Paper short abstract:

This contribution probes the heuristic, if not subversive potential of video art for video analysis in STS, and vice-versa. For this purpose, the contribution reenacts and reexamines a promotional video of a big science project – the so-called “Human Brain Project” (HBP).

Paper long abstract:

Visual analysis, and more recently video analysis, remains an important research strategy in STS at large (Carusi et al. 2015; Coopmans et al. 2014), as well as for particular approaches in and beyond STS, including ethnography and ethnomethodology (Broth et al. 2014; Sormani et al., forthcoming). Video art, in turn, has hardly provided an STS topic, let alone an analytic resource, in contrast to fiction and non-fiction film (e.g., Galison 2015; Macbeth 1999). Therefore, this contribution probes the heuristic, if not subversive potential of video art for video analysis in STS, and vice-versa (for a related line of argument, see Uroskie 2014). More specifically, this contribution makes the case for reenactment as a research strategy, on the one hand, and the video display of its startling results for an institutional and conceptual critique, on the other. The contribution sets out with examining a promotional video for a big science project - the so-called "Human Brain Project" (HBP) - and then draws upon filmed reenactments of selected video sequences as an heuristic resource to make explicit the video's methodic montage, a montage which lends "social credibility" (Shapin 1995) to arguable cognitivist reductions (notably in view of "neuromorphic computing"). In so doing, the outlined paper contributes to an "institutional critique" (Fraser 2005) of big science projects of potentially artistic interest too, given the envisaged video display and its site-specific installation at the 4S/EASST conference.