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Short abstract

Artists and artistic researchers are expected to collaborate in interdisciplinary or non-artistic settings. But how to collaborate well? I explore how artistic research as generous practice, turns collaboration into an ethical practice which allows for moral playfulness and experimentation.

Long abstract

Over the past decades, artistic research – research in and through art practices – has become institutionalized within higher art education and beyond as a recognizable and justified form of knowledge production. Artistic researchers increasingly are called upon to collaborate with scientists, engineers, societal stakeholders, and policymakers – especially around topics of societal concern. While debates on the epistemological status of artistic knowledge linger on, artistic researchers in practice rather struggle with challenges dealing with their normative position within collaborative and/or interdisciplinary contexts.

To collaborate as an artistic researcher (especially in non-artistic contexts) entails a lot of ethical work – work that often remains invisible or implicit. Part of this ethical work includes dealing with (emerging) expectations about what comes to counts as “good work”, which includes assumptions about the conditions of working together, specific norms of how to work together, and ideas about the possible value an artistic outcome of such collaborative processes could have (Van de Werff, 2025). Based on empirical examples of the artistic research group What Art Knows, I explore how such implicit norms and values can be turned into artistic material for collaborative experimentation. Through shared exercises, I propose an attitude of generosity – including a radical openness and a moral playfulness – which allows for tracing immanent and emergent values and concerns or shifting roles. Generosity does justice to collaboration as messy, ethical practice.

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Short abstract

The use of Labanotation to reveal structures in the movements of microscopic animals that may augment existing biological observation vocabularies, introducing the hypothesis that choreographic notation can expose spatial and temporal patterns not captured in current observational frameworks.

Long abstract

This presentation introduces a methodological experiment at the intersection of artistic practice and evolutionary biology in a space context. The project develops a notation-based approach for analysing the movements of Bdelloid rotifers recorded in microgravity experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS), as part of the research project Ēngines of Ēternity (Vermeulen et al., 2022).

The method applies Labanotation, a formal system originally developed to record human dance (McCaw, 2012), to transcribe the microscopic movements of rotifers observed in video recordings. Through observation and movement analysis derived from choreographic practice, conducted both manually and through algorithmic motion tracking, rotifer trajectories, orientations, and temporal patterns are translated into symbolic movement scores. This provides a structured representation of behavioural sequences that complements existing biological analyses by focusing on the spatial organisation, repetition and rhythm of organisms' movements.

The work is framed within boundary object theory (Star & Griesemer, 1989). In this project, the notation score functions as a boundary object between artistic movement analysis and evolutionary biology. It allows the findings to be positioned simultaneously within the evolutionary biological analysis of rotifer behaviour and within the art–science methodological framework developed in this project.

The presentation outlines the methodological process and introduces the project’s central hypothesis: that translating rotifer movements into choreographic notation may expose movement structures that are difficult to describe using existing observational vocabularies alone.

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Short abstract

Drawing on several art and design doctoral research projects at the Bauhaus Uni Weimar, this paper proposes “boundariness” as a postdisciplinary methodological framework for collaboration, extending Star’s pragmatism to boundary agents, spaces, images, and practices.

Long abstract

For art and design researchers, boundary objects (Star and Griesemer) offer a tangible, flexible, aesthetic, and highly effective instrument for collaboration that differ from other theoretical objects, such as epistemic objects (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger), hybrid objects (Bruno Latour), or hyperobjects (Timothy Morton). The pragmatist framing of the boundary objects approach to research collaboration enables artists and designers to contribute to multilateral knowledge transfer processes without diminishing their claims to epistemological autonomy or creative novelty—a common concern among artists working in interdisciplinary settings who resist becoming mere translators of scientific knowledge. At the same time, interdisciplinary collaboration often entails boundary work (as described by Thomas Gieryn and later Henk Borgdorff) that emerges within both conventional art-world spheres, and within academic institutions that may not fully recognize artistic practice as a research methodology. This presentation proposes boundariness as a conceptual framework for understanding how artistic research operates within inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations between art, science, technology, and society, leading to new configurations of e.g. boundary agents, boundary images, boundary processes, boundary spaces, and boundary practices. Drawing on eight years of directing the PhD program in Art and Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the presentation reflects on several doctoral projects as empirical cases through which these new configrations may be experienced and articulated. By conceptualizing boundariness as a post-disciplinary methodological sensibility of practice-based research, the presentation contributes to ASTS debates on how creative collaboration can generate new epistemic and relational spaces while negotiating the infrastructures that enable—and sometimes constrain—such work.

