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- Convenors:
-
Veerle Spronck
(HKU University of the Arts Utrecht)
Peter Peters (Maastricht University)
Denise Petzold (Maastricht University)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
In transdisciplinary collaborations, the arts are often instrumentalized as “creative partners” rather than practices that can interrupt, slow down, and interrogate. This panel explores the practices of artists, designers, and artistic researchers to inspire STS to rethink the position of the arts.
Long Abstract:
Recently, transdisciplinary collaborations play an important role in research on societal transformations and processes. Examples are the rise of generative AI (Faisal, 2023) or issues of sustainability and climate change (Rödder, 2016). These transdisciplinary projects often promise to address societal challenges by creating more ‘robust’ and democratic knowledge, for example through alternative modes of knowledge production that bring researchers and societal actors together (Schikowitz, 2020). Given the range of scholarly disciplines and (societal) stakeholders involved, however, tensions, difficulties, and conflicts are inevitable (Felt, Igelsböck, Schikowitz, & Völker, 2016). While scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) can explain how these problems emerge and play out, the aim of synthesizing different bodies of knowledge and solving such conflicts and tensions remains.
In such transdisciplinary collaborations, the arts are often seen as “creative partners” for cooperation. They are for example expected to facilitate the communication between societal stakeholders, or act as vehicles for social critique or commentary. In this panel, we propose to see the arts not as “instrument” or “creative solution-producer". Rather, we ask how the arts can inspire transdisciplinary practice, proposing that the arts are at the core of the very societal transitions that transdisciplinary collaborations seek to address. We re-attend to the arts as practices that can interrupt, distract, deviate, slow down, create discomfort, interrogate, problematise, and confront. By doing so, we critically address the conflict-solving approach that STS scholars have attached to transdisciplinary projects.
In this combined open panel, we therefore not only invite papers, we explicitly invite artists, (social) designers, musicians, writers, and artistic researchers to share their proposals for workshops, experiments, prototypes, performances, or other artistic inventions too. Together, we aim to explore methods, ways of attending, and collaborative work practices that can inspire STS researchers to rethink the position of the arts in transdisciplinary projects.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Alexandra Murray-Leslie (NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Sophia Efstathiou (Norwegian Uni. of Science and Technology) Clemens Driessen (Wageningen University)
Short abstract:
An exercise in joyful mutual instrumentalisation brought to you by pop art-philosopho-geographers. Participants vocalise their frustrations and joys of using each other for research and art, enjoying the positive frictions of challenging hierarchy and entitlements in non-disciplinary collaboration.
Long abstract:
What is your most intimate experience with being instrumentalised, for art and/or science?
The experience of being used for someone else’s purposes or projects cuts across the arts and sciences. Looping around, instrumentalisation is non-directional and multidirectional, humanists instrumentalised by scientists as ethics or RRI consultants, instrumentalised by artists when building new art works, instrumentalised by social scientists to create cultural impacts, instrumentalised by… But is instrumentalisation really so bad? Or does it actually allow for non-disciplinary collaboration in the time of polycrises? After all, one can consent to being used.
This intervention finds the rhythm in the loop, the beat in the feedback of recurring frustrations, the non-disciplinary chorus in the disciplinary jargon. Brought to you by pop star artist-philosopher-geographers, this participatory performance lecture gets you to vocalise frustrations, and joys of sampling each other for research and art (using the public to sequence real-time ideas into a polycritical cacophonic synthesis). Crashing the logocentric model of the argument, this occasion compels mutual instrumentalisation by side-chaining non-disciplinary collaboration, positive friction, rhythm and joy.
Instrumentalise Me! is a demo of a joyful mutual instrumentalisation choir. We explore the ethics of collaboration and participation proposing that we cannot do transdisciplinarity without mutual instrumentalisation; but instrumentalisation - especially when somehow mutual - is not all that bad - it can generate harmony and dissonance, through the positive frictions of rubbing against hierarchies, egos and entitlements.
