouring a common understanding despite users’ different views (Star and Griesemer 1989). Scientists seem to treat visualizations not simply as an aid to science, but rather as ways of thinking through a data set and co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword by Caroline A. Jones
• Foreword by Trevor Pinch
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: The past, present, and future of Art, Science, and Technology Studies
• Section 1 Constructing borders and borders at the intersections of art and science
• Section 2 Making multidisciplinary histories
• Section 3 Methods and modes
• Section 4 Collaborations and collisions in art–science
• Section 5 Institutions and infrastructures
• Section 6 Democracy and activism
• Section 7 Art as partner and critic
• Section 8 Exposure to the elements
• Section 9 Atmospherics
• Section 10 Gallery
• Index