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Short abstract

Based on a study of a sustainability research centre, we examine how contested epistemic cultures create barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration and how introducing artists as epistemic partners can generate boundary practices and mediation processes that advance sustainability transformation.

Long abstract

Interdisciplinary sustainability research is widely understood as essential to support biodiversity transformations, yet little empirical work examines how epistemic cultures are negotiated over time within sustainability research centers. We present a two-year case study of the Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science, analysing both its formative first year and its subsequent experimentation with art-science integration.

In the first year, interviews and survey data revealed contested understandings of what counts as valid data, what knowledge is, what makes work useful, and what collaboration should look like. Interdisciplinary work mostly operated as a space of coordination, shaped by different research standards, different working speeds, and disciplinary reward systems. Collaboration often remained additive rather than genuinely co-productive, reflecting uneven development of communities of practice and persistent asymmetries in epistemic legitimacy.

In the second year, we were able to fund integration of artists into the centre as equal epistemic partners. We analyse new empirical material on how these new collaborations influence research design, collective sense-making and sustainability-oriented transformation. Particular attention is given to artistic practices as boundary objects and arts-based interventions that facilitate conceptual integration, emotional engagement, and relational depth in collective inquiry processes . We also examine emerging art-science mediation methods developed to address communication asymmetries and foster interactional expertise across disciplines.

By comparing first- and second-year dynamics, the paper examines whether and how creative boundary work can shift interdisciplinary practice toward more reciprocal and transformative modes of sustainability research.

Keywords: epistemic cultures, interdisciplinarity, art-science collaboration, boundary objects, mediation, sustainability transformation.

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Short abstract

Science film festivals are ASTS settings in which actors, visual materials, and organisational arrangements craft the boundaries of science in society. Our historical case study shows how infrastructural aspects of the festival and different expertises contributed to shape the science-art boundary.

Long abstract

Science film festivals are epistemic spaces where technoscientific knowledge encounters artistic epistemologies through the medium of science film. Building on STS accounts of film as part of technoscience’s visual culture and epistemic practices (Gouyon, 2016; Wellmann, 2011), this contribution examines festivals as sites where collaborative knowledge-making is materially and organisationally accomplished through ongoing boundary-work and infrastructural arrangements. We analyse this boundary-work through the notion of “infrastructural choreography”, that is the patterned, yet continually adjusted, alignment of selection pipelines, classificatory regimes, evaluation devices, and award-making practices that coordinates actors (scientists, filmmakers, educators, curators, jurors) and materials (films, catalogues, entry forms, jury reports, screening formats, rules, categories). Shifting attention from representation to infrastructure foregrounds the mundane work of maintenance, calibration, and translation: composing juries, stabilising evaluative languages across pedagogy and scientific authority, thus negotiating evidentiary standards. In this sense, festivals operate as boundary infrastructures that both enable circulation and enforce accountability, rendering “science film” legible and comparable. Empirically, we develop an archive-based historical case study of the Rassegna Internazionale del Film Scientifico-Didattico hosted at the University of Padua (1956–1975), a yearly meeting point for research and educational films from across the world. By tracing how films were selected, categorised, judged, and awarded, we show how infrastructural decisions enacted shifting demarcations between science, education, and cinema, and how these arrangements produced situated knowledges that travelled internationally via moving images.

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Short abstract

This study examines how theatre develops new socio-technical imaginaries for dementia care using the ASTS framework. Participatory workshops and improvisation enable participants to co-create innovative care scenarios. Theatre serves as an epistemic tool to redefine technology and future care.