Lea Jakob (Leuphana University)
Short abstract:
The Leuphana Concert Lab is a transdisciplinary teaching & learning project at Leuphana University. Students and researchers from all faculties co-creatively develop projects with musicians from both Global North and Global South to address Global Challenges from a transdisciplinary perspective.
Long abstract:
The Leuphana Concert Lab is a transdisciplinary teaching & learning project at Leuphana University cooperating with scientific and artistic partners. Students and researchers from all faculties co-creatively develop projects with musicians from both Global North and Global South to address Global Challenges from a transdisciplinary perspective. It pursues the goal of encouraging students from all faculties to reflect on socially relevant topics through the medium of classical music and to bring them to the region.
We are especially interested how to integrate the topic of “What role for the arts in transdisciplinary collaborations” on the level of teaching and learning and are currently developing several modules for the complementary study programme. These seminar offers always bring together students and teachers from different study backgrounds with musicians. They center on one specific topic per semester (e.g. Societal Cohesion) and discuss disciplinary approaches and the specific potential of the Arts in both addressing and translating those topics for an audience.
Several seminars and concert activities with different artists have been implemented since the project started in 2023. Our accompanying research investigates how sense-making and sense-giving processes occur between the students, artists, and the audience. At the conference in Amsterdam, we would like to present the first research results, and discuss ways of aligning artists, researchers, and students to approach today’s Grand Challenges.
Lavinia Cazacu (University of Bucharest)
Short abstract:
Contemporary arts-based research prioritizes the collaborative process between artists and scientists over the final artistic objects, which repositions artistic practices as methodological inquiries, shedding light on both the individual's self-exploration and the ontological nature of art itself.
Long abstract:
The contemporary art landscape is witnessing the emergence of a dynamic paradigm that defies traditional categorizations, blurring the demarcations between artistic creation and academic inquiry, between art and science or artistic and scientific methodologies. A phenomena which is already dominant since several years, is the focus on the process and methodology of the artistic practice, which was “turned into a dynamic point of reference for theory-driven experimentation in general” (Slager, 2004). The proliferation of doctoral programs spanning various artistic practices, curatorial studies, creative writing, and creativity has elevated the methodology of artistic research practices to a prominent position within the academic realm. Consequently, projects and collaborations involving artists, scientists, and experts from diverse fields have brought to the forefront the tensions stemming from their distinct methodologies, fostering reflexivity and a deeper comprehension of their roles within the research process. Art is now expected to ‘deliver’ and current artistic production thinking shifts from the aesthetic to the utilitarian and the roles of the artists and scientists in these collaborations are blurred. The increasingly institutionalised artistic research practices are turning the artist into “a worker aiming to become a researcher” (Nowotny, 2010).
Through the examination of case studies such as Irene Kopelman's "Marine Objects", this study explores the roles of artists and scientists in the research process and methodology, particularly focusing on problem-solving approaches within this interdisciplinary methodologies.
tamara witschge (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences)
Short abstract:
In this contribution we share insights from a participatory artistic project with and about AI. We focus on the need for facilitating co-creation processes with care and intention to hold space for the vulnerability and equality needed for transdisciplinary interventions to be transformative.
Long abstract:
In this contribution we share and reflect on insights from the project “The value of art in artificial intelligence,” as well as more broadly on learnings from the participatory and artistic practices we have been involved in as artist collective and as researcher. We focus on the importance of developing a process of facilitation that allows for a collaboration based on equality. We have found it crucial that all participants are equally out of their comfort zone to be moved and learn from the project. Indeed, artists and artistic approaches have been shown effective in inspiring people to question and challenge dominant ways of working, perceptions, and norms (Berthoin Antal, 2015). Our experience learns that to create a space in which people are open and able to learn from the “other”, whether this is another person, discipline, or technology, we need to carefully design and guide the process.
In the case of learning about and from AI, which was central in the project “The value of art in artificial intelligence,” this also entailed considering differing levels of expertise and experience, as well as the biased nature of AI itself which can both impact the level of equality in the collaborations. Ultimately, we address not whether, but how art as creative partner can play a role in transdisciplinary projects and what conditions of the collaborations are needed for such projects to be transformative, acknowledging that vulnerability is required on the part of participants.
