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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.