Long abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, Art, Science and Technology Studies (ASTS) have developed, challenging traditional boundaries that separated art, science, and technology (Rogers 2024). In care, especially in Medical Humanities, ASTS has been productive (Parolin & Pellegrinelli, 2026). It generates and critically examines collaboration, contamination, and co-production between art and science (Rogers et al. 2023). By creating participatory spaces, ASTS encourages collective knowledge. In the ASTS framework, we explore the link between theatre and caring for people with dementia through empirical research using improvisation and participatory design in Healthcare Residences. As Bouchard and Mermikides (2024) note, artistic engagement broadens health's epistemology beyond clinical reasoning, fostering diverse understanding of care. Our work shows theatre as a co-production site where artistic, clinical, and experiential knowledge intersect to shape socio-technical imaginaries of dementia care.

The study employs theatrical improvisation and participatory workshops to help residents, caregivers, and facilitators collaboratively create socio-technical care scenarios based on daily practices. The findings reveal that these scenarios present a vision of technology as an evolving relational actor within the dementia care ecology—one that functions through predictive (temporality), performative (enactment), affective (embodiment), and ethical (care) potentialities. Methodologically, the contribution shows that theatre acts as an epistemic device that contextualises and reshapes how care and technology are expressed and practised. The performance becomes a crucial liminal space for externalising sociotechnical conflicts and co-creating futures beyond the present.

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Short abstract

This paper examines musical sonification as an ASTS practice in which sensors, environments, artistic mapping, and community radio co-produce situated and affective ways of knowing ecological futures through more-than-human collaboration.

Long abstract

This paper positions musical sonification as a practice of Art, Science and Technology Studies (ASTS). Rather than treating sonification as a neutral technique for translating data into sound, it examines how ecological sensing, artistic mapping, technological infrastructure, and public mediation are collaboratively assembled to produce situated and affective knowledge.

The case presented draws on plant-physiological, soil, and meteorological data from an urban forest. These data are transformed into music through mapping processes that assign sonic and musical parameters to measured and derived variables. The paper argues that this mapping is a form of boundary work: it negotiates between scientific measurement, technical processing, aesthetic decision-making, and communicative intent.

The contribution, therefore, focuses less on sonification as representation and more on sonification as collaborative practice. It shows how environmental sensors, nonhuman actors, artistic choices, and community radio together create a third epistemic space in which ecological relations can be heard, interpreted, and discussed. In this sense, musical sonification can open an affective mode of engagement with environmental change and resilient futures that conventional graphs rarely provide.

By analysing how such collaborations are practised, the paper speaks directly to ASTS debates on creative and relational labour, situated knowledge, and the making of more-than-now futures.

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Short abstract

This paper examines hydrosexual performance-making as an ASTS collaboration where accessibility becomes creative, relational labour. Through crip technoscience and disabled ecologies, it reframes the Baltic Sea as a more-than-human collaborator in situated knowledge production.

Long abstract

Presentation (theoretical–empirical paper) with openness to dialogue with the workshop and reflection sessions

This presentation contributes to Art, Science and Technology Studies (ASTS) by examining accessibility as a form of creative and relational labour within collaborative performance-making. Drawing on an ongoing artistic research project, "The Baltic Sea’s Divorce from Toxic Humanity", the presentation analyzes how hydrosexual performance operates as a third epistemic space in which queer feminist posthumanism, disability studies, and brackish (blue) humanities intersect with artistic and technological practices.

Rather than treating accessibility as a technical add-on, the project conceptualizes access as an intimate, processual, and epistemological condition of collaboration. Bringing together hydrofeminism, crip technoscience, and disability aesthetics, the presentation explores how concepts such as disabled ecologies, access intimacy, and wet cripistemology actively shape the making of a multisensory, more-than-human performance. In this framework, the Baltic Sea functions not as a backdrop or object of representation, but as an injured yet agential collaborator whose material conditions co-produce the performance’s aesthetic, ethical, and infrastructural design.