Simona Kicurovska (HKU University of the Arts, University of Humanistic Studies)
Short abstract:
The workshop explores designers' responsibility in the AI era, emphasising the transformative role of the arts in societal transitions through iterative, collaborative, and sensory-based activities. Aims to enrich dialogues on ethics in/of/for design in an STS context.
Long abstract:
The ‘Designing with Uncertainty: Co-creative event’ reimagines design practices in the context of digital automation and AI, by positioning design practices as pivotal for societal transitions. This workshop fosters critical reflection on ethical implications of integrating digital technologies in design, advocating a nuanced understanding of designers’ responsibilities.
Rooted in my doctoral research, this workshop confronts ethical challenges of opaque AI, promoting design ethics as an invitation to care. It leverages 'response-ability' (Haraway, 2016) to explore designers’ accountability, intertwining emergent knowing (Manning, 2016) with Walker's (2007) expressive-collaborative framework to redefine responsibility in design.
Structured as an exploratory journey, it involves iterative, collaborative, and sensory-based activities: from performative reading to a collective walk for material gathering and scored aesthetic encounters delving into the concept of responsibility. These explorations facilitate emergence, reflection, and engagement with critical themes of vulnerability and dependency.
Previously held in art/design contexts, this workshop's introduction to an STS setting aims to deepen transdisciplinary understandings, inspiring actionable strategies for ethical engagement and emphasizing the transformative potential of arts in ethical discourse. This venture into a new setting is expected to stimulate dialogue that enriches responsible design practices, underscoring the critical role of the arts in shaping our shared technological futures.
Clareese Hill (Northeastern University) Elly Clarke (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Short abstract:
Performance lecture/ workshop attempts to generate a prompt with participants to disrupt authorship and identity. We will create one identity across multiple inputs of experiences, backgrounds, and races, to be visible and invisible to the system of computation using Google Deep Dream and Chat GPT.
Long abstract:
Elly Clarke and Clareese Hill are Artist Researchers and collaborators thinking about how to disrupt the problematic notion of authorship. They have written collaborative texts merging identities to establish a new narrative of entangled identities from desperate ontological experiences. The performance lecture seeks to generate a prompt with participants to disrupt authorship and identity. Together with the participants, they’ll create one identity across multiple inputs of experiences, backgrounds, and races, to be visible and invisible to the system of computational surveillance. The core of the workshop will be to collaboratively generate a series of prompts across Google Deep Dream and Chat GPT to create a real and fictive assemblage identity via an image and a long biography. During the first half of the workshop, Clarke and Hill will deliver a performance lecture to unpack the notion of aliases and alter egos and how they relate to surveillance capitalism through sousveillance various methods of data collection. Both Clarke and Hill will troll their alter ego for strategies for operating in liminal spaces, under raiders, and out of the gaze of technological big brothers. We will also unpack the poetics of prompt generating for survival and opacity. The second half of the workshop will activate the skills and ideas just learned to troubleshoot the role of the algorithm’s reductive determination to create a new collaborative identity through prompt generation. The new identity will offer a speculative rest bit from the drag of identity performativity experienced in the terrestrial plane.
Irene Ortega
Short abstract:
Artistic exploration can function as an educative tool for cultivating collective dialogue about a physical phenomenon as wide, complex and unfathomable as climate change that includes scientific contributions, through the creation of fictions, shock, discomfort, and affective mobilization.
Long abstract:
Climate on the Tightrope: Imagining Future Extremes is a multidisciplinary research and educational initiative developed by an interdisciplinary team composed of artists and physicists. The artistic team comprises educators from the Pedagogical Museum of Children's Art (MuPAI), a university museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, dedicated to childhood artistic expression and research projects in art pedagogy. The scientific team consists of the Meteolab Group, researchers, and professors from the Faculty of Physical Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, focused on the dissemination of climate phenomena.
The core hypothesis of the project posits that art can function as a tool for generating knowledge, facilitating reflection and instigating inquiry into physical phenomena as broad and complex as climate change. Thus, artistic research is view as a means to cultivate collective dialogue about it, through shock, discomfort, and affective mobilization.