The presentation engages directly with ASTS concerns around boundary work, showing how accessibility practices blur distinctions between art, environmental knowledge, care infrastructures, and performance technologies. It argues that cripped hydrosexual performance generates situated, inclusive knowledge by foregrounding vulnerability, interdependence, and damaged environments as productive sites of collaboration rather than problems to be solved.

By framing accessibility as creative collaboration across human and nonhuman actors, the paper proposes hydrosexual performance as an ASTS methodology for imagining resilient, more-than-now futures grounded in care, relationality, and collective responsibility.

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Short abstract

This contribution frames ethnography as a mimetic practice shaped through encounters with art–science projects, activating new forms of situated epistemic experimentation through fieldwork.

Long abstract

This contribution starts from the proposition that ethnography is fundamentally a mimetic space. Since the early history of anthropology, mimesis has been treated with ambivalence, often distinguished from imitation and positioned in tension with modern forms of knowledge. However, since the 1980s, different authors have challenged this distinction, showing that ethnographic practice itself involves embodied, affective, and mimetic processes through which researchers attune to the worlds they study.

Building on this perspective, I argue that when ethnography comes into close contact with art–science practices, its mimetic character becomes particularly generative. Drawing on my ongoing ethnography of neuroscience laboratories in Colombia, I focus on groups of neuroscientists who are themselves deeply interested in art–science collaborations and in experimenting with alternative forms of expression. Sustained engagement with their experimental practices, tools, and aesthetic concerns permeated my own ways of sensing, thinking, and working, encouraging me to explore formats beyond conventional academic writing. Rather than remaining confined to representational accounts, ethnographic fieldwork triggered tentative forms of expression influenced by the practices and sensibilities of the community itself.

In this trajectory, mimesis operates as a mode of creative and relational labour that transforms ethnography from a detached observational stance into a practice of interrogation. The ethnographic process becomes a space for questioning the current conditions of ethnographic work, as well as the broader situation of critical approaches within these settings. The contribution narrates this process through experimental audiovisual and performative practices developed using art–science techniques learned in collaboration with neuroscientists.

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Short abstract

This paper examines what constitutes dramaturgical expertise in extended reality performance (XRP). Through thematic analysis of conversations between an XRP researcher and a digital dramaturg, key dimensions of such expertise for XRP are identified.

Long abstract

The emergence of extended reality performance (XRP) has changed what constitutes dramaturgical expertise. Adjectives used in this context, such as digital dramaturg (Kates, 2025) or tech dramaturg (Weijdom, 2025), signal the importance of negotiating technological affordances in the dramaturgy of XRP. In this context, practitioners play dramaturgically with technologies and the virtual spaces they create, often drawing attention to intersections of physical and virtual realities by shifting between virtual, augmented and physical realities (O’Dwyer et al., 2025). However, the dramaturgical expertise this requires is largely tacit, making it difficult to study, teach, or transfer. This paper thus addresses the question: What constitutes dramaturgical expertise in XRP practice?

Drawing on enactive cognition theory (Gallagher, 2020) and the concepts of reflection-in/on-action (Schön, 1983), we approach dramaturgical expertise as knowing-in-practice. As practitioners themselves tend to have the most suitable grasp of emerging practices and their theoretical implications (Penny, 2019; O'Dwyer et al., 2025), our research centers around the practitioner's voice in understanding XRP dramaturgical practices.

Our empirical basis consists of six in-depth conversations between an XRP researcher and a digital dramaturg, structured around a six-layer dramaturgical framework (Bleeker, 2023). The thematic analysis of these conversations reveals dimensions of dramaturgical expertise specific to XRP, informing what dramaturgs attend to, how they manage situations, and what repertoire they draw upon. These findings form groundwork for further research into XRP practices, while offering foundations for art and design pedagogy in this emerging field.

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Short abstract

This presentation traces silica across its material continuum, from stellar nucleosynthesis to semiconductor. Through fieldwork at major observatories and an “intermaterial method”, it surfaces material interconnections and operating assumptions embedded in technological infrastructures.

Long abstract

Silica is the residue of exploding stars, the sand beneath our feet, and the core material of the silicon chip driving AI. Its continuum from the cosmic to the computational is both metaphorical and material. What is revealed about the logic of technological acceleration when its core material is traced from supernova to silicon chip? The research project We Are Supernova pursues this question through an “intermaterial method”: using fieldwork and material investigation, from within art practice, to surface the compositional histories concealed within technology.

This method develops, in part, through creative collaboration with scientists. At Vera Rubin Observatory, Chile, surveying the southern sky in search of dark matter and cosmic transients, a drone was deployed to film its own reflection alongside the Rubin Observatory, in mirrors referencing the telescope mirror collecting light from the edge of the visible universe: technology reflecting technology in eternal self-referentiality. At SETI’s Hat Creek Observatory, listening for extraterrestrial communication, anything that doesn’t resemble human-made technology is discarded as noise – the search for other intelligences is limited to our own reflection. Here, a filmed meditation session – a human antenna, was staged in a field of radio telescopes, while scientists animated them – a collaboration where the boundary between observation and performance was obscured.

The research is conducted through an MSCA postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths University of London, and will take the form of a live performed text alongside a video work enacting rather than reporting the intermaterial method.

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Short abstract

This paper examines how ASTS collaborations are practiced within the FAMOS project. Using VR simulations and Personas of the Seas as boundary objects, we navigate the relational labour between engineering and civic engagement to co-create situated and resilient maritime futures.

Long abstract

The UN Ocean Decade marks a stabilization of the ocean’s role in global science and economy. As nations turn toward maritime territories, we face a pivotal transition in human-ocean relations. We ask: how can integrating artistic epistemologies transform collaborative research practices? We examine this through a process of making and doing within the FAMOS project, which develops a blueprint for Offshore Floating Multi-Use Energy Platforms.

In FAMOS, we engage in boundary work to navigate the interface between engineering and society. We utilize Art as boundary objects for cross-disciplinary communication in two ways: First, through embodied VR simulations, participants physically inhabit a digital representation of a floating island. This experience "materializes" a non-existent technology, triggering creativity and allowing stakeholders to identify regional needs incorporated into the "open island" design. Second, we developed Personas of the Seas to represent non-human actors, ensuring ecological agency is integrated into early design stages.

Our work reveals that sustaining such third epistemic spaces requires intense relational labour. We act as mediators between conflicting worldviews: translating the technical focus of engineers, the financial logic of business (CAPEX/EROI), the preservationist stance of NGOs, and the diverse local communities' perspectives. By navigating these practical and value-based choices, we demonstrate how ASTS practices foster dialogue among stakeholders, bridging epistemologies to generate situated knowledge. Through art and inclusive dialogue, FAMOS moves beyond technical blueprints, contributing to more imaginative and resilient maritime futures.

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Short abstract

Embodied counter-mapping grounded in Dharug and Gamilaraay Indigenous design methods invites participants in Poland to sense London’s buried waters, ecologies, and colonial histories through walking, yarning, and oral reflection translated into text, cultivating belonging, reciprocity, and healing.

Long abstract

This contribution presents an embodied counter-mapping workshop grounded in Indigenous design methodologies developed through a Dharug and Gamilaraay practice-based PhD and teaching centred on Remembering Country, Country Sensing Design, and Design Relationality. The work is led by a Dharug and Gamilaraay designer and Associate Professor of the Built Environment whose intertwined Indigenous and English ancestral lineages position her in relation to both unceded Australian lands and the imperial geographies of Europe.

Situated within a conference in Poland while counter-mapping London as an ecological and cultural landscape shaped by empire, extraction, rupture, and displacement, the workshop asks whether those connected to colonising histories can learn ethically from the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth. Walking, sensing, yarning, and collective making invite participants to attune to buried waterways, altered soils, migrant plant ecologies, atmospheric relations, and more-than-human presences that continue to connect Britain to the many Countries transformed through colonial expansion.