Implementation of the project includes a series of artistic workshops conducted in educational institutions. These workshops aim to collectively craft an art installation envisioning the aftermath of real impacts resulting from extreme atmospheric phenomena induced by climate change. The discomfort arising from the artistic capacity to construct fictional narratives and transform shared imaginaries prompts critical questioning of the physical reality underlying these phenomena, engaging a dialogue with the scientific team, wherein artistic exploration actively contributes to and propels the scientific reflection. Consequently, this collaboration becomes the catalyst for generating questions, fostering doubts, facilitating dialogues, and encouraging reflective and creative analysis concerning these climate-related events.
Helene Day Fraser (Emily Carr University and Simon Fraser University) Ayako Takagi (University of British Columbia (UBC)) Jihyun Park (Simon Fraser University) Leila Berg (Emily Carr University of Art Design) Eden Zinchik (Emily Carr University of Art Design)
Short abstract:
A workshop series convening a diverse group of designers, artists, Indigenous knowledge keepers and scientists used embodied, story-sharing approaches that embraced slowness, and ambiguity to interrogate and confront boundaries that exist between fields of expertise and lived experience.
Long abstract:
Designers and artists are often privileged to work with like-minded individuals in other disciplines with the intent to enable responsible engagement and care of our environment. This type of collective work involves acknowledging the ecological imperative to change current unsustainable behaviours and requires new approaches to collectively address the climate crisis. Seeking to find ways to develop relevant transdisciplinary collaborations, a participatory workshop series titled WITH Trees: The New? Material! Relations. Project was conducted, in Spring 2023. The project convened a diverse group of designers, artists, Indigenous knowledge keepers and scientists with the intent to identify new strategies and decolonizing approaches for working with biobased materials as alternatives to petroleum, in particular biomass (cellulose fibres) from the forest. Comprised of making/thinking/discussion activities, embodied approaches embraced slowness, and ambiguity to help interrogate, and confront boundaries that exist between fields of expertise and lived experience. The gatherings stimulated and captured expansive, iterative local collective sharing and envisaging related to our relationship with and use of biomass (cellulose fibres) from the forest. This paper shares approaches taken by the WITH Trees research team based out of a material focused design research lab within a Canadian art and design institution that has increasingly considered and sought ways of validating multiple and alternate histories (and presents, and futures) connected to material, practice-based research. Story-sharing Assemblages made up of made-material objects and language outputs (encompassing visual, tactile embodied, spoken and written modes of communication) that were applied in the WITH Trees workshops will be discussed.
Barbara Koole (Tilburg University) Lisa de Roeck (University of Antwerp) Krzysztof Janas Cecilie Sachs Olsen
Short abstract:
An empirical paper comparing four experiences with theatre-based participatory processes in Drama Labs. In each case. We explore how theatre might help us understand the role of different, potentially conflicting perspectives in transdisciplinary collaborations for urban transformations.
Long abstract:
This paper addresses the prevailing critique on consensus-seeking approaches in urban development and planning, and the traction gained by proponents of a so-called agonistic urban planning. This approach to planning might better accommodate differences and disagreements to ensure a more inclusive participatory politics and transdisciplinary collaborations (see Fainstein, 2010; Healey, 2003; Hillier, 2003; Metzger, 2017; Huxley & Yiftachel, 2000; Legacy et al. 2014; Pløger, 2022). Agonistic planning is, however, critiqued for a large gap between its practice and its theoretical approaches, and there is little work done that practically and empirically addresses how the nature of the conflict between different social actors can be identified, expressed, and negotiated in participatory planning processes. In response, this paper explores how drama labs, by means of theatre-based methods, can put agonistic planning into practice.
We compare experiences from four drama labs: participatory processes that were developed through art-research collaborations using theatre-based methods around urban climate-related conflicts. These drama labs were executed in Drammen (Norway), Gdynia (Poland), Tilburg (the Netherlands) and Genk (Belgium) – each with a unique approach and set-up, based on intensive research in the respective areas. In this paper we explore how developing such drama labs can be understood as institutionalizing arenas for productive conflict. We investigate whether drama labs can increase the transformative capacity of cities, by providing participatory processes that better accommodate and handle the presence of conflicts. This paper demonstrates how theatre might help us understand the role of different, potentially conflicting perspectives in transdisciplinary collaborations for inclusive urban transformations.