Reflection occurs first as oral relational witnessing, shared collectively and grounded in Indigenous knowledge practice. This spoken reflection is then carefully translated into written form as a trace of relational learning rather than extraction. Decolonisation is approached not as reversal or accusation but as a practice of love enacted through reciprocity, custodial awareness, across time. The workshop contributes an embodied oral-to-text reflective method to art, science, and technology studies, demonstrating how Indigenous design knowledge can open ethical space within imperial geographies toward futures grounded in belonging, love, ecological renewal.

Counter-mapping; Design Relationality; Remembering Country; Indigenous methodologies; decolonising design; ecological healing.

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Short abstract

In the political economy of the ‘neoliberal’ university, how do we experiment with and perform new forms of scholarship centred on collaboration, creativity and critical enquiry that help to break from the conventions of traditional scholarship that limit possibility in art-science collaborations?

Long abstract

This paper emerges from both my PhD work and a decade of experience facilitating collaborations between artists and academic researchers. It identifies a growing frustration amongst the art-science community of Bristol, that certain conventions of normative scholarship and University bureaucracy are having impacts not only the relationships themselves, but are shaping a very specific form of creativity and artistic practice that succeeds, shutting down other possibilities for epistemic opportunity and collaboration.

It foregrounds literature that points towards the increased level of capitalist practices within universities that orientate academics and artists away from scholarship that engages with collaboration or critial enquiry. The paper proposes that for these collaborations to succeed in building new domains of creativity and epistemology those engaged in the collaboration need to shed their organisation conventions stepping into a liminal domain or boundary space that sits outside discipline or organisation.

The paper articulates five core principles that provide a potential framework of governance for this liminal boundary. Following these principles or ethics would support new forms of scholarship and collaboration to be performed and maintained. These five principles or characteristics – autonomous, creative, open, collective and relational – are elaborated on with reflections from a series of experiments I carried out over my PhD in an attempt to understand the limitations and possibilities of performing new forms of scholarship.

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Short abstract

Glacial Hauntologies is an intra-disciplinary collaboration entangling contemporary art practices and glacier science. We explore what it is gained in our understanding of planetary ice when we do art and science through one another, and create works that foster new ways of relating to glaciers.

Long abstract

Comprised of both glaciologists and environmental artists, Glacial Hauntologies is an intra-disciplinary collaboration entangling contemporary art practices and glacier science. Through print, sound, pedagogy, writing, textile, sculpture, movement, fieldwork, and physics, we translate, subvert, and repurpose tools from many disciplines to explore geophysical data, glaciological archives, glacier memory, and alternate ways of relating to glaciers.

We will present some of the sculptural, sound, film, data, teaching, and performance work we have developed together since 2022.

- SIGNAL is a large sculptural fabric installation. Hung using materials used for glacier travel and weighted with ice cores, the sculpture changes shape as the melting of the ice core alters the stress distribution across it.

- WAKE is an audio-digital performance piece, using sonified seismic data from glacier calving events and glitched images from an archive of early US military incursions into Antarctica.

- MEDIAL MORAINE is an exploration of the teaching practices of two of our members on the Juneau Icefield, teaching scientific and artistic methods through one another.

The tensions that we grapple with in this collaboration reflect tensions embedded in how today’s society relates to glaciers. We explore how to: simultaneously hold responsibility for destabilizing the climate with the natural cyclicity of geologic systems that defies the life/death extinction binary; translate between the shared experiences of human bodies and icy bodies, convey the entanglement between human and geologic timescales, and dis/re-entangle the understanding that emerges from technologically mediated measurements (e.g., radar, remote sensing) and embodied ways of knowing.

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Short abstract

This workshop enacts the more-than-now through collage as a speculative, participatory method in ASTS. Participants collaboratively cut, layer, and recompose texts, images, and artifacts to explore contingent socio-technical arrangements, more-than-human relations, and futures worth realizing today.

Long abstract

Building on the EASST 2026 theme of the more-than-now, this workshop proposes collage as a speculative and participatory method for enacting alternative socio-technical futures in the present. Rather than approaching futures as distant projections, the session mobilizes material and aesthetic practices to rehearse how desired futures might begin today. Situated within Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS), the workshop draws on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons and Alphonso Lingis’ notion of a “community without commons” to frame collaboration as a plural, relational, and fragile epistemic gathering.

Collage functions as both method and metaphor. Through cutting, layering, and recomposing fragments of texts, diagrams, ecological imagery, and technological artifacts, participants expose the contingency of socio-technical arrangements while materially assembling speculative alternatives. From an anthropological standpoint, collage assembles partial perspectives and traces relations across human and non-human actors, foregrounding embodied, affective, and material modes of inquiry over predictive or extractive models of futures research.

Structured in three stages—conceptual framing, collective making, and reflective discussion—the workshop generates artifacts that operate as boundary objects and infrastructures for shared imagination. By transforming audiences into co-researchers, the session models STS as an active practice of world-making. In leaning into contemporary crises through collaborative experimentation, it enacts the more-than-now, demonstrating how fragmented, collective, and more-than-human engagements can help realize futures worth living in.

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Short abstract

When gaze becomes traceable in creative collaboration, it can serve as a shared point of reference while remaining open to interpretation. The paper asks under what conditions such cues are trusted, ignored, or contested—and how this reshapes relevance and coordination in the moment.

Long abstract

In collaborative making, we rarely “see what others see”: in real-world situations, attention must be inferred from talk, gesture, and the choreography of bodies around a table. This paper asks what changes when looking leaves a trace—when attention becomes perceptible in the shared workspace.

While groups engage in collaborative material composition—working with a palette of wooden blocks, tiles, interlocking modules, and paper elements—we introduce an otherwise unavailable property of collaboration: participants’ gaze becomes mutually visible as dots and short traces that settle onto objects and surfaces. Color indicates whose gaze it is; size reflects how long attention lingers. These marks act as visual residues of looking, turning fleeting attention into something others can encounter and work with.

Rather than treating such cues as neutral representations, we frame them as inscriptions that reconfigure what becomes referable and accountable in practice (Latour, 1987). Once present in shared space, gaze traces can be taken up, aligned with, ignored, or contested, shifting how groups stabilize shared reference while negotiating design decisions. They are open enough to invite divergent readings, yet stable enough to organize joint action across perspectives.

Drawing on close observation of these sessions, we ask: How do gaze inscriptions reshape leading and following? Do they steady explanation (“they are with me”) or introduce new pressure and self-monitoring? How do they reconfigure pointing, hands, and other embodied ways of coordinating? How do such marks gain authority in creative practice over time?

Keywords: relational labor; shared reference; visibility; eye tracking; collaboration

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Short abstract

We present insights into how people and pollinators respond to ‘living artworks’ planted as a network between domestic gardens. We explore the capacities of collaboration between art, ecology and STS to foster interspecies empathy and more altruistic urban ecologies.

Long abstract

The garden is often invoked as a metaphor for human relations with the natural world. A heterotopia of nature-culture, seeded with colonial legacy, it is a site where the biopolitics of killing and making live play out in the ubiquitous everyday of garden centres, plant names and ‘weed’ control. More recently, the garden has been proposed as a site to be re-imagined, a place for artistic intervention and ecological activism, for people to grow liveable futures.

We will present insights from an interdisciplinary intervention into the domestic gardens of 30 participants in a Cornish village; a collaboration between art, philosophy, ecology and STS. Using an ‘altruistic algorithm’ to design gardens for pollinators instead of humans, Pollinator Pathmaker (www.pollinator.art) is a living artwork by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg that aims to reconceptualise what a garden is and who it is for.

We have been studying how people and pollinators respond to such ‘living artworks’ planted as a social-ecological network connecting the community’s gardens. Unlike many Art-Science collaborations, this project was initiated by the artist herself. However, like many interdisciplinary experiments, the boundary work of navigating between disciplines, as well as the creative and relational labour required, has emerged as a key factor in how human and non-human participants engage with the project.

Our aim is to open up a broader discussion around ASTS interventions on the ground. And to consider the aims, scope and limits of what art and technology can achieve in nurturing the interspecies empathy required to cultivate resilient futures.