Monica Tușinean (Technische Universität Berlin)
Short abstract:
The emergence of artistic and design-driven methodologies allowed for tackling issues of industrial heritage that lay at the intersection of spatial and cultural practices. A method assemblage of video vignettes and hand drawings could mend a lacuna in the discourse on transformation and reuse.
Long abstract:
The design-driven research into the potential for maintenance and transformation of post-socialist industrial architecture in Romania has uncovered that the research gap lay not within spatial issues but constituted a cultural crisis:
As cultural amnesia became enforced by post-communist Romanian institutional culture (Wicke, 2018, p. 126), valuable industrial heritage sites were threatened with erasure and, along with them, an essential part of Romanian collective memory. It became evident that architectural research into the topic required developing a novel methodological toolset that allowed explorations rooted in design that could tackle hybrid cultural issues.
The missing method lay in an artistic design-oriented approach that would mediate between representation and architectural intervention strategy and that could embody the “shift of the gaze” (Ranciere, 2005, p. 13-25) onto industrial heritage sites by showing modes of reflection and possibilities for further action.
The process evolved into an assemblage of methods and uncovered a new methodology: “phenomenographic” (Troiani, 2020, p. 247) video vignettes of multiple case study sites that illustrated analysis modes, design proposals, and narrative context through the overlap of video, hand drawings, and annotated sketches. This experimental artistic process, relying on the making explicit of auto-ethnographic tacit knowledge, has uncovered how “spatial and representational expertise from architecture can be applied in other disciplines” (Von Ballestrem, 2023, p. 111).
This contribution to the “Making and Doing Transformations” aims to showcase and explore how artistic design-driven research can mend a lacuna in architectural discourse and offer solutions for rescuing fragile urban heritage sites.
Manuela Viezzer
Short abstract:
We will play and discuss “Promise Me” and “Eat Me Eat Me Not”, two persuasive art games exploring themes of intensive farming, animal exploitation and veganism, which make use of Promise cards as a design feature to enhance impact on player behaviour after game sessions.
Long abstract:
The development of “Promise Me” and “Eat Me Eat Me Not” is part of a larger artistic research project investigating how to design art games that can be used to help humans make kin with the nonhuman others with whom we share Earth. Both games are persuasive games for sustainability, because they embed design features creating a direct link between the play world and the real world, and because of themes of their storylines. “Promise Me” has also been used as a test-case to investigate how to increase players’ responsibility towards a game topic, in collaboration with the gaming department of the TUDelft, with encouraging results.
During the combined format open panel on "Creative partners? Repositioning the arts in transdisciplinary collaborations" I will reflect on my transdisciplinary collaboration with the TUDelft researchers, reporting on the results of the test-case study and their impact on the further development of my artistic practice. I will also set up the two art games and involve the panel participants in playing a few game sessions followed by short debrief sessions. The debrief sessions will focus on how the players perceive their own game choices (both games allow for role playing), the game storyline, and the game mechanics. Part of the discussion will address how the combination of art and gaming techniques not only facilitates the communication among stakeholders, but also has the potential to enact societal transitions.
Rimvyde Muzikeviciute (University of Groningen- Campus Fryslân)
Short abstract:
The study explores how sensory and arts-based approaches can strengthen human-nature connectedness and consequently inspire local sustainable food practices while fostering environmental awareness and inner connections to sustainability.
Long abstract:
Increasing society’s disconnection from nature, both on individual and collective levels, is often defined as a root cause for unsustainability and environmental crises. This in turn affects food consumption practices and one’s understanding of food supply chains and systems. To restore human-nature connectedness (HNC) many studies focus on quantitative approaches further encouraging ‘emotional ignorance’ known as a ‘knowing- feeling’ gap. By integrating sensory ethnography and arts-based interventions, this study reveals how engaging with art and one’s senses can deepen one’s understanding of and connection to a local landscape and its biodiversity, leading to more environmentally friendly food practices.
The core aim of our case study research was to deepen the understanding of place-based food practices in Biella (Italy) in relation to existing local artistic expressions, such as pottery. To cultivate awareness on sustainable local food practices this study focuses on exploring ‘embodied being in’ and ‘embodied understanding of’ one’s natural environment. This dynamic relationship was explored through an integrated research design built on an arts-based intervention. The framework of the intervention inherently considers arts and cultural practices to be embedded within a place-based food culture and agricultural context, reflecting the panel's interest in discussing arts not as a mere tool for problem-solving but as an integral to societal transitions and environmental engagement.
As we navigate the complexities of transitions towards sustainability, our study advocates for a re-envisioned role of the arts—beyond instruments of climate change communication or critique—to core elements that inspire transdisciplinary collaborations and artful sustainability outlook.
Leora Farber (University of Johannesburg)
Short abstract:
How collaborations between the visual arts, life sciences and biotechnology can give rise to new, experimentally driven creative possibilities. I draw on my experience as an artist working in collaboration with a microbiologist and the ways in which this allowed for symbiotic forms of exchange.
Long abstract:
Historically, art and science were considered to be oppositional disciplines with different theoretical, methodological and practical conceptions of what constitutes ‘research’. Within this divisive paradigm, art is seen as being in service of science; the artist-as-technician applies their skills to visually communicate scientific ideas or forms.
These entrenched divisions between art and science are increasingly being eroded through transdisciplinary collaborations. For example, in ‘biological art’ praxis, art, biology and biotechnology converge through deployment of biomatter as media and content, using scientific protocols and methods. Life-scientists and artists work synergistically to explore how transdisciplinary research can operate as a critical-creative mode of catalysing alternative knowledges, understandings, narratives, sensibilities and imaginaries.
Bioart presents a creative space of play for experimentally driven, practice-led research. Collaborators share a mutual curiosity and the recognition that, often, an objective may only be achieved through untested methods of working that involve risk and chance. Bioart offers exciting potential for introducing speculative methods of working with biomatter; engaging in new forms of collaborative praxis; exploring innovative ways of working with existing biomaterials and producing new ones; introducing methodologies in which art and science are situated as mutually valid knowledge systems; and facilitating engagement in areas of theoretical study that pertain to the entangled relationships between humans and the more-the-human.
In this paper, I explore ways in which these transformative possibilities play out with reference to my 'cultured colonies/colonial cultures' series of bacterial casts, made in collaboration with microbiologist during a 5-month residency at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia.
Diana Milena Acosta Cruz
Short abstract:
This classical music performance becomes a journey through the forest, like a tale supported by interdisciplinary tools, such as a narrator, projected images and electronic sounds. The audience will forget the usual expectations of classical music and will rediscover the music itself again.
Long abstract:
Old-fashioned, distant, difficult… This is the typical perception of classical music nowadays. Even the music written in our frenetic century, our contemporary music, struggles to find opportunities in concert programs because the audience, and even musicians, consider it incomprehensible and not beautiful anymore. How can modern musicians deliver the true essence of music? How can they create accessible, enjoyable and surprising performances?
The Wonders of the Forest is a musical performance that allows the audience to engage again with classical music thanks to its focus on the powerful artistic concept of the performance: giving priority to the theme and supporting it with innovative performance elements, such as storytelling, visuals and electronic sounds.
The structure of the performance is a tale through the forest, a journey to discover oneself across nature, sound and time. It has a unique repertoire selection, including cutting-edge contemporary pieces with electronics (synchronization of specially recorded tracks with piano live performance), original script and image design made by the pianist of the project, and live narration of the story.
The listeners will smoothly follow this beautiful allegoric story of transformation with impactful and unforgettable moments, such as the birds in the forest, the bells or the rain tree. But at the same time, subtly and unconsciously, they will experience a journey through more than a century of classical music, from late romanticism to the exciting 21st century, while listening to contemporary music without pressure or prejudices.
Approximate duration between 20-30min
Classical piano performance